Chapter Nine

When you set eyes on someone for the first time, you don’t know what they will be to you. Nothing at all, or a person you will love. Someone who’ll ruin you or the kindest soul you’ll ever come across. The first time I met Mr Brooke was the night Catherine took me to an inn called the Oakley Arms. She’d been visiting me at Cooke’s Row for weeks and when she asked if I would go with her to meet some friends who shared my personal concerns, I said I would but only if Mother Lambert could look after Tommy while I was away.

I was happy to be in her carriage again but that journey was unlike the one before it. We didn’t talk much, and I was disappointed. She had nothing to say about a woman being the measure of a man and that was what I wanted to hear. Woman is a rational creature. I wanted more of that. I was beginning to make sense of it and the more I spoke the words to myself, the more I was beginning to believe it was true. There was a door opening in my mind, a door with no locks.

We went quickly down Gray’s Inn Lane to Clerkenwell, on past Newgate Prison, and slowed as we crossed the Blackfriars Bridge. We were in a place I’d never been before. I knew it as ‘over the water’ even though it was just the other bank of the River Thames. Surrey. My mother was born there but it felt like a foreign country.

We stopped in a side street and she said we had to wait till it was dark, so we sat in silence for ten minutes more before she got out and told her coachman to return in an hour.

‘We can’t be too careful,’ she said. ‘Our organisation has been outlawed by Parliament. We change our habits often, so there’s no pattern to the places where we meet. We use secret signs written in charcoal on the streets.’

The tavern on the corner was much like any other, wide windows, too high to see in from outside. A woman who reminded me of my mother was dancing on the wooden cellar flaps. She was small and sturdy. Her clogs clattered in time with her singing. On the ground in front of her was a knitted hat and I knew she’d placed the single coin in its centre herself. Catherine led me to a side door. No-one stopped us in the corridor or on the stairs and I could tell she’d been there before. She knocked four times and then four times again on the door of a room at the back and it was opened by someone standing behind.

There was just one light, an oil lamp. It glowed yellow over the faces of eight people seated at a table in the middle of the room but there were others I couldn’t see in the shadows around them and I began to feel so uneasy I wanted to run. Two men leaned against the shutters each side of the window, looking out. Everyone was looking at me and I didn’t like that one bit.

‘Don’t be afraid, these are my friends,’ Catherine said. ‘Please welcome Mrs Evans. I’ve known her some time and I can tell you she’s been wronged by those who have wronged us. These are all members of the London Corresponding Society,’ she said to me. ‘John Bone and his wife. John spent six months in Coldbath Fields. A free man now but he shared a cell with my husband for a while. And David Tyndall, Jane Tyndall.’

Each of them offered their hands in turn as if I was a lady, but my heart was still drumming so hard I thought they’d hear it.

‘This is Joseph Burks. You may have seen Mr Burks when you were making calls to the prison. He was there with the others, all without trial. And Francis Place, who is …’

‘A tailor, madam.’ Everyone laughed but it didn’t seem amusing to me.

That was when I first noticed the man by the fire. ‘Mrs Despard, I hope you’ll give my respects to your husband when you next see him.’ It was Benjamin Brooke. I’d never seen such a pointed beard. It was white, cut sharp like a dart. He was half bent even then but his smile twinkled in the dark room and I wished I knew how to twinkle back at him without seeming to be forward. I made a crooked kind of curtsy, hoping he might guess it was my first and forgive me the awkward wobbling.

‘We’ve much to thank you for.’ Catherine put her hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s printers and booksellers like you who take our cause to the public.’

‘His carriage is here.’ One of the men at the window walked across to the door and waited.

‘Then we’re lucky this evening,’ she whispered to me. ‘Just wait till he asks you to speak.’

The same eight knocks. The door was opened to a tall, thin man in Morocco leather boots that squeaked with newness. His walking cane flashed silver in the dark of the room as he took the hand of Joseph Burks but there was something strange about the pressing of thumbs and fingers that touched. One said, ‘Unity,’ and the other answered, ‘Truth.’ Other voices joined them, two words whispered: ‘Liberty. Death.’ They were all secret signs, I could tell that much. Then I recognised Sir Francis Burdett from the day I saw him outside the prison. When he took off his hat and dipped his head in my direction I was sure I wouldn’t be able to speak a word but Catherine helped me.

‘Mrs Evans has been wickedly treated by Thomas Aris. She lived for more than a year in his house as a domestic servant, privy to the comings and goings of his family and guests and, more than that, she has been present on certain … intimate occasions.’

I expected to see a smutty smile play from one man to another but there was only kindness in their expressions.

Sir Francis came over and spoke just to me, quietly. It was the closest I’d ever been to a nobleman and the smell of him was sharp and strong, like fresh ground spices. Mace, pepper.

‘Mrs Evans, we’re grateful for your trust and courage. Whatever you disclose, your name will never be mentioned in connection with our discussions tonight. Please, speak.’

I took one long, deep breath, thought of my son tucked in Mother Lambert’s bed, snug as a mouse in a mitten, and found my voice. I began the story in March of 1798, with the tale of Mr Mainwaring coming to the house late at night, how I listened at the door while they talked of their secrets and laughed about Mr Aris and his sons helping the mutineers to escape. I ended with Mr Webb, the surgeon, saying he should be paid a little more for writing lies in the prison book considering ‘that dog Burdett’ was hot on his heels. I told them that was the last I heard before the governor sent me away to St Pancras to have my baby.

I was parched, and glad when they gave me a cup of small beer and a place to sit at the side. It was as if I’d disappeared. Their conversation went hot and cold and hot again. Sometimes they were all speaking at once. Catherine was always at the very heart of it. She didn’t look my way for half an hour.

John Bone was the quietest. ‘Citizen Burks, you must accept such extreme methods would damage our cause.’

I recognised the voice that answered him. I’d heard it many times, calling from the cells in Coldbath Fields. ‘If we’d gone ahead with our plans three years ago, we’d be a republic now. We’re just wasting more time.’

‘Bonaparte will be the weapon we need.’ It was John Bone again. ‘He supports our Irish brothers and sisters. If his new campaigns are successful, he’ll make a move. A French invasion.’

Their talk was a mystery. I was good at remembering words, even ones new to me, so you can be sure I tell it now just as it happened, but I didn’t know until later what they were talking about.

Catherine spoke, stopping them all. ‘It’s the people who fight this fight, and not just Clerkenwell watchmakers or the shoemakers of Holborn. Our supporters toil in cotton mills far from London. They plough fields in Kent. But we need more. We must wait until we’re stronger.’

‘No, we need to take action, now. Swift and sure.’

It went on and on. I didn’t need to follow their arguments to know they couldn’t agree on a plan. Sir Francis Burdett pulled his hat down over his eyes and picked up his cane. He said goodbye warmly but he had the look of a worried man. ‘I won’t be able to meet with you again for some time but I’ll do whatever I can. And remember, I wasn’t here.’

On the way out, I asked Catherine why it was so dangerous for them to meet as they did.

‘Spies, my dear, all around,’ she told me. ‘The government fears us. It makes them desperate. That’s why nothing’s ever written down. We trust no-one.’

The journey back to St Pancras took us through the heart of London in the darkest hour of the night. Our conversation drained all hope from me. No-one had questioned the truth of my story, Catherine said, but it gave them nothing. Nothing they could use in a court of law. ‘Your word against his. He has powerful friends. You’re a servant girl with a conviction for thieving. Forgive me. I must be honest.’

Then she explained things to me. Some of the group wanted to gather a peaceful army of workers, men and women, so many they could talk their way to a new kind of world. Some wanted to wait, hoping the French army would arrive and do their work for them. But there were others who had blood on their minds and by the time we passed Battle Bridge, I understood what they’d been talking about. Revolution. Did justice for all the human race mean murdering the King of England? I wanted no more of it, the clash and clang of ideas I could not even put a name to. I knew the word for what I felt but I’d never had a use for it till that night. Bewilderment.

After that, I pretended to sleep all the way home to Cooke’s Row. Thomas Aris had won. He’d come up from the Clerkenwell mud as I had but no law could touch him. If something was to change, I would have to make it happen myself.

The year moved on as it always does for those of us who are lucky and live long. I thought about the past. My own foolishness. Thomas Aris had milled me slowly like a grindstone till I was powder he could blow away or gather as he wished. At first he’d seemed gentle but he was wily. To fright a bird is not the way to catch her. His trap closed slowly but it closed tight and I was still a prisoner as sure as if my legs were in irons. He had me as a spider wraps a fly in her web, bundled up neat and tidy. For all the canny workings of my mind, I still could not protect my son from him or the dangers of the voyage to Australia. Before Governor Aris caught me in his net, thinking was just something I took up like a broom to help with sweeping, or a brass thimble to save my fingers from a pricking needle. It went along with the work it was fixed to. If I strayed too far and lost my way, it was thinking that guided me safely home. If I scalded the eggs in the pan, it was thinking that scraped off the good and rescued my mother’s dinner.

But my thoughts were growing wilful, like children. They were living things that did not need a job to do, did not need permission to topple me and sit me down and make me take notice of them. There I’d be, about to darn a stocking or stir a pot, and my thoughts would start up, turning and twisting, going nowhere. I thought about rights that cannot be taken away by any law. I have that thing called reason, Catherine said, and no-one can rob me of it. I am entitled to the workings of my own mind and all it can do. No man may suppress me because he is above me, no matter how long that habit has been the usual way of things. First, my father told me what to believe, then my mother instructed me in how a grown woman should be, then my aunt filled my head with what was already in her own, and nothing more. One day, not long after I met the members of the London Corresponding Society, I awoke in Cooke’s Row with an opinion of my own. I was something more than I had been before.

The next time Catherine came to see me, she brought Tommy a blanket, a fine, soft thing, and she gave me a warning. ‘We call for mothers to have rights, too. The right of a woman to a share of the man’s wealth, enough to bring up their children. The right of an infant to freedom. Aris, the monster that he is, has all the rights over your boy and you have none.’

‘What does it mean?’ I asked her. She told me the child’s father could take him from me or even give him away. Catherine knew well how to send my mind in the direction she wanted it to travel and the moment she saw my distress, she asked the question she had come all that way to ask me. That day, I gave her no answer, but what she’d told me stuck in my mind and scraped at me like a fishbone in a gullet.

The next evening, in the quiet time when nightingales sing their sweetest song, I sat with Mother Lambert by her fire, Tommy on my lap with his new blanket warming our knees. We were drinking buttered water, sweet and smooth and straight from the pan. She licked its yellow froth from her hairy lip and I told her what was worrying me.

‘A father may do as he pleases with his children and the mother has no say at all. It’s the law of men but what of the rights of women?’ Justice would not protect us, I’d learned that, and for all Catherine’s fine words, I was no more equal to any man than a kitten to a carter’s horse. Leaving would be an easy thing but, if I wanted to hide, it would have to be the alleyways of Clerkenwell for us, the place I knew. And how long before we starved? A woman with a fortune and a family to protect her might make her way alone but a woman like me would be dead in a ditch before the year’s end. Tommy needed more than I could give him.

I stroked his hair and pressed my cheek against his. ‘Mr Aris will come again soon,’ I told Mother Lambert. ‘He must sign his name as the boy’s father and keep a roof over his head, feed him. I can do nothing to change the way things are but I will never let him take my son from me. I will not.’

You might think I was weak not to run from Governor Aris on that very day but you would be wrong. Something filled me, bigger than fear. It was a very long time ago but I remember still the way it flamed in me, burned away everything in its path. I was a mother. It was love.

In the end, it was Mother Lambert who helped me decide what to do. I was darning, holding the long needle as high as I could, trying to stop Tommy from climbing onto me. I told her the rent hadn’t been paid for weeks and the tavern said they had no work for me. ‘I want nothing from Mr Aris,’ I said, ‘but he’s Tommy’s father so he should provide for him, as he does for his other sons. Why does the law never touch that man?’ I was not asking for her advice but perhaps wisdom just finds its own way out.

I remember how her back cracked as she stood to turn the pot on the fire. ‘Then do what your friend Catherine asked of you. Give the law a little help, dear. And leave Tommy with me. He’ll be safe here.’

I did not believe all the members of the London Corresponding Society wanted the kind of justice Catherine talked about – the violence they spoke of was shocking – but I was sure of one thing: they were fighting for people like us. The poor. When Catherine came to Cooke’s Row and asked me to help them, she’d said I was the only person who could get the evidence they needed against Governor Aris, the only one who could get close enough to his private rooms to steal the kind of things they could hold up in front of a judge and a jury.

For two weeks, the thought of going back to Coldbath Fields chilled me to the bones but if I did nothing, me and Tommy would soon be sleeping under hedges. Mother Lambert was right. She always was. I put down my darning and set off for Clerkenwell there and then, before my courage cooled.

By the time I arrived, the afternoon was over. I joined the throng of people in front of the prison so I was hidden from view but I could see the front gate clearly. I had to be sure Mr Aris wasn’t there before I went in with my lies.

I did the right thing, waiting, because half an hour later, the door in the gate opened and he stepped out onto the street with Miss Grace behind him. They went across the square. Holding hands, they were. Laughing. When they turned the corner, I pushed to the front of the crowd, kept my head down and knocked at the door. It was opened by John Amos, the storekeeper, and in that first moment, Heaven was on my side.

‘The governor asked to see me,’ I said and gave him a coy smile. I’d not forgotten how to do that. ‘He said it was a most personal matter.’

I saw right away Mr Amos didn’t know Thomas Aris had just left. Amos smirked and led me to his employer’s office without another word. Then there I was, standing alone in front of the desk I knew well, remembering its hardness against my back, its smell of fresh beeswax pressed close to my cheek.

I had to move quickly and be gone but there were so many papers, piles of them, and as I plucked up one sheet after another, each looked the same to me. Which had been signed by the governor? Catherine had shown me the shapes to look for, the tall, curved line of the letter T for Thomas and the pointed figure of the A that looks like a frame for growing peas, but on every page there were so many of them, they danced in front of my eyes. I wished I’d never told her I would try to do what the rebels asked of me but it was too late to stop. If I could find something they could use against him, real evidence, then he might at last have to pay for his crimes and the power he held over my life would be gone.

I stared at the marks on the pages, wished with all my heart my mother had taught me letters as well as numbers, and I tried to remember what Catherine had said. My act of bravery would help thousands of people all over London. It would be a great service to those who were trying to make a better world.

I heard a man’s voice, getting closer too quickly, and I knew whose it was.

‘But my father’s not here. I’ll find out what she wants.’

I had no time to choose what I took. Two seconds before James Aris walked into the room, I shoved a handful of papers from the top of the pile through the opening in the side of my gown. His eyes came to rest on my own at the same moment I pushed the crumpled pages into the deep pocket I’d tied around my waist with shaking hands just before I left home.

‘Evans?’ His glare was piercing and I was sure he could see my body moving with every loud thump of my heart. ‘Why are you here?’

‘A mistake, sir,’ I mumbled, then I said it again, louder, trying to hide the trembling of my lips. ‘My mistake. I was supposed to go to the house.’ As I spoke, I saw the rest of the papers had fallen into a heap across the corner of the desk. I walked quickly to the door, hoping to draw his attention away from the evidence of my thievery. ‘Mr Aris will be very angry if I don’t hurry. His message said I should come at once – in my haste I came here, as I always used to.’ I began sobbing, as loudly as I could. The noise and fluster were meant to distract him as I left the room, but the tears welling in my eyes were real.

He followed me out, muttering under his breath something about the stupidity of women, but as I ran from Coldbath Fields, retching with terror, I was content in the knowledge that it was the stupidity of men that had saved me.

I left the secret sign in the usual place, but it took four days for my message to get through. Catherine arrived at Cooke’s Row on the arm of a short, grey-haired man, smiling as if they were a married couple out for afternoon tea. I recognised Joseph Burks from the night I met him in that dimly lit room in Blackfriars. Catherine kept looking back over her shoulder and I began to worry.

‘Are you alone? Invite us in, quickly. People must think we’re just friends calling on you. Mr Burks and I were probably followed here today by government spies.’

She’d brought Shrewsbury cakes and sweet almond biscuits. I tried to eat and talk at the same time and thought what a waste it was not to lick up the buttery crumbs collecting on my apron. I told them I’d done as they asked of me but I’d had no time to choose only letters that Mr Aris himself had signed because James had come so suddenly into the room. When I handed eight crumpled sheets of paper to Catherine she said they were grateful. She said I was courageous. She said it might be the downfall of Aris and he might even drag Justice Mainwaring and the Duke of Portland with him.

Joseph Burks moved away from the window – he’d been watching the road – and Catherine took his place. I had no idea what they were looking out for but it made me very uneasy. He sat down next to me and leaned forward.

‘For now, we’ll keep all this to ourselves,’ he said, so quietly I had to lean in too, to hear him. ‘But, one day, you’ll know you were part of defeating this corrupt government and all they stand for.’

Catherine shouted, ‘They’re coming. Is there another way out?’ She was already in the scullery at the back and I followed. I told them to go into the churchyard and use the back door of the Adam & Eve. There’d be a crowd in there.

They were gone, over the garden wall before I stopped speaking, and I ran to the front door, pressed my back against it and slid to the floor, holding my knees tightly against my chest. I knew I must be silent though I did not know who I was hiding from.

Two voices, not far away. Boots on the path outside the window. Shadows moving across the rug. Was it the Duke of Portland’s spies who had followed Catherine? Or had Mr Aris discovered I’d stolen from him and sent someone to seize me? Upstairs, Tommy was not making a sound. I didn’t have to see him to know his hands would be curled into gentle fists, his silky brows furrowed by sleep, his feet pushing at the blanket as if running in his dreams. If he started crying, or called out for his mam, they would know the house was not empty. Mother Lambert’s firewood axe leaned against the stairs but it was not within reach – four steps, perhaps five. I was ready, every muscle taut for leaping.

I felt the heavy pounding of fists beating on my door even before I realised what the thundering noise was. If the timber moved again at my back, if I heard the iron click of the latch lifting, I would be across the floor and have the axe in my grasp before they opened the door.

I never knew who came knocking the day I gave Mr Aris’s papers to Catherine and I never found out if he’d discovered he’d been robbed. I heard the footsteps walking away down to the road but I didn’t move for a long time, even when Tommy woke and started chortling upstairs. I watched afternoon shadows come creeping across the walls, heard the sad nightfall song of a blackbird, felt lonelier than I ever had in my life, before or since. I longed for Martha’s earnest face, the way her eyes widened when I said the kind of things no lady should. I thought of Sally’s dear, work-roughened hands that held mine so tight and firm whenever troubles came our way, and I wished more than anything else to be pressed close against the warm shape of Lucy Burnes, curled for safe sleeping as we did in childhood, like two wooden spoons carved to fit, one to the other. I would’ve given up all hope of seeing her again just to know she was still alive and content somewhere, and perhaps thinking of me too.

The news I had from Catherine a week later was something I could not think about for a very long time without drowning in anger and despair. I’d risked my life for nothing more than lists of purchases to be invoiced to the prison and personal notes to a Masonic lodge, all of them signed by Thomas Aris, but not one page that was evidence of any corruption. If I’d known how to read, I might have found something useful, even in haste. As it was, the burden of my failure, my shame, weighed heavy on my heart for years.

The rent had still not been paid. Eliza came up from town to see her mother and told me she’d heard Mr Aris had two new girls in his house to keep him busy, both prisoners. Seldom lies the Devil dead in a ditch.

The day before I was to be evicted, I walked away from Cooke’s Row with my head held high as I passed the ladies at the tea garden. I needed a place to live and it was Eliza who helped me. When we set off together, I had little to carry, which was just as well, with my son not yet two years old and too small to help. He had no shoes but he walked by my side and didn’t complain of the stones on the highway. The little gown Catherine had given me for his first birthday was the only one he had and it barely covered his knees. The sleeves were tight at his elbows, seams opened wide, hem unstitched as far as it could go, but for all his mends and patches, Tommy had the long strides of a man and the twinkling Irish eyes of his grandfather, Gabriel Evans. There was never a mother more proud.

We rode the last few miles on a wagon of bricks, high up like rooks on a roof, and choked on the yellow dust that blew around as the load shifted. I thought of the day I first went to Cooke’s Row like a lady, sitting all dainty on the leather seats of Catherine’s coach. Tommy was too big to put to nurse and too small for the workhouse. I was in a peck of troubles.

Eliza’s home at Bard’s Buildings was two rooms over a stable yard. What food was on the table, we shared. I had a sleeping place near the fire. When her husband was away at the markets, I took his place in the bed and we lay like sisters with my boy between us. I had nothing to give her in return and didn’t want to be a burden so I walked to St Mary’s on Sunday mornings and sat down by the lychgate. There was always a crowd at church and the good people of Islington didn’t let me down. If they were in tatters like me I let them pass but if they were well fattened and dressed in new clothes, I put out my hand and begged a little help for a Christian woman whose husband was cruelly taken while serving his country in the King’s army. I never went home with less than a shilling and I never told Eliza where it came from, for the lies disgraced me.

Eliza’s kind-hearted husband fell poorly at the end of November. He took to bed with a fever. We watched the marks come on his cheeks, then the bladders, tight and full to bursting with their rotten sap. We woke on the first day of December to a smell like death and two days later, Eliza was a widow. I told her we couldn’t live on air and hope and she would starve if I didn’t leave their house. I made up my mind and crept away in the night without saying goodbye. I left my shoes. She wouldn’t get much for them but I’d nothing else to give.

When you have nowhere to go, the road takes you home. While we walked, I put my thoughts in order and found words to make them sound like intentions. ‘We’re free, Tommy,’ I said, ‘and we can do as we wish. We just have to put one foot in front of the other and go home to Clerkenwell. And when we get there, I’ll find paid employment and do what I must to set you safely on the path to being a gentleman. A gent, Tommy.’

We counted steps for a while. I told him the counting would keep us warm but when I saw his lips turning blue, I stopped and said, ‘Here’s our bed. We’ll sleep under a starry counterpane tonight and look up at the heavens.’ We lay down in a field of frozen cabbages at the back of Sadler’s Wells. I burrowed us into a pile of straw and lay my body over his to try and warm him. As I fell asleep, I felt the cruel frost settle on us like pricking dust.

The weather changed at last and children ran outside to play in the mud. Cockle sellers appeared on Clerkenwell Green and the aroma of hot chestnuts wafted from steaming baskets outside the Crown Tavern. Inside, in the ale room, working men gathered to spend a few pennies warming themselves and to hear the news read aloud for the benefit of those who did not know their letters. Sometimes it was the obituaries from The Times newspaper, sometimes a political pamphlet and sometimes it was the latest reports from Parliament. It was the same in every coffee house, tea room and public house across London. A young man was standing on two chairs in the corner, one leg on each. He was a solicitor’s copying clerk but he had the fine, deep voice of an actor and always gave his audience a thrilling performance. That day, it was a thin publication he had bought in a local bookshop. He had rehearsed the whole thing alone in his lodgings the night before, practising gestures and carefully timed pauses that would add to the drama.

Mr Sheppard banged a pewter tankard against the beer tap and the room fell silent as the crowd shuffled into a tighter circle. No-one noticed an elderly man with a sharply pointed beard enter the tavern and sit quietly at the back, his hat down low over his eyes.

‘Today I wish to read a small but interesting tract. It is The case of the House of Correction, Coldbath Fields, impartially stated in a letter to one of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the County of Middlesex, by a Brother Magistrate.’

The crowd breathed in sharply as one, shifted and murmured, as he knew they would.

‘I begin. This gives a candid view of the discipline and management of the prison. It proves that all the evils and irregularities of which so many falsehoods have been said, originated in prisoners who were sent there for crimes of treason. Scarcely one complaint of ill-treatment has been made by any prisoner convicted of ordinary crimes.

‘For those who believe all the tales and wicked reports which are circulated, the Appendix contains a justification of the conduct of Mr Thomas Aris, a man who has been scandalously persecuted. That he has been imprudent, there is no doubt, but no honest man can believe for a moment that he is a criminal. The charges against our magistrates are foul and diabolical. The chairman of the Middlesex Quarter Sessions, whose integrity is clear, is coupled with the Governor of Coldbath Fields in order to create public prejudice against him and the other magistrates are attacked for assisting him! These attacks all come from the same place, from a man who succeeded by accident to a great inheritance without a decent education, a man with a turbulent, discontented spirit. His ignorance is only equalled by his cunning and his cunning is only exceeded by his malice. Sir Francis Burdett!’

The audience listened so attentively that the speaker was forced to cough twice and then bow to show his performance was over.

The applause was still rippling minutes later as Benjamin Brooke stood slowly, rubbing his back. He was just a white-haired man who had wandered into the tavern to hear the news and he attracted no attention at all as he disappeared into the crowds on Clerkenwell Green.

Monday morning service was over and Reverend Davies was snoring, curled on the floor in the corner of the vestry. He had spent the previous night with a family on Brayne’s Row, saying prayers with them for their three daughters, but the girls did not live to see morning light. When the sound of the letter-carrier woke him, he raised himself up with a groan by leaning all his weight against the chair beside him.

The boy was breathless and in a hurry. He stamped his feet to shake off the snow from his boots and half dipped a knee in Davies’ direction as he placed a small pile of letters on the table. ‘Good morning, Reverend, sir. Your mail.’ He was gone before the white curls of his breath had disappeared into air the between them.

Davies turned the letters over one by one in his hand and scanned the colours of the inks, the loops and slants of words. He could match them all to their writer, except for one.

Miss Sarah Evans If gone from Clerkenwell please forward

C/O The Rev J Davies

St James’s Church

Clerkenwell

Middlesex

England

Above the address was a ship’s name (one he recognised), a date, and other words scrawled so faintly he could not read them. Together they told a long, flimsy story, the letter’s six-month journey from Sydney to London.

It was not the first time Davies had been used as a point of connection for those who had lost one another. To the people of Clerkenwell, the church was an anchor that held the parish firm through every storm, however far a member of its flock had wandered from home, but in the last few years, more and more letters had been arriving from New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land. The senders were usually convicts.

A gust of wind shifted the top branches of the plane tree outside the vestry window, dappling shadows across the carpet. Reverend Davies put on his spectacles and peered again at the name in front of him. Sarah Evans had disappeared three years before, soon after her trial at the Session House, and although there was talk later about her having escaped from Coldbath Fields Prison and being seen up in St Pancras, no-one had mentioned her name to him for months. He put the letter on the table with the others, yawned and shook a few more pieces of coal from the scuttle onto the fire.