Chapter Thirteen

The money hidden under the path, my earnings from Old Mother Redcap’s, had been saved for one purpose only, but on the morning of Tommy’s ninth birthday, I knew I had failed. My savings had not increased at all and most of the coins had gone, too. I’d lived for years on barely enough to keep me strong enough for the work I had to do, to pay for the room and things we could not do without, but it was hopeless. I did not want to admit there would never be enough to carry out my plan. I did not want to give up, so I kept trying for a few more weeks but I could not change anything alone. I remember numbers. It was the eighth of July when I decided to go and ask for help from the parish. It was a risk, but if I asked for nothing from Mr Aris, he might never find out. Never trouble us again. But now, there was only one thought in my head: I did not have long. If the beadle had sent for him, Governor Aris would be more angry than I’d ever seen him before. He’d know I was close by and he’d find me. I had to get Tommy away to a safer place. Martha told me I must follow my heart’s direction and, anyway, she’d already found another woman to pay my share of the rent so I put the coins I had left in a cotton pocket beneath my gown and started walking. It was summer when I stepped out along the road past the tile kilns and up to St Pancras, the clouds high and fast, rooks in the treetops and wind like a cracking whip in the trees. While I walked, I thought only of my boy’s face and wrapping my arms around him, but when I got to the workhouse gates, I began to worry. Marking the weeks as they pass isn’t the same as living them. Would he know his mother?

My feet stopped on the path to the overseers’ door. A woman came up to me and said she was sorry for my cares. ‘Come inside and rest, you poor thing.’ She sat me down at a table and that’s when I saw the book. I knew Tommy’s name was in there somewhere and he wasn’t far from me.

‘I’ve come to fetch my son,’ I said. ‘Thomas Evans. He’s nine years old. I can pay what’s required.’

She gave me a puzzled look.

‘I haven’t seen him for a long time. His hair is pale,’ I said. ‘His eyes are, I think, like sapphires, though in truth I’ve never seen one.’ I gave her a smile and hoped she was a mother herself and would understand.

People say things most clear with their eyes, not the words that come out of their mouths. I saw it sharp and bright, the thought that came to her, a flash like lightning on window glass, and she turned away. She was afraid for me to see it.

‘I’m his mother. Sarah Evans. I put my mark in that book when I brought him here. March, it was. The year, 1805. Look and you’ll see it.’ I was already drowning before she spoke.

‘He’s gone. Yesterday, in the afternoon.’

The chapel bell. The sound of children talking, running. A wooden spoon beating against a tin plate. The sharp-cut ends of a besom, brushing, brushing on a clay-tile floor.

‘His father came and took him. Mr Aris. There was a magistrate with him, assured us the boy was Mr Aris’s son.’

What happened then, the time between one thing and another, I don’t remember. How I came to be in Coldbath Square looking at the prison, then banging my fists at the gate. How it was that Thomas Aris took me into his house.

‘It’s too late,’ he said. ‘He went on the wagon to Low Mill last night, with ten others. I paid thirty shillings and signed his indenture to be an apprentice. He’ll be treated well, the only boy that’s not on the charity of the parish.’

My son was gone to Yorkshire, to a cotton mill. I knew well what they did with those children. Gave them a shilling and a new suit of clothes, told them they’d soon be eating roast beef and plum pudding. It was lies. They would starve him, beat him, work him like a slave. If he lived, his body would grow bent and twisted from crawling under the looms. He would go deaf from the noise of the shuttles within a year.

‘You must send for him,’ I said. ‘I know it’s possible.’

‘No, it’s for the best. He’ll learn the trade.’ He smiled then and his hand came down on my shoulder. ‘How glad I am to see you after all this time.’

That was the moment I felt a madness descend upon me. To this day, I have never felt such rage, such strength. Mr Aris witnessed what a mother can do to protect her child. I bit him, hard, screamed into his ear like a wild animal, tore the hair from his scalp. I stabbed his arms with my nails and drew them back to tear the skin.

I would never see Tommy again. Yorkshire was as distant to me as Australia or the Americas. His father had acted and there was not a judge in the land who would say the mother had any rights at all.

‘Perhaps there’s a way to get him back.’ Mr Aris’s voice was half-choked because my hands were around his throat. ‘I’ll think about it.’

His words worked, as he knew they would. I let my body go limp though my mind was rigid with purpose, and I laid myself back on the white-scrubbed pine of his kitchen table like a woman long dead, so there’d be no pleasure in it for him.

While he took what he wanted, quick as you like, I wasted ten breaths in hoping. He did his buttons slowly, tucked his shirt, took out his gold pocket-watch, said he was late, told me to stay or leave as I wished.

‘You’ve always been stupid, Evans. Your mind is dull and you never learn.’

He slapped my face and I felt the warm trickle of blood in the corner of my mouth. I would have killed him then, stopped the breaths that gave him life, but a blackness like night fell upon me and when I was myself once again, he was gone.

I lay there a long time. No-one came. It was dark when I crossed the yard to the prison. A turnkey let me out through the gate.

Clerkenwell is always a bustling place but in the night it comes alive like an animal. There was a musical entertainment at the Bath House. I stood outside with my ear at the glass and believed I could feel the heat of all those candles on my cheek. It was an old song they sang and I knew the words. Observe the fragrant blushing rose. My feet took me into the square and I watched people dancing around an organ grinder, throwing coins. I went past St James’s and on to the corner by the Crown Tavern. A squealing and a cackling, the noises of a cockfight from the yard at the back. My way was lit up like a dream, night things aglow in the shadows. A chestnut seller, hot embers glimmering in the dark. A mirror-maker’s shop window flashing its many silver eyes at me when the streetlight flickered. Fireworks, far away over the church spire, red and green gemstones on London’s black sky. I did not fear God. I told Him He would not have me. His moon would not have me. ‘A woman is a rational creature,’ I said. ‘I learned that and I know it to be true.’

I walked all night. It was the thinking that saved me. My heart sent me to the river, showed me how cold and kind the water might be, but my mind told me to look for a friend.

I found Sally selling watercress on Braynes Row. She held me close and stroked my hair, talked gently to me and listened to my rambling, even when I talked of death and murder. She said she would not leave me and I didn’t want her to.

My plan was to find a way of getting news from Low Mill, perhaps even to find a sympathetic woman in Coldbath Fields who might overhear news from Yorkshire, a passing mention of Tommy. My hopes were thin and Sally said the risk of staying in Clerkenwell was too great but, for me, that was nothing if it meant I could be sure my son was alive and well. I paid for a room in Vineyard Walk with my last few saved coins and hoped me or Sally might find some work quickly to pay the rent for another week, and then another and another. Our new home was a low-ceilinged box that smelled of ruin but it was not a sad place. When sleep wouldn’t come, Sally hugged me close. We whispered the names of boys we’d kissed, remembered the toothless lamplighter who confessed his love to both of us on the same night, and laughed until our eyes closed. We talked often of Lucy and wished she could be spirited home to us, as sweet and fair as she always was.

A few weeks after we moved into Vineyard Walk, Sally went to find Martha, knowing she would be worried with no news about what had happened to me. While she was gone, I made the best pottage I could for us all to share at supper, even though some potatoes, a bunch of cress and a knuckle bone were all I had.

When she came back, I knew something was wrong as soon as I saw her face. Martha was gone. The young girl who’d answered the door to Sally was a stranger, though kind enough to tell what she knew. The woman before her had lived alone, she said. Evicted for not paying the rent. Cheap rooms were not easy to come by then, and landlords wouldn’t wait even a few weeks for overdue payment. A neighbour had seen it all, how she was thrown onto the street by the bailiff. Martha had said she would be going to a house in Seven Dials, a place where she would be welcomed. I’d believed her when she said she knew someone to help with the rent, and if she was now in a place worse than the gutter, it was my fault. Sally knew it, too. That night, our supper was a quiet one. We did not want to say what we were thinking.

On 11th April 1809, I walked alone up the long road to St Pancras and spent the night in an overgrown garden at the back of Cooke’s Row. I did not know if my baby would survive and if I had to bury another child, I wanted it to rest in the earth with its brother, my little Charles.

George came into the world early the next morning. He slipped easily onto the grass, wet and strong like a newborn foal. His skin was smooth, not wrinkled, and golden like honey. He looked right at me as I pulled him up and laid him above my heart, and even though he was still a slippery, buttery, bloody little lump, I saw his eyes, darkest blue like Tommy’s, and his hair, black curls like my other lost boy. I loved George in that first moment for himself and for the way he held his brothers within him. He came from the darkest place of all but, somehow, he was made of the best of me. Even in his first moments, he had the face of an angel and nothing, nothing of Thomas Aris.

The holly tree in the churchyard had gone so I couldn’t find the place where Charles was buried but the heavens were kind to me and I had no need to dig a grave that day.

Six weeks later, I carried George back up the hill past the tall poplar trees so he could be baptised in St Pancras church. Sally wove white hawthorn blossom in my hair and called me the May Queen but I could not find a smile for my friend. I was thinking of Charles and Tommy. My little ones, both taken from me in different ways.

By the day of George’s baptism, we had no work and no money coming in at all. Sally went to the market each afternoon and begged or stole what was lying on the carts and on the floor in the time between the customers heading for home and the stalls closing. There was often bread, dry and sharp-edged like flat bricks, sometimes spoiled fruit and, on a lucky day, she came home with the crusts from pies, discarded by people who bought food when they weren’t hungry. Somehow, she always found the money for our rent and never told me where it came from, but I knew well what she was giving of herself to keep us all alive.

I prayed that Clerkenwell might be the last place Thomas Aris would look for me, so near to his house. Each time I went out I saw people I knew, but I was always careful. I’d grown cunning. There was still just a chance I might hear news of Tommy but months passed and we grew hungrier. I had another son who needed more than a mother’s milk now to survive and we did not have enough to pay for the room.

George was crawling everywhere and pulling himself up on anything in his way to try and take a step or two, without much success. I watched his features growing finer every day, the hairs of his brows turning black like his hair, and the small point of his chin looking sharper each morning when I picked him up.

On a bright, shining afternoon around Easter, I left him with Sally and went out to sell some cotton caps she’d found, dropped from a draper’s cart. As I turned onto Clerkenwell Green, I was imagining him as a grown man, wondering if I was wrong to believe for one single moment what Catherine Despard had said. Did my son have the right to an education, like any high-born boy? Could learning lift him, somehow, out of Vineyard Walk and upward? Could George Evans really become a gentleman, if the world changed in the way we’d all dreamed it might?

A loud noise made me jump. Men shouting. I was ready to run but it was just a boxing tournament. The crowd was in high spirits from their lunchtime drinking and the thrill of the wagers they were risking. The ring was built up on a stage and the spectators were already crowding up against the ropes for the next match. Two young men, bloody and shirtless, were being pulled apart by a thick-set man with a broken nose. They were there to fire up the crowd before the main event. He held their arms high and urged the onlookers into even more of a frenzy.

‘Your applause, gentlemen, for our setters-to! What fine entertainment they’ve provided for us!’

I looked away and hurried towards the Session House – I was the only woman there and much too noticeable, standing alone in the middle of the road.

‘I give you Harry Pack, the Grays Inn Growler, and our very own Clerkenwell lad, Daniel Aris.’

In the second it took me to turn back and see his face, Daniel looked down at me. Taller, older, more solid, but it was him. As I began to run, he leaped off the platform, straight into the crowd. The men roared, cheering him on.

I knew those Clerkenwell alleys like the lines on my palm and before he appeared round the corner I turned into a narrow passageway at the back of the tavern. But I was too late. He was behind me, panting, closing in. I heard the rush of his breath as he reached me but, in the same moment, I turned sideways across the opening into St James’s graveyard and bent low, curling deep and tight at exactly the height of his knees. He could not stop, and flew across me, landing twisted against a tombstone but was already moving, pulling himself up.

I looked left, right, but could not see a way past him. I would have to go back into the alley and hope the side door of the tavern was open, hope there was a crowd in the ale room.

Daniel was on his feet, his hands bunched into fists as he lurched towards me. ‘We’ve been looking for you, Evans. Where you been hiding, eh?’

I stepped back but my body slammed into something behind me, the hard barrel of a man’s chest. Breath against my neck. Tobacco, beer, cheese mould. A hand on each side seized my elbows and pulled me against the rough wool of a coat. I closed my eyes. There was no escape.

‘What’s all this? Cover yourself, man!’

It was a voice I knew, but not well enough to name its owner. I couldn’t turn, didn’t want to, but I opened my eyes and looked at Daniel. It was just a flicker, but I saw it. Fear like the quick flame on a struck match, and then it was gone. He wiped his arm across his bare chest. Sticky crumbs of sawdust thick with sweat fell at his feet. He laughed, open-mouthed, loose and easy.

‘I must get back. Seem to have missed my way.’

‘Go about your business then and be sure to find your shirt before you come this way again. Your father wouldn’t be pleased to find you up before the magistrates for vagrancy in the church grounds.’

My memory searched, back through the months, the years. Still I was held, but the grip was looser now.

‘You threatening me, Beadle Jones?’ Daniel spat, fast and hard. A glob of red spittle fixed itself to his boot and slid off onto the ground as he left. He smiled at me as he passed. ‘I’ll be seeing you. Soon.’

‘I’m sorry if I alarmed you.’ Mr Jones let go of me and stepped around so we were face to face. ‘My intention was to protect you.’

I tried to thank him but had to put my hand out to lean against the wall and steady myself. Hunger was spinning my head and I would not let him see it.

‘I saw him running after you so I followed. Is there anything I can …?’ The beadle was being kind and not for the first time, but I thought only of getting away.

I could feel his eyes on me as I crossed the graveyard and walked quickly past the church. I went by the back ways, the narrow slips between buildings, crossed a stable yard and climbed a wall to get back into Vineyard Walk without being seen on the street.

Sally was sitting on the bed with George in her arms.

‘How much did you get for the caps?’

What should’ve paid for our supper was somewhere under passing carriage wheels on Clerkenwell Green. I showed her my empty hands. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll go begging tonight up at Sadler’s Wells. After the show when the ladies are all in drink, that’s a good time. I’ll bring you a sausage, so hot from the brazier it’ll burn your lips.’

‘We just want you to bring back a turtle dove to sing to us, don’t we, Georgie?’ She hooked her thumbs together and fluttered her pale palms, a white bird winging over his head.

At last, it was summer again and life treated us more gently for a while. There were warm days and long evenings with no need to find coal or firewood but, in August, I came home one day to find Sally lying on the floor, gasping. Her skin was the colour of tallow, slicked with the sheen of fever. I did what I could for her. For months, she had more than a half-share of any food we had, and by the time fallen leaves were gathering in wet heaps along the streets, she seemed to be well again but when winter arrived, the coldest I could ever remember, she grew so weak again that she could not bear the weight of George on her lap, and needed help to dress.

When we woke on Christmas Eve, she could not eat and even a sip of water made her gag. I’m an old woman now but I see her as clear as the jarrah timbers beneath my feet today. Grey eyes, red rimmed but still smiling. I helped her walk to the workhouse infirmary. This time, it was more than a fever. They took her in and told me to stay away if I valued my child’s life and my own.

It was weeks before I knew she was well again but too late for me and George. I could not find enough to pay the rent on my own.

Paternoster Row was a narrow street of tightly squeezed buildings. The area was still connected with its past as the very doorstep of St Paul’s, leaving it softly veiled with its own saintly history and yet, at any time of day or night, all of humanity was there. There were clerics and beggars, surgeons and gravediggers, peddlers and schoolmasters. Some looked up at the white dome of the great cathedral with pious faces, others stared at their feet as they hurried from one appointment to another. Many strolled towards Dolly’s Tavern near the corner or lay on the grass between the tombstones, sleeping off the morning’s gin. Benjamin Brooke’s shop was at the western end, so close to Old Bailey that there were times he heard the roar from the public gallery when a ‘guilty’ verdict was called. In summer, when he left the shop door open to let the breeze through to the printing room, he could smell the Newgate cells.

Furtive customers no longer arrived in pairs, their coat collars pulled high and their heads down, asking for anything new of a political nature. Some of Brooke’s friends had been hanged for their beliefs and several had fled to save their necks. The injustice of it still burned in him, the corrupt magistrates and the men who licked their boots, all growing fat, while honest men still did not have the vote and women worked themselves into early graves.

Brooke had spent the years since Colonel Despard’s execution doing whatever he could. Small things. Crumbs of information gathered and passed on. Conversations overheard, letters copied, names listed and, sometimes, in great secrecy, a pamphlet printed and distributed. It had been dangerous before but now it was more so, with fewer supporters left for the government spies to prey on. He was always careful. Never returned to the same place too soon. Never started a conversation with a stranger. Never gave his name and never stayed anywhere long enough to be noticed.

In the first week of the new year, 1810, he was on his way to the Crown Tavern on Clerkenwell Green, a place he had not visited for months. It was not their regular reading of news that interested him, though the young man’s performance was always entertaining. It was the crowd that gathered there. Mr Sheppard had advertised that day’s event, a political report, knowing the audience would be thirsty and free with their money. The tavern was sure to be full and Brooke would be watching carefully. Who cheered and who shook a fist, who nodded silently and who shouted in support. Most of all, it was the quiet ones he would be looking for. If he knew their names, they would be noted and, if not, he would make sure he remembered their faces. They might just be the future, the new heroes who would dare to rise and take up the fight for freedom.

Brooke walked briskly and arrived too early, before the crowd gathered, so he decided to keep walking and take a circular route past the Bath House and back again in time to slip inside the tavern once everyone’s attention was on the speaker. It was a day of freezing fog and the streets were unusually quiet. He swerved into Bowling Green Lane to look for a way through the alleys and came out onto the corner of a small court. Vineyard Walk did not live up to its name. There were eight small houses, square and squat, so old they seemed to lean together for support. Once yellow, like the London clay of the bricks that made them, they were black with soot-choked moss from their rotten doorsteps to their crooked rain-gutters. It was a dead end and not a good place to linger.

Brooke was about to turn back when he heard the slam of a door and instinctively pulled his hat down further over his eyes. He had no good reason to be there but it was too late to run. If he was recognised, he was done for. The woman was walking directly towards him. She was not dressed for the cold, her body curved with the stoop that comes from despair.

‘Excuse me,’ he said in a voice he hoped was heavily disguised. ‘I’m looking for my tailor’s house. I’m told he lives hereabouts. Is this Coldbath Square?’

She stopped so suddenly that he realised she had not seen him at all and when she looked up at him, trembling, he recognised her.

‘Mrs Evans?’

She did not know him.

‘We met, some years ago.’

She reached for something hidden in the folds of her skirt.

As the knife flashed, he removed his hat. ‘You were with Mrs Despard once at a … social occasion. I believe we have mutual friends.’

‘Catherine? Catherine Despard? That was long ago. I don’t remember you.’

‘Benjamin Brooke. Mrs Despard brought you to an inn, late at night …’

‘I remember now. You’re a printer.’

They stood awkwardly, each scanning across the shoulders of the other to be sure they were not being watched. Her shivering was growing worse.

‘I must go. I had to leave my little boy alone.’

‘Are you in need of assistance?’

She was hungry and knew he could see it. ‘No. I’m well, thank you. I expect to find work soon and then we’ll be more comfortable.’

‘Hard times can fall upon any of us, Mrs Evans.’

She was walking away, the points of her shoulders pushing through her shawl.

‘Wait!’

He thought she would not stop but she turned and looked back at him.

‘You’re in a hurry so I won’t keep you, but if you’re looking for work, then our meeting today may be lucky for us both. I’m in urgent need of a servant to help in the kitchen. And the shop.’

‘Is it far?’

‘By St Paul’s, but you’d need to live there. I’d provide lodging. In addition to a weekly payment of course.’

He saw the thoughts as they moved behind her eyes.

‘You could bring the child, if he’s small – and quiet. Mrs Newman, my housekeeper, would be delighted if you could start right away.’

‘I could come tomorrow.’

‘Then you’ll be doing me a service. Thirty-five Paternoster Row. And please, if anyone asks, don’t say we met here today. You didn’t see me.’ He smiled. ‘Time passes, but some things don’t change.’