Chapter Sixteen

Springtime at Colebrooke Road was all ease and comfort. Jacob was at the cathedral five days a week but I was seldom alone. A woman was employed to clean and cook. The larder was cool, the shelves never empty. The smell of baking filled the house on Tuesdays. Folded bedsheets appeared in the linen press on Fridays, scented with rosewater. I had three gowns, one reserved for Sundays, and two pairs of shoes. George had a box of toys and new blue linen to wear to church. With each day that passed, I felt lighter, finer, in the knowledge that my son was dressed like a little gentleman even though the neighbours’ talk buzzed from open windows like blowflies on a dead dog whenever we left the house. What was expected of me was less than the duty of a wife and more than that of a servant, yet I was neither. I didn’t sit at the table with Jacob when there were guests for dinner but when I went into the kitchen, the cook dipped a curtsy and only spoke if asked a direct question. None of that seemed important, until the last day of April, when I gagged on my smoked herrings at breakfast and watched them splatter in a yellow stream onto the dining-room rug. The next day, and the next, the truth stared back at me from my mother’s mirror.

On a Sunday morning when the cook was with the rest of the household at church, I pretended to have a fever and stayed at home alone. Chervil looks much like parsley, with its jagged leaves, but Eliza taught me well. I found its reddish stalks in the kitchen garden behind the house, planted as a salad herb. Before Jacob returned, I’d prepared enough distilled juice from its bruised leaves to keep by me for a few days. I told him it was a tonic for the heat.

It didn’t work. No blood came. Next, I tried the leaves of ferns, more dangerous, and then the berries of a bay tree, poisonous if taken too frequently, purchased from a black-toothed woman in Brick Lane, but it was too late. My waist thickened. I told Jacob, thinking it would be the end, but he smiled in a saintly way and said he’d be glad to be a father at last.

Days I no longer counted went winging past my window like departing swallows and with them flew weeks. Months. November arrived and I still hadn’t found the courage to walk in the direction of the stable yard at Bards Buildings, the place I’d crept away from in the night nine years earlier, leaving my shoes at the end of Eliza’s bed, but sometimes we act without the luxury of reason.

On a dismal morning, I pinned my hat on, closed the door quietly behind me and walked to the end of Colebrooke Road where the street turned. I came out onto a small square and recognised the way into the yard. A drain ran down the centre, and the stone slabs along it were thick with yellow, grassy dung. There were the windows, two of them, above the door. Broken just as I remembered them.

‘No,’ the ostler said. ‘No-one lives here but me. Been here these last five years. Who’s asking?’

I walked away with my head down. The past is a dangerous place to linger.

Walking was no longer easy with my baby almost full grown, weighing me down, and the sky was darkening with rain clouds. The first drops came noisily, black splashes on brick walls. I needed a place to rest and wait for the downpour to pass so I crossed to St Mary’s, looking away from the lychgate, not wanting to see myself there. Sarah Evans in her rags, reaching her hand out for charity. I did not see a woman running towards me. A body thrown against my own pressed me into the railings. Was I being robbed?

‘Sarah? Is it really you?’

Hands gripped my shoulders and a face pushed into mine. Two blue eyes, open wide in surprise. A warm cheek against my own, wet with tears. Eliza.

Thunder rolled above us as we laughed and hugged, jigging from side to side like lovers at a barn dance. ‘We’ll drown!’ I said.

Eliza pulled me into the church as the sky opened. We sat close, still gripping one another’s hands, steaming as we warmed. Her hair was a thin web, scabs showing through in vivid, rosy patches. She was lame in one leg, her fingers gnarled, knuckles swollen. She told me how hard life had been since we last met, said she went wherever there was employment but the smell of her lodging was on her skin. The street. I asked her to go with me to the tea gardens by the Castle Inn so we could have cider and heartcakes. Told her I was Mrs Rogers now. A lie.

When I got home, Jacob was already sitting at dinner. My story about feeling unwell and resting at the church was close to the truth, and he seemed satisfied. Between the roast beef and the syllabub, he asked me if I would be willing to marry him, to make our child his rightful heir by law and I said I would. The cook looked at me sideways and called me ‘Miss’ for the rest of the evening.

In the weeks that followed, I went to meet Eliza whenever I could, took bread rolls for her, wrapped in a napkin so she could sell the linen and eat again. Sometimes I took coins. Sometimes other things. By the end of the year, the cook began to notice empty places on the shelves.

Jacob told me we were being burgled. ‘Please be careful, dear. It must be someone who knows the house. I’ve told Cook she must stay with you at all times while I’m away at St Paul’s.’

After a week of boredom in the house, watched wherever I went by a pair of sharp eyes, my waters broke and the cook helped me up the stairs to bed. On the 30th of December, just before midnight, William, the son of Jacob Rogers, was born with a look of worry on his wrinkled face. By the light of a tallow candle, I found the fragile flicker in his neck and placed my fingertip there to feel the music of his heart beating. I traced the shell shape of a tiny ear with my lips and he opened his eyes. They were pale like Jacob’s and by the time the cook had rubbed him dry, his hair was a fine white fluff. As we’d decided, I’d named him after Jacob’s father, who’d died just weeks before our son was born.

‘Billy.’ The very first thing you say to a child matters a great deal. Those words cannot be taken back. They will live with you till the day of your own death so you must be sure they are well chosen. This is what I said to my lastborn son. ‘You will be a gentleman. The equal of any man you meet. I’ll make sure of it, if I die doing so.’

Thomas Aris was pleased with his lodging in Little New Street. It was cheap and the woman who rented out the room did his washing for a shilling and slept with him for nothing. It was not usually easy to find a place in the area they called the ‘Rules’ of the King’s Bench Prison because so many were willing to pay the turnkeys for the liberty of sleeping like free men, outside the walls. Women were allowed in the jail yard until ten every evening and Aris had first met Janet Simpson while he was playing a game of dice with some other prisoners by one of the pumps. She took a fancy to him from the start and it was easy to string her along: ‘The Duke of Portland told me this …’ and ‘The secretary of State said that …’ A few names were enough to hook her and the next day she told him she had a room for rent, just around the corner.

Like Aris, most of the other inmates were debtors, not thieves or murderers, so the regulations were slack. His days were boring but not unpleasant. Inside the prison, he could visit a coffee house or a tavern and buy almost anything he wanted from the shops and stalls, including food, beer and gin. His problem was money. There was not enough left to pay for his key to the gate and to eat like a lord, as he once had in Clerkenwell. Sleeping in a house at night instead of a cell was costing him hard and he still had to sign in with the jailers each day to prove he had not strayed beyond the Rules. The irony of it was painful, the Governor of Coldbath Fields convicted and robbed of his liberty. He was glad it was only for a month. A bit of capital from the last house left to sell on Aris Row would pay off some of his debts and he could make a new start. Call in some favours and get back where he belonged, at the top of the pile.

It had not been easy to lose everything so suddenly. After they took Coldbath Fields from him and Mainwaring had slunk away like the turncoat he was, it was the power Aris missed most. He found poor, helpless men who were weaker than him and beat them down in any way he could – words, fists, mockery – to feel it again. The need to control was like thirst but it never lasted longer than the warming of his blood. He gathered a quacking flock of admirers who believed he still had the ear of influential men. He flattered them, lied to them and promised to deliver money, influence, advantages when he was free.

Janet Simpson had lost an eye as well as all her front teeth; she was not a woman he would have looked at twice if there had been any choice, but the services she offered were too good to turn down. When he first dropped his bag in her kitchen and asked for a cup of water, she gave him a mug of ale and said, as saucy as you like, ‘D’you have washing needs doin’, Mr Aris? Or any other things need seein’ to?’

He sat at her table that evening, eating a Bologna sausage, and watched while she scrubbed snot and blood and worse off his pocket handkerchiefs and hung them by the fire to dry. A fine white linen square (badly stained with tea), a red checked cotton rag he used often as a bandage, and a large, triangular handkerchief made of thick blue chambray, pointed at two corners and round at the other. As his washing steamed and the ale began its work, Aris stood up and pushed Janet back against the sideboard.

‘You’re no beauty, Mrs Simpson,’ he whispered against her neck. ‘But a man doesn’t look at the mantelpiece when he’s stoking the fire.’

She pulled up her skirt and called him a flatterer.

‘The pudding-faced one is a Mrs Warren from Southwark and the mousy one is Mrs Amos. We were introduced yesterday at the Pleasure Gardens.’

The two women arriving at St Mary’s church were newcomers so they were of much more interest to the gossips around them than the curate’s bruised eye or the fat mouse sitting on his lectern.

‘Two sisters, I believe, staying with their cousin for a few weeks. Their name was Aris, before marriage.’

‘Aris? Of Clerkenwell?’

‘The same. And we don’t have to puzzle for long why they might wish to distance themselves. Have you heard about their father?’

The news travelled along the pews like a breeze through grasses, a soft rustling as one woman leaned to pass the names along. ‘Grace Aris – married old Warren. Daughter of Aris who used to be Governor at Coldbath Fields.’

‘I heard he walked away a free man.’

‘Yes, but things aren’t going well for him. My sister’s husband knows a man who goes across the river as a journeyman and he told her—’

‘Ssssssshhhhhh!’ The service began and the congregation rose.

The Aris sisters were sitting in one of the high galleries, so close to St Mary’s vaulted ceiling they could see the intricate detail of flowers and leaves moulded in white stucco. The curate spoke in a tremulous monotone, one high, wavering note. He led his congregation in prayers for the officers of His Majesty’s armies fighting Bonaparte, then for the misguided troublemakers in the north who were attacking factories and destroying the new weaving looms that were the future of England’s success. Grace’s stomach was rumbling like a collier’s cart on cobbles as she thought of the stewed beefsteaks waiting for them when they got back to the house. Mace and cloves, sweet herbs and anchovy, white wine and oysters. She dabbed at her mouth with the edge of a cotton cuff as the sermon came to an end. People were beginning to shuffle in their seats. The ladies straightened their hats and pinched their cheeks to raise some colour.

‘St Mary’s is more elegant than St James’s,’ Susan whispered to Grace.

Below them, the curate warbled his way through the last business of the day.

‘I publish the banns of marriage between Jacob Rogers, widower of this parish, and Sarah Evans, widow of St James’s parish, Clerkenwell. If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in Holy Matrimony, ye are to declare it.’

Grace turned the colour of mutton suet. Her mouth hung open as she stared down at the curate’s balding head.

Susan prodded her sister’s shoulder. ‘Can it be her? A widow?’ Everyone was moving, an awkward sideways shuffle along the pews and out to the door of the stairwell. ‘D’you think it might be the same prisoner that lived with us? The one who caused Papa such troubles? He’ll be glad to know where she’s been hiding. We must write to him.’

Outside, the crowd was thinning as couples and families made their way home. Grace turned suddenly and grasped her sister by the wrist, pulling her away from the path. ‘If you think I care, you’re mistaken.’ She shoved Susan back with the heel of her hand, hard against the church wall. ‘If it is her, then I hope the man she’s marrying is the Devil himself and he takes her with him to Hell.’

People were turning to look. Grace lowered her voice to a growl and stepped away. ‘Never speak of her again.’

It was not difficult to find a widower called Jacob Rogers who lived in Islington. Everyone seemed to know him, the house where he lived and even the pew he sat in on Sunday mornings. They were happy to stop and talk to a stranger about the kind man who did important work at the cathedral, but it was a woman who finally offered up the details of Mr Rogers’ secret. ‘We must stick together. Men think they can make fools of us all,’ Grace Aris said to the candle seller on the corner of Paradise Row. ‘My own shame prevents me from telling you everything, but this Jacob Rogers has treated me badly, believe me, my dear. If he’s done the same again to another poor woman, he deserves to be exposed for the ruffian he is.’

‘Their cook’s a friend of mine.’ The candle seller leaned in and whispered. ‘She says the child’s a bastard. The woman, Mrs Rogers as she calls herself, there’s talk about her, too. Came from nowhere. Says she’s a widow but she has a devious look about her.’

By the light of a church candle, Reverend Davies peered through his spectacles at the small, black seals in front of him. They were all identical, but the three letters bore dates that were years apart. The oldest, with the year ‘1800’ written on the back, had been in the bottom drawer of his writing desk for ten years. It was mottled with greenish specks of mould. The next to arrive, four years later, looked almost identical but the handwriting on the front of the folded square was different, one the smooth, regular flow of an educated person, the other a hesitant scrawl. And now a third. All were addressed to Sarah Evans and had come from New South Wales.

He placed them together in an old wooden soapbox under his desk, on top of the pile of papers there, and made his way to the door of the vestry. ‘It’s a matter of hope, for someone,’ he muttered to himself as he left the room. ‘A matter of trust in the church.’