by Maeve Friel
‘By God, man, they sound like an evil pair. I would not have thought children capable of such deception.’
‘Indeed they are,’ Waring lowered his voice. ‘It’s their blood you see. Their father is already in Botany Bay – need I say more?’ He threw his head back and drained the second half of his glass. ‘Have you seen any children travelling alone?’
‘Not that pair, I am glad to say. I did see some children up in the woods this afternoon, close by the ruined priory at Llanthony, but there were three of them. I took them for the children of a sheep farmer, doubtless looking for a lost ewe. You would not credit how the hills are littered with lambing ewes this spring.’
‘Three children, you say? Not two? Could you describe them to me?’
‘Why, sir, they were children,’ the Rev. Lewis pursed his lips. He would have found it easier to describe a fossil, an orchid, even a butterfly. He did not tend to look much at children. ‘There were three,’ he repeated, poking his head out further from his collar so that even the unimaginative Mr Waring found himself in mind of a tortoise, ‘two boys and a girl: an older boy, a girl half a head shorter, a smaller lad. More than that I cannot tell for I was at some distance from them and the light was fading. I only remarked on them because the two fellows were wearing top hats; an odd apparel, I thought, for country boys.’
Oliver Waring rubbed his hands together and stood up.
‘Those will be the very children I am after. I am much obliged to you, sir. The boy, William, was apprenticed to a hatter in the town.’
‘Come, come,’ said Mr Lewis, reasonably, ‘that is hardly cause to abandon your supper. Doesn’t every man and boy wear a tall hat? If the possession of a hat was your only evidence, I fear you would be chasing after half the population of the country.’
‘You say the little boy also wore a tall hat?’
‘He did, a hat half as big as himself so that he looked like one of those children that sweeps have to put up chimneys.’
‘Sam Price, as I live and breathe!’ Oliver Waring sucked his teeth. ‘So that is the third member of the party.’
‘Another Ludlow runaway?’ The Rev. Mr Lewis raised an eyebrow.
‘Aye, one whose master spent all of Tuesday in the town stocks for drunkenness and disorderliness. The boy would have had time enough and the opportunity to make a run for it.’ He looked impatiently at his watch as if he had already spent too much time talking and shouted for coffee.
‘If they are the children you are seeking,’ the clergyman said sadly, closing his wine-stained notebook, ‘they will have taken shelter for the night and in the darkness you will miss all trace of them. Wait till first light. I shouldn’t think they could hide for ever in the Black Mountains.’
Chapter 12
In the morning, before it was truly light, William, Annie and Sam crept out of the crypt and drew in their breath with astonishment at how beautiful the world appeared. It had not snowed any more during the night but there had been a hard frost and every blade of grass, every branch and twig, every soaring arch and pillar of the ruined priory stood out white in the cold air. Delicate white veins of frost spread out along the stony floor of the old church. They crunched beneath their feet. William tapped at the frozen water which had collected in a broken water-font and gave Sam and Annie a sliver of ice to suck. It was so cold it made their throats numb and their lips turn white and bloodless.
The shallow pools of floodwater on the grass beside the stream had completely frozen over. On one, a duck slithered and slipped, its webbed feet sliding all over the place like a tipsy skater. Sam stepped warily on to the ice, testing his weight with one foot, then holding one leg behind the other knee as if he would be lighter like that. The ice held firm. He slid off, laughing.
Annie joined him, catching his hand and letting him slide her along the frozen sheet of ice, shrieking and laughing with mock fear as it shifted and splintered a little but did not crack. Even William forgot for a few moments to worry. He smiled at Annie’s happy face, took her by one hand, Sam by the other and the three of them spun around in a circle, faster and faster, the two boys in their black top hats, the girl in the middle like a red spinning top with her cape spreading out all around her.
It was Annie who saw Oliver Waring and the mounted militiamen riding towards them. She screamed out but the boys kept on spinning and laughing until she finally wrested her hands from theirs and broke the circle. William and Sam lost their balance and flew backwards. They turned to see what Annie was pointing at. The galloping horses bore down on them, their iron hooves shattering the crisp white stillness of the valley.
There was nowhere to run. The four horsemen surrounded them and the triumphant Mr Waring shouted, ‘Stand your ground, William Spears.’
Like lambs to the slaughter, their hands were tied and they were taken back by road to Hay-on-Wye, Annie riding pillion on the captain’s horse and Sam and William tied by rope and walking alongside until, exasperated by the slow pace they were making, the soliders hoisted the boys on to the backs of the horses too. So they were led into the town and up the hilly streets with jeering faces and pointing fingers following them until they finally arrived at the stable-yard of the Bear and Ragged Staff inn. A clergyman was standing by the mounting-block, waiting for a boy to finish saddling up his mare. He watched the sorry procession and shook his head sadly but said nothing.
Mrs Knill, the landlord, like many country innkeepers, had a room with barred windows where the watchman kept local wrongdoers, mostly poachers or sheep-stealers, until they could be taken to jail. William, Annie and Sam were thrown roughly into it and the key turned in the lock.
Nobody came to speak to them all morning and, shocked and terrified, they did not dare talk either but sat on the floor waiting for something to happen. Around midday, the door opened a fraction and a boy with terrified darting eyes pushed in a plate with three penny loaves and three tins full of teak-coloured tea.
‘At least they are not going to starve us to death,’ said Sam, handing around the food to the other two who had not moved.
‘What will happen to us, William?’ whispered Annie.
William’s shoulders began to shake. ‘If only I had gone back with the money,’ he said between sobs.
‘What money?’ asked Annie.
‘These,’ said William, drawing the two gold sovereigns out of his pocket and flinging them down on the floor.
Annie and Sam stared at the coins, bewildered.
‘Where did you get them?’ asked Annie.
‘Mr Smart gave them to me to pay for the hatboxes. I didn’t mean to steal them but I never went back, you see. We’re all of us done for now.’
‘But nobody knows about them. You can hide them here or throw them out that window there. Nobody will be any the wiser,’ said Sam.
‘It’s no use. Mr Smart will have told them he had given me money to pay for the hatboxes. He probably thinks that is why I ran away,’ said William, ashamed and heartbroken that the mad hatter would think him so ungrateful.
‘You called me stupid,’ said Annie in a low hurt voice though her eyes were flashing with anger.
‘I’m sorry, Annie.’ He looked away, unable to meet her eyes. ‘I didn’t want to be in charge of you. When Arthur found me and told me to take you away, I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to run and hide. I just wanted to stay in Ludlow and make hats like Abraham Smart.’
Sam picked up his tea and went to sit apart from the others below the window.
‘Oh God,’ he prayed, ‘let them not send me back to Ludlow and Master Bessell. I could not bear it.’
Soon afterwards, the soldiers came. They tied the children together and took them to a horse-drawn cart standing in the yard. A small crowd gathered and stared at them curiously.
‘Where are you taking us?’ Sam asked the captain.
‘To Shrewsbury Jail to wait until the Assizes,’ he answered, hauling up the back of the cart and drawing the bolt across.
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‘And may God have mercy on your souls,’ said Mrs Knill, as they drew away.
Chapter 13
At Shrewsbury jailhouse Annie was separated from her brother and Sam. Her cell was little more than an overcrowded, stinking room where the inmates slept on the hard, cold, damp floor. Spiders, rats and cockroaches infested the place and when the weather improved and the temperature began to climb, flies hatched in the open drains and swarmed and buzzed around their heads.
Annie was struck dumb with fear and repulsion. Nothing she had seen in her short, hard life had prepared her for such a hovel. She kept her head down, looking out at the world from under hooded eyes, only speaking when someone spoke to her, only moving to bolt forward and grab her food rations when they came. Her companions were thieves, beggars and debtors for the most part. There was one old laundry-woman accused of stealing a shift petticoat and a lace napkin. She was losing her wits with worry and sat rocking on the floor, scratching at her scalp with gnarled rheumatic fingers. Others had been picked up for vagrancy, for begging in the public streets, for giving short measures in the markets.
There was one murderer, a woman who had been accused of stabbing her husband. ‘I loved him once,’ she said, ‘or I thought I did, but I swear I will go merrily to Hell and will kill him again if I meet his ghost in Hades for he destroyed my life.’ The night before she was taken away to be hanged, she gave the jailkeeper all the money she still had to bring her ale from the prison tap-room, and shared it out among the inmates while the hangmen hammered at her gallows in the courtyard opposite.
From the start, one young woman, Molly Llewellyn, took pity on Annie and sat beside her. Molly was only a few years older than Annie but she had a baby, a tiny downy-haired thing barely three months old, whom she kept tightly wrapped beneath her shawl all day long as if terrified someone would come and take him away from her. She had got pregnant when she was working as a servant and had been flung out by her mistress. The parson had denounced her for her immoral behaviour.
‘Then they picked me up for begging outside the church on Sunday. They threatened to put me in the stocks but what was I to do? I had nowhere to go, no money. I stole a gentleman’s purse off him, but they caught me before I had a chance to spend any of it.’
‘What will they do to you?’
‘I don’t know. They’re all against me, first for having the baby, then for begging, now thieving. But what could I do, Annie, what could I do? The master would have his way.’ She clutched the baby, kissing the top of his downy head.
Many of the women knew they were likely to be hanged if they were found guilty. There were more than two hundred crimes that were punishable by hanging, nearly all of them crimes against property. It was clear that English law-makers thought thieves and muggers and forgers of bank-notes a far greater threat than rapists or murderers. And those that they did not hang, they sent to Australia, a vast empty continent on the other side of the world. It was as far from England as it was possible to be, a land no European had even heard of until forty-odd years earlier when Captain Cook first landed on it. Now it was nothing less than a dumping-ground, a remote jail for England’s unwanted criminals.
To people like those women in Shrewsbury jail who had never travelled more than a few miles from the house where they were born, the very thought of exile was more frightening than death itself. Rumours and half-truths flew around the cell, even though talking like this terrified them and made them sick with worry.
‘They say as many as half the transports die on the long sea journey.’
‘And nobody ever returns even if they do survive and work out their sentence, for they can’t earn their passage back.’
Every day the conversation in the cells was of little else but public hangings or prison ships, especially as the date set for the assizes drew closer. They were like cats unable to leave off scratching their old flea-bites. Annie had no choice but to listen to them for there was nowhere to hide and no peace in the overcrowded cell. She recoiled in horror as they recited their litanies of men and women whom they had seen hanged.
‘I remember my mother taking me to see a public hanging when I was scarcely seven or eight years old. She said I was to remember what I had seen and live my life in fear of the Law,’ the old laundry-woman said. ‘I can see him still as if it was yesterday. He was a highwayman, William Dempster, that the law had been after for many a year, and he went up the steps as jaunty as a bridegroom, waving and joking up to the minute the hangman placed the noose over his head. There must have been hundreds of people there to cheer him over the drop.’
‘May God have mercy on him,’ said another, ‘and give us the strength to do the same rather than blubbering and protesting our innocence.’
But I am innocent, thought Annie. Surely they cannot hang me.
‘There was a woman from Bromfield transported at the last sessions for stealing two chickens worth four pence,’ said a woman who had stolen enough combs, scissors and mirrors from a barber-shop to set up business on her own. She knew only a miracle could save her now.
‘And I heard of another who was running a forging business. When they broke down the door of his house, they found a copper plate press in a back room, and engraving tools and a drawing for a five pound note of the Bank of Ludlow.’
‘Oh, the wickedness of that,’ said a beggarwoman who had never held a five pound note in her life, real or forged.
Annie thought of her father, exiled for passing a forged note, four years before.
‘Can people just stop loving other people?’ she asked Molly Llewellyn. They were standing in front of the barred window of their cell looking out at the full moon.
‘I suppose they can,’ Molly said, remembering the father of her baby. ‘Who are you talking about?’
‘My father,’ answered Annie. ‘You know, he never wrote a single letter to us except the one he sent from the docks in Portsmouth before his ship sailed.’
‘Maybe he never made it,’ said Molly, gently. ‘A lot of people die from the hardships of the voyage, they say. That’ll be why he never wrote.’
‘That’s what Mr Evans wanted my mother to think so that she would give in and marry him, but she still loved my father too much. I hope my father is dead, you know, for it would be worse to think he was still out there somewhere but he had just stopped loving us once he arrived on the other side of the world. I hope he is dead, Molly.’ She sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve.
‘Shush, Annie, don’t say things like that.’
‘I cannot even remember what he looked like, only that he had a beard, a yellow beard.’
‘Four years is a long time for you – a third of your life – but he will not have forgotten you. How could he forget his own flesh and blood?’ Molly pushed Annie’s hair back off her forehead. ‘Go and lie down, Annie, go and sleep.’
Annie looked very poorly, with huge black circles under her eyes, and her skin had become dry and sallow. Her dress, the black work-dress she had been given to wear at Dinham and that had been such a perfect fit, hung on her like a sack, as if she had put on someone else’s clothes, someone much taller. Molly wished there was something she could say to comfort her but what was there left to say? The truth was they were both doomed. She looked under her shawl at her own tiny baby, curled up against her like a sleepy kitten. ‘You will forget me too,’ she whispered, ‘for you cannot come with me where I am going.’
Across the yard were the men’s quarters where William too waited for his trial. The men’s cells were as squalid and stinking as the women’s but more dangerous. Fights were common, erupting in sudden unpredictable explosions of violence. William learnt to keep himself to himself, to touch nothing that didn’t belong to him and to speak only when a man spoke to him. When they found that he could read and write, the prisoners dictated letters to him, pleas to the judge for leniency, last messages to the wives and parents they feared they would never see again. The pennies that he earned fro
m his writing paid the keeper for his rations, for nothing in that hovel came free. They paid for their supper or they did not eat. They coughed up if they wanted a straw mattress to lie on or they slept on the floor awash with filth.
Sam was gone. The day after they had arrived in Shrewsbury, his name had been called out and he was led away. To freedom, William thought, or as much freedom as he could hope for with the drunk, useless Israel Bessell for his master. One morning a new prisoner was thrown into the cell. William recognised him as a butcher from Ludlow. He had been arrested for tampering with his weights and measures, filing them down so that he could sell his customers short.
‘Sam Price, old Bessell’s lad?’ he said when William asked him about the little sweep. ‘Well, they brought him back to Ludlow and put him in the parish workhouse down Old Street for the poor mite had no family to take him in. Old Bessell had disappeared the day after he was let out of the stocks in the square and nobody had set eyes on him again until his body was found floating below the weir at Ludford Bridge. Fell into the river drunk, I expect.’
‘So Sam is still in the workhouse?’ William asked.
‘No, no, not at all,’ said the butcher. ‘The lad showed a clean pair of heels as soon as they took their eyes off him and ran away again a few days later. That’s all I can tell you about Sam, except to say good luck to him for there never was such a lad for smiling in the face of misfortune. He was born a bolter and will stay one as long as he lives.’
‘He wanted to see the sea,’ said William, ‘his heart was set on it.’
‘We could all be seeing the sea soon enough,’ said the butcher, ‘worse luck. May God forgive the man who first thought of banishing Englishmen to Botany Bay,’ and he spat angrily on the floor of the cell.
