The Night Flower

by Sarah Stovell

  For all I didn’t want no baby, I didn’t want to carry out no wicked acts, neither. I knew I wasn’t gonna be allowed to keep my job at Liverpool Street nursery, considering who the father of my child was, and considering who the grandfather of my child was, too. I couldn’t much see as they’d be happy to let me live there as a poor convict mother, neither. They was folk with strict views and I knew them Suttons was all thinking Liverpool Street’d be a much tidier place if I wasn’t in it no more.

  So I was gonna get turned away, and I’d end up in the crime class, and maybe I’d live there with my baby, doing work like stone-breaking and building and such till I went and died from the heavy of it all. There wasn’t never gonna be another way out of it, because certain no decent man’d ever marry me now and no decent man’d ever employ me, neither, for that matter, and I knew this was how girls ended up working at Ma Dwyer’s place, because they didn’t have no other way of putting food in a baby’s mouth.

  Whatever way I looked, I couldn’t see no happy ending.

  That night, without telling no one, I took myself over to the Black Horse to talk to Ma Dwyer. I sat on a stool at the bar and told her about my plight in a few mumbling words. I wasn’t in the mood for making a long and exciting story of it.

  When all was said and done, I s’posed I didn’t really have no one to blame but myself for all this. I knew well enough how most men was scoundrels, especially when they was of the unmarried sort, and I ain’t sure why I ever reckoned John Sutton’d be different from any other, just because he’d got an extra helping of the Lord in his soul.

  Ma Dwyer listened and nodded her wise-woman head in a kind and sympathetic way. It was the sorta story she’d heard a hundred times. Then she give me a gin. ‘I thought as much,’ she said. ‘How long?’

  I shrugged. ‘About two months. Three, maybe. Three at the most, I’d say.’

  ‘You didn’t use them sponges and all that lemon and vinegar I gave you?’

  ‘I used em, ma’am,’ I told her. ‘But they didn’t work.’

  ‘Well, they don’t always, it’s true. Not always.’

  ‘Can you help me, Ma?’ I said.

  ‘Of course I can help you, child.’ She smiled. ‘Of course.’ And then she described her two methods. The first was the one she’d used on Katie-May, and the other one was a bit different, but no less bad-sounding for that.

  I reckon I must of gone a bit pale in the face. ‘It’s not as bad as you think, Miriam,’ said Ma Dwyer. ‘What happened to Katie-May was the exception. Things was bad on that ship. It was dirty and dark, and I didn’t have all the right equipment. It’ll work better for you.’

  ‘How much is it gonna cost?’

  She named her price, then cut a few pounds off, on account of knowing me well. ‘If you want, I can give you credit and you can pay me back with a few nights’ work.’

  I shook my head. I might of got myself in a bad way, but I wasn’t ready to sink as low as all that. I didn’t say nothing, though, and just sat and drunk my gin quite quick.

  When I’d finished, Ma Dwyer took my glass and filled it up again. I noticed she put a lot more gin in it than normal, and thought maybe she was trying to help get the baby outta me in a natural sorta way. I reckoned that was kind of her, seeing as she didn’t make me pay for the gin, what with me being in such a sorry state and just needing someone to talk to.

  37

  I was still waiting for a letter from my father about his release and the sale of our house. There was little now that money could do for me. After the board’s decision, the Suttons were refusing to take Arabella into the nursery. I wouldn’t have expected them to – they were Christian, law-abiding people and I had to accept that – but the thought sometimes entered my head that I might simply take her and run away, as I’d dreamed of doing in the past. I had not the first idea of how to go about it, though, or whether I had the necessary skills. When I was sitting alone in my room one evening – Miriam was over the road at the Black Horse; I supposed her to be discussing her plight with Ma Dwyer – I read an article in the Hobart newspaper about five convicts who’d escaped from the male prison near by. A small wooden boat had been stolen from the harbour at around the same time the men had disappeared, and police believed they were rowing themselves to New South Wales and then to Asia. The reporter said it was a common route for escaping prisoners to take, though a difficult and treacherous journey which few finished alive.

  I folded the newspaper and put it under my bed with my old diary, so I could return to it now and then, as a prayer or a message of inspiration. My suspicion was that the escaped unfortunates took the route they did because they had no money. I thought that perhaps if my father could send me a plentiful sum, I might be able to pay my way for me and Arabella to catch a returning ship one night.

  I decided to keep the idea at the front of my mind and see if I might develop the courage to do it. The penalty for being caught would be severe, but I was growing used to being in trouble by now.

  Wednesday, 16th June, 1841

  Mrs M interviewed the new nanny today. I watched from the schoolroom window as she arrived and departed – a tall, thin woman, about forty. Later Mrs M told me her family has lived in the village for generations and that she’s worked for the same people these past eighteen years. Now their children are older, the family has dismissed her. I pity her. To be dismissed so easily after such long service. But I cannot help wishing she would find a situation far away from here.

  Thursday, 17th June, 1841

  My spirits are too depressed to write this evening.

  Friday, 18th June, 1841

  Spirits still depressed.

  Monday, 21st June, 1841

  Better. A lovely day alone with the children. I’ve decided to make the most of the time we have left together. Today’s warm weather meant we could take our morning lessons out of doors. Mrs M has agreed that this is acceptable, as long as we are studying, and I’m sure it does Charles more good than being cooped up in that dingy schoolroom where we cannot even open a window.

  Ever since putting the children to bed this evening I’ve been feeling strangely anxious about them, and have paid several visits to their bedrooms to check they are still breathing &c. Mrs M would think me hysterical, but I cannot help being fearful of someone coming in and taking them away.

  Charles was sleeping fitfully, so I’ve brought both children out of their rooms and into my bed. It is a tight fit, but I feel now that I have developed a mother’s instinct where these two children are concerned, and can sense any threat to them, however slight it may be.

  The current threat I’m sensing must be the new nanny. We (Charles and I) are not happy about her imminent arrival.

  Tuesday, 22nd June, 1841

  Mrs M came up to the schoolroom today and informed us all that nanny would be starting on Thursday – the day after tomorrow! Charles, bless his heart, said he did not want a nanny, he was happy with me. Mrs M merely pursed her lips at this sentiment.

  Charles later told me that he will never love the nanny as much as me, and I cannot help being pleased at this. Mrs M, absent from her children almost all the time, seems to have no idea what is right for them, and the new nanny has barely glanced at them yet. It will always be me who knows them best.

  Thursday, 24th June, 1841

  Another warm and sunny day, so I took the children out for a picnic lunch. Mrs M seemed not to mind.

  Charles has caught the sun somewhat. He is looking rather sunburned.

  Friday, 25th June, 1841

  The new nanny arrived today. Her name is Louisa. Mrs M brought her up to the top floor, taking Isabella from me straight away and disappearing with her into the nursery. I’m sure that if they have their way, I will be having nothing to do with the baby from now until she turns five. I shall let Louisa settle in for a while, then set about resolving this issue.

  Charles is still sunburned. It looks slightly worse today.

  Reverend Su
tton was leading a service for the convict mothers and their babies in the hall, so the nursery was quiet. I found Mrs Sutton resting on a chair in the yard before lunch, so I went and stood by her, knowing that Miriam was away cleaning the dormitories and not in the kitchen, where she might have overheard us.

  I wasn’t sure how far advanced her pregnancy was, though we all believed it to be between four and five months. She was putting on a little weight, but there were no other outward signs. She’d told me she’d refused to have the baby killed and, while I admired her principles, I knew it was going to bring her a great deal of trouble. Her wild Gypsy’s heart would render her incapable of the true and steady devotion to another person that motherhood requires.

  I paused by Mrs Sutton’s chair and asked, ‘What is to be done about Miriam and the child?’ I didn’t know if it would be allowed a place in the nursery. I often found myself imagining what it would be like to be charged with the care of Miriam’s baby. Certainly, I would care for it as tenderly as if it had been my own. I’d even worked out that when it was two and due to be sent to the orphanage, my yellow ticket would be granted, and perhaps I would be able to adopt it. There were always babies that were adopted out to settlers.

  Mrs Sutton shook her head, looking worried and afraid. ‘I do not know, Rose,’ she said. ‘I feel quite sorry for her sometimes, but then I speak to my husband and he insists that we cannot help her because of the shame it would bring to us as a family. He says the child cannot be John’s, though John himself hasn’t said as much. There are times when I would like to do what I can to help keep Miriam from Cascades, but then I speak to my husband and I start to see his viewpoint. Miriam is a convict, after all. This fact is not to be overlooked.’

  ‘What do you think? Do you think the child is John’s?’

  ‘I …’ Her voice trailed off, and I could not tell quite what she thought.

  ‘I do not think it is,’ I said. ‘You know Miriam is good friends with Ma Dwyer, and that she has regularly visited the Black Horse …’

  Mrs Sutton nodded. I could see my message was being absorbed, without my needing to say anything more about it.

  Afterwards, I wrote to my father and stated the amount of money that I required.

  38

  Every night for a month, I took myself to the Black Horse and Ma Dwyer’d give me two big gins, what I drunk down as quick as I could. They used to make me feel sick to my stomach, and sometimes my head’d spin and my words’d come out slurring. Walking home to my bed’d be no easy feat, neither. When I got there, I’d kneel on the floor beside it and pray like a God-fearing Christian girl for that gin to work its violent magic and get the baby outta me. But it never did, and I couldn’t understand how a potion what could leave a girl seeing double and without her mouth or legs working proper, could still manage to keep the bones of a baby in her, growing and healthy. There wasn’t no sense in it, if you asked me.

  When the baby’d been in me four or five months – I wasn’t exactly sure how long – I come to see there wasn’t gonna be no getting rid of it with gin, and there was times I wished I’d given Ma Dwyer the money she’d wanted to cut it out, for all what that was a wicked thing to do, and for all I wasn’t sure my conscience’d let me live with myself afterwards.

  Things wasn’t easy in the nursery, neither. Mrs Sutton didn’t hardly look at me from one day to the next, and I didn’t never see John Sutton no more. There was rumours he was off learning stuff somewhere, because he’d all of a sudden decided he wasn’t gonna take on the nursery, after all, and he was gonna follow the way of his father and become a reverend instead. I was pretty well as surprised as could be when I heard that, because he hadn’t never took no interest in such a thing before. But then everything he’d done lately’d come as a surprise to me, because I didn’t know him like I’d thought I had.

  All this turmoil give me a longing for my old fortune-telling ways, and I wished I could have my tarot pack back so I could see what was in store and get some advice on what was best to do, maybe get a picture of the Sun or the Lovers, something what’d give me hope of a happy end to my sorry way.

  There wasn’t much in the way of Gypsy folk in Parts Beyond the Sea, though, and tarot cards wasn’t easy things to find. Christian folk thought of em as being the devil’s work. I thought maybe I could get myself some card and a pencil, and draw myself a new pack, though my drawing skills wasn’t up to very much. Seeing as I was only making em for my own use, and not for reading the lives of other folk, I reckoned maybe it wouldn’t matter too much if my Queen of Swords weren’t beautiful, or my Ten of Cups wasn’t overflowing in such a pretty and magical way.

  So that was what I did. Night after night for a month, I sat on my bed with a couple of candles flaming beside me. I’d spend an hour or two before going to sleep drawing the day’s cards, and when I’d got the seventy-eight of em – what took me a while, because I couldn’t remember em all straightaway, and had to search my brain for em – I tied em up with a piece of string I’d took from downstairs in the nursery. I felt proud of my work. It was a soothing thing on the spirit of a girl, to work hard at something what was for her own good, and not just the good of others what didn’t deserve it.

  By the time my cards was drawn, the baby in me was showing itself beneath my smock, and it was kicking, too, in a way I didn’t much like. Of course, I knew there was ladies out there in the world – ladies of the rich and Christian sort, what’d waited their whole lives long to become mothers – what reckoned having a baby move in em was about as special as anything could get. For all my efforts, I couldn’t see it that way. I didn’t say nothing about them feelings to no one, though, in case they thought I was inhuman in my thinking. I s’posed maybe I was.

  Once I’d got my cards all drawn, I packed em away under the floorboard where I used to keep my ring, and I left em there for eight nights, till the moon was shining full again. Then, when I next walked up the hill to get the nursery’s water, I picked plenty of bracken and wrapped my cards in it, leaving em out in the yard a few nights to soak up the light of the full moon and all the magic what come in it.

  I knew then that they was ready for reading futures, so in the morning, when I’d finished the washing-up from breakfast, I picked myself six cards, and in the first three I turned over, I saw a life what looked like this:

  There was a bit of trouble ahead for a while, but things was gonna get better, and there’d be plenty of kushti things coming, like love and some money and a pretty happy life, all in all.

  And because that was a life what suited me, I didn’t bother with turning over the next three cards, and just put em facedown at the bottom of the pack instead. And then I got on with my day in a happy sorta mood.

  39

  I was becoming quite expert at eavesdropping. In the evenings, when Miriam had finished her work and gone upstairs, and when I knew the reverend and Mrs Sutton would be having their end-of-day meeting, I would find reason to dawdle outside the study and listen to what was being said inside.

  Usually, they would discuss simple things – the budget and whether they’d gone over or under it this week; what the governors’ latest news was about making improvements to the place; and how best to instil morality into the minds of the convict women. Recently, though, their main conversation focused around Miriam and their son.

  ‘If what Rose says is true,’ I heard Mrs Sutton saying, ‘then we simply cannot keep her here. She is nothing more than a prostitute, accusing our son to cover her own immorality.’

  There was a loud, heavy noise, as though the reverend were banging his fist on the table, which I daresay he was. ‘This is just what I have been saying to you for the last six weeks. You have spent all that time refusing to listen to me, defending that girl and her slander …’

  Mrs Sutton was quiet. Then she said, ‘We must summon the officers of the law, Jacob. Her offence is serious. We cannot keep her here.’

  Saturday, 26th June, 1841

&
nbsp; Last night, Charles grew feverish and complained often of tummy ache. It was only me who heard his whimpering. Louisa, who is supposed to be caring for him now, slept soundly on while I went to his room and comforted him. In the end, I brought him into my room again. I am going to keep him with me now in case he grows distressed by Louisa’s strange presence. He and I have not had lessons today. Louisa asked how he was and I said it was just a touch of sunstroke. I do not want anyone but me caring for him.

  Sunday, 27th June, 1841

  I decided last night that the best thing for the children will be if I share Louisa’s duties with her while she settles in. It will make the transition easier for them if they see that I am still here, and always will be here, as they get to know her.

  This morning, Charles was still feverish, so I ate breakfast in the nursery with just Louisa and Isabella. Possibly, Louisa found my presence irritating, as she suggested a couple of times that I go and prepare my work in the schoolroom, or check on Charles, but I’m not ready yet to leave the children alone with her. Mrs M might have been impressed with her references, but references mean nothing until a person is working. You can never be sure if you can trust one person’s opinion on the worth of a nanny, particularly when they are usually written by mothers who have hardly the faintest idea of what is happening day by day in the nursery.

  When I rose from the table after breakfast to return to Charles, Isabella began to cry.

  Louisa picked her up from her highchair and tried to comfort her, so I said, ‘I can take her with me. I usually do.’

  She looked irritated. ‘That would not be sensible, Mrs Winter,’ she said. ‘I am the child’s nanny now. She must grow used to me.’

  So I returned to my room and to Charles, but made sure I left the door open so I could listen to what was going on in the nursery.