I’m ready now to do all my talking at the trial, to try and tell em all I didn’t do it, so they won’t hang me, and so I can live at the new nursery with Rose and my baby. But, of course, we did kill him, me and Rose together. We killed him because of how angry we was that he’d sold my baby away, and we wanted to stop him doing it to the next one. Rose had come to think of Emma as her own baby, see, and had plans to adopt her, even though that wouldn’t never of happened, because I was gonna get her back for myself. But Rose didn’t know that at the time.
I started out just dreaming about killing him, but the more I dreamed about it, the more I wanted to do it, and it was an idea I couldn’t much get rid of.
So once I’d decided on my date for running away, I thought I’d quickly get the reverend out the world so’s he couldn’t go off wrecking any more girls’ lives, and then I’d be off, with my pack on my back and my belly full of baby.
I went over to the nursery, full of the murdering fire. I said to Rose, ‘That Reverend Sutton sold my baby.’
She shook her head and her eyes got full of tears, because I reckon she’d truly loved my baby, and she said, ‘I know he did, Miriam.’ And she cried.
I said, ‘I’m gonna hurt him for it.’ I said that because I reckoned she’d think I was only joking, but she took me quite serious, what surprised me. She said she’d help and keep a lookout to make sure no folk was coming to save him.
I waited for him in the kitchen, because I knew he always used to come there late at night, to pick up his sandwiches what the servant would of left him. Mrs Sutton was in bed, and the nursery was quiet enough, though of course it never got proper silent. That was a help to me, because it meant them crying babies’d cover up the noise of me bashing the reverend hard about the head with a log I’d brung in from the outhouse.
When I knew he was on his way, I jumped up quick and stood on a chair and, as he opened the door, I smashed that log down on his head. I hit him hard, and he didn’t even scream. He just groaned a bit, then fell straight away to the ground.
I stood there with my heart pumping like it hadn’t never pumped before, and then I called in a hoarse-sounding voice, ‘Rose!’
Rose come to me, and she put her arms round me and said, ‘You’ve done it, Miriam.’
‘I’ve gotta get away,’ I said.
Then she got down on the floor by the reverend and put her ear against his chest. ‘Give me the log. He’s not dead,’ she said.
So that was what I did, and then she brung that log hard over his skull three more times, and then we knew for sure how dead he was.
‘I gotta get away,’ I said again. ‘Or they’re gonna hang me and get my baby.’
She held out her arm. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We need to get rid of the body.’
But there wasn’t nowhere to put it, because we was in the town, and folk was around, so we just put him in the shed in the yard and ran back to Ma Dwyer’s, quick as we could. When we got there, Rose asked Ma for a bottle of brandy and Ma said, ‘Why, what have you ladies been up to, that you need brandy?’
‘Nothing, Ma,’ we said.
We sat in my room and drunk it down deep, and we kept a lookout opposite to see if the police was on their way, what they wasn’t, and not for a long time.
‘I’ve gotta go, Rose,’ I said.
But she wouldn’t let me. She just kept on pouring more and more brandy into my glass till I couldn’t hardly walk no more, and I wasn’t never gonna get away then.