The Night Flower

by Sarah Stovell

  After hearing from my father about his release, I found it easy to turn all my attention to developing a flawless plan to get Arabella back. At breakfast one morning, I said to Mrs Sutton, ‘Do you think it would be possible, if the orphanage agreed to release my daughter, for her to come and live with me here?’

  ‘I can speak to my husband about it, certainly, Mrs Winter. If he agrees, then I see no reason why not to allow it. Of course, we would have to deduct some money from your weekly allowance to cover the costs of her keep.’

  ‘Yes, certainly. I shouldn’t mind that. All I am concerned about is having my daughter back.’

  ‘I understand, Mrs Winter. I would like to help you in any way that I can. We must make sure everything we do is legal, so my husband will have to discuss the matter with the board of governors first. I hope they will look kindly on your case, though, and see how your background and conduct since being here make it clear that you are not from typical convict stock, and perhaps ought not to have been sent in the first place.’

  I was beginning to feel very hopeful.

  32

  One evening, about a week after I’d spoke to Ma Dwyer, I finished my work and took myself upstairs and there I saw John Sutton, waiting for me on the landing. ‘Well, well. If it’s not Miriam Booth,’ he said and smiled in the cheeky way what he had.

  ‘Ain’t Hattie around?’ I asked him, because it’d been a long time since I’d seen her, and I wanted to ask her some questions about making a Romany living in Parts Beyond the Sea, and if she thought it was a possible thing. Rose’d put the idea of running away in my head, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked it, but before I went running, I’d gotta make sure there’d be a living to earn when I got there. I wasn’t a girl to leave a house full of food and run off to a place of no food. There wasn’t nothing sensible about that.

  ‘She’s upstairs,’ John said, and pointed to the door what led to her attic. It was closed tight. Then he put on an offended sorta face. ‘Don’t you want to see me, Miriam?’

  ‘Not as much as I want to see Hattie, sir, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Come and sit with me in the kitchen. Have a night cap,’ he said.

  Well, I wasn’t sure what he was meaning by this, because I hadn’t never heard of such a thing before, except as a hat to wear to bed, but I couldn’t really think that was what he was planning to give me.

  He didn’t give me a hat. Once I’d sat myself down and made myself as comfy as could be in a small kitchen what only had a hard bench to sit on, he give me a tumbler of brown liquid. I looked at it. ‘Are you giving me liquor, John Sutton?’

  He laughed. ‘It’s a night cap, Miriam,’ he said, but that wasn’t really answering my question.

  He sat opposite me. ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘Try it.’

  So I took a sip. It burned my lips and throat as it went down. I coughed. ‘That ain’t nice, sir,’ I said and put my glass down, because I didn’t have plans to drink no more of it.

  He grinned and leaned over towards me. ‘It’s a magic drink, Miriam. The more you have of it, the better it tastes. By the time you reach the end of that glass, you’ll think it the finest nectar on earth.’

  ‘You talk a lot of rot sometimes, John Sutton,’ I said, but I admit, he’d made me curious, and I missed having a bit of magic in my life, ever since leaving my Gypsy ways behind, so I took myself another sip. ‘It’s still horrible,’ I told him. ‘You gadje folk ain’t got no magic in you, and that’s the truth of it. Where’s your father this evening?’ I had to bite my tongue then to keep from saying, ‘Not at the Black Horse?’ I wasn’t meant to know about that.

  John said, ‘I don’t know.’ Then – as a way of changing the subject, I reckoned – he said, ‘Have you seen Ma Dwyer recently?’

  I looked straight at him, because I knew this was one of them questions designed to catch me out.

  ‘I bumped into her at the greengrocer’s the other day, and again at the butcher’s, and once in the street.’ I took another sip of my drink, to see if it was tasting any better; it wasn’t.

  ‘You haven’t been to the Black Horse to see her?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, sir, I haven’t,’ I said. Then I added, ‘Have you?’

  He ignored my question. ‘I’m glad about that, Miriam,’ he told me. And then his mouth opened again and all them boring words started falling out of it, about my soul and my corruptible heart. I pretty well stopped listening after a second of it, because I’d heard it enough times by now, so instead I just sat quiet and drank my drink, what I admit did start tasting a bit better then.

  When he’d stopped talking, John looked at me like he was waiting for some sorta response to all his preaching. ‘You used to be fun, John Sutton,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to you, but you ain’t no more.’ And I felt better inside for saying so.

  He laughed. ‘I’m sorry, Miriam,’ he said, and he chinked his glass of night cap against mine. ‘I’ll stop lecturing.’

  ‘You make sure you do. Or maybe I’ll start lecturing you instead, and try and get you to be a magical sorta Gypsy boy, without no Lord to believe in, and without all this worry about heaven and hell. You could just live outside with me, hunting hedgehogs and rabbits, and cooking em all up in a stew, living happy as anything, without poking your nose into other folk’s affairs and trying to get em all thinking as you do. There’s other ways to live than yours, John Sutton.’

  ‘Why do you always call me John Sutton?’ he said.

  ‘Ain’t it your name?’

  ‘Why not just John?’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be disrespectful, sir?’

  He didn’t say nothing to that, but added some more of the night cap to my glass, what surprised me, seeing as I hadn’t finished what was already there.

  ‘Is it tasting any better?’ he asked.

  ‘Much better, sir,’ I told him.

  A banging noise come down to us from upstairs. Of course, I knew pretty well who was making it and how, but I looked round and said, ‘What’s that? You reckon Hattie’s all right?’

  John Sutton said, ‘Perhaps not. Perhaps she’s going crazy.’

  ‘You think she’s crazy?’ I asked, because it was a thought what’d crossed my own mind more than just once or twice.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She’s old. She’s weak. She hasn’t had an easy life.’

  ‘I s’pose I’ll go crazy too, then, when I’m old,’ I said. ‘Because I ain’t strong and you folk here are working the flesh off my bones, and I can’t say as I’ve had an easy life, neither, what with one thing and another.’ But that was where I stopped, because I wasn’t the sorta girl to go sharing all my life’s secrets with a man like John Sutton.

  ‘You won’t go crazy, Miriam,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know? You ain’t got the life I’ve got, and you ain’t got no tarot for reading the future, neither.’

  He winked. ‘I’ll save you from it,’ he said and then, before I could say nothing else, he leaned over as far as he could and give me a kiss on my lips. It wasn’t no small and ordinary kiss, neither. It was a long kiss, and it felt to me like it’d got love in it.

  I wasn’t sure how long we’d been sitting there in the end, talking about this and that, and drinking our night caps and laughing. We did laugh, and that’s certain, because John Sutton stopped his preaching ways and got more of his old self about him.

  I wasn’t sure, neither, how much of that night cap I’d drunk, but it was more than a little bit, though not so much as to make me start shouting like the men in the Black Horse. It’d just got me feeling tired, like I wanted to lie my head down and rest – I s’pose that was why they called it a night cap – and so at some time what must of been quite late, I said to John Sutton, ‘I’ve gotta go to bed now.’ And I stood up and my legs swayed a bit like I was at sea, and I had to hold on to the table to steady myself.

  John Sutton give me his arm to hold on to, for what I was grateful,
and he walked me across the landing to my room. The banging’d stopped up in the attic, but Hattie’s door was still shut firm, and there wasn’t no one else around that I could see. The noise of crying babies come up from downstairs, what meant Mrs Sutton’d be kept busy there a while yet. The reverend himself could of been just about anywhere, but was probably at the Black Horse.

  ‘Thank you for helping me, John Sutton,’ I said, when we’d been stood outside my room longer than what was necessary just to drop me off.

  He nodded and I waited for him to go, but he didn’t go. He just stood there. I thought to myself, well, one of us has to go. And though I knew it wasn’t polite to leave a man by the door, that was what I did and I went inside.

  Except he followed me, what I thought wasn’t really a proper sorta thing for a man to do.

  When we was both inside my room, he said, ‘Is Rose working tonight?’

  ‘She ain’t here. I s’pose she must be,’ I said, and I wasn’t feeling that happy about it by then, and wished she was here.

  ‘Which one’s your bed?’

  I pointed to it, and he sat himself down on the edge.

  ‘Ain’t you got a bed of your own to get to, John Sutton? It’s getting late,’ I said, because I was feeling a bit nervous now, though of course I knew I didn’t really have nothing to worry about. This was John Sutton, after all, and he was a kushti man what cared about my soul.

  He took a cigar out his breast pocket and lit it, what I thought was a bit rude, seeing as this was my bedroom and I was wanting to go to sleep in it. To show how I wasn’t that happy with his behaviour, I opened the sash to let some air in.

  He grinned and patted the bed beside him. ‘Come and sit down,’ he said, ‘and try this.’

  Well, that shocked me. I said, ‘John Sutton, what do you take me for? Some sorta harridan from outta Cascades?’ I hadn’t never said the word harridan before, but I knew what one was. I thought it a nicer word than wench.

  He laughed. ‘Not at all.’ And he give me a cheeky look, what I s’posed was his way of saying sorry.

  ‘Ain’t you ever gonna go home?’ I said.

  He said, ‘I am home.’

  ‘I mean to your own bed.’

  ‘But that would mean taking myself away from you, and I don’t want to,’ he said, and he give me another one of them kisses again, what showed how he liked me, and I couldn’t help being pleased about that, for all I knew it was a dangerous thing by now.

  Well, I ain’t quite sure what happened after that, but it didn’t take very long before we wasn’t just sitting on that bed no more, but lying on it, and John kept on kissing me and saying loving things in my ear, and a girl what’s been full up of lonely for nearly two years on end can’t help welcoming a bit of love in her life. So I kissed him back and didn’t much mind it, though he did slobber a bit at times, but a girl who wants kissing by a boy can’t get too particular about the style he’s got.

  Then he whispered more stuff in my ear, about purity and not getting corrupted by a bad man, what I took to mean not getting corrupted by a man what wasn’t him, because by now it was getting clearer and clearer to me what he was wanting, and I wasn’t sure I’d got the strength to fight it.

  So I didn’t say nothing when he hitched my smock up to my waist, though I could feel myself shaking a bit with the fear of it, and then when he started fumbling with his belt and his trousers, and when I saw the shape of his thing coming up in his pants, I shut my eyes and thought, how can I get outta this? But I couldn’t think of a way, without shouting the house down, so I didn’t do nothing, because shouting the house down was gonna cause a lot of trouble, and the trouble wouldn’t be for John Sutton.

  He wriggled himself outta his trousers and underpants, and then he took hold of my own underwear and whispered, ‘Ssssh, Miriam. Good girl, good girl.’ He pulled it down over my ankles and dropped it on the floor. ‘I love you, Miriam,’ he said, what was nice words to hear, and I knew that was why he was doing this, so I didn’t mind, and I did what I was needing to do to make it easier for him.

  I felt his thing against my thigh and then it was pushing against the bit of me where it wanted to go, and it hurt a bit, and I turned my face away. I wanted to change my mind then, and ask him to stop, but I reckoned he’d think me rude after getting this far.

  After pushing at me a while, John Sutton pulled his thing away. I thought maybe he was giving up and was gonna go back to his own bed, but he didn’t. He waved it in my face instead, like he was wanting me to do something with it, but I turned my face to the side again because it smelled and I didn’t like it. I thought it was quite ugly, like a turkey neck.

  Then he spat on his fingers and rubbed the spit over his thing a few times, and he spat again and rubbed the spit on me, and then it seemed to make the whole thing a lot easier, because suddenly his thing was on its way in me and it didn’t hurt as much as I’d thought it was gonna.

  So that was that. He moved about on top of me a few times and then he cried out, ‘Oh, oh.’ And he stopped and just lay there, with his face buried in my neck, and I felt myself full up of something warm and wet, what wasn’t comfy. All I wanted was to get a wash, but I couldn’t, because John Sutton wasn’t showing no signs of going nowhere.

  So I lay there and put my arms around him, and I s’posed this meant I’d been up to no good.

  Part Four

  33

  Life in Van Diemen’s Land went on and on, and then when October came round, we’d been there a full year. I had seen Arabella just ten times, and not heard once from Jack or Clara. I tried hard not to think about it, but there were days when I couldn’t help wondering what they thought of me, and how they remembered me and whether they grieved for the absence of their mother or if they simply carried on happily with their new lives. I still wrote to them diligently every month, with bright promises for our lives together, but whether my mother-in-law ever opened my letters, I didn’t know.

  After my October visit to Arabella, I returned to the nursery feeling my usual depression in spirits and so I decided to speak directly to the reverend about removing her from the orphanage and bringing her to live with me.

  ‘I am not happy about the conditions she lives in at the orphanage, sir,’ I said. ‘She is my child, and I need her with me. If you permitted it, it would give me great happiness to bring her here to live.’

  He appeared to think carefully about it. ‘It would certainly be acceptable to me, Mrs Winter,’ he said. ‘I should not usually allow it, as it is not good for children to be exposed to the ways of their convict mothers, but you are a good, hardworking Christian woman. I can see that it is not always the wisest thing to adhere strictly to every law, and that perhaps your daughter’s welfare would be improved by proximity to you, her mother. I am prepared to put the idea to the board, but be aware, Mrs Winter, that they are bound by regulation and persuading them to deviate is often difficult.’

  ‘I understand, sir,’ I said. ‘But perhaps we might work together and draft an appeal. If they see that you support me, they might be more inclined to consider my case.’

  He nodded his head. ‘Indeed. Perhaps they will.’

  Wednesday, 26th May, 1841

  I am going to write to my father today, and perhaps plan a visit, though in her most recent letter Aunt Emily has said he is not keen to receive visitors – he doesn’t want any of us to witness his life in prison, and the coarseness of the men he must now live among. I find it all so hard to imagine, after only knowing him live amid splendour, wealth and refinement.

  Aside from this, today has been a difficult one with Isabella. She spent a great deal of the afternoon crying. Perhaps she is teething. I’m trying to follow Mrs M’s commands that she ought not to be fed or amused simply because she demands it, so instead I left her in her crib while I tried to teach Charles the letter ‘a’.

  The noise was distracting, however, and both Charles and I were finding it hard to focus. Eventually, I left th
e schoolroom and went to Isabella, and I was shocked to find her convulsing in her crib – her body was arched, her mouth purple, her arms flailing against the mattress. I scooped her up, held her and walked about the nursery with her for three or four minutes. She appeared to recover with a short sigh, then her body relaxed, her head flopped backwards, her eyes glistened and I thought for a dreadful moment that she had perished.

  I remained calm. Mrs M had told me previously that both children have always been susceptible to such fits, and that they can be restored by a teaspoonful of brandy, which she keeps in the nursery kitchen.

  Once the medicine was administered, the baby was soothed again. I changed her nappy and fed her, despite hearing all Mrs M’s protestations very loudly in my mind. Afterwards, we returned to the schoolroom, where I abandoned Charles’s lesson and we passed a pleasant two hours while he played with his Noah’s ark, and I resolved never to leave the baby crying like that again. I do not care now that Mrs M is the children’s mother. I am the one who looks after them, and I believe I have a better understanding of their needs than she does. I shall do things my own way from now on, just as I would if they were my own children.

  Thursday, 27th May, 1841

  Today was Charles’s fourth birthday. We rose early and had his favourite breakfast – poached eggs on toast, which I cooked on the nursery stove. It is not easy cooking on such a small stove, to be sure, but I should prefer that to traipsing the children down to the dining room and eating with the Murrays. (Mrs M has given no suggestion that she wishes to share her mealtimes with the children, and seems perfectly happy with this arrangement.)

  I decided that a birthday warranted outdoor amusement, instead of being shut up in a darkened schoolroom endlessly trying to fill Charles’s mind with facts and letters. So I took the children up to the beech forest. We spent a lovely morning trudging through paths, picking flowers and leaves and mushrooms, and Charles even found a fallen dove’s egg, which he held carefully in his palm all the way home. I thought we might start a nature table in the schoolroom, and fill it with leaf rubbings and bark from various trees &c.