XX
IT WAS OVER. The long ordeal, the years of suffering and fear, the ceaseless struggle, the shame.
Mary the convict, the convicted criminal, was no more. Now she was Mary the free woman, pardoned by the king himself, reborn to a fresh start and a new life.
It must have taken days, perhaps even weeks, for Mary to arrive at a full sense of her transformation. Days and weeks during which, guided by her rescuer James Boswell, she moved into a rented room in a lodging house in Little Titchfield Street near where Boswell’s brother David lived, and began to accustom herself to London life. Having an entire room to herself must have seemed a great luxury—and not only a room, with a fireplace and a carpet, a bed and sofa and chairs and tables, but a place to hang her clothes and cabinets to store her few possessions.
Thanks to Boswell’s continuing effort to collect charitable contributions on her behalf, Mary was acquiring the accoutrements of gentility: some day dresses, a bonnet and shawl for when she went out, and well-made shoes, not the rough clogs of a countrywoman but leather shoes, to be worn over stockings, the shoes of a gentlewoman. Probably there were gloves for her rough hands, and ribbons to trim her dresses, and colored bands to bind up her dark hair, for these were in vogue in the spring of 1793 and no respectable woman would go out without banded hair, any more than she would go out wearing rouge on her lips and cheeks. (“Only the disgraceful French,” it was said, went “rouged and hatless” in public.)
The contrast between Mary’s former shabby, shapeless prison garb and her new finery was startling—and emblematic of the new world that was opening before her. It was impossible for Mary not to feel different in her new clothes, and living in her new lodgings, and most of all, enjoying her newfound freedom. She answered to no one but herself. There were no schedules to follow, no rules to heed. All London was before her; she could go where she liked, see whom she liked. The hours of her days were hers to spend—or squander. Each night she slept well, and long. Each day she ate well.
Gradually her hard edges began to soften, her musculature to relax. Her body filled out, the wariness in her grey eyes began to give way to a brighter look, one of greater peace and security.
All London was Mary’s to explore. The Thames, its garbage-ridden waters reeking in the spring heat. The narrow streets and alleys with their tempting shop windows where everything from fragrant hot cross buns and pastries to anthologies of sermons to anti-earthquake pills were sold. Such an overplus of goods of every sort must have tempted Mary, after so many years of deprivation, to overindulge. With the pocket money Boswell gave her out of the fund he collected, she bought sweets and trinkets and, more than likely, called at the neighborhood gin shops where a glass of Blue Ruin could be had for a penny.
Most likely she took a boat to Vauxhall Stairs and paid her shilling to be admitted to the twelve attractively landscaped acres of Vauxhall Gardens, where the visitor could walk for miles along well-tended paths that led through green arbors and among blooming rhododendrons and beds of roses and lilac and laburnum. As if in a dream she walked beneath immense triumphal arches and past imitation ruins of Roman temples, while in the distance a band played marches and dance tunes. At her leisure, she took tea in the Chinese pavilion and watched the passing parade of fashionably dressed patrons, hoping to see the king.
There was much to divert Mary in the first few weeks of her new life. The daily small dramas in the street—carriages overturning, arguments between cart drivers, the commotion and clatter of sheep and cattle being driven to the slaughterhouses of Smithfield. Cries of street vendors and sellers of news sheets kept her informed of the rapidly unfolding events in the larger world. Rumormongers spread tales and gossip. And in the capital’s hundreds of coffee-houses, where people gathered to read the newspapers, all the talk was of the war with France and of the seemingly berserk and savage Parisians, who had taken over the government and executed King Louis and were massacring innocent priests and aristocrats.
Whether Mary took advantage of her early days of freedom to explore London, or stayed close to her room, we don’t know. Her benefactor Boswell looked in on her often—in his journal he wrote that he assumed “a very attentive charge of her”—and was frequently in Titchfield Street to visit his brother, with whom he often dined.
1 Mary knew no one else, only her four companions from Sydney Cove who were still in prison. Boswell assured Mary that he was endeavoring to have the four men pardoned, but had not succeeded. Boswell, it would seem, was Mary’s entire society in her earliest weeks of freedom.
But Boswell was exceptionally busy that spring, and may have had scant time to spend with the Girl from Botany Bay, as the newspapers called her. Not only did he have an important case in the courts (a case he lost on the day after Mary’s release) but he was eagerly immersed in making travel plans.
Since February of 1793, Britain had joined her continental allies in waging war against revolutionary France. Boswell planned to leave in June for Holland “to pass some time with the combined armies.” No doubt he planned to send back accounts of his experiences to be published in the newspapers. He was compiling a book of his travels, and given his wide repute as a literary figure and the great success of his Life of Johnson, the projected book was bound to have very bright commercial prospects.
Events had been moving quickly over the past few months. The French armies, having advanced rapidly eastward as far as Mainz and taken Bruges, Liège and Antwerp to the north, had recently fallen back and begun to retreat. The Austrians were besieging the frontier fortresses of Condé and Valenciennes. With France itself plagued by internal upheaval, counterrevolutionaries in charge of several provincial cities and civil war in the Vendée, it looked as though the revolutionary government might fall and the monarchy be re-established. Boswell was enthusiastically planning to put himself in the heart of all the ferment. Nothing pleased him more, nothing lifted his perennially depressed spirits more than hurry, bustle and activity; he was at his most buoyant when pressed for time.
Throughout the first week of June, 1793, he wrote letters and called on officials and colleagues, and dined with those in a position to inform him about current conditions in Holland and Flanders. In his exuberance he drank too much (as he usually did), and suffered for it, but went on drinking too much day after day and night after night. On June 5, late at night, he was on his way home, swaying as he walked and clearly intoxicated. He was in Titchfield Street, probably coming home after dining with his brother.
2 Suddenly from out of the darkness men attacked him, knocking him down, beating him on the head and arms and stealing his money and his watch before they ran off.
Stunned, Boswell lay in the dirt, bleeding, until a young barrister came by and found him, alerting the night watchman and the neighborhood patrol. Together they carried the injured man home.
Boswell was fortunate; the attack could well have been fatal, as many such street attacks were. Even so, he was an invalid for weeks, while the deep cuts on his head and arms healed and his bruises and aches gradually subsided.
The assault and its aftermath were sobering, both literally and metaphorically. Boswell wrote to his close friend and severest critic William Temple that he looked on his mugging as a crisis in his life.
“I trust I shall henceforth be a sober, regular man,” he wrote. “Your suggestion as to my being carried off in a state of intoxication is awful.”
3 He felt humiliated as well as injured, and the combination depressed him.
“My being knocked down in the street and consequent illness . . . sunk my spirits,” he wrote in his journal. He had no heart to resume his former life, and was in “much pain from feebleness” for the rest of the summer.
4 He abandoned his plans to go to the continent, his “military ardor quite extinguished.” Weak and sore, ashamed of himself and distracted in mind, unable to focus, he limped through his days, doing his best to fulfill his obligations but subdued and often somber.
Mary too had grown more subdued. Her initial elation after her release from Newgate had spent itself, to be replaced by nagging feelings of emptiness and dread. She was free, well fed, well dressed, and enjoying every convenience, yet she didn’t belong. Smoky, noisy, exciting London was not her home, and never could be. No doubt she grieved for her children, and thought of the family she had left behind so long ago in Fowey, when she began her wanton career of crime. Would they ever be able to accept her? She doubted it—or so she told Boswell.
5There were few respectable paths open to her: marriage, if the right man could be found; employment, probably in a factory or in domestic service; or emigration, perhaps to Canada or America. Some or all of these possibilities may have preoccupied her as London emptied during the dusty midsummer heat of August, the propertied classes leaving for their country homes in preparation for the fall shooting season.
It was during this exodus, on a hot Sunday, that a visitor called on Boswell. He was a Mr. Castel, a Cornishman, from Mary’s town of Fowey and an acquaintance of Mary’s relatives.
6 One of the relatives—Mr. Castel did not say which one—had sent him a letter asking him to call on the famous Mr. Boswell, who had taken Mary as his protégé. Castel said that he wanted to see Mary and send word back to her family as to how she was.
And beyond that, he said, he had two pieces of good news for her. First, that her sister Dolly was in London, working as a cook at an establishment in Bedford Square. And second, that her father, along with three or four others in the family, had received a large inheritance.
At this, Boswell must have felt a chill of alarm. Confidence men often tried to trick the gullible by telling them that a large sum of money was on its way to them. Was this Castel—if that was his real name—nothing more than an impostor, trying to take advantage of Mary?
Did he imagine that he could extort money from Boswell in some way, using the spurious legacy as collateral? Castel mentioned an improbably immense sum: three hundred thousand pounds (the equivalent of seventeen million pounds in 2003).
All Boswell’s suspicions, his latent snobbery, his sense of class and privilege, were aroused. How dare this blackguard try to hoodwink him, taking advantage of his acquaintance with Mary’s kin?
But when Boswell took Castel to see Mary (who did not recognize him), Boswell’s suspicions began to abate. In talking with Mary it became clear that Castel was who he claimed to be, and did know the Broads fairly well; he recognized Mary, who must have felt a combination of happiness and trepidation at hearing that Dolly was living and working not far away, and that Castel wanted to bring her sister to Mary’s room that very evening.
When Castel began to talk of the family inheritance, Mary was strangely unmoved, as Boswell noted in his journal. Perhaps she disbelieved him, as Boswell himself did. In any case, she showed good sense, her protector thought, in being “shy to him [Castel] and not being elated by the sound of the great fortune.” Mary was no fool; she knew the sound of trickery when she heard it.
7Not wanting to leave Castel alone with Mary, Boswell escorted him out, and made sure he left the immediate neighborhood, walking with him a long way and then returning to Mary’s lodging alone to talk with her. He warned her not to believe anything Castel had said until he proved his good faith by producing her sister. No doubt Mary did not need the warning; she was on her guard.
It must have been a very long afternoon. Mary was alone, Boswell had gone to church and then to dine with legal colleagues. Thoughts of Cornwall, and of the family she had not seen for so many years, must have tumbled over themselves in Mary’s mind. How far could she trust what she had been told, if at all? Was Dolly really in London? And if so, why had she not come herself before this to tell Mary of the change in the family fortunes?
Chances are Dolly could not have read about Mary in the newspapers, for like Mary, she was probably illiterate. But she could have heard others talking of the Girl from Botany Bay, the Cornish highwaywoman named Mary Bryant. She might have wondered whether it was her sister. Or someone in the family, the same person who sent Mr. Castel to Boswell, could have gotten word to Dolly that Mary was back from New Holland, and freed from imprisonment.
Dolly’s arrival in Little Titchfield Street put an end to all conjecture. There she stood, in Mary’s doorway, joyful, incredulous, her eyes full of tears. It was indeed Dolly, thirty years old now, but still youthful and slender—as Boswell noted when he saw her afterwards—and above all affectionate.
8No doubt the two women embraced, and wept together, and sat talking for a long time, with the avuncular Mr. Castel looking on. Mary must have told Dolly of her long odyssey of prison, voyaging, escape and recapture. Of the husband she had had and lost, of her two beloved children, both now dead. Of the miracle worked by Mr. Boswell, who had arranged for her pardon and release.
The tears must have fallen freely as Mary told her story, for Dolly was warmhearted and empathetic (when he met her, Boswell noted her great “tenderness of heart” ) and her sympathy and concern would have melted any reserve or wariness Mary felt. When Boswell arrived later, he found the two still talking, Dolly telling him that she had been “in great concern” about Mary and “showing her the most tender affection.”
The benison of Dolly’s love must have warmed Mary and put some of her trepidation to rest. She had family again, she was embraced and not scorned. And just possibly, all that Castel had said was true. Just possibly, Mary would one day be rich beyond her wildest dreams.