by Maeve Friel
‘Shush, Annie. If there was some way he could send a letter, believe me, he would. We don’t know what it’s like there in Botany Bay. Your father is a convict,’ Annie’s mother’s face darkened, ‘at least that is what they say he is, though God knows there was never a more honourable man in all of England. It may not be possible for him to get a letter sent out on the ships bound for London.’
‘Perhaps father is dead, mother,’ said Libby, who had been listening all the while without saying a word. She had been a baby when her father went away so she did not remember him at all. ‘Perhaps he got sick and died like Mr Evans always tells you. If you marry Mr Evans we should not have to sew gloves.’
‘What? Are you going to marry Mr Evans?’ Annie looked at her mother in disbelief.
‘Your father is not dead,’ said Kezia fiercely. ‘One day we will all be together again. His time will be up in three years and he will have his liberty.’
‘It’s not fair,’ said Annie, ‘it’s all Master Evans’ fault.’
Her mother measured out a length of linen, wet the end in her mouth and threaded her needle. She did not want any more of this talk. ‘If it hadn’t been for Mr Evans, your father might have been hanged, Annie. And William would not have been able to go to the Grammar School. Remember that and try to think well of him for, without him, we would all have been in the workhouse.’
Annie snorted. Four years earlier, her father, John Spears, a tanner, had been sentenced to hanging at the Shrewsbury Assizes for passing a forged banknote. It was only on account of a letter that Leonard Evans, the glove merchant, wrote to the judge asking for leniency, that his sentence was reduced. Instead of being hanged, he had been transported to the penal colony of New South Wales for seven years. The judge had not asked John Spears where he had got the banknote or he might have learned that Evans had given it to him in his wages.
In the four years that they had been alone in England, they had had only two letters, both almost in tatters now from having been read and re-read so often. They had been sent from the convict ship Julius Caesar before he left, telling his wife and children that he was to be sent into exile at the other end of the world.
‘My heart is broken,’ he wrote, ‘at the thought of having to part from all of you whom I love so dearly. To be cut off and sent into exile without having done any wrong to anyone is very hard on me. Forgive me the shame I have brought upon you and believe in my innocence always. May God protect you, my dear wife and children, and be merciful to me.’
When that letter came, Kezia Spears had written to everyone she could think of, from the Shrewsbury judge to the Prime Minister himself, asking to be allowed to travel out to Australia to join her husband. ‘Spare me the dishonour of throwing myself and my children at the mercy of the parish,’ she wrote, ‘for I have no means to gain a living but by what I can earn by my needle and the work is very poorly paid. In Sydney, my skills in dressmaking and glove-making may be of value to the colony.’
Although a few families were sometimes allowed to travel out on the convict ships and start a new life in Australia, Kezia Spears’ request was turned down. Before Annie’s eighth birthday came around, she and her mother were working round the clock as glove-makers for Mr Evans. Libby, then only two, would not have to begin work for another couple of years.
In those early years, her brother William went to the school near the Mill Street Gate, with Mr Evans paying the fees, but what the glove merchant gave with one hand he took back with the other. The rent for the house in Corve Street was soon nearly as much as Kezia and Annie could earn with their sewing. They gave up the lower floor and moved into the one room upstairs. One Friday William threw down his slate and told his mother he had left school. At first he took a job as a servant for Abraham Smart and his wife in Quality Square, but within months they had made him their apprentice hat-maker.
‘Give me a glove to hem,’ said Annie, at last, to her mother, ‘and let me help you for I will not be able to sleep if you are still at work and the candles burning.’
‘It’s not fair, Annie, my love,’ said Kezia. ‘You have your own work to do and an early start again in the morning.’
‘I’ll be all right. Pass me a glove, Libby,’ said Annie, ‘and I’ll give you a penny from my wages at Easter-time if you can finish yours faster than me.’
No one spoke after that, but drew closer to sit in the pool of light cast by the tallow candle. They stitched and stitched until their fingers ached and their eyes were closing with weariness. It was long after the night watchman had gone past banging his staff against the cobbles and calling out ‘it’s past one o’clock and a starlight morning’ when they were finally able to lie down and sleep. Annie curled her body around the smaller body of her sister, but even when Libby finally fell asleep, Annie could sense that her fingers kept moving mechanically for several minutes as if she was still sewing the tiny leather fingers even though there was nothing in her hands at all. Annie drew her closer and held her hands in hers to stop them moving. After a while the nervous twitching stopped and Libby’s breathing became deeper and peaceful at last.
In the other little bed tucked in between the window and the table, however, her mother still fretted. Annie could hear her coughing and tossing this way and that, pulling the blanket around her and bunching up the bundle of clothes she was using as a pillow as if she could not make herself comfortable enough to sleep. Now and then huge shadows crept around the walls as the night watchman walked by the house, waving his lantern in front of him to light his way.
Mother would surely never marry Mr Evans, thought Annie, pulling Libby closer to her. Please, she prayed, let there be a letter from father soon so that she will know he has not died.
In her dreams, she imagined she was on a convict ship bound for Australia. In the dark shadows below deck lay men and women chained together, their ankles in shackles so they could not walk. Faces loomed up in front of her, faces of men flogged to within an inch of their lives, of women riddled with fevers, of starving children begging for food. She was running from one to the other, handing out plates of cake, her body aching with exhaustion.
‘Spears,’ the familiar voice of Mrs Stringer was shouting, ‘set that fire. Clean those boots. Fill that scuttle.’ The beautiful French princess, Christine-Egypta, was looking down on her from the crow’s nest.
‘I know you are the daughter of a transport,’ she called to her.
‘Papa,’ Annie shouted but when she woke, it was her mother who was holding her, rocking her back to sleep.
Chapter 3
‘That odious little brat only went to the bend in the flue and settled down for a nap when I had him in to sweep my chimney the other day,’ remarked Leonard Evans, looking out the shop window as Sam Price, clutching a bundle of rags and brushes, trailed past behind Master Bessell. ‘Some of these children would sleep all day if they could and still whinge for their supper. I can tell you, I sent him off with a flea in his ear.’
Abraham Smart placed Mr Evans’ new top hat in its leather carrying-box and passed it across the counter.
‘A flea in his ear, eh?’ he said, peering over his half-moon glasses at his customer. Mr Smart was one of those people who neither agreed nor disagreed with anything people said to him but kept everybody quite happy by repeating the ends of their sentences. It seemed to do the trick. It also meant he didn’t really have to pay attention to most of the conversation but could quietly get on with fastening the buckle on a hat or giving the crown a final brushing.
‘That hat is a beauty, I grant you that, Mr Smart,’ said Mr Evans, picking up the leather box. ‘As fine a hat as ever I’ve seen.’
‘There is nothing like a fine tall hat to give a man stature,’ agreed Mr Smart proudly, ‘and that specimen is all of nine inches from brim to crown. You will stand above the crowd, Mr Evans, the very pillar of society.’
‘The hat is a credit to your craft, to be sure. And now I shall bid you good-day. Shall we be
seeing you tonight at the Assembly Rooms?’
‘At the Assembly Rooms? Yes, indeed, sir. Mrs Smart would give me no peace if she could not be there and see Prince Bonaparte in person, or rather, see all the French ladies in the latest finery from Europe.’
‘Until this evening, then.’ Mr Evans gathered up his hatbox and umbrella and departed.
No sooner had he closed the door than William Spears came out into the front shop from the workshop behind.
‘Has he gone then, Master Smart? I daren’t be in the same room as that man for fear I might let myself fly at him.’
Mr Smart the hatter squinted at William over the top of his spectacles. He was a tall, thin man, about sixty years old, and very stooped, like someone who had spent his life trying to make believe he was not as tall as he truly was. He was mostly bald, though he still had tufts of hair over his ears and wild sprouting eyebrows that were stained reddish-brown from the solution of mercury he used to brush the beaver fur of his hats. Those same fumes of mercury, breathed in year after year, had also affected his brain, people said, so that he was gradually losing his wits, becoming quite mad, as hatters were inclined to do.
‘My dear Wills,’ he said, ‘you will never make any money if you think like that. When a gentleman is in trade, he will do business with old Nick himself.’
‘Well, I would not care to do business with him. It is he who has ruined my family,’ said William vehemently.
‘Ruined your family?’ said the hatter. ‘If that is so, and I’m not disagreeing with you, it’s up to you to “unruin” them. And hats are the way to do it. Does Sam Price wear a topper?’
William nodded. He had heard this argument a dozen times a day for the best part of two years.
‘And would Lord Powis be seen with a bare head?’
William shook his head.
‘There you have the secret of a good business. Make or sell something that everybody needs, from the highest lord in the land to the lowest chimney sweep’s skivvy.’ Mr Smart tapped the side of his head. ‘They may say I am mad, William Spears, but my head is screwed on tighter than most. Now fetch the boxes and we’ll pack up the hats for Dinham House. But first let us drink a toast to good King George.’
He took a bottle of wine and two blue glasses from under the counter.
‘God save His Majesty, William,’ he said, carefully pouring out a full glass for himself and a rather less full one for William, ‘a mad king, so they say, but a blessing to all hatmakers.’
Mr Smart had taken to drinking a toast to King George each afternoon as, slowly but surely, the hat business he had set up at the turn of the century had started to grow. In those early days most men still wore wigs. Then the government had brought in a tax on wig powder. Since most people, men and women, both rich and poor, hate to pay a tax if there is any way around it, wigs went rapidly out of fashion and the hat came in instead. Mr Smart’s business took off. Now, apart from some crusty old clergymen and the lawyers down at the courthouse who hung on to their powdery white wigs, everyone wore a hat.
Mr Smart was an acknowledged master of the craft. He made toppers, tapering or straight-sided, chimney-pot or stove-pipe, black beaver or silk plush, broad-brimmed or narrow-brimmed, fawn or purple, brown or black. He had recently designed a prototype hat that collapsed in on itself, ideal for a man to stick under his seat at the opera. He had thought about making papier mache hats for those who could not afford fur or silk – but hadn’t yet solved the problem about going out in the rain. The man was unquestionably the king of the hatters in Ludlow and far beyond. Earlier that year he had sent a selection of his hats to the royal court in London – William was sure they had never been ordered, let alone paid for. In any case, Mr Smart had Hat-Maker to the King written in gold lettering on his hatboxes. His latest plan was to fit out Lucien Bonaparte and his entourage in Smart hats and add Hat-Maker to European Royalty. It was difficult to know if it would be good or bad for business to boast of the Bonaparte connection.
Business was the thing and Mr Smart, for all his dottiness, was good at it. ‘There’s a great future to be had for hatters, William,’ he said, topping up his glass with another couple of inches of wine. He had to clutch the bottle with both hands for the mercury poisoning was giving him the shakes. ‘You stick to this trade with me, and you and your sisters will never know the meaning of hunger again.’
William drained his glass in one and gathered up the order of hats for Dinham House. ‘Your good health, Mr Smart.’
‘And yours, Wills.’ He placed a shilling on the counter and pushed it towards William. ‘Take that and buy something extra for your supper. And wrap up warm. There’s a keen wind coming in from the east today. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see people skating down on the river. It’s the coldest January I can remember for many a long year.’
Outside, William piled up the hatboxes on the hand cart he used to make his deliveries in the town. The cold air made him gasp when he came out of the shop into the courtyard. He had been so busy for the previous few days that he had not been outside at all and was astonished to discover that the world had turned white. It hadn’t been snowing – it was too cold for that. Every building in Quality Square, from stable to workshop to warehouse, was rimmed with white frost. Short icicles hung from under the eaves of the stables and the edges of window-sills were sprinkled with brittle frosting. The ground underfoot was solid, for the usual mud that had been churned up by horses’ hooves and the rains at the beginning of the year had frozen into uneven ruts and ridges that made pushing the handcart hard going.
As he came out under the archway into Castle Square, William stopped to look around him. The London stagecoach had just drawn up in front of the White Horse Inn and a bailiff was taking delivery of the mail bag. The horses, sweating hard after the final descent into the town, were snorting great plumes of hot breath that instantly turned to icy droplets. Leonard Evans, with his new hatbox under his arm, was swaying across the square in the direction of the mail coach. William could see the bailiff holding something out to him.
Otherwise, the scene seemed unnaturally still as if the cold snap had slowed everyone down. The market traders, shifting their weight from one foot to the other to keep their blood circulating, looked pinched and miserable under their heavy, shapeless coats. Even the man at the fish bench at the rear of the Market Hall, crying out that he had oysters from the Welsh coast, three pence the dozen, sounded bored by his own voice. It was getting dark, almost time to shut up for the night.
William trundled his cart over the cobbles of the square and round by the castle walls to Dinham House where Lucien Bonaparte had taken up residence. The house was a large, handsome red-brick one, one of the finest in all of Ludlow, built right up against the outer walls of the ancient castle. He rang the bell at the side entrance and began to unload the hats from the cart. The carillon clock in the tower of the parish church began to ring out as he was waiting for the door to open. It was four o’ clock in the afternoon. The house with the curtains drawn seemed deserted. He rang again. He stamped his feet and whistled. It was so quiet, even the river which usually tumbled noisily over the weir a few hundred yards away was eerily silent. William guessed that Mr Smart was right and that it must be frozen over.
Behind him, there was a clatter of loose stones and the squawk of a jackdaw as it rose up from the castle walls. A rat, thought William, picking up a rock to throw at it, if it appeared. There was more scrabbling and scratching. He thought he heard someone moaning and called out, ‘Who’s there?’ Just then, a pool of yellow candlelight appeared behind the window next to the door and the butler’s face peered out at him. In a trice, he handed over his order, took the receipt, and was just about to turn down the hill to see the frozen river when he saw the figure of his sister Annie disappearing down the basement steps.
‘Hey, Annie,’ he shouted, catching up with her in the nick of time before she vanished behind the heavy wooden doors. Annie turned around, her
face lit up with pleasure at seeing her brother, for they had not seen each other since she had started her new job as parlour-maid in Dinham.
‘Come down to the river with me, Annie. If it’s frozen hard enough, I’ll give you a ride out on the ice on my handcart.’
Annie’s face fell with disappointment. ‘Oh, William, I wish I could but I daren’t leave or Mrs Stringer will box my ears. Everyone in the house is going to the ball tonight. The French maids are busy dressing the ladies and I have to help with the little ones’ supper and get them to bed.’
William looked at his little sister. She looked gaunt and worn out. ‘Are you all right, Annie? Are they good to you in there? I haven’t seen you since you started.’
‘I’m all right, William, but it is hard being away from home. They let me spend one night there last week but …’ her voice trailed off.
William raised an eyebrow.
‘But what?’ he asked.
‘Mother is so unhappy because papa doesn’t write and Libby looks ill.’
‘What do you mean, ill?’
‘She’s too small for the work and the hours she has to do. Mother and Libby sew and sew and still earn scarcely enough to pay the rent, let alone have anything left over for food. What’s worse is I think Evans wants to marry mother.’
‘Evans marry mother? She wouldn’t! She couldn’t! Father is still alive.’ William gripped Annie’s elbow.
‘But say he is dead? It’s well known that half the convicts die on the ships.’
‘You must not believe that, Annie. A letter will come soon, you’ll see, and Mr Smart will give me my dues at the end of the month so we shall not be so badly off. I’ll talk to mother – if she can hold out just a little longer, everything will be all right. You know how father loved us all. We’ll hear from him soon, I am sure of it.’
Behind them, in the dark shadows beneath the castle wall, there was more scrabbling and another shower of small stones fell to the ground.
