Altogether, ten babies died in just six weeks – some of em from the influenza what took hold of the place, and others of bad stomachs what wouldn’t never keep the food in. Reverend Sutton gave a lot of sermons on how they was the children of sinners, and he seemed to reckon they might not make it to heaven, for all what he carried out his emergency christenings to try and help em along. The ones what died in the same week got put in a grave together, so the governors could save on the cost of it all, and it was a sorry sight to see two or three babies wrapped up in their dirty white sheets, being carried off out for ever, with it not even being certain if they was gonna find their way to the heaven they all believed in so hard.
That first autumn was about the saddest time I ever saw in that nursery. Maybe it was the saddest time I ever saw anywhere, come to that.
The sorry of it all made Rose sick and she had to have three days in bed. Mrs Sutton wasn’t happy about it, because even though a lot of babies’d died, there was still a lot left behind, and it wasn’t no easy thing, looking after more than thirty babies together. But Rose could be brave when she had to be, and she said, ‘Mrs Sutton, if you don’t let me rest and grieve, you will have to send me to find other work.’
Well, at that Mrs Sutton give her just what she was asking for, plus a bit more, because Rose were a kushti worker what the nursery depended on, and she knew she’d be a desirable body for settlers. Convicts what could read and write wasn’t common, and there was a lot of folk in Van Diemen’s Land wanting the sorta maid what could give a bit of learning to their children. Reverend and Mrs Sutton wasn’t gonna give Rose up easy, that was certain.
On the day the last of the autumn’s babies got took off for burying, I finished my work with a sigh of relief and hauled myself up to my room. There I found Rose, lying face down on her bed, sobbing like someone what’s heart wasn’t gonna last another hour.
‘Rose,’ I whispered, and I sat beside her. I couldn’t think of nothing else to do, so I just patted her back and stroked her hair, in the way Evelyn’d of done to me, if I’d ever been in such a sorry state as what Rose was.
After a while, she sat up and wiped her tears away. I was pleased and a bit relieved at that, because I wasn’t the sorta girl what was easy at offering a body comfort. It give me awkward feelings, not knowing if I was acting in a right sorta way, or if I was even wanted there.
Rose said, ‘It’s terribly sad.’
I nodded, because even though one baby was pretty well the same as any other to me, and even though a nursery crowded to the rafters with em wasn’t no kushti thing, I could see how ten dead ones’d be the cause of a lot of grief in the bodies of folk what cared for em day after day and night after night.
Then she said, soft and quiet so I couldn’t hardly hear her, ‘You must think I’m silly to be so upset over children that aren’t even mine. But it all reminds me of losing my son, and having my other children taken from me.’
She spoke in a way what give me an ache in my heart for her.
I decided I oughta change the subject, so I talked about how I missed England, and how bad it was to be living here, far away from all we knew, without hardly no hope of getting back again, even after our seven years was up. Rose agreed with me, and I reckon it made us both feel better a bit, to know how someone was sharing our sorry state.
Most of the time, the Reverend Sutton left me alone to get on with my work and didn’t much come near me, except on Sundays and on them days when he was delivering his sermons to the whole nursery. He give a lot of extra sermons in them days after the babies was all dying – he reckoned he was trying to help the mothers with their fears, and he used to make me go and listen to em, too, so I could learn a thing or two. But I didn’t understand much, because they was so full of long words and old-fashioned language what didn’t please my ears enough to listen to.
But one lunchtime, he come into the kitchen, just as I was cutting the bread into slices to go with the day’s ox-head soup. He watched me for a while in silence, then said, ‘I hope you are feeling more settled here now.’
‘I am, sir,’ I told him, what I admit wasn’t the truth, but I didn’t see no point in saying I was sad and then having him tell me all that stuff about my soul, and how I should love God and get the devil outta me. It wasn’t the sorta thing I wanted to hear no more, because when all was said and done, I wasn’t the sorta girl to go loving the invisible folk of the world. Love were an unreliable thing at the best of times, without a girl putting all her feelings on a man what didn’t so much as show his face in the mornings, or ever, come to that.
He said, ‘I hope Hattie doesn’t influence you too much.’
It took me a while to work out what he was meaning, but then I s’posed it’d got something to do with how Hattie’d gone and got cross with him, back when I’d only just got here. Maybe he hoped she wasn’t gonna make me hate the place, just because she was a creature of the miserable sort.
‘Why is Hattie so unhappy, sir?’ I said.
Of course, I knew how living here’d make a body miserable, but I reckoned Hattie’d got a kushti enough time of it. She didn’t hardly have to do no work and she had a whole room to herself and they fed her and kept her as good as if she was the reverend’s own sister. So I’d been wondering a long time why she didn’t never so much as smile, and even though I’d asked John Sutton once or twice, he hadn’t never said a thing about it.
The reverend shook his head, then bowed it a minute like he was praying. He said, ‘Hattie has been here a long time. She considers herself to have suffered while paying for her crimes. She has behaved at times with great licentiousness, which has taken its toll on her body and soul. I believed her to have been led astray, so I rescued her from sin and brought her here to work for us, where she might find salvation, instead of earning her living through immorality.’
I s’posed he was meaning fornication.
‘Where’d you rescue her from, sir?’ I said.
He give me the name of somewhere, what I reckoned must of been a bawdy house.
So I said, ‘I’ve seen you a few times, sir, going in the Black Horse. Is that what you’re going there for? To save the ladies’ souls?’
Well, it was an innocent enough question, but the reverend didn’t think a lot of it and started getting proper cross with me. Then he give me some sorta preaching story, what I couldn’t hardly understand, but it was full of the fires of hell, and I knew he was meaning they was the fires I’d be ending up in if I wasn’t careful.
For all what she was a Christian lady, Rose wasn’t like the others of em when it come to talking about matters of the flesh. I hadn’t never talked about such things before, though of course I knew what went on between men and the ladies what was their wives, or men and the ladies what wasn’t their wives sometimes. And although it didn’t sound like the sorta thing I’d ever want to go and do, I understood well enough it was something ladies had to put up with, to keep their husbands happy. I knew there wouldn’t never be a way outta it for myself, not unless I lived my whole life long on my own, what wasn’t something I wanted to do – all the ladies in England what’d lived on their own was of the strange sort, what grew hair on their chins and kept wolves and such, or so the folk what knew em said.
‘Miriam,’ Rose said one day. ‘I want to talk to you about the things Reverend Sutton says. Of course, it is up to you to make up your own mind, but I think you ought to hear another view. I don’t like how he preaches. The things he says about sin and punishment. They’re not true. If you love someone, it’s not a sin. This is something I’ve come to learn recently.’
And she went on and told me what she’d come to think about love ever since meeting that man on the boat, and how there was earthly love and divine love, and earthly love wasn’t no bad thing at all. It was a kushti and beautiful thing, Rose said, to love another person on earth, because it was the love of the Lord, and he was sending it down from heaven. The happy you got when you loved a
man on earth was a taste of the happy you’d get in the afterlife, except that the happy in the afterlife’d be better – it didn’t come with fear of death or loss, because everyone stayed alive up there, even though strictly speaking they was actually dead as dodos. Though of course, Rose didn’t say that last bit; I added it on myself.
When Rose talked like this, she come over with a dreamy sorta look, and her voice got soft. There was times when I thought listening to her was like being put under a spell or something, because her words wasn’t just floating round me, but getting in me, too, and they put a gentle smile on my face like the one she’d got on hers. I felt in my heart then what a particular sorta kushti person she was – not kushti like Mrs Sutton with all her caring for poor babies, and not kushti like Evelyn, what’d brung me up and worked so hard to keep me – but kushti like something else entirely, in a way what was clever and full of thinking, and she come to seem like something a bit outta the ordinary to me. I wouldn’t never go so far as to say she was an angel, but I would say maybe she was gold.
27
Winter came to the nursery, and with it came sickness and death. So many babies passed away that the governors grew concerned, and sent officials out to inspect the place. Rumours were circulating that babies had been secretly smothered, so as not to be a burden on the public purse, and there was talk of the nursery being shut down, if it wasn’t clean and warm enough to give those that were left a chance of surviving the rest of the season.
‘Do you have any thoughts about why so many babies have died?’ one of the inspectors asked me in private. He was interviewing everyone who worked there.
‘It’s not a very clean establishment, sir.’
He wrote this down in his notebook, though I’d have thought it obvious enough. The reverend blamed Miriam, but I wasn’t sure. Keeping the nursery clean was a big job for one girl, and it was unrealistic to expect a Gypsy to have high standards about dirt.
‘Did you inspect any of the corpses before they were taken away?’
‘I beg your pardon, sir?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Did you have a chance to look at any of the bodies of the children before they were buried?’
I shook my head. ‘Oh, no, sir. I believe that is for the mothers. It wasn’t my place to …’
‘So you weren’t aware of any bruising to the mouth, or anything like that?’ He kept his tone light and casual, but I understood what he was saying.
‘I saw nothing like that.’
He wrote this down, too. Then, all of a sudden, he looked up at me and said, ‘What brought you here?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked, though of course I knew. It was unavoidable. Everyone asked.
‘What was your crime?’
‘I took something that wasn’t mine. Nothing more.’
I was surprised and a little alarmed when he wrote this down in his notebook. ‘And who did you steal from?’
‘My employer. It was wrong of me, I know. But I was very poor.’
He continued to write it down. Then he said, ‘The reverend tells me you were a governess before you came here. Is that true?’
‘Yes, that’s true, sir.’
‘To how many children?’
‘Two, sir.’
‘And what were their ages?’
‘Five and one.’
He frowned. ‘That seems very young for formal instruction.’
‘I was meant to teach only the older child. The boy. But the nanny died shortly after my arrival, and it became my job to care for them both.’
‘And that, I take it, is why the reverend employed you at the nursery?’
‘I believe so.’
He nodded. ‘And the children you used to look after … Are they both still in good health?’
‘I …’ My voice trailed off. I could not talk about Charles. Not now.
The inspector smiled at me. ‘Of course, you wouldn’t know. You cannot still be in contact. Not to worry. Thank you, Mrs Winter, for talking to me.’
And he left.
Later, in my room, I took out my old diary from under my bed and thought about destroying it. Instead, however, I began to read.
Friday, 30th April, 1841
It’s not the children that make this situation so difficult. I’m sure that if it weren’t for them, I should be quite desolate. It is their mother, and her friends, and their taste for always reminding me of my inferiority. And the seclusion. The creeping loneliness of being a stranger, of living by myself on the top floor in this enormous house full of people. Sometimes, at night, I become so afraid this is all I will ever have that I start to panic. I wonder if I am turning into a hysteric.
I am given so little free time here, it is next to impossible to meet new acquaintances and, on occasions when I do meet people, they simply gaze at me pityingly and keep their distance. A governess is not a coveted companion.
Recently, I’ve thought perhaps I am starting to love the children as my own flesh. But it’s a painful solace I take from them. No matter how much I pretend to myself when I am with them, they will always be someone else’s.
Sunday, 2nd May, 1841
A storm last night. Upstairs was cold and I felt a little afraid. I still had some time before Isabella’s feed was due, so I went down to the main house. There was so much energy and light there, compared with all that dark rolling over the top floor, I could have wept from longing for it.
I wandered into the kitchen, thinking no one would mind if I made myself some tea. The oil lamps still burned on the table, and the din of the servants in the rooms above came down through the floorboards. But as I padded silently towards the pantry, I realized that Jo, the young ragged girl Mrs M has just brought in from the workhouse and Lucy, the scullery maid, were lying on old mattresses by the range, and so without even meaning to, I listened to them talk. I was hoping for a way in, a way to make friends. I no longer care that they are the lowest of all the servants.
Lucy was making a pile of books on the floor, moving them away from the heat.
Jo asked, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Missus wants someone to wrap these up in paper. They come for her from the ragged school that’s closed down over there. I don’t know why, as she can afford all her own books, but maybe they was thinking of all her charity work she does. Anyway, she said she’ll give em to the orphan children – for all the good that’ll do – but she can’t keep things like this upstairs. These covers is so dirty, miss, and the Murrays so afraid they’ll pass on smallpox or something dreadful, so she’s sent em down here to be done by a maid.’
‘But what if you took the smallpox then, and died?’ Jo said.
Lucy laughed. ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so, miss. Not a flinty old thing like me.’
I laughed lightly at this, though neither of them heard. Then I went into the pantry, hunting for sugar. There was none. A token of the Murrays’ anti-slavery sentiments. I wonder sometimes what they would say, if they knew about my father. They should probably cast me out to the workhouse.
‘Mrs Murray gets taken ill very often,’ Lucy went on. ‘You’ll get used to it. It’s queer to me, to think of how a woman with all her luxury can be in such bad health, but so it is and we’re not to question it. Flora – that’s the housekeeper – she says we’re to pity the poor woman and count ourselves as lucky. We are not troubled in our heads like Mrs M, worrying about her household and her husband and all her charity goings-on. We just rise from our beds, carry a few coals here and there, mangle the wash and all, and then at night we go back to our beds and sleep there deep until the dawn starts again. We think it’s labour and hard work, but Mrs M – hers is the labour of the mind, miss, which is much, much worse. She don’t sleep like us. Her work keeps her awake at night, and that’s why she gets so ill.’
I coughed then, and they both jumped.
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘I came down for some tea. I didn’t realize you would be here. I didn’t mean to disturb yo
u.’
Lucy laughed and looked at Jo, ‘She didn’t realize we’d be here. It’s because she’s the children’s governess, you see. She don’t realize there’s those of us servants what have to sleep in the kitchen.’
I do beg your pardon,’ I said again.
‘She do beg our pardon.’
‘I …’
Constance Murray’s voice came suddenly from behind me. ‘Is everything all right in here? Mrs Winter, what are you doing in the kitchen?’
‘I just came for some tea, ma’am,’ I explained.
She looked bemused. ‘But you have a stove in the nursery you could have used. Is it not working?’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Murray,’ I fumbled. ‘I was tired. I must have forgotten.’ I did not wish to explain that I’d been afraid, shut at the top of the house in a storm, with only three sleeping children and the nanny’s empty room.
‘Right. Well, I’m shutting down the house now as Mary is away, so up you go.’
‘Yes, Mrs Murray,’ I said.
She looked at me curiously. ‘Perhaps you should use your evenings for writing letters to your family, Mrs Winter. It will keep you from becoming too bored and in need of amusement.’
I nodded. ‘Quite right, Mrs Murray,’ I said, and hurried away with my candle, back up the spiral staircases to the top floor.
Only silence came from the children’s bedrooms. I wandered in to check on each of them. Charles slept soundly, a tin soldier clasped in his fist. Gently, I removed it and placed it on the floor beside his bed, and then I bent down and kissed his face. He didn’t stir. In the bed beside him, Isabella also slept. Outside, the wind was still strong, and soot and old leaves whispered down the chimney into the fireplace. I knew it wouldn’t be too long before Isabella woke, so I scooped her up and carried her to my own bed.
The Night Flower Page 14
