Chapter Eight

My days were busy and I was always tired but I was all alone so I had time aplenty for reflection. I could no longer rock my body to and fro in the chair without discomfort so I sat there by the window every evening with my feet planted flat on the floor, and I called into my mind once again the words Catherine taught me on the day I went to St Pancras in her carriage. They were little words, familiar, all of them, but it was the way she’d put them together into ideas, all knitted tight, that had puzzled me for a long time. By the time summer came along, bright with blossom, I’d unpicked the stitches of a tangled thing and sewn the threads back into the shape of something I thought I understood. Justice? It seemed so very simple then – the law was for everyone. Rights? I would stand up like those other women and fight for them. Liberty? I believed I was free, but today I know that, still, I did not yet understand.

On the ninth day of May, the hedges were sprigged with low colour from the road’s edge all the way down to the meadow. Cuckoo pint and celandine, cow parsley and cranesbill, ragged robin, pignut and knapweed. Fat bumble bees bumped against the window glass. Swallows swooped in and out of the eaves where their nests were hidden under the roof. I was sweeping their droppings from the step outside my door when I felt a warm flow between my legs. A wet stain grew on the stone at my feet. I knew what it meant but I didn’t know what to do when the moment came so I went on sweeping and put it out of my mind.

When the first pain came, the squeezing of an iron grip low down inside me, I laughed to think I would never be alone in the world again and all I had to do was wait to see my daughter’s face, but when the next pain came, I cried out and dropped to the floor. For a long time I sat there, whipped forward, snapped back, breathless.

I can still only half-remember the footsteps, the arms that lifted me. There was singing, coughing, the sour-fruit smell of wine, grainy with columbine seeds that caught in my throat. Hands pressing, pain so hot and white it blinded me but nothing else until I felt a soft weight as someone laid a squirming bundle on my chest.

‘It’s a boy. You were lucky we heard your cries,’ Eliza Hudson said. I found out later she was Mother Lambert’s daughter, come to to visit. She wiped my bare legs and asked if there was someone they could send for, a sister or a friend.

‘Will the father come?’ Mother Lambert was dropping bloody rags into a pail.

I’d been afraid for so long that the child would die before I saw its face, because of all I’d suffered at the hands of its father. I’d wondered if I would somehow harm it in the terrible pushing it would have to endure. Would it even see its first day in a world we could share? When I felt my son’s heaviness upon me, I wanted only to feel the little shape of him pressed against me. I had no need of anything else.

‘No. We’re alone.’

Eliza said she would stay three days before she went home to Islington. I was laid flat, my baby wrapped in a cheesecloth, perched on me like a large white caterpillar that moved up and down with my breathing. I lifted my head to look at him and thought how strange it was to be a mother, but then his eyes opened, dark like blue-glazed porcelain. His lashes shone, still wet from my body. I’d asked God for a daughter but He sent me a different gift: there was my father, looking back at me like a tiny, wrinkled old man. I loved my boy from that moment. I promised him he would have everything I could give. Mr Aris would have none of him, I’d make sure of that, but the law said the father must acknowledge his son and keep him. It was a child’s right. I named Tommy as I did to be sure of it.

‘Good afternoon, Thomas. Thomas Evans.’

‘Look! He likes his name,’ said Mother Lambert.

Eliza told us it was wind, not smiling, that curled his lips, and we laughed.

I pulled him close to me for the first time and pressed my cheek to his, to breathe in the smell of him. I had nothing of my own, not a stick of furniture or a dinner plate or a Sunday dress but he was all I needed in the world. I would never let anyone harm him. Or take him from me. I remember that thought as it held me and today it leaves me weeping.

After three days, my friendship with Eliza had set firm. We talked for hours, taking turns to hold Tommy and rock him to sleep, and discovered we’d been born in the same street, just a year apart. She never asked questions but I said as much as I dared about the Governor of Coldbath Fields. I was a free woman with a pardon from the King, and I had a plan. I told her I would make for myself the kind of life Catherine had talked of, where a woman can find her own way.

By the time Eliza was preparing to return to her own children in Islington, I’d learned what was needed for an infant to thrive and Tommy knew how to play his own part. His voice was already louder and stronger than Mother Lambert’s singing and, freed early from his swaddling bands, his body was round and tight, smooth like a pebble. On Eliza’s last morning we walked in the graveyard and I took her to a grey tomb behind the church and asked her to read the inscription aloud.

‘Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.’

‘One day, Tommy will be baptised in this church and Mr Aris will sign his name as the father. Women and children have rights,’ I said. ‘Just as men do.’

‘To imagine it is not to make it happen. Be careful.’ Eliza kissed me on the forehead. ‘Aris is a dangerous man. If he can pluck you from the hand of the law, he can do anything.’ She was right but I did not want to think of it.

We heard the rattling and pounding of the coach arriving from Hampstead. ‘Don’t forget to use the spearmint to wash Tommy’s head daily. It’ll prevent scabs. Try to persuade my mother to take a little of the bilberry conserve.’ Holding her skirt, Eliza put a foot on the narrow step and pulled herself up. ‘I’ll come again in August and we can feast on strawberries!’

Every table in the Adam & Eve tea garden had an embroidered linen cloth and a small glass vase of hedgerow flowers. Tommy was at home, in the care of Mother Lambert, who was busy drying summer herbs for Eliza. Catherine Despard handed me a bowl full to the brim with sugar nips. We sat in the shade of an apple tree to take tea together in the way the ladies and gents do. There was a plate of buttered bread and two small glasses of sweet jelly. Two cups, a teapot of blue and white–glazed Liverpool porcelain, a pitcher for cream and a slops bowl with a matching tea caddy, shaped like a little house with painted doors and windows.

‘We should use the tongs,’ she whispered. ‘But let’s use our fingers. It’ll give them something to gossip about. The ladies will think it’s a new fashion from Paris and they’ll all be doing the same tomorrow in Hampstead.’ She picked up four lumps at once and they plopped into her full cup with a loud splash.

I did the same, then I asked her for any news of Colonel Despard.

‘He’s been moved,’ she said. ‘Too far for me to see him. Did you know Aris has been investigated? The justices went to the prison. It was supposed to be a surprise visit but he was warned so they found nothing. Burdett told the House of Commons it was a cover-up but his motion for another investigation was rejected, a hundred and forty-seven votes to six.’

I asked if there was anything we could do and she said it was useless while Mr Aris was being protected by Mainwaring. She leaned forward and whispered in my ear, ‘He dealt savagely with the sailors as he was told to and that means the Duke of Portland is deeply in his debt, so now he has both the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister in his pocket. And perhaps even the King.’

I knew what she wanted to ask of me but I pretended not to hear when she said it.

‘Everyone knows what Aris is, but he’s feared. We need evidence of his crimes, proof that can’t be drenched in whitewash by his cronies. If only there was someone who could tell us his secrets.’

She leaned back and took her cup in both hands but her eyes were fixed on mine, unblinking like a fox in moonlight.

I drank my tea, the whole cup, in one long gulp.

The witness spoke confidently, looking straight at the magistrates. He knew exactly what he had seen and heard, he said.

‘The governor told me he needed a loan, a hundred pounds to build some houses, and if Eversley, one of his prisoners, would lend it, the man could have some favour in return. I was there in Mr Aris’s house when he told Eversley he could get him a Royal pardon in return for the money. I was asked to send a case of wine to the doctor, who would repay him by swearing Eversley was in very ill health and should be released immediately. I arranged it all – I saw the medical certificate myself in the Duke of Portland’s office – but when I tried to call in the debt, Aris said he knew nothing of it and refused to pay. He was arrested but nothing came of it.’

The proceedings dragged on and on. The doctor, the final witness, was asked to wait while the magistrates discussed the case. He twitched nervously and picked at his buttons, the purse of coins Mainwaring had paid him still weighing heavy under his coat. At last, he was invited to speak and his voice boomed out so loudly that someone sniggered at the back of the room, and said, ‘If ’tis loud, then it must be true!’

‘Eversley was very ill in the prison. I saw him myself, several times. And I don’t remember anything about wine. That’s just nonsense.’

Thomas Aris was sweating by the time he gave his name and swore the oath. He stood straight in a new waistcoat the colour of buttercups, looked directly at the justices on the bench and spoke in a slow, unwavering voice. ‘Yes, I went to see Eversley in the infirmary. He seemed unwell so I sent for the doctor. I never saw the man again. A pardon? I don’t know anything about a pardon. Wine? I swear, I said nothing at all about wine.’

At midnight, Aris was still wearing the waistcoat he had taken out of its box for the first time that morning. It was supposed to show them all how far he had come. No longer a baker’s boy but a gentleman wearing clothes made by the Home Secretary’s own tailor. Not toiling in front of the ovens but ordering hundreds of loaves at a time. He had stood back and gazed at the yellow silk, embroidered in the Oriental style with twisted stems, exotic flowers and hummingbirds. He had been assured it was an item of exquisite taste, made long, down to the thigh with a cutaway front, but the moment he had stepped up in front of the magistrates, he’d known it was an error of judgement. The desire to be part of their circle had made a fool of him. The need to be recognised as a man of influence and power was just a pitiful, gaudy picture painted on his chest. He was trying too hard and they had all seen it.

Things were not going well. Forced into explaining his actions. Writing long letters to justify decisions. And now he had endured an hour in the Session House, standing in the witness box, defending himself against charges made by a grocer called Eversley. Being questioned like that, so publicly, it left a taste of bile in his mouth. Someone had found witnesses who dared to speak against him and Mainwaring had been too soft on them.

Aris tore away two of the silk-covered buttons as he pulled the waistcoat off. He threw it to the floor and dropped the lace-edged cravat into his well-filled pisspot. Then came the shoes and the breeches, hurled against the wall. He lay back on the bed in stockings and shirt, cradling the tight mound of his stomach with both hands. ‘Resolved unanimously that the charge against Mr Aris has not been proved.’ Mainwaring had promised him that verdict but it was not enough. Anger rolled in him, looking for a place to plant itself. He would make sure it never happened again, the shame of being questioned like that in public. Mainwaring would have to pay. Aris fell asleep imagining a row of fine new houses somewhere near Clerkenwell Green. His name on the sign: Aris Terrace.

It was still dark when he woke on wet sheets, curled and slippery in his own sweat, twisted tightly into his shirt. The same dream again. It lingered each time like a storm around him. Always her. As he reached out to her she laughed because she knew he could not tear her from his mind. There was a new girl in the house, a sweet-mouthed thing, grateful for her escape from a public whipping and a year in Newgate but nothing he did to her was enough for him. For weeks, he had been rolling off her burning with the need for more and it was always the face of Sarah Evans that hovered above him in the night while he wrestled with his own body, clawing and pulling until she was gone.

It was nearly Christmas but no-one came to evict me from the house. It meant Mr Aris was still paying the rent. I knew he’d be back for what he was missing but when he arrived, he’d find me a different woman. My plan was worked like a well-stitched sampler. Time for thinking, that was something I had by the shovelful at Cooke’s Row. I had every word ready. I felt the absence of my friends more than I ever had before but even in my loneliness, I knew Sally and Martha were somewhere not too far from me in Clerkenwell and I believed the time would come when we’d be reunited. It was Lucy, my beloved sister in all but blood, who’d been taken far from me by cruel fate. I thought I’d never see her again in my life and terrible pictures appeared in my mind: Lucy in leg irons, carting stone beneath the burning sky of Sydney Town.

All through that winter, Tommy was the sun that shone in my life, with his pale halo of spiky hair that tickled me when I nursed him. I carried him everywhere. I could not be apart from him for any reason, except if I was doing something that might be a danger to him, like chopping logs or tending a bonfire. By the end of December, he was crawling everywhere, sideways like a sand crab, and always under my feet, so I asked Mother Lambert if she would watch him for me, just for a little while so I could boil the linen.

Before I’d even gone out to gather the wood, I heard a coach stopping outside the Adam & Eve. I breathed hard on one of the windowpanes and rubbed at it with my sleeve to clear the frost. A man was stepping down to the road, his hat pulled low. It was beginning to snow. I couldn’t see his face but I knew him by the wolfish slope of his back. I counted my breaths to calm myself, and he was through the door before I got to twelve.

‘No fire on such a cold day?’

My stomach sickened from the look he gave me but I remembered I was stronger than before and found the words I’d set aside for him.

‘I’ve something to say.’

I could tell he was in a hurry to get what he wanted by the twitching in his breeches and the whistle in his voice, so I was ready when his great paws came at me.

‘Let me warm you, my sweet rosebud.’

I put my arms out hard and straight like broom handles and pushed. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No!’

‘Oh, my dear child! I’ve come to take care of you. Embrace me, let me keep you from the cells.’ His hands hooked into my dress and pulled but I stuck out my chin and shouted. That surprised him, such a quiet mouse screaming into his face.

‘I’m a free woman. I have the King’s pardon. You’ll have no more of me!’

Thin words came from between his teeth. ‘A scrap of paper can disappear. I can send you to New South Wales with the blink of my eye or the crook of my little finger. You’ll have a long voyage to Sydney Cove and six more years to serve.’

I heard Tommy laughing, Mother Lambert’s wooden clogs, eight steps across her floor from the hearth to the chair. That was the day when I learned a thought has a power of its own. I could choose to do a thing or not. My words still hung like something bright and shimmering in the air between us.

‘I told you, you’ll have no more of me.’

He turned bright red like a pickled beet.

‘But you have a son. You must do right by Thomas, according to the law.’

I said goodbye to Mr Aris then as I turned on my heel and walked outside to fetch my boy.

Grace’s bedroom on the first floor was airy and light with a window that looked across the garden but the noises of the prison drifted in through the shutters. She picked up a book, flicked the pages without looking at them, put it down again and went over to her mirror. It was five days since Susan’s wedding to John Amos, an elegant affair at St James’s with several important ladies and gentlemen in attendance, and her sister had not been back to Dorrington Street since then. It was also Daniel’s first day at St Paul’s School. A special meal had been planned for that evening because he was the first Aris to step upon the ladder of intellectual advancement. His father said it was to be a celebration of Daniel’s entry into a school where England’s gentlemen were nurtured. Mrs Whiskin had instructions to give the boy his supper on a tray in the parlour before bed at seven, and then she was to serve roast beef with porter in the dining room, a feast for two.

Grace tucked some loose, wiry tendrils of hair back under her cap and scowled at her own reflection. Five minutes later, she was crossing the yard to the main gate, a thick cloak pulled closely around her. On Braynes Row, trotting horses, speeding carriages and slow carts passed in both directions with no more than a few feet between them. The apothecary’s window on the other side of the street was shiny with brightly glazed pots and sparkling glass jars. She stepped out just as a passing hackney coach pulled in near her. Jumping back, spattered by the spray of mud as its wheels locked, she caught a glimpse of the passenger. Grace moved quickly into the shadows of the butcher’s doorway.

‘How much, driver?’ It was her father. ‘That can’t be right. Three shillings to St Pancras and back? Take this and be gone or you’ll find yourself in front of the magistrates.’

Grace was black-eyed, trembling as she backed into the shop.

‘Miss Aris! This is a pleasure. What can I get for you?’

She stared blankly, open-mouthed, at the hanging fowls above Mr Skinner’s head.

‘Some tripe for a pottage, perhaps? A nice rabbit for a pie?’

Grace turned away again without a word and was gone. She did not walk directly home but took the long route up past Sadler’s Wells, along the twist of pathways through the fields. Near the theatre, she stopped halfway across the small bridge and looked down into the New River. Her mouth was moving but there was no-one to hear the words. Grey foam frothed against the railings beneath.

A sudden death means sadness for some but opportunity for others. Henry Jones was not expecting to take another big step up the parish ladder so quickly after his last promotion but he was in the right place at the right time when the St James’s beadle took a fatal turn for the worse after a bad case of the black vomit. It was the day before the Middlesex Quarter Sessions and there was a short, unplanned meeting in the vestry. ‘We need someone to represent the parish tomorrow,’ said the verger. ‘Jones has already proved himself at the Hatton Garden office. A man of advanced years and measured decisions. He’ll do.’ His was the only nomination.

On his first day as a beadle, Jones was an observer at the trial of a lawyer accused of rape. Mary Rich, the thirteen-year-old plaintiff, had been under lock and key in Coldbath Fields for her own protection as the only prosecution witness. Jones knew her but it was not his job to speak that day, just to watch and listen while the law did its work. He was expecting a quick trial but as the girl appeared on the steps to the witness box, she collapsed like a folding card table. The clerk helped her up and when she stood to face the court there was a gasp from every side. Her body was emaciated, her hair matted. She fell again and someone lifted a chair up the steps but, as she felt behind her for the seat, she slipped sideways like a rag doll.

‘Get some water.’ Mainwaring jerked his head at one of the bailiffs. The girl looked at the jurymen as the drink was held to her lips and they saw her eyes, glazed and flickering. She gagged on the water.

‘Good Lord! The child cannot even see us.’

The chairman was drowned out by Mainwaring. ‘The witness appears unwell. She’s not fit to give evidence.’

After a few questions, the gentlemen of the jury found that the girl had spent a month confined to a cell, fed only on bread and water. They sent for the magistrates and suddenly the room was full, a lake of bobbing heads, grey wigs on black shoulders.

‘She’s been deliberately starved!’ said the chairman of the jury. ‘Send for the doctor.’

‘Send for Aris!’ The others were finding their voices, one by one, as they grew angrier.

Later that evening, stretched out on his bed with boots off and breeches loosened, Henry Jones told his wife it had been a very curious day. ‘That my life should run around in circles like this.’ He sucked on the browning remains of an apple core, eyes closed. ‘There I was again, on my first day in a new place of work, at the Session House. Again, a young woman, and lurking like a wolf spider beneath all of it, if I’m right, the same man. Aris.’

Mrs Jones was nearly asleep at his side. ‘What happened?’

‘The girl was taken back to the prison. Mainwaring ordered she must be given medical attention and nourishment before she appears in court again. The jury will visit the prison and see things for themselves. They think Aris and the doctor might be feeding them lies.’

Jones followed the news daily and, as his anger grew, he waited for justice to be done. Sir Francis Burdett told the House of Lords they were being abused by Aris, who controlled what they saw at the prison and hid anything incriminating. If they recognised the rights of humanity at all, Burdett said, they must act immediately. It was a strong speech and Parliament appointed a committee to investigate the prison. Twelve men. When Jones read the list in the newspaper at his breakfast table, Mainwaring’s name was at the top. Mrs Jones had never before heard her husband utter such profanities.

The committee delivered their judgement on July 12th and Henry Jones read the report the same evening. It said that Mary Rich had been properly treated and lived better in the prison than she did at home with her parents, but Jones knew the doctor had been insisting for weeks that the girl was still not well enough to testify. By the time the jury talked to her, someone had got there before them and her story changed completely. Lies were purchased, paid for in ways Jones did not want to imagine. Blindfolding justice. All so easy.

As the new beadle, he began making regular visits to prisoners from his parish. In August, for the second time in three weeks, he had to pass through a company of the Clerkenwell Volunteers to get into Coldbath Fields. Bayonets fixed, they were trying to make a human barrier between an angry crowd and the prison gate. Yelling came from inside, urging the mob to push forward.

‘We’re being starved!’

The soldiers were pelted with stones but they stood firm.

‘This is England, not France! Down with the Bastille!’

Inside, the place was crawling with worried-looking turnkeys. Jones made his way to the hospital to interview an elderly woman convicted of vagrancy. Her head was bandaged and she was not sober but she answered his whispered questions about the girl. Mary? The thin girl, yes, she remembered her, but she was gone and no-one knew where. Left suddenly. Wearing a new skirt. ’Twas blue.

The part his own silence had played weighed Jones down as he walked home. The man who had committed the rape had enough money to keep his victim, the only witness against him, out of the way. Jones had always known that every person has their price. A false medical certificate. Silver coins. A blue skirt. What would it take, he wondered, to buy his own soul? The truth was that he would lie, say whatever they asked of him, to save someone he loved.

For the next thirteen years, that knowledge darkened the beadle’s face each time he walked through the gates of Coldbath Fields.