The Night Flower

by Sarah Stovell

  I didn’t sleep well on that first night. It was difficult on the nerves, to be shut up in one room with eleven convicts. I lay awake for several hours, listening to the sounds of weeping from the surrounding hammocks. Arabella slept soundly beside me, though, which I was pleased about. It would never be possible to protect her from all the horrors of our situation, but I aimed to expose her to as little distress as possible, and to make it feel as much like an adventure for her as I could.

  At some very late and dark hour, there came the sounds of shrieking from the yard below us. It was a piercing noise indeed, as these were not the shrieks of just one or two ladies, but many, and they were not shrieks of fear, but sounded to me like the shrieks of people wanting to make trouble. The noise woke everyone, including Arabella, and we all sat up in our hammocks, desperate to know what the commotion was about.

  ‘Is it burglars?’ Arabella asked.

  ‘Ssh,’ I said. ‘It’s all right. We don’t know what it is yet, but we will find out.’

  The overseer disregarded the silence rule again, as women jumped out of the hammocks and requested candles to be lit, so they could relieve some of their fears with at least a little light.

  There were candles in the room for emergencies only – convicts were not the sort of people to be trusted with such things – and our overseer must have regarded this as an emergency, for she lit several and handed them out to those who were crowded closest to her. I decided I would like to see the source of the noise for myself, so I tucked Arabella back in, and took a candle for myself, too.

  I carried it to the window, and gasped in shock and horror at the sight that met my eyes. In the yard below were the ladies from the prison class – at least thirty of them had escaped somehow from their messes and they were all without hair, standing there with liquor bottles and cigarettes, gazing up at our window, swearing and cursing and throwing stones at our walls, and acting in about as vulgar and dreadful a way as I’d ever seen. Then, when they caught sight of the six or so faces gathered at the window, they laughed even harder and all of a sudden they threw off the dresses they were wearing and removed some undergarments, too, until they stood only in their knickerbockers. Then they carried on in such a shocking way together, these ladies, that I can’t bring myself to describe it.

  As we were watching, the matrons and the superintendent went out to the women and tried, with shouting and threats, to make them stop their wild and unholy behaviour. They laughed and went on until such a time, I suppose, that they tired of it and took themselves back to their cells.

  I was shocked at what I’d seen, and could hardly think what to tell Arabella, so I just said some people were having fun and playing a strange sort of joke on us, because we were new here. Eventually, we all settled back down in our hammocks, but I didn’t find it easy to fall asleep again.

  In the morning, the bell clanged us awake at five thirty. We dressed in our convict uniforms and took ourselves down to the yard to wash before breakfast. There we waited for Mrs Hutchinson to come and inspect us. I had made sure Arabella’s face was free from any sort of grime at all. I wanted her to look appealing to our prospective employers, so we would be chosen by the best.

  Miriam came and waited next to me and while Mrs Hutchinson was making her way around the rows of convict ladies, I asked her in a whisper, ‘What job did you do in England?’

  She whispered back, ‘I mostly didn’t do no jobs.’

  ‘Oh, don’t tell them that,’ I advised quickly. ‘Or you might not be selected. Think of something.’

  There was no time to say any more; immediately, the deputy matron shouted for quiet. Breaking rules carried serious consequences.

  Once the inspections were complete, Mrs Hutchinson stood before us.

  ‘In less than an hour’s time, the settlers of this island – your masters and mistresses – will be coming by to choose which of you to take into their employment. Those of you not chosen will stay here at the factory and be put to useful work.’ Then she stopped speaking and peered at us from over the top of her spectacles, before carrying on with the cruellest words I’d ever heard. ‘All children who are no longer suckling will be removed from their mothers. Those under three will be placed in the nursery, where they will remain until their third birthday. The others will be taken to the orphanage. Any mother who wishes to visit her child may do so on the last Sunday in every month, if her master agrees, subject to good behaviour.’

  I gasped at this unexpected news. Other ladies with children started crying, and one even said, ‘But my daughter ain’t an orphan, miss. She’s got me, and I’m her mother.’

  ‘Hear! Hear!’ I replied. Several people turned and stared at me and I looked away, embarrassed.

  Our crying was ignored.

  We were then taken back to the hall, for a breakfast of brown bread and gruel. I could hardly swallow mine because of the lump in my throat and, although I tried my hardest to be strong for my daughter, my tears fell into that bowl of gruel and made it even thinner than it was before.

  Immediately after breakfast, a wagon arrived to collect the over-threes and take them away. I could hardly bring myself to look at Arabella’s face, so confused and afraid. I wanted to scoop her up and run away with her, and would have done so, had it not been for the restraining touch of Mrs Hutchinson’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Say your goodbyes for now. You will be reunited soon.’

  ‘Where am I going?’ Arabella asked.

  I smiled at her. ‘To another house,’ I said. ‘Just for a little while. There will be lots of other children there.’

  She said she didn’t want to go, that she was frightened and feeling shy. I little knew how to argue with that, as I didn’t want her to go either, and I, too, was feeling frightened, so I simply held her for a few minutes, then let her be led away by the woman from the orphanage.

  They returned me to Mrs Hutchinson’s office. ‘You will need to stop crying,’ she told me. ‘No one will want to employ a hysteric.’

  ‘I am not a hysteric, ma’am,’ I said, calmly and coldly, wondering whether the judge’s report had reached her, too. ‘I have just had my daughter taken away from me. Are you surprised to see that I should be upset at this?’

  She stared at me and said nothing. I could not stop my tears from falling, though, and I was so angry, it shocked me. To be told that I could bring my child with me as a comfort, and then to have her snatched away and sent to some dreadful institution was more than I could bear.

  When we were all standing in the office with our backs straight, Mrs Hutchinson opened the door and a string of men and a few women came into the room. They went walking up and down the rows of convict women, occasionally poking a few about the arms to see how strong they were. Then they stared at them and asked questions, such as, ‘How old are you?’ and ‘What work did you do in England?’

  Several of them stopped and talked to me, until finally one man – a vicar it seemed from his attire – asked, ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-six, sir.’

  ‘How were you employed in England?’

  ‘As a governess, sir.’

  ‘To how many children?’

  ‘Two, sir.’

  ‘And how did you come to be a governess?’

  I shook my head and couldn’t answer. He was a good enough man not to force the story from me, and turned round to the woman behind him, who smiled and nodded her head, so I came to assume she must be his wife. Then he said to Mrs Hutchinson, ‘I will take her as the nursery nurse.’

  I stepped forwards, uncertain. His wife came and shook my hand. ‘Welcome,’ she said. ‘My husband and I run the nursery in Hobart. It’s where the babies of convict mothers are looked after.’

  For a minute, I thought with joy that I might be there with Arabella, but then she continued, ‘The nursery is for children under three. Many of them are born with us and we help look after them until they’re ready for the orphanage, which they go to once they are old enou
gh to work.’

  I became depressed in my spirits again very quickly and watched her husband move about the room, examining the expectant convict maids. He paused again when he came to Miriam, and asked her similar questions to those he’d asked me. She said she was fifteen and that she’d worked as lots of different things, but recently as a servant. I wasn’t sure how true this was.

  Finally, he said to Mrs Hutchinson, ‘I will take her to be the nursery’s maid-of-all-work.’

  Miriam looked at me and smiled, seeming pleased that we were going to the same place. Had I had Arabella with me, I might have felt pleased, too.

  20

  The place they took us, once we’d got picked, was Liverpool Street nursery. We walked there from the factory, and the folk what’d picked us introduced emselves as being the Reverend Jacob Sutton and his wife, Mrs Sutton. She didn’t have no name of her own, as far as I could tell.

  It was much busier in Hobart than what it’d been in the valley, and it looked like plenty of rich folk was living there. A lot of houses’d got gardens like the ones in England – with rose bushes and hollyhocks and daffodils sprouting on the lawns – and there was ladies walking about in rich dresses of black lace with white collars and cuffs. They looked a bit like English ladies, too, except that when they spoke their words come out sounding different and strange, even though they was the same words what’d got spoke back home, and seemed to come with the same meaning, too.

  Anyway, that main street in Hobart was a nice enough place, but as soon as we turned off it and went down Liverpool Street, everything changed. The buildings wasn’t houses no more, but taverns and grog shops and other frightening-looking places what’d got ladies standing in the windows, wearing hardly no clothes and smiling and beckoning folk inside with saucy looks. I shuddered a bit as we walked past em, because they made me think of them shouting women from Cascades, and also of Katie-May and her poor, torn body at the bottom of the sea.

  The Reverend didn’t so much as glance in the windows of them shops. He just kept his eyes hard on the road ahead, because I s’pose it didn’t do for a religious man to be looking at ladies in shop windows, even if he didn’t plan on buying any of em.

  The street was a noisy place, full up of drunks and sailors what I recognized as being off The Marquis of Hastings. And there was children, too, running about in bare feet, wearing only shorts, with grubby legs and faces and dust in their hair. They reminded me of me, back when I used to be a Gypsy girl living outdoors, and I couldn’t help smiling at em.

  The nursery was near the end of the street – a rundown place, but nicer than what Cascades had been. When we got there, the reverend said, ‘Liverpool Street nursery,’ in a proud sort of a way, what made me think he was pleased with his life’s work. Then we went inside and he disappeared away to his study and we hardly saw him no more.

  Mrs Sutton showed us around the downstairs floor. It was the place where the babies and the convict mothers all lived, a simple sorta dwelling, with plain, whitewashed walls what had damp patches on em, and hard stone floors covered in rugs what looked like they’d seen better days.

  There was one big room for the babies to play in, and two dormitories for the babies and convict mothers to live in. Mrs Sutton said the convict mothers got sent here just before they was due to give birth, and she did the caring for the babies. She did the delivering of em, too, when that were necessary. The babies and mothers was allowed to stay at the nursery for six months, after what time the mothers had to go back to prison, and the babes’d stay and get looked after, though sometimes a few of em got adopted to the settled folk of the country. Both the dormitories was full to bursting with cots – fifteen or twenty in each one and there wasn’t hardly no space between em for their mothers or Mrs Sutton to squeeze through. There was a smell about the place, too, and it wasn’t a nice one – dirt and damp and something else I couldn’t put my finger on, what seemed to be coming from out the blankets. Must or mites or something.

  Aside from them three rooms was a dining room with tables and benches what run the whole length of it, and then there was a kitchen and the concrete yard where the stone laundry sinks and privies was. There was three privies all in all, what wasn’t always enough to go round, and what I reckoned wasn’t gonna be easy when the nursery’d got an influx of sickness.

  Mrs Sutton took us back to the hall. ‘We all live up there,’ she said, and pointed to the stairs.

  I wasn’t sure what she meant when she said that. I reckoned she must of just been meaning the family, and that me and Rose was gonna get put somewhere else. Then she called up, ‘Hattie, Hattie.’

  A woman come to the top of the stairs, wearing a beige smock like mine, but she was older, with a scarf tied over her head so tight you couldn’t see no hair. I wondered if she were one of them ladies from the crime class, though I couldn’t think what she’d be doing in the reverend’s house if she was. I didn’t reckon the reverend’d think much of them crime class ladies, all in all.

  Mrs Sutton said, ‘This is Hattie. She’ll look after you.’

  Hattie stared at us, but didn’t say nothing, and I could see the sad in her face, even then. Mrs Sutton spoke to her in a kind sorta way, and said something about bringing her a child, then added, ‘You show them their room, Hattie.’ She looked back at me and Rose, like she was expecting us to do something.

  Seeing as I couldn’t think of nothing else to do, I went up the stairs. Rose followed and when we got to the top, we stood there and waited.

  Hattie didn’t say nothing again, but she looked at us in a way I didn’t think was polite, then turned round and led us down the landing.

  This was where the family all lived. I could tell from the rooms we passed what’d got their doors open, and it give me a funny feeling of being important, to know I was gonna be living among em. But I come to realize soon enough how we was only living up here because this were a family of the religious and humble sort, and they didn’t have nowhere else to put their workers.

  It were a tiny room they give us, and white inside, like everywhere else I’d seen here. The window – what wasn’t much of a window – looked out over the street, and it was a noisy street what sent up bad sounds to us. In the distance you could still see them deep green hills and mountains of the island, rising up all round, stopping the light from getting to the town, or at least stopping it from getting in through the windows of Liverpool Street nursery.

  In the corner of the room was the chamber pot and a bag of sand. I didn’t much know what that was for – sitting on or pissing in. Hattie swept some got-away grains in a pan and threw em out the window, then she looked at us and at last said, ‘Hello.’ She’d got skin and eyes as dark as what mine and Katie-May’s was, and I wondered if she was a Romany like me.

  Rose and me said, ‘Hello.’

  And then Hattie went back to saying nothing.

  It wasn’t all the dirt and crowding what most bothered me about that nursery. It was the noise. Babies wasn’t the sorta creatures you could go putting rules about silence on, and they used to cry and scream emselves crazy. Even though the room I lived in was upstairs with the family, the noise of forty-three crying babes’d come up through the floorboards day and night. It was enough to send a girl to wishing she was deaf, and I admit I put cotton wool in my ears from early on.

  The next day, they give me my job and it was pretty much just cleaning, washing and polishing, nothing more interesting than that. They give me a bit of cooking, too, for the poor mothers what lived there. It was gruel and ox-head soup cooking, what wasn’t a good sorta cooking if you asked me, by what I mean it wasn’t the sorta cooking what made a girl want to eat it on the way.

  Because of being a refined sorta lady, Rose wasn’t given no cleaning tasks to do. She was given the job of looking after the poor crying babies, especially them ones what didn’t have no mothers to feed em, of what there was lots. This was reckoned as being a kushti sorta job, or at least better than
a lot of jobs what convict girls could of ended up doing, and Rose didn’t much seem to mind it, for all I reckoned it would of drove me crazy.

  ‘I like babies,’ she told me, as if it was just a simple sorta matter.

  I s’pose for someone what liked babies – and even sometimes for someone what didn’t like em, such as me – the nursery were a kushti place to work, but not an easy one for that. Hardly any of them babies looked of the healthy sort to me, and they was bundled up in sheets what didn’t look thick enough to keep the cold from out their bones. The cots they slept in was of the old and rickety sort, and I reckoned some of em was in danger of falling right through the bottom of em before very long. A lot of them cots’d got two or even more babies lodged inside em, especially if the babes was of the newborn or sickly type.

  So all them suffering and sickly babies wasn’t always a happy sight, and I reckoned that was why, right from the very start, I used to catch Rose looking sad about the face when she was holding em or feeding em. All I could think was how maybe she was coming to love em, in a strange sorta way.

  It took a while to work out what Hattie’s job was. It seemed to us like she didn’t much have one. She lived on her own in the attic, what’d got turned into a room, though I didn’t never go up there so I didn’t know what it looked like or how big it was. I reckoned it was probably bigger than the room me and Rose’d got, though, and that made me cross inside. It didn’t seem fair to me that two hard-working folk’d gotta share a room like a cupboard, when the lady what didn’t hardly do nothing got a whole floor to herself.

  Anyway, it turned out Hattie’d got sent to Parts Beyond the Sea more than twenty years ago, and hadn’t found her way home again, for all what her sentence was up. ‘No money,’ she said to us, and shrugged. ‘And I haven’t got much reason to go home, either. No husband. Parents dead. No hope of earning a decent living. I might as well just stay here, where it’s hot sometimes, at least.’