Chapter Ten

Me and Tommy heard Mrs Bittle’s story every Sunday, regular as clockwork, while I spooned hot, spitting bacon lard over the potatoes. Never a word changed from one week to the next. I’d been hearing the same tale for two years. She would not let me forget the debt I owed her but she’d saved my life and that of my son so I didn’t think badly of her. On the morning she found us half-frozen and half-starved, glittering under a mantle of frost, she fell to her knees among her sister’s cabbages, put her palms together and cried out to the heavens. ‘Redemption! A gift surely given in the true spirit of Christ’s mercy.’ Then she took us both home to her tidy house at Stone’s Lane in Somers Town.

We were fed and clothed and safe. Tommy was still small for his age but he was wiry, strong like a terrier and almost ready for his first pair of breeches. We were making our way in life and all without a farthing from Thomas Aris. I was a servant to Annie Bittle, paid in kindness not coins. The living arrangements suited us both and she didn’t ask me about the past though there were times when she looked at me sideways and I wondered what she was thinking.

Two years after I arrived – it was the first week of December and I wouldn’t forget that – we went down to Clerkenwell to visit her sister and collect vegetables from the field. We were followed all the way back by a sly-looking boy in a tattered coat. Mrs Bittle wanted to call for the constables but I said not to worry. I recognised him as a lad who worked for Mr Aris and, sure enough, a few days later, she told me a man had come to the house asking for me. Wouldn’t give his name. Well dressed but showy. Heavy in the chin, always a sign of the criminal class, she said.

It didn’t take long. I was scrubbing moss from between the pavers in the front garden when I heard a cough behind me and Thomas Aris was there, leaning on the gate with both hands.

‘You’ve been hard to find, Evans, so far from home.’

I thought I was ready. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Mr Aris.’ I stood up and looked right at him as I said it, with only the green-painted timbers of the gate between us. ‘I wish to talk to you about your son.’ I had the King’s pardon and my chains were long gone but I did not yet understand what liberty really meant.

‘Ah, I see it now,’ he growled. I watched the flush of his anger rise. ‘The boy. Thomas, isn’t it?’

I gripped the scrubbing brush in my hand so tightly that its hard bristles pierced my palm.

‘You wish me to sign as his father? Easily done! An allowance for him, is that what you’re after? To keep a roof over his head?’

He told me what the arrangement would be between us and I was turning away, about to say the law did not require anything at all like that, when his arm came out over the gate and grasped mine. From the corner of my eye, I saw a movement at the front window and the white flash of Mrs Bittle’s lace cap as she moved quickly back.

‘If you wish to keep your son alive, you’ll go with me now. I won’t trouble you for long.’ Now he was grinning. ‘If you choose not to, I’ll come at night and murder the little mongrel right in front of you. Cut his throat nice and tidy so he doesn’t yell.’

It was not a hard choice. I knew he would do what he said.

When I came home late for supper, Mrs Bittle didn’t ask for any explanation. Even when Mr Aris called again a week later and invited me to walk with him, she said nothing. I guessed she had a colourful past of her own. By the end of the year, when the roundness under my gown had grown as big as the plum pudding we shared on Christmas Day, it was not discussed.

On the sixth day of May 1804, Mrs Bittle buffed a shine into her calfskin boots and pinned a white ostrich feather to her hat. We set off for the church, Tommy walking beside her, holding onto a fold in her skirt. Baby Charles was in my arms, wrapped up so warm his black curls were damp, stuck tight to his head. When he was born, I thought we were both going to die. He took a long time coming and I was nearly gone from the world by the time he dropped, slippery and blue, into Mrs Bittle’s basin. He was so small we thought he wouldn’t live, not a sound out of him though she held him upside down by his poor, scrawny ankles and slapped him three times. She gave him to me to say my goodbyes, but I remembered something Eliza once said and I rubbed him in his wrappings – as rough as I could – and he cried then, so loud and so sudden he sounded like a vixen screaming, and I knew he would live and grow and be a boy. Perhaps a man. Perhaps stand by my bed when my own time came and give me the only comfort a mother really needs at the end.

Somers Town was a checkerboard of new streets and half-built houses but we were soon among the hedgerows of St Pancras, white with hawthorn blossom, and as we crossed the meadow, I saw Cooke’s Row, the houses crumbling and tumbledown. Tears came but I rubbed them away on my sleeve. It was all best forgotten. When we arrived at the church, Tommy took Annie Bittle’s hand. He didn’t like the idea of water being poured over him by a stranger and after six weeks he was still not happy about having a brother who couldn’t even speak yet claimed most of my attention.

It was a long service with a sermon on the importance of charity. I’d sent a message to Mr Aris and I was sure he wouldn’t come but as the Reverend Champneys called for the children to be brought up to the font, Governor Aris came into the church, scowling. He squashed himself down next to me in the pew and Tommy gazed open-mouthed at his father’s yellow woollen breeches. Mrs Bittle made it her business not to look his way.

‘I can’t stay long. I’ve a coach waiting.’ His voice made my stomach lurch. ‘I wasn’t expecting a crowd.’ He hunched himself down, pointing at the chambray handkerchief I’d tied across me. ‘Give me that,’ he said. It was wet from wiping the baby’s face but he didn’t seem to mind. He wrapped it around his neck and pulled it up to cover his mouth.

‘The Evans family?’ The vicar raised his hand to us and Governor Aris gripped my elbow to steer me.

‘Leave it to me.’

Tommy watched as his brother’s head was dipped. When it was his turn, he didn’t make a sound even when he was lifted roughly by a stranger. He closed his eyes until he was back safely on the ground but when I moved away from his side, he clamped himself to Mrs Bittle again and began to cry, silently. I wished for it all to be over, for us to be alone again, away from a father who frightened his own son.

The curate was seated at a small pearwood table, writing in the book of baptisms.

‘Say nothing,’ Mr Aris hissed at me.

‘Child’s name?’ The curate dipped his pen and turned a page.

Mr Aris answered in a high-pitched voice – it was not his own – and despite my anxiety, I had to smother my laughter with my hand.

‘Charles Evans.’

‘Father’s name?’

Mr Aris stabbed at the page with his finger. ‘Write this: Son of Thomas and Sarah Evans.’

The curate did not look up as he wrote. I’m sure he understood the situation and didn’t care as long as the child was baptised into the church. ‘And the other?’

‘Thomas Evans. Son of Thomas and Sarah Evans.’

The curate signed his own name as witness and when the next family stepped forward, Mrs Bittle took Charles in her arms and told Tommy to follow her. ‘Let’s go home and eat some caraway cake to celebrate this happy day,’ she said. She was not the world’s softest soul but she was always quick to see what others did not.

‘I’ll send someone to return the handkerchief.’

When Mr Aris said that, I could tell he was about to leave. I was not going to let him wriggle out of doing his duty again.

‘The law is clear.’ I’d had the words in my mind for weeks. I took a step closer to be sure he heard every one of them. ‘You have a duty now to both your sons.’

He grabbed me then, hard. ‘I’ve a pistol here, under my coat.’ His lips brushed against my ear. ‘If you ever threaten me again, I’ll be back. If you ask for money, I’ll shoot you and throw you in the river and the world will never know what happened to Sarah Evans and her bastards. If you even whisper my name to anyone at all.’ He pulled the blue handkerchief higher and was gone before I could find the breath to call him back.

In the evening, Mrs Bittle sat by the stove at her darning and mending. There was never much conversation between us but that night she was quieter than usual and I felt awkward in her company for the first time. I was busy making up some yellow varnish, trying to remember the right quantities of lamp black and turpentine oil, but the heaviness of something left unsaid became so weighty in the warm air of the kitchen that I plucked up my courage and asked her if there was something the matter. She told me she’d turned back as she left the church.

‘I saw him push you against the wall. That look on his face.’ She said it twice, to herself not to me, and then she told me a story. It began with the cruel grip of a man’s hand on her wrist, the burn of a slap on her cheek, and it ended with the tinkling bell of an apothecary’s door: ‘I need some arsenic for the rats in my cellar.’

On the morning Mrs Bittle found me and Tommy half-dead in her sister’s cabbage field, she had recently rid herself of a cruel, heartless husband and gained ownership of his six-roomed house at Stone’s Lane but the guilt of her crime was becoming an intolerable burden. One life taken but two saved and in the same generous act she had acquired a maid who did not expect any kind of payment other than food for herself and her child. She told me her soul had been purified by my arrival. I told her I was not in a position to stand in judgement on any other person but I was happy to think my own misfortunes had not been endured in vain.