65
I first met Miriam Booth at Cascades Female Factory, after we’d been transported. She seemed a polite and friendly girl, looking for company, and I was happy to be a friend to her, especially when we moved to the nursery and I lost my daughter to the orphanage.
‘As time went on, I became wary of her. She had no faith in the Lord, and I thought her strange and secretive. A Gypsy. She flirted with the reverend’s son. She was clearly after something, though I could never work out exactly what. He was hardly a rich man, but perhaps anyone with a roof over their heads would appear rich to a Gypsy girl.
‘When she found herself with child, it became clear. It was a deliberate act,’ I told them, ‘to ensnare the reverend’s son into marriage. Miriam was not the innocent girl she had seemed when we met. She was devious, a trickster. When they sent her to Cascades, I’d hoped that would be the end of it for the poor Sutton family, who had only ever done their best for her. But then she was released, at Mrs Sutton’s kind request, and returned to the nursery with a baby she had starved half to death. It wasn’t long then before she left the nursery and became … Well, she went to work at the Black Horse. I was disappointed – disappointed to find she would sink so low, but I was unsurprised by then. I no longer thought her a young lady of good character.’
I did not look at Miriam while I spoke, of course, but I could hear her gasping and crying out in shock at my words.
I’d looked after Emma from the day she arrived at the nursery, undernourished and thin. I cared for her as tenderly as if she were my own flesh and blood, and then the Reverend Sutton sold her. With no warning, he sold her to a settled couple with no child of their own, and took her out of my arms and into theirs, as if she were nothing more to me than a dog.
Six months later, he was dead. There was whispering that Hattie might have come back from wherever she’d run to and killed him, as she’d threatened to do before. Or perhaps the girls at the Black Horse had done it – they despised him. It was no secret.
I said – to Mrs Sutton, not the police: ‘It could have been Miriam.’
Mrs Sutton sniffed, and she agreed with me.
The police interviewed Miriam, at length. They interrogated her, and she confessed. I hadn’t expected that.
She is sitting near me, crying silently. There is an inevitability to the conclusion now. Poor Miriam. Of course, she does not deserve this. She is staring at me, hurt and shocked. I can hear it. Say something, Rose.
But what would be the purpose of that? Someone needs to bring up that baby.
66
The lawyer man done his best, but they went and found me guilty and the judge said I’d gotta hang for my crime.
So now I’m here, waiting for my baby to come, and then waiting to die. They ain’t gonna hang me till my baby’s born, but we ain’t got long to wait now. I don’t reckon as I’ll be going to hell, because I reckon if the Lord exists, then he’ll take some pity on me, and send me up to live with Evelyn.
I’m cross with Rose for betraying me like she did. I’m so cross, I have to try not to think about it too much. If I do, the rage inside gets too big and makes me afraid. She done it because she wants my baby. I wish I could stop that from happening. I wish it could get adopted to kind, settled folk instead, but I ain’t in no position to go fighting it now. I just hope she’ll give the baby a kushti life, like what she said she would. Her father’s outta gaol now, and he’s sent her money enough to live a good life on, once she gets her yellow ticket and is allowed to settle on her own. So the baby’ll grow up good, and maybe even go back to England, too, in time.
But I wonder about my other baby. Emma. I wonder where she’s living, and who’s looking after her. I hope she’s got herself a kushti pair of parents. I hope maybe she’s gonna remember her mother, what tried hard to get a picture of herself put in her head before leaving that night. And I hope maybe she’ll remember her real name, what I whispered in her ear that time. I’ve got a lot of hopes for my babies. Mostly, though, I hope they’ll get free of this land. I hope they have what I never had – freedom to have their own babies, and then the freedom to keep em.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Northumbria University for the generous PhD scholarship that gave me the time and resources to write this novel. Thanks especially to my supervisor, Michael Green.
Thanks to my partner, Clay Lister, for far more than can be contained in a single page, but in particular for the beetroot tarte tatin, which got me through the worst bits.
Thank you to my children, Bonnie and Sam Lister, for showing me that there really are far more important things in life than sitting around writing books.
Thanks to Claudia Cruttwell for reading early drafts and giving excellent feedback, as usual.
And finally thank you, WriteWords. May there be rum on our boar for many years to come.
The Night Flower Page 30
