Chapter Four

I was trusted to come and go between the house and the prison, sometimes to the butcher if Mrs Whiskin was cup-shot with the juniper juice. Every Thursday I went out to do errands and, one day, Miss Grace sent me to the seamstress to collect her new gown; there was to be an entertainment at the house that evening and Grace wanted to wear it for the first time.

I walked out past Coldbath Square with my head high. It was the furthest I’d walked for six months and I thought God was bestowing blessings upon me because I’d started up my prayers again. Everywhere I looked, the morning was blue like a painter’s powders shaken out in the wind and dusted all over Clerkenwell in skirts and shutters and carriage wheels. In shop windows too, blue bonnets and rolls of satin and China plates and rows of books.

After I collected the dress, I plucked up the courage to return by a longer way so I could go and find Sally Turner. I didn’t like to think of her believing she’d never see me again because I’d gone across the seas as a convict, so I hoped Mrs Whiskin wouldn’t notice exactly how long my errand had taken and I went to the corner of Aylesbury Street where Sally always stood with her basket, selling watercress. If I close my eyes now, as I turn these memories into words, I can still see the back of Sally’s striped gown with its rips and patches and her bare feet just ahead of me as we scrambled up the steep sides of the Clerkenwell dust heap. I was barely six then and she was ten. Two years later, she shared my bed on the night her mother and father were murdered up in Islington. When I was fourteen, I whispered in her ear that she should say her goodbyes because I was bleeding to death. She told me I was just become a woman and should be glad of it and then she showed me what to do. In the year before Mr Aris took me in, Sally lost her husband and her little son to the smallpox.

When Sally saw me, she wept and laughed and squeezed me so tight I could barely breathe. I couldn’t stay long but I told her all I knew about the peculiar circumstances of my escape from the convict ship and said she must be careful who she told about my new place of work for I still did not understand how I’d come to be a free woman and a prisoner at the same time.

I asked Sally to tell Martha my strange tale, then I hurried back across the fields and picked my way up to the New River through the crossways between each green parcel of land. I didn’t dare stop to watch the water riffling or to lean across the bridge as we used to, to see if there were fishes hiding in the shade. I passed by the woman who lays out the bodies in St James’s and she gave me a murky look as if she knew me, but I didn’t slow my pace. I was wearing my freedom so bright and glossy that day. I pretended I was a lady, shading my face from the sun, all a-hurry along the path by the river. I thought I was the luckiest girl in London, even though I had to return to Dorrington Street with a new gown that was not my own tucked under my arm in paper wrapping.

I was helping Mrs Whiskin with the table when Grace called me upstairs to dress her. The robe was copied from a picture in The Lady’s Magazine, white muslin trimmed with French lace, cut exceeding low at the neck and shoulders. A thin, gauzy thing it was, with her cherrilets peeping through like pink bon-bons for the gentlemen’s delight. I was doing her hair the way she asked, as it was in the picture, twisting it through a riband and passing a plait around to catch it at the back, when my fingers caught and pulled so we were tangled together, my hands and her hair and the comb. As she raised her arms to hit me she tore even more tightly on her own head and screamed. I thought someone would come but with all the noise downstairs, her cries and mine went unnoticed. I began again on her hair.

When she left the room, all spruce in her finery, I was red around my neck from the blows she inflicted, but she came off worse. She was bald in a tiny, round place at the back but I didn’t tell her.

After the guests were gone and the house put in order, I lay down in my bed, free of care. My body was smudged with black bruises but I knew my skin would be white again in a few days while Miss Grace would be bristled like a hog for weeks.

It was the same night, after my first beating from Grace, when everything changed. I’d been there for six months. Dawn comes early in summer and, at first, I thought it was the sun that woke me but it was light from a lantern. I was not alone in the room. Mr Aris was standing at the end of my bed in the chintz banyan he always wore at breakfast. It was unfastened and even in the half-light I could see the furry dome of his belly. I thought something terrible had happened and I was needed to help. I sat up on my elbows and pulled the blanket to my chin, afraid to show myself even in my anxiety. He sat beside me. I was looking at his bare feet, dangling like plucked, pink fowls hanging in the market, when he began speaking. I don’t remember what he said, because of his hands.

Don’t think I was innocent. I’d already allowed a few indelicacies in return for favours that kept me alive, a plate of cheese and gherkins at the Crown Tavern or even some coins. If I tell the truth, I’d played a light-skirts and before I was sixteen I’d done much of what was asked of me, the strokings and lickings and pushings and pullings liked so much by men, but I’d never sold, nor given away, what my aunt told me to hold precious. I had not been plucked.

The press of Mr Aris’s fingers through my bedcover seemed at first an imagined horror and I did not speak or move. I knew him as a man like my father, who made gentle conversation with me and smiled into my eyes. I watched his two hands digging at my blanket and hoped it was a dream but when he reached beneath and I felt the stumpy end of a cold thumb against me, it was as if all the bells of London rang at once, to wake me.

‘… so be still, my sweet child, and close your eyes.’

With no care for my future, I drew my knees to my chest and took hold of his hands. My nails bit into flesh but he pressed my arms back onto the lumpy pillow where my sleepy head had rested not five minutes before. With his knee, he pushed my legs wider for his comfort. I wanted to call out, but there was no air. My voice was gone from me.

‘Remember one thing,’ he said. His mouth was wet against my ear. ‘If not for me, you’d be spending the next seven years a stinking convict.’ He told me I did not deserve the freedom he’d given me. He said he could take it away again at any moment he chose.

I’m sure he thought me weak when my tears came but he was wrong. It was anger that brought them. Anger that set the course of my life from that moment.

When Governor Aris lifted himself onto me and called me his sweet little rosebud for the first time, and the rusted springs of my narrow bed creaked faster, I was thinking of a day to come when I would stand in the middle of Clerkenwell Green and shout to the world that the governor’s droopy shot pouch was longer than the barrel of his piece.

The dying year was bitter cold, frosting the beards of men who walked without their collars turned high and grazing red-raw the hands of street women who went gloveless. In the house on Dorrington Street, I worked harder than ever, hauling scuttles of coal up from the cellar to keep the fires going all day, but it was not the house chores that had turned my body into a coloured tapestry of bright marks. Thumb-shaped bruises were scattered like ash smudges along my arms and legs. Scratches patterned my chest, some faded to thin lines like white lace, others still flaring red. Each told the story of a time and a place. The pantry, before breakfast. The dining room, late in the evening. Sometimes, long hours, locked and bolted in my room with the man who told me I deserved everything he was doing. There were other marks too, not seen but felt, the deep hurt from another kind of cruelty. I watched pleasure flush his face when he hurled words of humiliation at me in front of his family, his friends and visitors to the house. When he called me an ugly slattern or a lazy trollop, I imagined the burning sky over the convict village in Sydney Town, made it so real in my mind that I could feel its blistering heat. The life I had escaped from was surely worse than the one I was living.

On the afternoon I was sent to collect the Christmas goose, the temperature lifted for a while around noon and chimney soot drifted into the puddles as they thawed, then froze again into black sheets of ice. On Dorrington Street, December hung like a white shroud, the air so thickened that horses, people and coaches passed by as ghostly images. I had to get to Mr Skinner’s shop before he closed and there were boots to fetch from the cobbler. The more I hurried, the more I slipped and slid.

I kept my head down when they sent me out and never spoke to strangers, but the butcher knew exactly who I was and where I lived. The meat for the prison came from his shop and he was often a guest at the house. Now and then, he gave me news of people I used to know and, one day, he told me Lucy Burnes had been caught stealing a roll of calico. Transported to New South Wales for seven years. ‘I don’t know anyone of that name,’ was all I said but I cried myself to sleep that night and the next for the terrible distance between me and Lucy.

Mr Skinner lifted the dressed goose into my hands, wrapped tightly in a muslin cloth. It was much bigger than I’d expected, and heavier. ‘Health and happiness this Christmas-tide, miss.’ As usual, I was not expected to hand over any payment.

Carrying the cold lump that would be the Aris family’s Christmas dinner the next day against my chest, I walked unsteadily out of the shop. I had gone only a few steps when I realised it would be impossible to manage the goose as well as the boots I’d been told to collect. A wave of nausea came from nowhere, filling me and pitching me forward. As I retched, the goose shifted against me, flipping my balance. The bird was thrown up into the air. I sat on the ground and puked for the third time since breakfast. The goose lay on its back a few feet away in a pool of smut-blackened slush.

The hand that rested on my shoulder was small, soft-gloved in red calfskin.

‘It’s alright. Here, take my arm.’

Someone leaned down to me and I felt feathers brush against my face, then the warm touch of a grey woollen pelisse as my rescuer helped me stand. Roses. Incense. Cloves and nutmeg. Not a perfume bought on a London street.

‘The goose …’ I began to heave again and clutched my stomach.

‘A problem easily resolved. Where does it need to go?’

‘Dorrington Street. Eighty-four.’

‘You’re too weak to walk. My coach is a few steps away.’

I looked up at the woman for the first time. The stranger was a lady, elegantly dressed.

‘Mr Skinner!’ The butcher appeared at the door and the woman called out to him over her shoulder, without a look, ‘Have that goose delivered, please, and put the cost to me.’

On another day, I would have tried to run. I was not stupid. Fine clothes can mask evil intentions. Soft words can be lies, sweet as caramel. But how could the danger that waited in a stranger’s carriage be worse than the life I was living? Old bruises on my chest were buttercup yellow. New bruises on my arms were dark red berries and the ones on my thighs bloomed purple. When I went home I would be beaten for not collecting the boots. If the goose was damaged, I would not eat on Christmas Day. I had healed many times before and knew how hunger gnawed and scraped but the new foreboding in me was for the child, not for myself, so I took the woman’s arm. ‘Thank you.’

Inside, the coach was like a room filled with flowers. Bright carnations printed in rows on the papered walls. Forest green baize pulled down over the windows, crewelwork in silk threads – knots, twists and rosettes like jewels – on worsted cushions, piled for comfort along the leather seats and a rug, cornflower blue, across her knees.

‘I am Catherine Despard.’ One eyebrow lifted, a curious trick that gave her the look of a lawyer making his case. She was dressed fashionably and the feathers on her hat were placed low on the side to brush against the jaw, like the ones in the shops on Clerkenwell Green. An actress perhaps, or the mistress of a man with money. Her face was the colour of a freshly fallen chestnut.

I realised I was expected to recognise the name but I did not.

‘You live at number eighty-four? The home of the Governor of Coldbath Fields?’

‘I’m a servant to Mr Aris.’ The woman knew him. I had to get away as quickly as possible and say no more.

‘I understand. Believe me.’ She looked kind but it would be dangerous to accept help from someone who was not my family, not my friend, not my neighbour, and if Mr Aris heard I was resting in a fine carriage instead of doing my errands, his lardy feet would come creeping up the servants’ stairs in the night to deliver punishment.

I pulled at the handle of the door. ‘I must go now. Thank you for your kindness.’

As I took the deep step down to the street, the sickness rose again in my throat. I hung there for a moment as the world around me whirled then I set my two palms flat against my temples to steady myself and walked away in the direction of the cobbler’s. If I arrived home with Susan’s boots, perhaps no-one would know what had happened.

After the family got home from church the next morning, the house was quieter than usual. Mr Aris was reading in the parlour, Susan was in her room laying out gowns and Charles had walked up to the prison to oversee the weighing of the prisoners’ bread. He was supposed to check the loaves once a week and record the weight in the log but he always told Amos to see to it and then spent the afternoon in the porter’s lodge with one of the female prisoners. Mrs Whiskin was busy ladling goose fat over potatoes and grating cheese for the pudding. I knew the cook would be glad of an extra pair of hands with dinner but Mr Aris was very firm about household arrangements. It was simple. If I worked in the house and not in the kitchen, my duties included attending the family in their bedrooms. If ever I was seen on the stairs at night, no-one would think anything amiss. I had time to myself, an hour at least, before I would be needed to dress the ladies for dinner.

I lay flat on my back on the narrow bed and looked up. A brownish circle of damp on the ceiling had been growing darker and larger as the weeks passed and I wondered if a day would come when it would begin to drip, no longer strong enough to hold back the deepening reservoir hidden somewhere above me. Nothing else ever changed.

I was almost asleep, wondering if Lucy ever thought of the friend she had abandoned to the constables of Clerkenwell, when a noise stirred me, a loud conversation on the landing below. Two people, both shouting.

Daniel had the shrillness of a child but the determined tone of a man. ‘You cannot make me, you fling-stink!’

A woman screamed in pain. Miss Grace. Someone came running up the stairs from the front hall.

‘Papa! Look what he’s done to me!’ A muffled thud was followed by another scream and then the voice of Governor Aris.

‘Daniel! You must conduct yourself more gently. Come down to the parlour and we’ll take a glass of port together.’

I took off my shoes and padded to the door, prising it open far enough to put my ear to the space.

‘You must try to find some kindness in your heart for your brother.’

The heavy footsteps going back down again to the ground floor were the governor’s. As I closed my door, the quick drumming of light feet came up the narrow stairs to the servants’ landing, closer and closer. They stopped on the other side of the timber slats against my cheek. The door opening threw me backwards across the room.

Grace stood there in her rose-sprigged church dress, wide legged, chin out, the lines of tears shining on her cheeks.

‘Stand up, Evans! Stand when I speak!’ She was straight and stiff, lips a tight line, fists curled by her sides but the hems of her sleeves trembled like leaf-edges in a breeze and I saw her anger. ‘Did you think I wouldn’t find out? D’you think me stupid?’

I looked around for something to protect myself with but there was nothing. What was coming my way could not be avoided.

‘You were told to bring the goose home. Mr Skinner had to bring it – he said you were unwell. Unwell!’ She took a step closer and glared into my face. Two steps, three. Her fists opened into flattened flails. As her arms lifted to deliver a blow from each side, I bent forward, curling myself to take the punches on my shoulders but Grace grabbed my wrists and pushed them back. A knee came up, the hardest, fastest thing I had ever felt against my body. The scream I heard was my own.

‘No!’

Grace stopped. I was folded over, arms locked across my stomach, head over my elbows like a clamp. Silence rocked in the air between us like the moment after a tree falls.

‘So, there we have it.’ There was something in Grace’s tone that sounded like pleasure. ‘I’ve heard you, gagging like a drunkard. Did you think you could deceive us? When will your bastard arrive?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘This will be the end of you. Papa won’t be pleased.’

When Grace left, I did not move from the floor. I thought there would be blood but it did not come. Later, I pulled myself up and lay on the bed, hands flat on my stomach, waiting. I did not notice the rain, lashing heavily in windy squalls against the window. As I closed my eyes, one heavy drop from the ceiling hit the middle of my forehead.

The best fishing is in the deepest water. When Thomas Aris caught me, I was so young. I followed the bait and wriggled for him like a carp on a line but by the year’s end I saw myself for the fool I’d been. I learned my mistake and began to fear him but he was a clever man. I don’t know how he made me feel that it was my fault. That I caused him to do what he did to me. I’ll never understand it and that grieves me today, as I write. Words have a power beyond our human understanding and he used them against me. To live as I did when I was orphaned, I know my mind must have been as strong as my body. My heart flamed with anger, but somehow that man made me feel helpless. I did not know what else to do but polish the brass fender in the parlour of the house in Dorrington Street till that ugly thing glinted like gold.

Thomas Aris could not write without twisting his mouth towards his right ear, a habit learned as a seven-year-old who squeezed the letters out painfully, one by one. He was never short of the right thing to say. That was just imitation; he could talk like a minister or a magistrate or a fishmonger, perhaps even a king. But words on paper, they were another matter. Writing made him feel like a fool. While he sat and chewed over the spelling, ink dried on the nib so it scratched at the page like a hungry fowl. He screwed up another piece of paper and threw it onto the floor.

His office was cramped, musty. The new place would be better, a house fit for a gentleman. There was talk, the expense of it, the governor’s new residence, but he didn’t care. He would have his way, even the latest extras he had added to the builder’s specification. A man in his position was due a bit of luxury. He would be out of the old place in Dorrington Street and living in comfort by spring. Now, he just had to put an end to the fuss the Despards were making. The woman was whipping up trouble all around.

He looked again at the letter the Duke of Portland had passed on to him the day before. It was elegantly penned with the fine loops and swirls of a lady’s hand.

To His Grace the Duke of Portland, Home Secretary

Berkeley Square

December 23rd, 1798

My Lord,

I request Your Grace’s attention to the situation of my husband, Colonel Edward Despard, who is now in Coldbath Fields Prison where he is not allowed to see me or any of his friends, except for a few minutes. He is treated more like a vagabond than a State prisoner. Sir Francis Burdett, Member of Parliament, has most kindly taken up his cause on my behalf.

The colonel served His Majesty for thirty years yet he has been confined nearly seven months in a damp cell not seven feet square without fire or candle, chair or table, knife or fork. He has neither glass in his window nor any book to read. His feet are ulcerated from frost.

I entreat Your Grace to direct some change to be made; that I may be permitted to see him at reasonable times; that I may take him books; that the usual food allowance may be given to him. This is all that I request.

I am Your Grace’s most obedient humble servant,

Catherine Despard

Aris was writing his own letter. He would lay out an argument in the proper manner. Show the woman for what she was, a slave-born strumpet with a boglander husband not fit to bear the rank of an officer in His Majesty’s army. He dipped the nib and began again on another new page.

December 28th

The Middlesex House of Correction

Coldbath Fields

My Lord

I hope Your Grace will do me the honer of considerring my views on maters recently brout to my attention since Mrs Despard has begun to complane so publickly and falsely about her husband’s acomodation here. I believe Sir Francis Burdett intends to bring this all up in Parlyment and request an inquery into the prison and my own conduct. I am

The crumpled paper hit the wall and bounced. He began again.

My Lord

Burdett has visited Coldbath Fields three times in the last four weeks. I have showed him the utmost civillitty. He was given leave to interveiw two of my sons, James Aris my prinsipal turnkey and Charles Aris, my prison porter. I made every corner open to his invetsiagations so

He tore the page into small pieces and threw them into the air.

My Lord

If there were complaintes I would know of them, for I make it my daily busyness to walk about the jail. The letters Burdett has in his posesion are false, mallicious gossip. They were writ by scowndrells who have been collecting money for the wives of the mutineers, cauzing riots outside the prison.

Your faithful servant, William Mainwaring, will conferm the prisoners are treated accordin to the rules. As for rumers about a cell called the Black Hole, no such abonnimation exists.

Aris hated Sir Francis Burdett for his wealth and his fine houses but he hated him more for his politics. All that rubbish about a thing they called ‘social justice’. Burdett had been in Paris during the French Revolution. Came home with treason in his heart, that was for sure, and he was being followed by government spies wherever he went. The Duke of Portland would do whatever was needed to get the man off Aris’s back. One favour for another. With the right friends, a baker was more powerful than a baronet.

Aris dipped the nib again and began a new line.

Is there something that can be done to stop Sir Francis Burdett from interfearing where he shoud not stick his nose in? I trust you will act swiftly for our mutuel benifit.

At last, it was going better. The words were well chosen and he felt sure the spelling was correct. He added his signature, a name that needed no flourishes: Aris.

‘Governor! Come quick!’ John Amos was agitated, pointing at the window. ‘A hullabaloo outside. The crowd’s growing – I do believe there’ll be a riot if something’s not done.’

‘The Despard woman again?’

‘Yes, and …’ Amos looked at the floor.

‘And what, man?’

‘Burdett’s at the door and he’s making a racket.’

‘Did you tell him to leave?’

‘James told him in no fancy words but he refuses to budge till he’s spoke to you.’

When he opened the door in the prison gate, Aris could see the situation was worse than Amos had described. Sir Francis Burdett and another well-dressed man he did not recognise stood between Catherine Despard and the wife of John Bone, a bookseller who had been arrested with the colonel, Catherine’s husband. Behind them, people had gathered to see what was happening.

‘May I be of service?’ Aris lifted high the heavy bunch of iron keys he carried with him and jangled it playfully at the crowd. ‘Did someone knock on Heaven’s gate?’

A man at the back laughed and called out, ‘Sir Francis has a fancy for an overnight stay in the Bastille!’

‘Perhaps the baronet would like a nice room for two.’

More laughter. The mood was shifting.

‘I wish to speak with Colonel Despard. Will you refuse me entry?’ Burdett, taller by a head, looked down at Aris.

The crowd went silent, listening.

‘Bring me the Duke of Portland’s signature on a warrant and I’ll let you in … my Lord!’

Burdett moved aside and said something to his companions. As they walked away from the gate, Mrs Despard stopped, alone in the shadow of the prison wall, and turned back to Aris. Her voice was powerful, deliberate.

‘It’s against the law to imprison without trial, no matter who gives the order. It’s not right to treat an officer in the King’s army like a common thief. You starve him, forbid him a candle in the darkness, but you’ll not be rid of me. Your abuses will be judged. The people will judge you!’

Aris saw one or two he recognised in the crowd, nodding and pointing at Mrs Despard. The balance was changing again, the mob’s favour slipping from one speaker to the other. There was no way to guess which way things would turn.

‘You’ve no right to accuse me. Your husband’s a damned revolutionist – and there’s many here don’t believe he is your husband. An officer marrying the likes of you don’t seem likely, m’dear!’ Aris strutted in front of the crowd, making obscene gestures, but the square fell quiet. Catherine Despard had turned to them too, and when she spoke, she was even louder than before.

‘His only crime is seeking justice and equality. Like many in this town. Like many here today.’ Heads nodded. ‘Colonel Despard did no more than read a book your masters don’t approve of, a book that talks of men’s rights. And there are those who speak of women’s rights, too. Will you throw into your jail every woman who reads the words of Mary Wollstonecraft? If there is any person here who believes all of us to be free and equal, then I say beware of Thomas Aris and his herd!’

The onlookers raised their fists and cheered in support of her courage and defiance.

Aris had lost them. He scanned the crowd but did not notice Sarah Evans standing at the back, open-mouthed, watching Mrs Despard walking away with Sir Francis Burdett.