The Night Flower Read online

  Evelyn was the only person in the whole kumpania what reckoned how this was a kushti thing because she could see how Anna’d got happy again at last. She’d kept her caring eye on Anna ever since her mother and father’d died. It were a promise she’d made to em, back when they was still alive but things was looking their worst. She tried her hardest to convince the elders that they oughta let em get married, but they only said no and didn’t approve, because the man my mother loved was a strange one and spoke a different language and they reckoned he’d got bad in his soul.

  So they didn’t get married, but they got a baby what was me. They was frightened when they knew I was coming to em, and Anna tried her best to hide it, but after five months’d gone by, her belly got big and her hair got thick and there wasn’t no hiding to be done no more. The elders saw and they got full of anger. The men of the tribe got together and they beat Joe, and Joe got the fear in him so hard, he run away to no one knew where. Anna’s heart broke at losing him and she was cross that he hadn’t tried to take her with him because she’d of gone, given half the chance. But Evelyn, who was wise, said you never knew what went on in someone else’s heart or their head, for that matter, and Anna wasn’t to think bad of the boy. He was just young and afraid, and sometimes fear could turn out stronger even than love.

  The elders didn’t have no pity. They said Anna’d brung em shame and needed punishing and talked about how they was gonna make things as hard for her as they could.

  When she heard all this, Anna ran away. She ran to the bottom of the mountain, to where there was trees and Ullswater Lake. She wasn’t sure when the baby was coming, but once she’d got a sign it’d be some time soon, she waited till evening, when the sky’d be dark enough to hide her, and she trekked round the lake and into the village. She collected all the junk the gadje dumped. They left stuff everywhere – in the forest, by the road, outside their pretty stone houses. She got blankets, cushions, old dirty sheets. She was a Gypsy. She knew how to use it.

  It was winter now, and Ullswater were frozen, but Anna couldn’t never sleep on no gadje’s sheet. She got a dead branch and smashed and smashed till the ice cracked open and the water come up to the top again. Then she sunk the sheets in the lake, scrubbed the gadje off em, and hung em up to dry in the trees. While they was hanging there, she walked round and round em, tying up knots in every one. The next day she walked the other way and untied em all again, so’s there’d be no knots in the cord when the baby come.

  By the time that baby started on its way, the ground was full up with snow and Anna was cold. She crawled far under the tree and sent up prayers.

  The snow turned red with blood. Anna’d got to the wild time. She wailed and grunted; she worried about the blood and the foxes.

  She grabbed icicles off the weeping willow’s branches and sunk her teeth into em, suffocating under that huge, breaking belly. Later, she pushed and howled, and got the sound of tearing flesh, and a girl fell out of her onto the dark red snow, grey and silent, till Anna reached down and my cry took its place in the mountains.

  Anna swaddled the baby in the old gadje sheets. She was weak and the snow all round her was bleeding red. The blood warmed the ice; the ice froze the blood. The baby cried.

  Anna held me against her chest, and lay down in the snow. ‘Cry, baby,’ she ordered. ‘Cry.’

  By the time Evelyn come walking by, hunting for her, Anna was dead. Evelyn heard the baby cry, and she followed the sound till it brung her to the weeping willow tree and the snow all around it what’d got stained with too much blood. She pulled back the branches and peered inside. The sight of it all made her gasp, but there wasn’t no time for tears. Quick and gentle, she took the baby off Anna’s chest and held it against her own, folding it up warm and quiet in her coat.

  She looked at Anna, lying white as could be in all that bleeding snow. ‘Chey, chey,’ she whispered and stroked back her hair and kissed her face. ‘Chey.’

  And she took me away, and I was hers.

  So that was how I come to be Evelyn’s. She left Anna in the blood-red snow and carried me off up the mountain and back to the kumpania.

  ‘Anna is dead,’ she said when she got there. ‘And this here’s her baby. A girl. We’ve gotta keep her.’

  The lady elder looked up from what she was doing – mending old clothes what’d got torn when they was drying in the trees – and sounded like she was interested. ‘Anna’s dead?’ she said, and Evelyn could hear shock and sorry in her voice.

  She nodded and told em the sight she’d seen on the ground under the weeping willow. ‘We can’t leave the baby there to die as well. We must go back and take care of poor Anna, and say goodbye to her like we love her.’

  But the man elder’s heart was hard. He shook his head. ‘Who will look after the child?’ he said. ‘Who will feed it now its mother’s gone? We ain’t got milk enough for ourselves. And the child is full of shame, Evelyn. Full of it. Parents ain’t married, no father around, and now the mother’s got punished and the child’s gotta live off the kindness of others. We ain’t having it, Evelyn. Can’t afford it, don’t need the shame of it.’

  Evelyn got anger stirring in her heart. ‘Then I’m taking this baby and I’m gonna bring her up myself. I don’t care if there ain’t so much as air to feed her. I gotta try my hardest.’

  And that night, when the kumpania was all sleeping, she hitched the old red wagon to the brown mare’s back, then took every sheet and bit of material what she could find, even including the purple silks what the tarot cards and rune stones was wrapped up in, and away we went down the mountain, where we got swallowed up by the gulp of the valley and off to a new life on our own.

  Evelyn give me my names. The first was my true name, the real one what she whispered in my ear the night we left the kumpania and what she ain’t never breathed again since. A Gypsy don’t tell no one their real name, so they can trick the evil spirits and keep em away. Then there come my Romany name, the one I mostly went by, but what only other Gypsies could know. But the gadje all just call me Miriam. I don’t trust none of em enough to tell em my Romany name.

  Evelyn’d got a Romany name what the Gypsies all called her, but I just called her Dey, like she was my real mother.

  I s’pose maybe my real mother’d already give me a name, and maybe she whispered it in my ear the minute I’d got born, but Evelyn reckoned she probably had other things on her mind, because she was dying by then, so she give me a name as well, just to be safe. So maybe I’ve got two real names for keeping the evil outta my life, but if that’s the case, then a double helping ain’t seemed to make much difference so far.

  The bad luck come when our wagon and horse got broke and we ended up in Lime Street, because it was them slums what killed Evelyn, and it was them slums where I met Katie-May, and she was the one what brung the trouble into my life.

  We got through the worst of the winter well enough. Of course, there was the weather to contend with and hunger in our bodies, what we did our best to get rid of with fortune-telling and music-making. But then all of a sudden the cholera come.

  There wasn’t no fighting it for the poor souls what got struck. You could hear em all moaning and groaning as it took hold of their bellies. Then their eyes’d sink deep into their skulls, their skin’d dry up, and their bodies’d start pouring out shit until the whole place was running with it and stinking like a sewer. Once they’d died, the bodies had to be got rid of, what wasn’t no easy thing, so a lot of em we had to just roll into the river, where they floated away to hell.

  Me and Evelyn carried on with our lives as well as we could, taking ourselves to the city every morning, where I’d stand in doorways and play my tunes till my throat got sore and my jaw ached with the work of it. We tried our hardest not to drink no water or do anything what’d give us the disease, because by then the cholera’d got hold of the whole city and even the Christians was dying of it, so that was when we knew things was bad.

  But it com
e for us, in the end. Evelyn come to my doorway to get me one afternoon, and as we was walking back to Lime Street, she complained how thirsty she was and how her stomach was aching, and we looked at each other with fear in our hearts because of course, we knew well enough what this meant.

  And that night, Evelyn couldn’t hardly move, and she couldn’t hardly say nothing, neither, and I went creeping about the bridges, trying to find a blanket to wrap her up in, but even when I got one, it didn’t last long because it got covered in the cholera mess and I couldn’t do nothing but toss it in the river.

  So for the next lotta days, I didn’t go off and do no singing or making music. I just sat under the bridge with Evelyn and give her water when I could. I listened if she talked and I made her promises about living a good life and took her hand and cried sometimes, until in the end her breath went away and she was dead.

  So that was that. All I’d got in the world now was my tin whistle and Evelyn’s tarot deck, wrapped up in purple silk to keep the magic inside. Before she got ill, Evelyn’d been teaching me the tarot, and what the cards all meant. She used to sit with me in the evenings, show me the cards and make me talk about the things I saw in em – she said that was the way of training my fortune-teller’s instinct. And so, sometimes, after she’d gone, I’d sit on my own and study the cards myself, and there was days when I read futures for the other folk in Lime Street, as a way of practising for when I was old enough to make a living of it myself.

  I read my own future, too, now and then, because I was feeling bad about things and wanted a bit of hope for the life what was ahead of me. But then I decided it wasn’t as easy to go reading your own future as it is to go reading others’. Folk with fortune-telling gifts affect the cards in strange ways, and they bring out futures of the wrong sort. Besides that, I’d also got myself a habit back then of throwing away the bad futures and only holding on to the good ones.

  So now I can’t much remember what was in them bad futures I first read, but what I know for certain is that never, not never, did I see for myself a life as bad as what I’ve ended up with. Of course, I saw a few heartaches and a bit of a sorry state of affairs here and there, but I never saw no convict ships or no crafty, holy reverends and their sons. The only thing I did see once was this:

  Some trouble come up in the shape of some stolen goods – I never saw what the goods was, but s’posed em just to be chickens or a gold ring, or some other such thing as the gadje’s meant to give poor folk to help make the world a bit fairer – and after the stolen goods come a judge. And then after the judge come death.

  Well, this was one of them futures what I threw away, quick as a piss in the snow. But it played on my mind a bit, and it was a relief in a lotta ways when the trouble come and then went off again, because I thought then it was all over and got hopeful about the other future I’d took for myself – the one with the big house and the rich husband and all them other things folk have to make em happy, such as babies and rubies and the like. Though I admit, I never did quite deal me this future, but had to go spreading the pack face-up on the ground, and picking out the cards I needed, one by one.

  Once Evelyn’d been dead a while, Katie-May come up to where I was huddled up in my spot under the bridge and said, ‘You’d better come and live with us. You won’t survive on your own.’

  And because I hadn’t got no better offers, I decided that’s what I’d do.

  Katie-May didn’t do no work at all to get her money. She just went robbing and begging. Every day, after I’d done my singing, she took me ducking in and out of streets and alleys, and we snatched food off the vendors’ stalls and out the bakers’ shops, and sometimes out the rich folk’s dustbins. But it was hard work and we didn’t never come back with much. It wasn’t as easy for me to get money from singing as it used to be. I’d done a lotta growing over the winter and didn’t look like a child no more, so I wasn’t as appealing as the girls what was still young, and I wasn’t as appealing as the ladies with babes in their arms neither, so I didn’t get much in the way of sympathy. I wished there was an easier way to get some money and some food in my belly.

  Katie-May said, ‘There is an easier way.’ And when the nights was coming down, we’d go back out again and Katie-May’d keep raising her eyes to all the houses in the rich folk’s terraces. She’d set to studying em to see if their lamps was lit, and if they wasn’t, she’d decide their owners must be out. Then she’d go back a few more nights, too, to see if they was reliable enough to always be out at the same time. And when she found they was, she’d say, ‘That’s a kushti house for a break-in.’

  We’d go back to Lime Street and talk about our chances. There wasn’t a lotta police about, so we reckoned we could do it. We was after gold watches, silver spoons, silk scarves and pretty gloves, because they was the easy things to sell to the pawn shop. We knew we’d gotta head straight to the dining room and the bedrooms, cause they was the places where that sorta stuff was kept, so we could be in and gone in ten minutes, if we went quick enough.

  I said, ‘What’ll happen, if we get caught?’

  Katie-May shrugged. ‘A whipping, maybe, or a few months in the mill. They’d make us work hard in the mill – get us up at four in the morning – but we’d get fed and there’d be a roof over us, so it wouldn’t be that bad. We need to try not to get caught, though. You wouldn’t want to live in the mill.’

  The next night, we went off to the terrace we’d been watching a few days, and it was dark outside enough to hide us, and the lamps on the inside wasn’t lit, so we unlatched the back gate and went into the yard where the fighting tom cats and the bins was kept, and we stood a while and waited, because that was what Katie-May said we’d gotta do to make sure no police was on our tails.

  Well, my heart was pounding like no one’s business and I’d got half a mind to run back to Lime Street with nothing, but before I’d even got a chance to say as much, Katie-May’d smashed a pane of the kitchen window and the noise of it was enough to make me think the police’d be along any second.

  But they wasn’t. Katie-May straggled her long arm through the cut and jagged glass, leaned in and unlatched the window, what opened neatly, and meant we could climb through it easy enough.

  We set to work quick. Katie-May did the upstairs, because she’d got more experience than what I had, and I did the downstairs. I found the dining-room dresser stocked full of silver, and took as much spoons and knives as I could carry in my shawl. Then I went back to the kitchen and tried to get into the pantry. I reckoned as that’d be full to bursting with rich pickings, but the door was locked, what come as a surprise to me and no small disappointment, neither.

  ‘They always keep their pantries locked,’ Katie-May said, once we was on the way out again. ‘To stop the maids from stealing.’

  Well, even though we hadn’t got no extra food, I knew we’d got enough silver and gold and silk scarves to sell at the pawn shop and get us money enough for weeks, and as we went back out through the gate and into the street, I was feeling brighter in my spirits than what I’d done since Evelyn died.

  But it turned out that we ended up running straight into a police officer, what must of heard the glass smashing and been waiting there for us all this time.

  He took hold of each of us by the collar, and I admit, the lies started flying out my mouth quick as anything.

  ‘It wasn’t me, sir,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do nothing.’

  Then he asked my name and I said the first one what come to my head, what was Anna Carter, and I didn’t much know where I’d heard it before and who I might be getting in trouble. But names didn’t much seem to matter to this police officer, and a different name wasn’t gonna get me off the hook. He rattled the chains in his pockets, then brung em out and clamped em round my wrists first and then round Katie-May’s fists, too, and he dragged us across town to the sheriff, what was the man who’d gotta decide what to do with us.

  THE TRIAL OF MIRIAM BOOTH AND KATIE-MAY
SAUNDERS NEWCASTLE ASSIZE COURT 2IST MARCH, 1841

  The two accused are indicted for breaking into 31 Salisbury Avenue, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and stealing from therein twenty silver spoons, fifteen silver knives, two gold watches, five gold necklaces, one diamond ring, two pairs of ladies’ gloves and six silk scarves.

  Police officer called by Justice:

  — Please describe to the court what you saw on the night you arrested these girls.

  — I was patrolling the streets of Newcastle centre. There had been a lot of house breakings recently, because of the influx of beggars and homeless to the slums at Lime Street, so several of us was employed to keep a vigilant watch. I heard the sound of glass breaking from near by, and knew that could only mean one thing, so I headed towards the source of the noise and waited. After ten minutes or so, two young girls came bursting out through a back gate and onto the street, carrying in their arms a large supply of stolen goods. I questioned them both, and they lied about what they was doing and about their names.

  Katie-May Saunders called by Justice:

  — How old are you?

  — Fifteen.

  — Are you not older than that?

  — I ain’t.

  — Have you a mother?

  — No.

  — Where is your mother?

  — Dead, sir, these past nine years.

  — Did you hear what the police constable reported about you?

  — Yes.

  — Do you consider his account to be true?

  — What?

  — Did he tell the truth about you and your friend breaking into a house and stealing a large amount of valuable goods?