The Night Flower

by Sarah Stovell

  Other than that, she didn’t much talk to us. Mostly she just stayed up in the attic, but sometimes I’d bump into her if she was in the family’s kitchen, making drinks or something like that, and she’d look at me like she thought I was up to something bad. She seemed like an angry person, but I wasn’t sure why she’d be angry with me, considering we’d only just met and I’d never done nothing to her.

  She told me she was close to fifty years old. She’d done a lot of different jobs before coming here, and she’d had her share of time in Cascades, too – not because of doing nothing criminal, but just because of no one wanting her as their housemaid. ‘I’m too weak,’ she said, holding out her arm. It was thin as the bone itself, and covered in dark skin what was wrinkled like old fruit. ‘Bad leg, bad back. Can’t do anything these days. Nothing but darning a few socks and mending worn-out clothes.’ And she held up the dress what’d been lying on her lap as she talked, and I saw the holes under the arms what she was sewing up to be good as new again.

  Then she said, ‘I’m useless to everyone but the reverend’s family.’ And her eyes got a hard look in em and she stared ahead of her at nothing.

  I said, ‘Are you a Romany?’

  My words jerked her outta whatever daydreaming place she’d been in. She looked at me and said, ‘Yes, I am.’

  I said, ‘Me, too.’

  And then she give a smile for the first time ever what I’d seen and we talked a while about the tribes we’d belonged to, and what kind of Romany we spoke – because there was a lot of different kinds, see, depending on where you sprung from.

  She said, ‘They only sent me here because I’m a Gypsy. They wouldn’t have sent me if someone else had done my crime.’

  I said, ‘That’s what I reckon about what they done to me as well.’

  She shook her head. ‘It doesn’t pay, to have been born a Gypsy. It doesn’t pay at all.’

  And she looked miserable again, what was a shame.

  After my day of working finished, I’d take myself weary upstairs. Usually, the door what led up to Hattie’s room was closed, so I just went to my own room instead. Rose mostly slept downstairs with the babies what didn’t have no mothers to help em. She got two nights off from em every week, so all I ever got to do with the time left before bed was stand at my window and watch the noisy goings-on of the street below.

  Nothing about that street was quiet, not never. Opposite the nursery was an inn called the Black Horse. It’d been shut down and boarded up when we first got here, but a few weeks later it got opened again. Then I heard a convict mother say she’d heard it was being run by the wife of an ex-convict, what’d brung money with her from England and then earned herself more on the ship coming over. No one knew where her husband’d got to, and they reckoned maybe it was all just a ploy for the governors, so she could get her ticket to Parts Beyond the Sea and live a better life than the one she’d got in England. And when I heard all this, I got a feeling of hope in me that the lady they was talking about might be Ma Dwyer.

  But the Black Horse wasn’t no place for kushti folk. It got full up of men and not a few women, neither, all hours of the day and night. They was a rowdy lot when they come stumbling out them doors, as drunk as they oughta be ashamed of emselves, and sometimes they was so bad the landlady’d come running out after em, waving a rolled-up newspaper or a broom, shouting at em to get home to their other halves or they’d be sorry for it in the morning.

  Well, that was exactly what happened this night, after I’d been living at the nursery three weeks or so. Two men come running out into the street, falling over emselves because of the beer they’d drunk, and they ended up in a pile at the roadside – arms and legs everywhere, without no idea how to get emselves back up again.

  When the landlady appeared, shouting, she had the voice what I knew. ‘Get up, you idiots,’ she said to em, and shook a feather duster in their faces. ‘This ain’t what I expect from men who come to my inn. Get up now, or I won’t be letting you back again.’

  It was Ma Dwyer. I was so excited about seeing her face again that I bashed on my bedroom window till she looked up and waved at me. ‘Miriam,’ she called. ‘Come and see me some time.’ And then she went back to hauling them men out the road and sending em on their way.

  A lot of women come and went at the Black Horse, too, and not all of em was of the drunk sort, though they wasn’t often dressed in a savoury sorta way. I’d got my suspicions about just what sorta ladies they was, and I’d got my suspicions about what was going on in the upstairs of that inn. I knew Ma Dwyer was a woman of the world, one what knew a thing or two about this and that, but I reckoned I could keep her as my friend, for all what she was running a bad establishment. She were a kushti woman in her heart, and that much was certain.

  So when the Black Horse blinds come down and the strange shadows started appearing behind the windows, I used to turn my face to the children on the street instead, begging for scraps to take home to their poor widowed mothers. And then I’d end up thinking a while about Evelyn, and the life I’d used to have, what might not of been a rich or easy life, but was better than this.

  Apart from the Black Horse, also on Liverpool Street was these places:

  Some houses for ordinary folk to live in – settlers and such, but not settlers of the rich sort.

  Two grog shops, what was shut in the mornings, but opened after lunch and then stayed open pretty well till midnight.

  A butcher’s shop, as full up of flies as it was dead meat. It was a job of mine to go there on a Tuesday, so I could get the two ox heads for the week’s soup. The butcher wasn’t open on a Monday. He didn’t have nothing to sell then, because the hunters never went hunting on Sundays. I s’pose it was something to do with the Lord.

  A greengrocer’s where I had to go to get carrots and such. I always went at the end of the day, just before the grocer was about to pull down his shutters, because by then there’d be carrots what’d gone so soft they couldn’t be sold no more, and they was cheap. And then sometimes the grocer’d throw a bit more stuff in my bag, too, like a walnut or an orange, and I didn’t tell no one about it and kept it for myself.

  A church. Reverend Sutton was the vicar for it, as well as for the nursery. He used to go there every day to check everything was all right and that no bibles or holy stuff’d been stolen, and he also gave a service on a Sunday morning, and he buried the dead when they needed it.

  And that were pretty well it. The end of the street didn’t go nowhere – just to a cracked brick wall covered in ivy, what folk’d shimmy up and jump over sometimes if they’d been making trouble and needed to get away quick.

  There was always trouble in the street, because of the grog shops and the Black Horse. I only went out if I didn’t have no choice in the matter. It wasn’t a comfy sorta place to live, and I missed the fields and hills of England, where I’d first lived and where there wasn’t nothing but Gypsy folk like me.

  21

  SUMMER

  Reverend Sutton sat upstairs in the kitchen with his son, just returned from fifteen months in New South Wales. When the reverend retired next year, John was due to take over the management of the nursery himself, and he was still a young enough man to have high ideals about how best to care for the babies and erase from them the convict stain.

  John said, ‘I want to put money into this place, Father. A baby cannot thrive and become good in these surroundings. We need to provide them with the necessities of life first. Their bodies must be comfortable and healthy before we can tackle their souls. We need new cots, clean blankets, better food. And the whole building needs painting.’

  ‘You are forgetting, John, that these improvements of yours will require money. Where do you propose to raise sufficient funds for it all? The governors of this island provide us with a budget, which barely stretches far enough now.’

  John shook his head. ‘There are some church ladies who will happily knit blankets to raise money, once we’v
e explained our aims to them.’

  ‘I’m not sure. Your ideas are liberal and radical. We are dealing with the babies of convicts. These are not innocent children, and those of us who have been charged with the grave task of reforming their souls need to be very careful how we go about it. Providing them with luxuries will only breed expectation and greed. Remember, we are responsible for the future of this country, and these babies are the next generation. We need to rid them of their mothers’ corruption and that means feeding their souls, not nurturing their bodies. They must be removed from their mothers as soon as possible and set to honest work as soon as they are able. They must be fed simple food that they can survive on, but not food that will stimulate the taste buds and encourage gluttony. They must be taught right from wrong and know that if they transgress, they will be punished. They must be introduced to the Bible and taught to say their prayers. These are the only ways, John, to rid these children of their mothers’ stains and transform the land into a good one for the future. We cannot falter. Allowing yourself to become bogged down in issues of comfort and new blankets will only distract you from your proper aims and before you know it, you’ll have produced spoiled, unholy children who expect luxury and won’t work. And there it will be: another generation of thieves and robbers.’

  The reverend looked at his son to make sure his words were being listened to and taken seriously. His concerns were deep, and he was not prepared to retire until he felt certain John would run the place along the strictest guidelines. The reverend himself had been nurturing a new idea recently, which he needed to think through a little more before presenting to the board. He was confident they would come round to his way of thinking if he could just argue his case sufficiently.

  Over recent months, he had become more and more convinced that it would be better to remove the children from their mothers the moment they were born. The current rules stated that any woman giving birth under sentence was to stay with her newborn at the nursery and feed it until it turned six months. She must then be transported immediately back to Cascades, where she would be locked in the crime class for allowing herself to get with child, while the child would stay at the nursery and be cared for at the country’s expense.

  Reverend Sutton was anxious about those first six months, where the baby received milk at the breast of its criminal mother. Who knew what vices might be passed on to the child in such a way? Was it not dangerous to expose a baby with wicked blood coursing through its veins to more of its mother’s poisonous fluid? He had tried to broach the subject with the governor just the other week, but the governor had shaken his head. ‘You could well be right, Jacob, but we need to think about the economics of your proposal. To feed a child from birth would cost more than we can afford. For now, we must keep them suckling from their mothers, and pray that our efforts for their futures will reap rewards enough to balance the effect of the mother’s milk.’

  But Reverend Sutton was determined. He planned to spend the next week composing a speech to put to the board, in which he would argue that providing feeding powders of arrowroot and baked flour from birth would cost the country less in the long run than corrupting them with the life-milk of convicts. To feed them the milk of convicts would inevitably result in these babies growing up to become criminals themselves. There was the danger that it would hold back the nation’s progress by a generation.

  He said to John, ‘I have employed two new convict maids, by the way, since you’ve been gone. The one looking after the babies is called Rose. She strikes me as a good, Christian young lady, and I believe she has repented of whatever sin brought her here. I am certain the Lord will see fit to forgive her. The other one, Miriam, is to be kept working in the kitchen, and she is to clean the nursery, but she must not be allowed to handle the babies. She is, as far as I can see, a perfect heathen. It will be hard work, making a Christian of her.’

  John said, ‘What about Hattie?’

  ‘Hattie is still here, but I have allowed her to retire. She was as good as useless towards the end, anyway. Her body is in a bad state. She will not be long for this world. I thought I ought to allow her to spend her last years in peace, instead of working herself into the grave, which she always claimed would happen if I didn’t give her time off.’

  ‘But you’ll let her live here?’

  ‘Yes, John. I will allow that. She has worked hard for us for fifteen years. We cannot see her back out on the streets. She is much improved, but vulnerable to vice, and I would not like her to fall prey to her old profession again. She must be kept here, where we can protect her from her own nature.’

  ‘Very well, Father. As you see fit.’

  Reverend Sutton nodded. ‘While you were away, a woman took over the running of the Black Horse. She’s opened it up again, and it’s pretty much the place it always was. We must try to help the wretched female souls she has over there.’

  ‘Of course, Father,’ John said, and left the room.

  Reverend Sutton stood up and checked the time on his pocket watch. Seven o’clock. He would take the next two hours to write a draft of his speech, then he would change his clothes and pay a visit to the Black Horse. A few nights ago, Ma Dwyer gave him a young girl and he wanted to see her again. She couldn’t have been much more than eighteen. He’d forced himself not to gaze at her pert, sweet breasts, or the smooth white arc of her belly. Reverend Sutton was in love with the Lord. He had surrendered the ways of the flesh, and did not experience desire. As proof, he hadn’t been near his wife for nineteen years, not since she’d produced their son. He gave himself only to the wretched.

  22

  On Sundays, they gave us a bit of extra gruel for breakfast and a bigger chunk of bread. But apart from that, they was my worst days. Living among these religious folk meant there was even more praying and thanking the Lord than usual. Considering the life I’d got, I couldn’t help saying, ‘What’re we thanking the Lord for? He ain’t done nothing, except give me a bad time of it, and I ain’t thanking no one for that.’

  Rose, because of being a lady, put her finger on her lips. ‘Don’t speak in that way, Miriam,’ she said, with begging in her voice. ‘We might not understand why we have these hardships, but to turn our backs on the Lord now is the worst thing we can do.’

  I wasn’t one to go starting rows, so I just sat at my place on the bench, spooned my gruel into my mouth and kept quiet.

  The nursery folk called me a heathen. The reverend said it was a serious state of affairs, and they’d got plans about getting the Lord in me as a matter of urgency. They was gonna have their work cut out for em and that was sure.

  Once breakfast was done and dusted, I got myself back in the kitchen so I could wash the bowls the children and convict mothers’d ate off. I s’pose that was one good thing about the babies – the ones what was still suckling didn’t make no washing-up.

  The governors reckoned the mothers was a problem – the reason so many babies got ill half the time. They said the mothers was keeping the babies at death’s door on purpose, so they could stay with em instead of going back to the prisoner class at Cascades. I s’pose it was a possible thing, but didn’t seem likely to me. Whenever a baby died here – as often as once a week in winter – its mother’d send up such a howling and wailing it was a wonder the roof didn’t fall in.

  Anyway, me and Hattie was standing out in the yard on a Sunday morning a bit before Christmas. It wasn’t like the Christmases I was used to in England, where it’d been cold enough to freeze the life out a body. Christmas in Parts Beyond the Sea was hotter than anything I’d ever known; the sun felt like it’d bake you to death. It wasn’t no easy weather to work in, that was certain.

  I’d got a whole pile of bowls and spoons round me and a giant pail of water beside me to wash em in, and I was looking at em with a heavy heart, thinking how there’d gotta be an easier way of doing this than scrubbing the life out my arms. Hattie stood there watching, and talking now and then. She didn’t never
help with the work, because of being too weak for it. It used to annoy me sometimes, but I ain’t the sorta girl to go dwelling on the unfairnesses of life.

  While we was talking, the Reverend Sutton and his son suddenly appeared, from pretty well outta nowhere, as far as I could tell.

  The reverend nodded his head at us. ‘Good morning, Miriam,’ he said. ‘And Hattie.’

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ I said. Hattie didn’t say nothing, like usual.

  His son was carrying a glass in his hand and when the reverend give him a nod, he passed it to me. ‘Drink this,’ the son said. ‘It is holy water.’

  ‘I ain’t thirsty, sir,’ I told him. I didn’t want no vicar’s son trying to put angels in my soul.

  The reverend shook his head. ‘It’s to bless you, Miriam,’ he said, like that was gonna make a difference. ‘It is to help you begin your journey to the light. You must say goodbye to the evil that found its way into your heart, and now you must set about your soul’s redemption. Celebrate the fact that you have found your way here.’

  I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but I ain’t that happy about being here, so if it’s all the same to you, I won’t have none of that holy water, thank you. And there ain’t no evil in my heart, neither, for that matter, whatever you folk might think of me.’ I was trying my best to make my words come out sounding polite, because I knew this was talk of a sort heading for trouble, but there wasn’t no way any man was gonna get me drinking religious drinks and changing round my way of thinking.

  When I looked at that young John Sutton, I reckoned I saw a bit of a smile or maybe even a laugh on his lips, but the reverend himself looked serious and stern. He bowed his head and was silent a while, I s’pose because he was asking for the Lord’s help in how to deal with me.

  When he looked up again, he said, ‘The Lord loves, but the Lord punishes, too.’

  They didn’t try pushing the holy water down me after that. Instead, the reverend said, ‘Please come into the kitchen and sit down, both of you.’