‘Up the steps we go! One, two, three, four.’ I stopped at four. It was as far as George could count. It was years since I’d been inside St James’s but nothing had changed. It still smelled of lost souls and sadness, but I did not want my sons to spend one more night sleeping at the burying ground. I put Billy down on one of the pews. It was a windy day and his hair was sticking out, fine and almost white around his little face. It gave him the serious look of a priest and made me smile to think that perhaps he would be well suited to that profession. I gave George a prayer book to play with. He flicked at the pages and burbled as if he was reading them. I looked up, saw the bright colours of the King’s arms on the wall, and put a hand to my waist where the pardon he’d given me was always tucked away, wrapped in a piece of cotton. I’d kept it by me for thirteen years.
‘Intellect will always govern.’ I knew what those words meant – that reason rules in the end, above all else – and I wanted to hear them so loud I might believe they were meant for me.
‘Intellect will always govern! Did you know that, Your Majesty?’ The sound of my voice ringing against high brick walls startled me. Louder, the words did not sound any truer.
The door from the vestry opened so quietly I didn’t see Reverend Davies until he stepped into the light. He’d changed so much I didn’t recognise him.
‘Sarah Evans?’ he said. ‘Is it you?’ The voice was the same, more gravelly, but there was the musical rise and fall of the words, songlike even when he was delivering a funeral service.
I picked Billy up, tried to take hold of George and pull him away, but the Reverend called out to me, said I was safe. He didn’t try to bar my way, just stood with his arms open, waiting.
‘I’ve no need to know where you’ve been,’ he said, quieter, now that I was still. ‘I won’t even ask. Just stay a moment. I have something for you. Letters.’ He said he’d been keeping them a very long time.
When we came out of the church, St James’s graveyard had disappeared under a fall of snow, soft and white like a gull’s breast. I had hopes of a roof over our heads that night. Reverend Davies had pushed some shillings into my palm as we left, saying it would do for food and a week’s rent to set me up so I could look for employment. He said I should try knocking at a chandler’s shop in Northampton Street, the home of a Mrs Blakey who sometimes offered lodging to good Christian people who were in hard times. I told George he wouldn’t have to sleep outside in the cold again and we would soon be sitting beside a warm fire.
‘I’m not cold, Mam. I’m hot.’
I told him not to whimper but to take my hand and walk as quickly as he could. I should’ve seen it then. I should’ve thought.
Number sixteen was halfway up Northampton Street and there was a light showing so I knocked even though it was getting late. Ann Blakey was a once-a-lady kind of woman, with faded finery around her in a house where there were no luxuries. Bodice of wool, darned in three places, but cap of silk and lace. Shoes of good leather but down so far on the heels she walked like a pigeon. The china was the very best and there were silver sugar snips on the shelf but no sugar. She told me she was a widow and would be glad of one more lodger. I think she took pity on us because she didn’t ask for rent in advance, just sat me down right away while she made us welcome. Billy had bread softened in good, hot broth and she put meat and roasted parsnips on the table for me and George.
I was so happy I had to fight my tears away when I saw how quick George cleared his plate, his pink tongue licking at it hungrily like a wild little wolf, but before he put the dish back down on the table, he threw back his head, cried out, and hurled his dinner back up across the cloth. Mrs Blakey felt his forehead and told me to bathe him in cold water while she did the dishes.
‘Your boy has taken cold. The poor mite has a fever,’ she said.
Still, I didn’t know.
‘He’ll be well after a night in a warm bed,’ I said, and I believed it.
Our room was a long way up, with a window so high I couldn’t look out, but it had everything a home needs – a bed, a chair, a deal table with a bowl for water and a shelf where I could put things. When I lay down with George at my feet and Billy by my side, I heard the Clerkenwell watchman calling the hour and thought I was the most contented woman in the wide world. I slept deeply, not knowing when I woke up the next morning that it was Christmas.
George was curled like a fallen leaf in the corner. His small body heaved but he could only spit yellow bile. Fever burned on him and his black hair was plastered wet to his forehead like the curls on a newborn lamb. Mrs Blakey put him in a tub of iced water and tried to make him drink some milk but he would not swallow a drop. She prayed and told me I should do the same but I couldn’t say a word. I was useless, afraid to touch him in case it was the wrong thing, ashamed to watch Mrs Blakey caring for him as I should have done.
On the third day, the fever broke and he came back to us just as he was before.
The same evening, as we sat at supper, I put the letters Reverend Davies had given me on the table. They were smudged with coal dust and grease because I’d opened them, held them to the light, cast my eyes over the pages criss-crossed with jagged lines going in both directions, but the only word I could pick out was my name: Sarah.
‘They’re all for me, from New South Wales,’ I said and pushed the papers towards Mrs Blakey. ‘But I don’t know who the senders are.’
She picked them up one after the other, turned them, held them close to the end of her nose.
She was talking while she was reading. They were all from the same person, a friend, but there must’ve been a marriage, she said. Two different names. I told her I didn’t think that could be right, I didn’t have a friend in the Colony.
‘Well, this first one was penned by Lucy Burnes.’ She looked at me across the table and showed me the page, pointed to the words.
‘Lucy?’
‘And these two are from Lucy Bird.’
She looked worried when she saw my expression. Grief and joy feel so much the same, look the same, sound the same. I tried to tell her it was good news but I could only make small noises like an animal.
She put the letters down and picked up our supper plates. ‘I’ll just take the dishes then. Leave you alone for a while.’
It didn’t take long for me to find my voice. I asked her to come back, if she wouldn’t mind. I said I wanted more than anything in the wide world to know what Lucy had to say to me. Mrs Blakey began reading aloud. She started with what was written on the outsides, which wasn’t much. Just some dates and the names of ships. Then she read the words on the pages. Words for me, from Lucy, written on the other side of the world. She read slowly and when she’d finished, she turned back to the beginning and read everything again.
When I first went to live with Mrs Blakey, I thought a plan was all I needed and the path I would travel into the future would be straight, like a journey from one place to another. That was foolish. An idea is not a fixed thing like a wall to be climbed over. It’s a shifting thing, wilful. It wriggles like an unruly child. A woman must be willing to turn and turn about. We cannot guess how the world around us will change. When I came to Australia, I looked on in astonishment as women just like me elevated themselves in the space of a year from the foul stink of a convict ship to the flowery perfume of a fine house. A girl convicted in London and sentenced to seven years could become the proprietor of an elegant emporium and the owner of a large, comfortable home, employing servants. The equal of any lady in the district. So many arrived in leg irons and began their time wearing convict clothes that a woman’s past was not a weight to hold her back. If you were lucky, the skill you had to offer was all that mattered. What you knew and what you could do. Here, there’s no shame in poverty but I will never forget the pain of it, for a mother.
I was so happy living in Northampton Street that I stopped smiling only when I slept. Our days hurried along and Mrs Blakey had the habit of singing while she worked, her voice as sweet and true as a lark. Some were old songs, innocent stories, and others were the dirtiest ditties I’ve ever heard. We laughed till we cried the first time I sang along with her to ‘The Fair Maid of Islington’. And what shall I give, fair maid, says he, one night with you to lie? She was not my mother or my sister or my friend but there was a closeness between us that grew, deep-rooted in the laughter we shared. I told her one night I was ashamed not to read and write and she answered that a handful of good life is better than a bushel of learning.
After I heard what Lucy had to say to me, I chewed on my thoughts for a while, lumps of envy and anger they were, but the chewing didn’t make them easier to swallow. No Ticket of Leave for me. If one day in my life had been different, if I’d been sent for seven years to Sydney Cove, if Thomas Aris hadn’t taken a fancy to me, I’d be a free woman. I went around and around in circles for a long time. Back and back I’d go, to this moment or that moment, wishing I’d acted differently. In the end, I resolved not to blame Lucy for my misfortunes. I packed up those thoughts that brought only misery and set them aside. Mrs Blakey wrote a letter to Lucy for me. I asked her to say I was well and living in Clerkenwell and I did not bear any grudge. Nothing more than that. Nothing.
I needed to find money for the rent so I asked Eliza if she would look after my children in the day and she said yes. I was taken on to serve at table in a tavern called the Bull in the Pound. On the first day I finished at eleven in the evening and went back to Mrs Blakey’s where Eliza was waiting. I was all set to make a real home for us. When I went in the room, there was a story painted on Eliza’s face. I did not want it to be told.
‘You must look, Sarah,’ was all she said and told George to open his mouth so I could see. The lesions were small, no more than red marks, but they covered his throat and tongue. We didn’t say its name then, hoping she was wrong, but by morning the rash was there across his forehead. No mistaking it, Eliza said. When Mrs Blakey came upstairs to look, it had spread like a thing alive, down onto his cheeks. She put her hand on my arm and said what we did not.
‘Smallpox.’
Mrs Blakey knew there was nothing to be done and we must wait. Eliza said the same. I counted each day and each hour in it and was thankful to have them, even when the marks on his palms and the soles of his feet raised up and tightened and he could not hold a hand or take a step without pain. Four days went by. We watched as fluid fattened the blisters that littered George’s face, stretching them until they leaked, pearly on his skin. Eliza wiped him constantly with cloths that Mrs Blakey brought us. Up and down the stairs she went, washing and drying and fetching clean ones. She burned the worst.
Seven days. Ten days. Did I sleep? Did I eat? I do not know. The marks of the pox grew hard like beads buried in his skin. On the thirteenth day, we found his body marked with drying crusts, his beautiful face blackened all over with flakes like cinders from the going down of the sores. Eliza said there was hope at last, and saffron might save him. I wept because I didn’t have the means to get it and I wept for Charles, the memory of losing him the way I did, there again, right in front of me. I would’ve freely given any part of myself to save George, including my eternal soul, but it was money I needed to keep him alive and I didn’t have a halfpenny to my name. I watched Mrs Blakey take a guinea from inside the hem of her petticoat. I can see her hand, the way the coin looked in its wrinkled cup. She handed it to Eliza. The goodness of it glows in me now, as I remember her kindness.
It was not long after that, a chilly night, we sat knee to knee, warming our feet in front of the range in the kitchen. I was sewing a piece of black silk Mrs Blakey had given me, the tiniest stitches I could manage running along a rolled hem. I said George should help her around the house to thank her, when he felt better.
‘I’ve no need of the silk,’ she said. ‘Too small a piece to make anything for myself.’ She told me I should embroider the border and finish it nicely along the selvedge, taking some threads from her work basket, the finest I’d ever seen. Such clear, pure dyes. They came from another life.
‘I’m glad to see them used at last.’ Mrs Blakey pushed her feet closer to the range and eased off one shoe, then another. ‘There’s the matter of the rent, my dear.’
My heart dropped to the ground but I did not look up from my sewing. I assured her I would pay soon. ‘The Bull in the Pound won’t have me back now after I left so sudden. I’ve asked for Poor Relief but they’ve refused me.’
‘Then the workhouse is your only choice.’
What she said next I barely remember. I felt something coming towards me like the first light breath of a mighty storm that will have its way.
On the first day of February in the year 1813, I was standing outside the bakery at the end of Northampton Street, weeks of rent still owed to that dear, good soul. She was looking after Billy and George while I went out to look for work but there was none to be found. Mrs Newman had called to see me the previous day, with a message. ‘Mr Brooke sends his regards. He says to tell you he’s in need of a servant again. There’s a place for you, same arrangement as previous, living at the shop, if you can find somewhere for the lad.’
It was hope, delivered to me on a plate, but I couldn’t take it unless I found a place for George and I would never leave another son at the St Pancras Workhouse. My plan to make a new life for my boys had fallen like piles of wet winter leaves around my feet.
We’d been living on bread and tea for weeks. I’d taken to stealing food. The fresh-baked loaves were left out for loading early in the morning and, if I watched the carter as he came and went, I could move in and take one in the time it took him to turn and bend for the next batch. I moved swiftly, and when I walked away into the fog there was a hot loaf under my shawl. I was glad of the damp air and the greyness that swallowed everything in front of me. Mist beaded on my sleeves and a wet crescent darkened my bodice. The fog draped so low I could not see more than ten paces ahead.
‘Mrs Evans!’
He’d been waiting for me. I pressed myself back as hard as I could against the wall of a house.
‘What good fortune.’ False surprise slid over his face like slime. ‘I was just passing by.’
Oh, how I wanted to hit him, to slap away that leer. I wanted it more than my next breath, but I was still clutching the loaf against me and would not risk dropping my children’s breakfast for the pleasure it would give me.
‘You look well. How’s my son?’ He leaned in, too close. Deliberate.
The sound of a man’s voice came from inside the house and Mr Aris took a step back, away from me.
‘D’you know how much I miss you, dear girl?’ He passed his sleeve across his face. Wiping tears away?
Anger lodged in my throat but, oh, how I wanted to laugh at him. To laugh and laugh in his face until he crumbled from the indignity of it.
‘Can we be friends again? I ask nothing of you. I only wish to see George, and to enjoy your company as I used to.’
There it was, the smile that had fooled the magistrates and bought what no man should be able to purchase from another. He had not touched me but I knew he would, and soon.
‘You speak of your son yet you do nothing for him. If you don’t do what a father should, George must go hungry. Or go to the workhouse.’
‘I can’t pay what they ask. That’s the truth.’
I walked away as quickly as I could in the thick, milky light but he kept pace by my side, pulling at my arm.
‘There’s another way. I know a woman, lives in the country. She has a children’s farm. The parish sends infants there. They stay till they’re six.’
I stopped and stood quite still. Today, back and back I go to that little moment in my life. What if I’d kept on walking? If I’d run home to George and taken him in my arms and stroked his coal black curls and told him we would never be parted? To think of it now, to watch myself turn to Thomas Aris, is my greatest pain.
‘Why do you care for your son so suddenly? Where has this fatherly feeling come from?’
He said he didn’t want to see his own flesh and blood suffer as he knew the boy would in the workhouse. ‘Have you forgotten?’ he asked me. ‘It was me who took the other one out of that place, and you who put him there. I found him a good position at the mill – and I paid for it.’
To think of Tommy, to try and imagine him taller, to remember that I promised him I would come back for him, that I never even said goodbye, that was more than I could bear, but I pictured George in the workhouse, a terrible place I’d seen with my own eyes. Then I saw him somewhere green and fresh, open and free. I’d been living with only one choice for days and Thomas Aris had just given me another.
‘Where is this farm?’ I asked him. ‘And how is it possible? You say you’ve no money.’
‘It’s thirty miles out of town. I did this woman a service once, long ago, so she’s in my debt. She’ll take George, I’m sure of it. You’d have time to settle yourself and then you could bring him home again – when your situation changes.’
He’d hooked me then and he knew it. I told myself it would only need to be for a few months. I said I’d never hand over my son unless I saw for myself she was a kindly person. Mr Aris said she was his sister.
I could see he thought it was decided, but in my own mind it was not. ‘I’ll enquire tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Now, shall we go somewhere? To talk as we used to?’ Down came his hand, a claw that grasped the bone of my hip.
I prised his fingers away, one by one. ‘You think I’ll go with you so easy?’
It does not shame me now to say I feared him then but I would not let him see it.
‘You will do what I tell you because I hold your life here, in the palm of my hand.’ His closed fist pressed at my face, bony knuckles against my cheek. ‘Unless it’s a long voyage that takes your fancy. D’you still hanker for the convict ship?’
My hand shook but I reached through my skirt into my pocket, held up the stained piece of paper that had been so precious to me for thirteen years.
‘Ah, you think you have a pardon from the King.’
When he smiled, I opened the page and put my finger to the only two words I recognised. ‘You showed me my name. Here.’
‘And where d’you think I came by it?’ He was laughing now. The fog began to empty itself, dripping off his hair onto his shoulders. ‘I paid for it. Mainwaring owed me a favour. Your precious pardon’s a fake.’ He grabbed it with his wet hands, tore it away from me. ‘Mainwaring had a bundle of them, all blank and signed by the Duke of Portland. I told him what to write. It was just for me, to make it appear legal, Never for you. If you’d still been a prisoner when I sent you away to St Pancras, it might’ve been awkward. Look, these are my words, not King George’s.’
I could not speak but my legs moved, one step, two, three, four. Not quickly enough. I heard every word he read, louder and louder as I walked away.
‘Our will and pleasure is that you cause the said Sarah Evans to be forthwith delivered over to the custody of the Governor of our House of Correction, Coldbath Fields.’
The words that had handed me to Thomas Aris like a fresh fillet on a plate.
When I first came here, Windsor was a town in name only. It was small, quiet, except when a boat came in and the wharf was bustling, but men are men and they always want more. Land makes money, no matter if the riches never fall into the laps of those who do the felling and clearing. Soldiers came, then convicts, hundreds of them. In a few years there were walls and roads where we once walked among wattles and red gums. New buildings meant there were places I didn’t want to go. I couldn’t bring myself to pass by the convict barracks and I still walk a long way round to avoid setting eyes on the Court House. I have my reasons and I keep them to myself. I carry the past with me but it’s no longer a weighty burden and to shake it off would be to lose something of myself.
We live on high ground, safe from all but the worst floods, and have everything we need. What we cannot grow comes to us up the Hawkesbury and what we send back to be sold in the warehouses, the fruit of our labours on the farm, gives me a life without want or hardship. There are two shelves of books within an arm’s stretch of my rocker by the stove, some ordered from a bookshop in Sydney, some picked like treasure from the crates laid out on the wharf when a shipment of goods arrives from London. They are not as fine or expertly bound as the volumes at Mr Brooke’s but they are mine. I fall asleep most nights with the gentle weight of a book in my lap. For that alone, I am a fortunate woman.
When I went back to work in the bookshop in Paternoster Row, the prices had changed but numbers were never a problem for me and Mr Brooke gave me paper and pencil so customers could write what they wanted to order. The room I once shared with Mrs Newman was now my own, since she could no longer manage the stairs and slept in the kitchen. I felt as if I’d come home.
There is a pleasure to be had in running a hand along a shelf of books. Not just the bump, bump, bump, as your fingers pass across hard leather, or the smell of ink and oil and paper and dust that rises, but the tumbling sense of so many ideas turned into words. Thousands and thousands of thoughts, caught and hidden, tightly packed on pages, paper pressed to paper. I watched the customers tilt their heads sideways to read the titles. They touched the spines, lightly, and moved along, but sometimes they would pull a single volume, hold it, open it, and then their eyes changed. Did they know, I wondered while I watched them, that their faces shone when they looked at books?
On my first day, I struggled to keep my eyes open. I’d been awake all night. In the afternoon, Mr Brooke took over in the shop and I went out to the kitchen. Mrs Newman was scraping potatoes and talking to the woman from the ironmonger’s about the price of fowls. What was left of a plate of bread and ham stood between us on the table and it was as much as I could do not to fall on the crusts and rind and shove them into my mouth. Mrs Newman set me to work peeling and quartering some apples and pears she’d brought up from the cellar and said I should help myself if I was hungry. I started unwrapping the torn papers that separated each one and cutting out the dark bruises.
‘We were talking about your boys,’ said Mrs Newman. ‘I was just saying, Billy’s with a nurse woman and George is in the country, gone to a farm.’
The ironmonger’s wife gently patted my hand. ‘You must be glad to know he’s in a place like that,’ she said. ‘Have you had news of him, since he went?’
I was peeling an over-ripe pear, the juice running down my hands. I bit into its sweet flesh and the first lie slid from my lips. ‘I have,’ I answered, wiping my chin with the back of my hand. ‘I’m told he got there safe. And he’s well, they say.’
Three weeks passed like three hours. March mornings brought watery sunshine. One day, I picked snowdrops in St Paul’s churchyard on the way back from market and found Mrs Newman flustered and tearful in the parlour.
‘You’ll have to help, dear. My gout is come upon me. I’m useless as an infant.’ The fingers of her right hand were red and swollen.
I told her she needed hemlock root, roasted, and promised to get her some if I could find my friend, Eliza. Mrs Newman made me sit down and said she’d been a servant to Benjamin Brooke for fifteen years and she wasn’t going to let the troubles of her old age affect the daily routine of his well-ordered life. He’d already been served the cold chop and potatoes he liked to eat at half-past twelve so all I had to do was fry the fish for his supper at six but he would be going out as usual on a Monday evening so there was the matter of his boots.
‘Mr Brooke’s very particular about his boots. Must be polished weekly. I’ll show you what to do.’
I’d never polished a pair of boots before. It wasn’t a difficult job but my arms were soon aching and I could not rest with Mrs Newman watching so intently.
‘A little blacking on the cloth each time. Now spit on the toe and polish before it dries. Yes, like that, but rub harder.’
I worked faster and a shine was appearing but it was not up to Mrs Newman’s standards.
‘Do it again. Spit and polish! Spit and polish!’
Once she was satisfied I was getting it right, she went out to the garden to see if the washing was dry. I fell into a kind of dance with the boots and the cloth and the blacking, sitting there all quiet, my arm moving to and fro, watching the clock as I always did when I was at my work in the kitchen. The way the hands fell slowly from one number to the next and then climbed again; it was such a measured, certain thing. A safe thing. A sure thing. Not like a life. I can still remember the sharpness of that thought as it came to me.
One o’clock. Spit and polish.
The knocking on the door was so loud that I jumped.
Henry Jones did not like the tightening squeeze of anxiety in his chest. He had been in the Old Bailey many times before but had never felt so troubled as the courtroom began to fill. He still did not know for sure if Sarah Evans had killed her child and it had been keeping him awake for so many nights that his cheeks were channelled with dark shadows.
He wanted to believe it was Thomas Aris, that he had somehow gone up to the New River without being seen and rid himself of his son. Or was the woman involved, the one Sarah said had taken George to live at her farm in the country? Was she given money to look after him and then disappeared, first making sure there was no boy for her to care for? Or had she been paid by Aris to do the terrible work for him? The worst nightmare of all, Sarah Evans herself reaching for a broken brick to weigh down her son’s body, left Jones shouting in his sleep.
Each time he went over things in his mind, it was the same. There was nothing he remembered, nothing at all, that could prove Sarah’s innocence. Not a word whispered or a glance given. He could not shake off the realisation that had wormed its way into his mind on the night she asked to see him, the night she changed her story just in time. She had been so adamant until the very last minute, so sure in her responses to his questions, even though every word she uttered painted her as deceitful and guilty. Her new tale about meeting Aris and giving George to a woman on his instructions had come from nowhere when it was almost too late. With so much time to think while she was in the cells, and knowing her confused lies had painted her as guilty as sin, had Sarah Evans suddenly come up with an idea? A way to escape the gallows and revenge herself on the man who had treated her with such cruelty? There were few left in London who did not despise Aris for getting away so easily with a life of corruption. Implicated in the murder of his own child, a crime so evil it matched his reputation, who would believe him to be innocent?
The previous night, Jones had written a letter to the parish clerk. It was formal notice of his resignation but it would sit on the table at home in Clerkenwell until the next day. He would step onto the witness stand as a respected beadle of St James’s and not Henry Jones, retired, formerly someone important. It was the last thing he could do for the woman, make his words carry some weight. Jones wanted justice for Sarah Evans after all she had suffered at the hands of Thomas Aris but he thanked God he was not to be her judge. If the jury found her guilty of murder, the death sentence was mandatory. She would hang.
It was freezing cold outside but the room was stuffy. Five lawyers in wigs shuffled papers on the dark green baize of a semicircular table below the judge’s throne-like chair, eight clerks were already dipping their pens and scribbling at desks along one side and every seat was filled in the gallery high above. The public had all paid a good price for the show. Mr and Mrs Sheppard from the Crown Tavern were there and Aris’s daughters too, in the front row. Their faces were veiled but he knew them, Grace and Susan, with their thick shoulders and hair like wire poking out from identical bonnets.
The waiting was over. The bailiff had brought the witnesses from their comfortable waiting room in the basement and herded them like sheep into a pen and Jones was seated on one of the small chairs inside an enclosure between the judge and the defendant’s box. Now the bailiff stood ready to line them up for their turn on the stand so no time was wasted. Everyone knew it was going to be a long trial.
At exactly ten o’clock, twelve citizens of Middlesex filed onto the jury benches in three rows of four so they were close enough to discuss their verdict. Jones hoped they were the honourable men the law said they must be.
When they brought her in, Sarah Evans swayed, gazed up at the bright colours of the King’s arms on the wall high above them and fell to her knees. They lifted her and pushed her against the front of the box for support as Lord Ellenborough proceeded slowly along the back of the room to his lofty place behind the lawyers, so heavily weighted with velvet, ermine and gold that he struggled to keep his balance.
The sound of a hundred people sitting at once is a melancholy noise, Jones thought. I hope never to hear it again.