And so we went on sailing, though it was another week or more before the land appeared again, and we could all of us see how we was heading straight towards it: a wide, sandy bay cut in the middle of the rocks, and all over them rocks looked wild and green.
‘Sullivan’s Cove,’ an officer told us.
And then we was there.
Part Three
SPRING OCTOBER, 1842
Hobart, Van Diemens Land
17
LIVERPOOL STREET NURSERY FOR THE BABIES OF CONVICT MOTHERS
Reverend Sutton stared at her as she lay on the bed, and looked for the gratitude in her face. He couldn’t see any. ‘You can stay,’ he told her again. ‘But think of yourself as retired.’ He wondered if she hadn’t understood what he was telling her the first time he said it. Convict heads weren’t up to much.
‘Who’ve you got to replace me?’
‘No one yet. There’s a boat due any day now. My wife and I are taking a new maid from the cargo.’
‘Just one, sir? You know this place wrecks a girl. It’s the work of at least two bodies.’
He couldn’t be sure if this were the case. True, Hattie was weak now, always telling anyone who listened how she’d had the life worked out of her, but she was lazy. A convict. She preferred to sin her way to a living. She was brown-skinned too, which meant indolence was in her nature. It could scarcely be whipped from her.
He said, ‘Perhaps we will take two, though it will be expensive – two more mouths to feed, two more bodies to clothe. This is a Christian institution, Hattie. Money isn’t hidden in the rafters.’
She gave a derisory snort.
Downstairs, several babies were crying. Hattie rolled over and buried her face in the pillow, covering her ears with her hands.
He ignored her. She claimed the noise chipped away at her brain, and made her ill. He wondered if she was a hysteric, or if her criminal core had made her feminine qualities defective. She was not a mother. He thought that perhaps he should employ a younger maid – a girl with energy enough to carry out the hard work required, but who also might be a child for Hattie – someone who could help awaken her maternal soul.
He didn’t mention his idea, but said, ‘There will be new babies on the next ship, and none of the current ones are due to go on to the orphanage yet. The oldest child here is still six months from its third birthday. The noise will be getting worse.’
She rolled over again and shrugged. ‘There’ll be a few more deaths, though. That’ll balance things out. But even if it doesn’t, you’ve just told me I’m retired.’
‘You are,’ he said, and began stroking her hair. It was softer than his wife’s, or how he remembered his wife’s.
‘You need two maids, sir,’ she told him again. ‘One to look after the babies, and the other to do the cooking and cleaning and whatever else needs doing. It’s too much for one girl to do it all.’
‘We’ll see,’ he said. She was still talking, but he shut his ears to it and unbuttoned his breeches. She always talked while he got himself ready. He wriggled out of his trousers and underpants, while the drone of her voice filled the room. Like a fly, he thought. He closed his eyes while he made himself hard, then lifted her smock. She parted her legs willingly – she always did – and he pushed his way inside her.
It didn’t take long. He thought how she must be feeling – full and complete. He didn’t pay her these days. He used to, but now she understood. Her soul was not beyond redemption. She needed a Christian man in her, to bring her closer to God. She needed to be filled with His spirit.
The thought made him ejaculate.
When he’d finished, he wiped himself on the sheet and got dressed again. ‘Goodnight, Hattie,’ he said.
She didn’t say anything, which was usual. He opened the door and crept down the attic staircase to the landing below. There was still some crying coming from the nursery below, for which he was grateful. The noise of the babies largely smothered the noise of his wanderings.
His wife was asleep when he entered their room. He lit a candle and changed into his nightclothes, then took off his spectacles and placed them on the table that separated his bed from hers. He stood and looked at her for a while, then blew out the candle and climbed into bed.
18
I was one of the first to get off the ship. Ma Dwyer and me’d put ourselves right by the door as soon as we knew we was heading towards land. As we come up on the decks again, my eyes could hardly keep emselves open from the bright of it. I hadn’t never known a sun like this one. It were wicked – the way it got in my eyes and stung tears out of em, and put a hard glint on the water what shone in my face like a slap. I looked at the land up above me, and all I could see was deep green trees and wild-looking plants, stretching up to the sky and then dangling back over the earth. More than anything else, I wanted to be inside that forest shade, where I reckoned it’d be cool and wet and dark enough for my eyes to see again.
Me and Ma Dwyer’s sea legs got us to the harbour without no disasters and once I’d got used to the light, Parts Beyond the Sea seemed like a pretty sort of place. The beach we stood on was full of white sand and the salt smell of the sea. There was flowers in the mountain what towered out of the land ahead of us. But even though it were something kushti, it were something strange, too. It was October, but there was daffodils growing and a proper feeling of summer about the place, and that wasn’t the sort of thing to be expected from the almost-winter of it. And so it made me a bit afraid about what sort of place they’d brung us to.
My mind went drifting off to Evelyn. I thought how me and her’d be coming to the end of our fortune-telling season now, looking for work and a roof for the winter. It give me such a feeling of longing in my chest, I thought I might die from the ache of it, right there and then. And then the tears sprung to me eyes, and I couldn’t help but sob a bit, but I saw how it was all right to do that, because a lot of the other convict folk was sobbing, too.
Once everyone’d been rowed ashore, the officers counted us and matched us up with the numbers what’d left London – except them unfortunate ones what’d died and never made it, and that was eleven altogether. The officers and sailors split up the convict folk and started marching us out the harbour and on to a muddy path, and we went trudging up the hill to no one knew where.
It took us more than one whole hour of stomping through mud before we got to where we was going. The path slopped under our feet, and all round us there wasn’t nothing but trees – tall as any trees ever I’d seen, hanging over us and bringing that dark forest path a green sort of light. There was huge, overgrown plants, wild as anything, and we had to push em all out the way as we tried to get through em. I wondered if I’d found myself in the jungle, and if there’d be lions and elephants and such, stalking about the trees.
There wasn’t nothing to remind me of home.
We went walking up that hill, following the creek all the way through the valley to where the mountain stood ahead of us. Its top towered so far in the sky, it were covered in clouds and we couldn’t hardly see it. The air smelled strange, like mint, or the medicine they used to give us in the reform school in London if we’d got coughs or bad stomachs or the like. They wasn’t the same trees from earlier, but eucalyptus bushes what put the smell out like that, and it were a funny sort of thing to get used to, but of course I did get used to it in the end, same as I got used to roses in winter.
Near the end, the walking got steeper and it wasn’t no easy thing on the legs, specially legs what’d been at sea these last five months. As we come closer to the mountain, the clouds cleared away and its top come into view. The air got cold as we headed into a hollow beneath it where the sun couldn’t reach.
We stomped our way through till there we was: our prison. Cascades Female Factory, it were called, hiding behind gates shut tight with heavy irons.
There was the smell of shit everywhere – all the sewage from the factory come running down like a strea
m in the gully near our feet. I hardly batted my eyelids at that no more, not after the convict ship. It wasn’t the most welcoming of sights, but you come to expect nothing better when you wasn’t no more than a Gypsy girl, and a convict one at that.
The soldiers lined us up two by two in front of the gates. From behind em, we could hear the clanging about of pots and the chopping up of wood, and then suddenly the gates opened and a man and a woman was standing there in front of us, looking as strict and hard round the face as them matrons’d done in the reform school.
The woman was thin as wire and no less tough, neither. She’d got a white bonnet on her head, tied up neat in a bow, and her dress was stiff and black, buttoned tight to the neck, as if she wanted the world to know she wasn’t no sort of woman for dallying about with no sailors. From behind her, come the man what turned out to be her husband. He was thin in the face and pale as a moon, with scraggy whiskers over his neck.
They hustled us into the yard, and there we saw a lot of women – at least, I s’posed em to be women because they was wearing dresses, but they didn’t have no hair on their heads and they was pretty well as ugly as beasts – and all of em was busy working away at jobs what looked to me as being too hard for their small bones to handle: axing at wood; breaking up stones; and other labouring work I couldn’t make out, but what looked tough even for a man to do. None of them ladies was saying nothing to no one. They was all just standing there, working away, coughing and sweating like men, and running their tongues over gums what was red and sore-looking, with hardly no teeth in em.
They wasn’t no pretty sight, that’s for sure.
Once they’d got us past that noisy, miserable yard full of silent women, we was took through the front door and lined up in the hall. Another woman appeared and announced her name was Mrs Cato, the deputy matron. The woman what’d met us outside was mostly in charge, along with her husband, and between em all, they’d got emselves strong ideas about how a factory full of convict ladies was to be run. It was with hard work and a lot of religion and not much in the way of food or kindness, what seemed an odd thing to me, seeing as they was all of the Christian and charitable nature. But I was coming to see for myself how there was a lot of difference in this world between the Christian way of thinking and the Christian way of acting.
We all stood in that line for a long time, and eventually I come to the front of it. The woman what was called Mrs Cato took me into a small living room, where there was a tin bathtub in the corner, and where the matron in charge – Mary Hutchinson – was sitting beside a pile of ugly-looking dresses, what I reckoned with a bad feeling was meant for us convict girls.
Matron Hutchinson looked at me. ‘Name?’ she said, in the barking way I’d come to expect.
‘Miriam Booth.’
‘Age?’
‘About fifteen, ma’am.’
‘About fifteen? Don’t you know?’
‘Fifteen,’ I said then, quick and quiet. Of course I knew my age, but these folk in charge of us was a frightening lot, and it made me not want to say nothing, in case I got it wrong somehow and they took a whip to me.
Then she made some notes on some paper and said, ‘Disrobe and bathe yourself.’
Well, I wasn’t much happy about taking off my stiff, salty dress in front of her, but she made a show of letting me know how she wasn’t interested in watching, and for all what the water in that tin bath was dirty and cold it give me a kushti feeling to get some soap on my body and scrub off the muck from The Marquis of Hastings.
After I was done, the matron give me a towel, what’s size wasn’t enough to cover up all my parts what needed it, but it was a towel nevertheless and I was grateful for that. I wrapped myself in it best I could and waited for some clothes to come along, as I knew they was going to.
But first the matron patted the wooden chair opposite her. ‘Sit here.’
Once I was sitting down, she took a sharp-toothed comb to my head and checked it through for lice, of what she didn’t seem to find none. That come as a relief to me and a surprise as well. Then she handed me a pile of clothes:
Two shift dresses – one for wearing and one for washing
Two aprons
Two caps
Two pairs of stockings
Two napkins for the monthly flow.
They was tough, ugly clothes, but the new stockings was kushti to have on my feet and they give me a nice, clean feeling on the skin. I knew by now that was about as much as I could ever ask for, so though I’d never say I was happy with my lot, it did me well enough.
19
Van Diemen’s Land was wild country in every way. There was nothing but jungle for miles and miles, and almost all the inhabitants were criminals, or dark-skinned men and women living among the trees, staring at us in an angry way that made me afraid of them. They put me in mind of the Africans.
We found ourselves thousands of miles from home and in another prison, though they called it a factory. When we arrived, after a long walk through mud to get here, we were allowed to bathe and were given our convict clothes and lunch. Lunch, like supper after it, consisted of nothing but ox-head soup and a chunk of brown bread. The soup was watery and tasted every bit as dreadful as that which we received in Newgate. It made me fretful for Arabella. She was not healthy and rosy-cheeked, and I little knew how she could thrive on a diet such as this.
The matron and deputy matron took us around the whole factory. This would probably just be the first place we’d stay, they informed us. Tomorrow morning, the settled people of the island would come and choose which of us they wanted to work for them. Most work would be in Hobart, a couple of miles from here, and any jobs we might be given would depend largely on the captain’s report from the ship. Those of us who were literate and behaved well would be recommended for the best work. My hopes were raised, after Oliver’s promises, though I could only assume that ‘best’ in this case merely meant least miserable, and not likely to kill you.
Mrs Hutchinson then went on to say how we would be taken straight back to the factory and locked up in the prisoner rank if we misbehaved in our work. Of the three ranks of convict, the prison rank was the worst. It was where the most serious or repeat offenders found themselves sentenced to hard labour, and with their heads shaved, too. We were told that the crimes of those in the prison rank included theft, consumption of liquor and any other immoral conduct, including becoming with child. Once they’d served their time there, the women would be moved up to probation, where they were given easier work and allowed to grow their hair. Finally, they might progress once more to Assignment, where they could meet with settlers and be hired out to work again. Assignment was where we all were now, except those creatures who had behaved badly on the ship. They were being sent straight to the prison rank.
Anyone from Assignment not chosen in the morning would have to remain in the factory. I prayed that Oliver’s report would be enough to save my daughter and me.
Once we were clean again and had eaten lunch, an assembly was held in the factory hall where the superintendent – the matron’s husband – read us the rules of the place, in a very stern and grim-sounding voice. The rules were:
1 No talking, no laughing, no whistling, no singing.
2 Working hard and behaving well.
3 Maintaining cleanliness in our bodies, clothes and mouths.
4 Attending prayers morning and evening, plus a divine service in the chapel on Sundays.
5 No fires.
6 No smoking.
7 No keeping of poultry, pigs or pigeons.
I was unsure why anyone would want to bring poultry, pigs or pigeons to the factory, but assumed it to be important enough to the governors of the island for them to make a rule of it. A couple of young ladies – if you could call them that – let out a small laugh at that point, but were silenced by the superintendent’s glare.
I noticed a young, sorry-looking girl in the assembly. She was sitting across the aisle from me, an
d now and then she gazed up and looked out of the window at the mountain outside, and it seemed to me that her eyes were filling with tears. I wondered if she were here alone. I smiled at her and she smiled back like a poor urchin child, desperate for the warmth and care of a good friend, or perhaps a mother.
I saw her again that evening, when we were all split into bedrooms, which the matrons called messes. Each mess slept twelve ladies, all of them in hammocks, and one of those ladies would be the overseer, whose job it was to ensure everyone behaved themselves and stayed silent.
Our overseer was an older woman from the ship, and not terribly strict. A great deal of whispered conversations were had before bed, and Arabella and I found ourselves in a hammock next to the poor young girl, so I said, ‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ she replied.
I said, ‘How are you finding it?’
And I couldn’t help laughing at her reply, which was this:
‘Well, it ain’t good, ma’am, is it? I don’t expect a grand place to live, of course, but over there in the corner’s a chamber pot – just one pot for twelve ladies to share through the night. I can’t say as it made me all that happy, when I saw how far it was from the hammocks, and how hard it’ll be for folk to find in the dark. And you know it’s gonna be someone’s duty to empty it in the morning and I tell you this, I’m gonna make sure it ain’t me.’
I said, ‘I think you’ve got the right idea. What’s your name?’
‘Miriam. What’s yours?’
‘Rose,’ I said, and then I moved a little in my hammock so she could see Arabella. ‘This is my daughter. I was lucky enough to be allowed to bring her with me.’
‘Was you on the same ship as me?’
‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘But I paid some money so the officers would let me sleep above deck.’
She looked at me, and I saw envy in her face. I wondered what she had witnessed and how she had come to be here.
The Night Flower Page 9
