The Night Flower Read online

  — No. It wasn’t me. It was just that girl, over there, what did it. I just found her after.

  — Tell me what happened, and how you came to find her.

  — I was on my way to town to beg one night and I stopped at them big houses on the crescent, because I’d got some goods to peddle. At this house, I went round the back to the tradesmen’s entrance, because what I’d got was good for servants to buy. There was a girl there, the other girl what I’m accused with. I hadn’t never seen her before. When she saw me coming, she ran past me, quick as a flash. But she’d left the gate open and the streetlamp showed there was glass on the ground in the yard, so I knew she must of been burgling there, and she was running away soon as she knew someone was coming.

  — And what did you do after that?

  — I ran after her, so I could take her to the police. But then the police officer came along and took me for a thief, too. But I ain’t no thief, sir.

  — And that is all?

  — That is all.

  Miriam Booth called by Justice:

  — How old are you?

  — Thirteen years old.

  — Have you listened to the reports made about you?

  — Yes.

  — Do you consider them to be true?

  — No. I wasn’t there. I didn’t do nothing. I wasn’t nowhere near.

  — Have you a mother?

  — No.

  — How do you make a living?

  — Singing and playing my tin whistle. And begging sometimes, too.

  — And stealing?

  — Not often, sir.

  — But sometimes.

  — Sometimes, sir. When I have to.

  — Please sit down.

  Court adjourned for jury to reach verdict.

  — I ain’t done nothing. Sir, it wasn’t me. You ain’t gonna send me to hang, sir, is you? We wasn’t meaning no harm by it. Just wanted a frock or two for ourselves. We ain’t rich girls, sir …

  — That’s quite enough.

  There is silence in court until the return of the jury.

  — Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached your verdict?

  — We have, your honour.

  — And do you find defendant one, Katie-May Saunders, guilty or not guilty of burglary?

  — Guilty, your honour.

  — Oh, but it wasn’t me! I didn’t do nothing!

  — Silence! And do you find defendant two, Miriam Booth, guilty or not guilty of robbery?

  — Guilty, your honour.

  Part Two

  3

  1841

  Letter from Mrs Rose Winter, prisoner of Newgate Gaol, London, to her father, Thomas James Hodges Esq., prisoner of York Gaol

  Dear Father,

  I have little to say in this letter and will bring myself directly to my purpose. Of course, you know how deplorable conditions are for a prisoner, and how I despise my life at Newgate. While I would never conjecture that things are worse here than they are for you, I must say that as a member of the gentler sex, I am shocked to my core at the things I have witnessed, and am apprehensive indeed about the forthcoming voyage to Van Diemen’s Land. I fear that four months incarcerated below decks with these vulgar and dreadful creatures may be more than I will be able to bear. Word has reached my ears that the sailors and officers of the ships are able to be bribed, and I implore you to please send your desperate daughter some money, that she might buy herself a position elsewhere on the ship, away from the wretches that will make up the crime class.

  Ever and affectionately yours,

  Rose

  Letter from Thomas James Hodges Esq., to his daughter, Mrs Rose Winter

  My dearest Rose,

  It is with great pain that I tell you again that I no longer have any power to assist you, or to lighten your burden. Believe me when I say that I regret the consequences of my actions far more for you than for myself. As soon as I am released, I will do everything I can to bring you home.

  Keep your faith in the Lord, and in

  Your loving father

  NEWGATE GAOL, LONDON

  — You crying again, Rose?

  — She’s always crying.

  — What’s the matter now? Bad letter? From your pa again, was it? Pa not coming to save you? Life not fair? You better get used to it, lovey. That’s how it is for most of us.

  — She won’t answer. She’s too refined to talk to rough girls. She’d never get caught screwing a man for a sixpence.

  — Bet she’d screw the captain of the ship, though. She’ll have to, if she wants a bed to sleep in, and I bet she does want one. She’s Rose Winter. Never slept a night off a feather mattress before coming here. She won’t handle the prison deck – nothing but rats and shit, they said the other day, and you know Rose has never been near a shit in her life. Her own arse drops out lily-of-the-valley, so I’ve heard.

  — Better watch your mouth. Matron’s heading over.

  — Good morning, ladies.

  — Morning, missus.

  — Rose, I have some news I think you’ll like to hear.

  — They’re not giving her a reprieve, are they, ma’am? That ain’t fair, just because she’s a gentleman’s daughter.

  — No. No, there’s no reprieve. But the judge has examined your appeal, Rose, and decided you will be allowed to take your daughter on the voyage to Van Diemen’s Land. Only one daughter, mind. The youngest.

  — Thank you, ma’am.

  — Bitch.

  4

  There was talk of em hanging us, but in the end they just decided to pile us up on the next ship and take us to another country instead. The judge used all that fancy gadje language when he said what’d happen, and I didn’t understand it proper at first. ‘Seven years’ transportation to Parts Beyond the Sea,’ he said. It turned out Parts Beyond the Sea meant Van Diemen’s Land, what was a place full of beaches and bad folk. The bad folk was meant to get good in the end, and make the place a happy one.

  They only had two ships a year being sent, so while me and Katie-May was waiting for ours to come, they made us go to a reform school all the way down in London, to try and mend our natures before we left. All I can say about that school is there’s only one thing I learned there, apart from sewing patchwork, and it were how beating a girl every day with a stick and telling her she’s going to the devil ain’t the way to get the best outta her.

  On the day of my last beating, the warden there threw up her hands like she were in proper despair and said, ‘If you survive that voyage, young lady, I tell you there’s a world waiting for you that’s closer to hell than hell itself. And it’s no more than you deserve, for your foul tongue and your disgraceful habits.’ And I didn’t think how that was a very nice way of talking, because it put the fear in me hard and I went to bed that night and cried with it.

  Anyway, the day rolled round and it wasn’t a good day. The month of it was May, but the weather were raining and thundering like nothing I’d seen in a good lot of years.

  We had to meet the ship on the Thames in London, and then we was gonna travel down rivers and estuaries and all sorts of places like that till we come to Portsmouth, and then we was gonna go sailing away, months and months across the sea, and the rich gadje folk of England’d have emselves rid of us. That were the point of it all – the rich folk of England didn’t want poor folk hanging round, stealing their bread and their clothes and such, so they was carting us all away like a thousand bagfuls of rubbish, and dumping us somewhere they wouldn’t have to smell us no more.

  There was a lot of girls in the reform school, but only three of us was getting took to Parts Beyond the Sea, and they was me, Katie-May, and another one what’s name was Lydia. I didn’t much know about Lydia, because I was the sorta girl to keep myself to myself these days. I didn’t want to speak to no one no more, specially girls what come with natures in need of reforming. I couldn’t see how talking to em was ever gonna do me no good, not considering all the trouble what talki
ng to that Katie-May’d got me in.

  So I kept quiet, as much as I could, and only talked when someone like that warden lady spoke in a bad way to me. Of course, it’d of been better if I hadn’t talked then, neither, but a girl can’t be expected to be a saint, not when she was faced with being sent off to Parts Beyond the Sea for something she didn’t hardly even do.

  A warden from the reform school walked with us to Gallions Reach, where our ship was gonna be waiting for us. It were a long way from the reformatory in Clerkenwell to the docklands, and it took us a lot of tired hours to get there. Lydia was moaning like a spoiled girl and Katie-May was scowling like a pig what’d been sucking half an hour on lemons, and all that bad-tempered stuff was proper making my head hurt, but I just kept on walking.

  And then in the end we come to the docks. You could smell em before you saw em. First, when we was walking through the markets towards Blackfriars, the smell got mixed up with the ordinary stink of horse shit and sewers and I couldn’t tell straight away how this was a whole separate smell to all that street-stinking stuff.

  But when we was getting closer and closer, the street and sewer smell got a bit less and the ship stench got more and more, till it were so bad all of us ended up with our faces in our hands to try and get away from it.

  Katie-May said, ‘These docks stink.’ I s’pose she was the sorta girl what liked to point out obvious stuff to folk, in case they was unlucky enough to be short of a bit of sense.

  Then the warden lady, what’s name was Miss Chapman, said, ‘That’s not the docks, Katie-May. That’s the smell of the convict ship. You’ll be living on it for months, for your bad ways.’ And I thought it wasn’t very nice of her, to sound so pleased about that being the way things was for us.

  *

  Them docks was crowded – full up of workmen and noisy folk going off to Parts Beyond the Sea. Of course, not everyone was bad folk and not all of em was bound for Van Diemen’s Land, neither, but certain they wasn’t no gentry. You could tell what ones was criminals, because they was wearing handcuffs to stop em escaping and they was shouting a lot in words what was meant as being English, but come out harder to hear than the English other folk spoke.

  I were a bit surprised at how there wasn’t much of the criminal sorts hanging about the docks and I said so, and then Miss Chapman, what was a woman who reckoned she knew pretty well everything about the world, shook her head and said, ‘A lot of them are on the ship already, Miriam. It’s been docked here for months, waiting for the gaols to send their prisoners over. You won’t be leaving yet, I can assure you. You’ll have a few days or weeks to pass on the river first.’

  Well, I couldn’t see the point of that. They might as well of just left us at the reform school a bit longer, for all I didn’t much like it there and for all what they was beating me half the time. At least it didn’t stink bad as what this place did.

  I reckoned no one’d cleaned out that ship in more than a hundred years, and the walls was full of the stink of every criminal ever what it’d took to Parts Beyond the Sea. I wasn’t sure how I was ever gonna get on that boat when the smell just from the dockside was making me feel deep-down sick.

  It were a big boat. It come with sails what must’ve been white once, but now they was brown as the river and full up of the stink of it, too. There was writing on the boat’s side what I couldn’t read, because of being just a Gypsy girl what’d never had no learning, but what Miss Chapman told us said The Marquis of Hastings and was meant as being the ship’s name. Well, I hadn’t never heard nothing as stupid as giving a boat a name, because it wasn’t a person or a dog or nothing alive like that, but I s’pose the gadje must’ve reckoned they could come to love a ship what was ridding their country of its poor folk, and so that was why they named it like that – because then one day they could sit by the fire with some brandy and cigars and sigh a bit like lovers and say, ‘Ah, God bless The Marquis of Hastings for her kushti work in getting them Gypsies and whores outta England.’ And she’d be dear to em as what their own mothers was.

  The river was busy, full up of ships without a place to stop because there was already so many what’d docked and not sailed off again. You could see long lines of undocked ships, spreading away for miles and miles, waiting for a space. A lot of em was full up of coal and they sent thick dust in the air, what hung over us like we was already on our way to hell or some sorta place like that.

  Not all the ships was full up of coal, and not all of em was waiting for a place to dock. It turned out some of em – the ones what was just bobbing about without nothing much to do – was prisons. Proper prisons, full up of bad folk what they couldn’t find no room for in Newgate, and on days when the sun shone warm and the wind didn’t much blow, the smell of them bad men got mixed up with the smell of our ship and it come to be a strong enough stink for a body to fear it was gonna get the life choked outta it. It wasn’t just the men emselves what stunk – though of course that wasn’t no trifling thing, what with all that filthy-man sweat and the fevers they was suffering – but the sails on them ships was swinging with ancient sheets and prisoner clothes, all of what could only get washed in river water, and you couldn’t call that so much a washing as a dirtying-up again. Also, there was a lot of rotting going on in the wood of them old ships, and a lot of rats and cats into the bargain, and a fair few of them rats and cats was dead and rotting, too.

  So all in all, there wasn’t a lot in the way of flowers or Gypsy magic going on.

  5

  It was six months before they released me from Newgate. I’d thought my life at Constance Murray’s bad enough, but being locked up among criminals was another thing altogether. I’d have gone mad, had they kept me longer. The filth of Newgate wasn’t confined to its floors and walls. You could enter pure in spirit, but you’d come out sick and with memories vile enough to keep you so.

  For many months afterwards, I could hardly bear silence, though I used to long for it in gaol at night, when the noise was relentless and violent. I once heard a woman in the cell next to mine, hitting her head over and over against the wall. It sounded so desperate and dreadful, I had to hold my hands over my ears and cover my own head until it stopped. In the morning, we were told she was dead. No guard or warden gave us any explanation, but I always knew.

  I was never meant to be there. Never.

  Almost everyone’s mind turned. One woman spent her days wandering the halls, carrying an absent baby in her arms, wailing for it to be returned to her. I didn’t know whether the child was dead, or if she’d left it on the outside. Others who’d brought their children with them fared better, but the children were a coarse, ragged and dirty bunch. You saw them dressed in very little, many of them hungry, but with a hardness in their eyes that made you shudder.

  It was only stubbornness that kept my mind intact. Charles Murray was wrong in what he’d said about me, and I was determined to show it, though exactly what good my efforts did, I’m not sure. The world cared nothing whether I was good or not. The world cared nothing at all.

  They released me. I stood outside with a guard while we waited for Aunt Emily to deliver Arabella back to my care. All I carried were the clothes I was wearing, a bag with two grey governess’s dresses and my old red diary, left over from the bad times at the Murrays’, but which I was fearful of throwing away. The guard spoke few words to me, except these:

  ‘You’re looking pleased with yourself. Don’t start thinking you’re free, just because you’re out of Newgate. You’re as much a prisoner as you ever was.’

  I ignored him because at that moment, ahead of me, I saw Aunt Emily approaching with Arabella on her arm. Tears sprang into my eyes. I brushed them briskly away. It would not do to overwhelm the child with too much emotion. Besides, any display of feeling would be witnessed by the guard and seen as yet more evidence of hysteria, so I fought all my impulses to race towards her and just waited for her to reach me.

  I held out my arms and embraced her, but
our nine-month separation had made her shy in my company. She hung her head and would scarcely look at me. ‘She is afraid,’ I said to Aunt Emily.

  ‘It’s probably inevitable,’ Aunt Emily said. She kissed me coolly on the cheek.

  The guard cleared his throat. ‘Are you ready? The ship won’t wait.’

  I fumbled in the front pocket of my dress for the letters I’d written to Jack and Clara that morning and handed them to Aunt Emily. ‘Please give these to the children, whenever you next see them. Tell them …’ I shook my head, and couldn’t finish. With each one, I’d enclosed half of a small medallion with my initials etched into it. I’d kept the other halves with their names on them for myself, and promised them both I would work my hardest to make sure that one day, those medallions would be whole again. But it was a small gesture and such feeble comfort for this too-enormous loss. I wasn’t even sure their grandmother would give them to them, set as she was in her belief that they would do well to forget me.

  Aunt Emily took the two white envelopes from my hands. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, my dear Rose.’ For the first time, there was warmth in her expression as she looked at me. But then she added in a whisper, ‘Are you sure we can’t change your mind? You truly insist on taking Arabella with you?’

  ‘She’s all I have, Aunt Emily,’ I said. ‘The judge has taken everything else. You must let me have this.’

  She pursed her lips, then handed me an envelope with my mother-in-law’s seal on it. ‘The elder Mrs Winter sent this for you. It’s a sum of money to help you through your passage.’ Without waiting for my reaction, she bent down to say goodbye to Arabella, who wept a little and clung to her. Aunt Emily unhooked the child’s arms from around her neck and said, ‘You have your mother now. You must be happy to be with her again.’ And as she left, the look she gave me was reproachful.