The Night Flower

by Sarah Stovell

  Well, when she said that, I was ready enough to settle myself back to sleep again, but Mrs Sutton disappeared away, and left me holding the baby. The baby kept crying, so there wasn’t nothing I could do except hold on to it till she come back. Then Mrs Sutton said I’d gotta feed it myself, because I was the baby’s mother, and when she said that word mother it put a strange sorta feeling in me, and it wasn’t one of them words I could feel myself to be – not like other words, such as Gypsy or girl, or even convict, what I knew belonged to me about as much as my own names did.

  Once the baby’d got a bottle in its lips, it was happy enough, sucking away in its normal crazy way. I said to Mrs Sutton, ‘I called it Emma. Just so you know.’

  ‘Emma. Now, that’s nice.’ Then she reached out and stroked the baby’s cheek, and she smiled. ‘Hello, Emma.’

  But when I looked at the baby, I didn’t see no Emma. I just saw a baby.

  49

  The reverend came back that night. He’d largely avoided me ever since our unpleasant encounter in his study several months ago, but there were many times when I could feel him staring at me from afar. It made me shudder. I never knew what he was thinking, but I knew it could be nothing good. His mind was empty of honourable, Christian thoughts.

  He walked into the dormitory just after midnight, looking for his wife. Mrs Sutton was there with Miriam, standing beside her bed and trying to get the baby to take her milk. I looked up from where I was sitting on my chair in the corner. The reverend saw his wife and began striding towards her. Then he saw Miriam.

  ‘What on earth …’ he bellowed, loudly enough to wake the mothers who were resting.

  Mrs Sutton turned to him and placed a finger to her lips. ‘Ssh,’ she said. ‘I’ll talk to you about it later.’

  I assumed that it was because he didn’t want to be seen losing his temper in front of the other women there that he simply span round and left the room. But his fury could be heard in every footstep.

  Half an hour later, Mrs Sutton left the dormitory. I was meant to use the time between the babies’ feeds to rest, but I stood up and followed her out. I knew she would go to the reverend’s study, as always, and I stood outside the closed door and listened.

  ‘Why is that girl back here?’ the reverend demanded.

  ‘The baby was ill. The girl was ill. She gave birth on her own, Jacob – on her own in a cell – and hadn’t the first idea what to do with a baby. No one helped her. She didn’t feed it. The superintendent over there asked the doctor to visit, and he took one look at them both and said they ought to come here as a matter of urgency. The baby would have died.’

  ‘They can’t stay. The girl is bringing shame on us.’

  ‘It’s John’s baby, Jacob. I know what you think, but it is. He ought to marry her. He ought to face his responsibilities.’

  ‘Marry her? Have you lost your mind? He can’t marry her. She’s a convict. A Jezebel. We can’t be associated with a whore. Our family would become a laughing stock.’

  ‘It’s John’s baby. She’s your grandchild. Your own flesh and blood, Jacob. We can’t turn her out.’

  ‘But what about the mother? We can’t keep her here longer than six months.’

  ‘The mother is still in shock, and she’s struggling. Her milk isn’t coming. I think it might have dried up already.’

  ‘Well, then. There it is. We’ll keep the baby, but we can’t keep the mother.’

  ‘Jacob, please, you are being inhuman.’

  ‘I don’t think so. There are laws in this place, and the laws state that a convict mother may only remain with its child if the child is feeding from her. And Miriam’s child isn’t. So she must go back to gaol and face the consequences of her behaviour.’

  There was silence after that. I turned and walked away. With Miriam gone, I would be able to care for the baby myself.

  50

  For all what John Sutton’d made his empty promises about helping me escape his father’s rage, there wasn’t nothing any of em could do and, soon enough, Mrs Sutton come to me and said, ‘Miriam, I’m afraid we are not having any luck with persuading Emma to feed from you.’

  I said, ‘I know that, ma’am.’

  ‘You know what this means, don’t you, dear?’ she said, and wouldn’t look at me.

  I nodded. ‘I’ve gotta go back to Cascades.’

  ‘Yes. I’m so sorry, Miriam. But there are rules and they cannot be broken, not for anyone.’

  ‘I understand, ma’am,’ I said, because she looked like she could do with being understood at that moment.

  Then she went away, and Rose come to see me, and asked me if I was all right and such. ‘They’re sending me back to Cascades,’ I said.

  She looked a bit shocked and unhappy. ‘Why, Miriam?’ she said.

  ‘They say it’s because I ain’t got no milk, so there ain’t no point in keeping me here and costing em money. But really it’s because they know the baby’s John Sutton’s, and they can’t have the shame of it, especially not when John Sutton’s gonna be a vicar.’

  Rose got tears in her eyes. She said a few times how sorry she felt for me, knowing I’d be losing my baby. ‘I wish I could stop this happening to you,’ she said.

  ‘You can’t. Only they can and they won’t.’

  She was quiet a moment, then she said, ‘How would you feel, Miriam, if I adopted your baby?’

  ‘They ain’t gonna let you do that,’ I said. ‘You’re still serving your sentence.’

  ‘But by the time Emma is due to leave the nursery, I’ll have my yellow ticket. I could take her with me. My father has money that he will send me, and I could give the baby a good life. We could keep her here until then, and I would care for her as if she were my own. And I will get Arabella back one day and Emma will have a sister.’

  I gotta say, I was surprised to hear all this. ‘If you want to,’ I said. ‘That’d be fine with me.’

  She looked funny at me then and said, ‘Do you love your baby, Miriam?’

  I didn’t say nothing to that, and Rose looked away, shaking her head like she was disappointed.

  I didn’t go back to Cascades in the end, because Ma Dwyer rescued me. She come pushing through the front door one day, and I could hear her from where I was sat on my bed in the dormitory. ‘Let me see that poor girl before you go sending her off to Lord knows where for crimes that aren’t even her own.’

  Even though we wasn’t meant to have visitors, and especially not in the dormitories, Ma found her way in, because she was the sorta woman what could get rules bent when she needed to. When she saw me, sitting like I was on my bed, giving the baby its ten o’clock feed out a bottle, she calmed down a bit. ‘Let me hold that baby for you, love. You sit back and have yourself a rest. There now. There. Hello, baby,’ she said, and I wasn’t sure if I was maybe seeing things, but it looked to me like she’d got tears in her eyes.

  ‘How’d you know I was back here?’ I said.

  ‘There’s not a secret to be had in these parts, Miriam. You know that. John Sutton’s got a mouth that talks once there’s a few drinks down it, and he told me your tale last night – said you were on your way back to Cascades because his father couldn’t cope with what you might say, and the shame and judgement you might bring him, so he was getting rid of you. Men like him have to do that, Miriam. You shouldn’t take it personal. It’s their way. Like squashing a deadly spider before it bites.’

  ‘But I ain’t deadly,’ I said.

  ‘You are to them.’

  ‘But I ain’t meaning no harm, Ma. I just wanted …’ I’d been going to say I just wanted to marry John Sutton, but it seemed like a silly sorta thing to say then, because I knew now such a thing wouldn’t never of happened, never in a month of Sundays. I was a foolish girl for ever dreaming it might.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Ma Dwyer, ‘I’m here to tell you they’re not sending you back to Cascades. I won’t have it. A girl can’t be spending another four months in solitary co
nfinement, or shut up in a room with that mob of ghastly women, not after what you’ve just been through. It’ll be the undoing of you. No, lovey. You’re to come back with me and I’ll look after you.’

  I looked at her in a blank sorta way. ‘But what about the police and the folk what sentenced me to six months? They ain’t gonna say it’s all right to just come and live with you instead.’

  ‘They won’t know. We’ll keep you hid. And, frankly, they’ll be glad of having one less mouth to feed and one less bed to find, up there. It’s in a terrible mess – everyone knows that. They haven’t got space enough for the women they’ve already got. They won’t come looking for the one that got away, especially when all she did was have a baby. It’s not like murder, Miriam, now, is it?’ And she give me a smile, to show how certain she was that things’d be all right.

  ‘Do I have to bring the baby?’ I said.

  Ma Dwyer took my hand in hers and give it a squeeze. ‘No, darling,’ she said. ‘We can’t have babies at Ma’s. And, besides that, John Sutton said his mother had good plans for bringing up this little one. Now, she might not be the mother you’d choose for your baby, but she can give it a good enough life and, from what I’ve heard, it’s what she plans to do, if she can just get that husband of hers on her side. But your baby won’t be ending up at the orphanage, Miriam, that’s for sure. Mrs Sutton won’t let that happen.’

  I nodded my head. ‘But what about me living with you? You gonna make me work like your other girls?’

  ‘What you need, my lovely, is a rest. A good, long rest and some looking after. I’ll give you two weeks of that – more if you need it. Get yourself well and back to normal, and get some strength back in that spirit of yours, and then we’ll see about working. But if you can bring me in a few dollars a week, child, I’ll care for you as if you were my own flesh and blood.’

  If Ma was offering me the chance of a two-week sleep, then I wasn’t gonna turn it down. And seeing as I’d already got up to no good in the past, and ruined myself with it into the bargain, then I couldn’t see much of a reason to not go getting up to no good again, especially if I was gonna get paid for it with a roof over my head. It ain’t the life I would of chose for myself back when I lived in England and wanted to make a kushti living telling fortunes, but it was probably about the best I could ever ask for now. Ma Dwyer was a loving sorta woman. I fancied a life what had some love in it.

  ‘When can I come?’ I said.

  ‘There’s a bed already made up for you. You come whenever you like.’

  That night, I said my goodbyes to Rose, but she wasn’t her normal self with me. She acted quite cold, like she wasn’t one bit sorry to be seeing me go.

  ‘I wish you the very best of luck, Miriam,’ she said in a dark-sounding way, like she reckoned there wasn’t a lot of hope for me, and not very much what luck could do neither.

  I reckoned then that she saw me as being bad straight through to my soul, what with me being a bad sorta mother, too, what couldn’t feed my own baby properly.

  And so I turned my attentions to the baby, what was lying in its cot, wide awake, but not crying. It’d learned better than to cry in them four hours between feedings, because it wasn’t gonna get nothing, not even a drop. It just used to lie there, looking up at the ceiling, or turning its head to the side and staring out the cot bars at the shadows on the walls and such things as that.

  We wasn’t meant to pick the babies up between feeds. I just bent myself down on the floor in front of the cot and put my hands through the bars, so I could reach the baby inside. It rolled its head my way, and I reckoned it could see me clear enough, for all what Mrs Sutton and Rose’d said its sight wasn’t up to much yet. I put my hands on it, one on its face and one on its belly, and I looked and looked at it, right in its eyes for as long as I could without no one thinking I were crazy.

  If I looked hard enough I reckoned then that baby’d get a picture of me on its memory. It’d know, in the years what was coming, how it’d had itself a real mother, and what she’d looked like. And then I thought how it’d know she looked like a convict, and how the new mother it’d got was a better one.

  I left the nursery that night.

  All I carried was one bag, with some stockings, napkins and my other convict smock in it. I’d left my yellow one back in crime class, and didn’t have no plans to wear it again if I could help it, for all what yellow was a prettier colour than this old brown they’d give us.

  Anyway, the Black Horse wasn’t that busy, and I was grateful the folk what was there didn’t take no notice of me. I knew what that Reverend Sutton’d be saying if he saw me. ‘Told you,’ he’d say, all smug to his wife. ‘Nothing better than a harlot.’ He’d see it as proof of how I’d told lies about his son, and he’d tell the whole of Hobart, and they’d all shake their heads and say, ‘You’re right, Reverend. You’re absolutely right.’ They’d make me out to be a terrible villain, because that was their way.

  I put my bag down on the bar. ‘Hello, Ma,’ I said.

  And she come round to the front where I was stood, and embraced me as if I was an old friend, and I got a lot of relief in me, to know I was gonna get took care of here.

  After she’d pulled away from me, she called out to the man what was sitting with his pint by the window. ‘Bert, get off your fat backside five minutes and mind that bar for me.’

  He looked up, a bit surprised. ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. Who else in here’s got the name Bert? Come on. Up, before I drag you.’

  He stood up, and still looked confused. ‘I’ve never run a pub, Ma. What am I going to do if a punter comes in?’

  ‘You can pull a pint, Bert. Beer’s in the taps, whiskey’s in the bottle, glasses under the bar. I’ll be ten minutes at most. Don’t forget the money, and if the next punter’s your mate, Frank Carter, tell him he still owes me for yesterday and I’m not forgetting it.’

  Then she looked at me again. ‘Come on, lovely. Let me show you your room.’

  I followed her through a swinging door at the back of the inn’s lounge, to a small dark room, no bigger than a cupboard. Some stairs went off to the right, and Ma Dwyer led the way up them.

  Once we’d got upstairs, things was less dingy. There was a lot of moaning and groaning noises coming from inside the rooms, of course, because far as I could tell Ma Dwyer’s girls kept working round the clock. It wasn’t a very comfy thing to listen to, but the upstairs itself was grand looking. There was lamps lit, for a start, and even one of them candelabra things dangling from the ceiling. There wasn’t no carpet up here, just floorboards covered with a gold-coloured rug, and there was five doors leading off the landing. From under each door come a piece of string, what’d got put through a crack in a board, and I guessed they was the strings what was tied round the bells Ma Dwyer kept on the bar, so she’d know her girls was working and not bunking off.

  Ma Dwyer took me to the room what was mine. ‘Here,’ she said, opening the door. ‘You’ll do well enough in here.’

  Compared to the room Rose and I’d shared at the nursery, this one was as big as a queen’s. It’d got a queen’s bed in the middle, too. A big bed, with a lush-looking red spread that I couldn’t be sure wasn’t silk itself. It’d got cushions on it, too, and a feeling of luxury all over. Next to the bed was a table with some strange objects, wooden eggs, and a thing what looked like it was trying to be a man’s cock. Hanging on the wall was some whips and ropes, what I s’pose was for Ma Dwyer to use on a girl what didn’t get them bells ringing downstairs.

  Ma Dwyer must of caught me looking at em all. ‘You don’t need to bother yourself with any of this yet, my love. Not until you’re ready. You make yourself comfortable. Have you got a nightgown in that bag? There’ll be one that fits you in the wardrobe. You’ll be needing different clothes here, too, so consider this the end of that dreadful smock. Anything you need, you’ll find it in the wardrobe. Help yourself. There’s plenty in there to fit you. Now, you hav
e a good sleep, and I’ll see you in the morning. I’d better get back to the bar, or Lord knows what Bert’ll do to my profits. Don’t you worry about a thing, my angel. You’re here now.’ And before she left, she give me a kiss on the cheek.

  Once Ma’d shut the door behind her, I got to rifling through the drawers and the wardrobe. The wardrobe was full of bright-coloured dresses, like what I’d wore as a Gypsy girl, with low necks and long skirts, but more of a raunchy air about em. There was feather boas, and I picked one up – a white one – and draped it over my shoulders and stood in front of the mirror. I reckoned it didn’t look half bad, though of course it’d look better over a bright red dress than my old brown convict smock.

  In the drawers was more of them wooden egg things, and also pots full of salt and sponges, what was for a girl to clean up with and stop a baby growing, though I’d learned myself that wasn’t a method what always worked. There was some pamphlets, too, with writing I couldn’t read, and drawings what made my eyes pop nearly outta me head. I reckoned they wasn’t nothing for me to worry about, though. Ma Dwyer wasn’t gonna make me do that sorta stuff.

  I stood at the window and looked out. It was exactly the view as I’d got from my room in the nursery in reverse. If I looked straight ahead, I could see into my old bedroom, with its two empty single beds next to each other. I got a sad feeling about me then, and a longing for them evenings what I’d used to spend with Rose. I couldn’t help thinking about the baby either, and wondering how it was doing, if it was drinking its milk better now it didn’t have no confusion between me and its bottle.

  I was surprised to find, when I thought about the baby living in the house just opposite me, that it brung tears to my eyes, not just the pricking of tears what didn’t fall, but real sobs. I sat at the window and cried my whole face sore.