The Night Flower

By Sarah Stovell

Two girls are brought together under the worst of circumstances: a prison ship taking them from London to 'parts beyond the sea'.

Miriam is a Romany girl drawn from freedom in the hills of the North-West to the city to eke a living playing her tin-whistle in a place where her people are despised. When her mother dies - from cholera, the 'gypsy disease' - she's caught breaking-and-entering and sentenced to transportation.

Rose has been brought up to expect more, but when her husband dies and her father is sent down for illegal slave-trading, she's separated from her children and forced to take a governess's job. When she's caught stealing, the judge shows no mercy.

Surviving - just - an appalling voyage, the two arrive just after Christmas into the blinding sun of the strange new island: Van Dieman's Land. Here they are sent to work in a nursery, where women of ill-repute give birth before being sent for correction. The nursery is run by a corrupt, debauched Reverend and his idealistic son, who soon takes a fancy to Miriam. But Rose, her best friend and close confidant, watches jealously and makes plans to reverse their fortunes.

The Night Flower takes the reader on a thrilling Dickensian adventure through the dark side of our penal history to a Tasmanian frontier town where anything could happen and morality is made by monsters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tindal Street
• Release date: Aug 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781906994969

Sarah Stovell

Sarah Stovell was born in Kent in 1977 and now lives in Northumberland with her partner and two children. She has an MA and a PhD in creative writing and is a lecturer in creative writing at Lincoln University. She is the author of four previous novels, Mothernight, The Night Flower, Exquisite and The Home. Exquisite was chosen by The Times as one of the top 40 crime novels of the past 5 years.

Book preview

Part One

1

LIME STREET SLUMS NEWCASTLE, ENGLAND WINTER, 1841

We was Gypsies. We was always getting punished, for one thing or another. They reckoned the rich folk of the land was gonna get wrecked by us if they wasn’t careful. We’d give em diseases what we caught off the streets – whooping cough and smallpox and the like. It was our own fault we was diseased, because we was dark skinned and didn’t believe hard enough in the Lord, so he saw fit to punish us with an early death and a quick journey to hell. But they didn’t see it as being right that we’d spread it to the Christians of the world, too, and when an epidemic of typhus or measles broke out, there was a lotta anger and shouting from the rich folk, and they reckoned the country oughta get rid of us, and the rest of the poor, too, for that matter.

City Gypsies was the worst. At least if we was just travelling the countryside in our wagons there wasn’t a lotta harm we could do, except robbing a few vegetables off the farmers here and there. City Gypsies was another matter. They said we was nothing but beggars and pick-pockets.

I hadn’t always been a city Gypsy, though. I was a girl what had spent years living up mountains, breathing proper clean air, and it give me a head start on getting a clean soul. I wasn’t like the rest of them filthy wretches, for all what I found myself living among em, through no fault of my own.

Before she died, Evelyn, who wasn’t my real mother but was as good as one to me, said, ‘Work hard, schej. Work hard and live a good life. Beg if you have to, but working is better. And don’t steal. Only take what’s in the ground, because that’s meant for everyone. It don’t matter who grew it. But don’t take nothing else. Look after yourself good, and keep out of trouble. They’ll hang the life outta you if you start stealing, and you don’t deserve that, because you’re a good girl, schej. A good girl.’

Of course, I made her all the right promises, because it wouldn’t do to upset a dying woman, specially not when I loved her. She’d been kushti enough to bring me up, for all I wasn’t her own flesh and blood. But truly, I don’t know how she was expecting me to get by on my own in the world, with nothing but my tarot pack and tin whistle.

Evelyn’d brung me to the city when I was twelve years old. Before then, it’d just been the two of us, travelling round the mountains of Westmorland and Northumbria, with a wagon she’d took off our tribe the day we left. We’d got a horse, too, off a trader who sold him cheap, but the horse was old and so was the wagon and in the end they both collapsed and we was left with nothing.

It was winter then. The ground was cold, and the plants and animals hid emselves away and wouldn’t be hunted. We was hungry, and although we found ourselves shelters in caves and such, the cold’d come blasting down them hills and freeze us – skin, flesh and bone – till we was stiff as the dead and not much happier, neither.

Evelyn decided how we’d be better off coming to the city to live, because there was more folk there to earn a living off – reading fortunes and begging and such – and that was what we did. After a lotta walking and a lotta catching rides with farmers on their wagons, we got ourselves to Newcastle. The air there was full of smog, but the streets was lit at night, so folk passing by could see us, and maybe toss some pennies our way, or some old newspapers, if they was of the rich and charitable sort.

There was a lotta folk without houses what lived on Lime Street. It were a kushti sorta place, because the River Ouse passed by there, what meant we could wash ourselves now and then if we was needing to, and there was also some bridges, and if you folded yourself up tight enough you could spend the night tucked under their arches and they’d give you a decent enough shelter from the rain, and also from the wind, what wasn’t no laughing matter in Newcastle. So that was what we did – about fifty of us, all in all, children and grown-ups together – and we huddled under the bridges and slept in the doorways of the factory, and in the daytime we all had our own ways of making a living, some what was honest and some what wasn’t.

Evelyn got money reading the tarot and telling fortunes, and by selling lucky bunches of lavender to folk what worried their luck was running out. It was me what got the most money, though – more than pretty well everyone in Lime Street slums. I played my tin whistle and I sung sometimes, too, and there ain’t nothing nicer for the rich folk of the world, than to see a hungry girl belting out a pretty tune from a doorway.

They was all hungry in the slums. Me and Evelyn’d gotta be careful about what we took back there at night. If we earned ourselves a crust of bread, or if a kindly-seeming mother’d given me a cup of milk to help put some strong in my bones, the others’d fight us for em – proper fighting, with fists and feet and kicks to the head – and we could end up beat black and blue. It hurt a lot to get beat, what was the first reason to not like it, but the other reason was because it didn’t help with making money. The rich folk was happy enough to throw their coins at a hungry girl, but a girl with black eyes was another thing altogether. I s’pose she wasn’t pretty no more and folk are happier to feed a pretty girl than an ugly one.

So if we’d got food, we used to stop in the alley on our way back to Lime Street, and stuff our faces with it, so we wouldn’t have to share it with no one and so we wouldn’t get beat. And when we got back, all them hungry-eyed children’d crowd round to see what we’d got, and we’d just shake our heads in a sad sorta way, and say we was sorry, but it’d been a bad day and we didn’t have nothing for em.

But it didn’t do to be always fighting. I made friends well enough with the other children, and there was times we did share stuff round, and also times we went off together to do a bit of stealing from the street vendors and such. To go stealing with other folk was kushti and give you more in the way of guts, and it might mean you’d come back with better stuff, like cheese or a meat pie, or some chestnuts if it was Christmas.

The bad girl had been living at the slums years before we got there, and she reckoned she was a thing or two above the rest of us because of it. She was a Gypsy like me, and her name was Katie-May – two names rolled up in one. And it turned out Katie-May was two lots of trouble rolled up in one as well, but none of us knew that at the time, and I just reckoned she was clever, because she’d got a proper thieving way about her and didn’t never get herself caught. She was fifteen years old and didn’t have no mother or father to speak of, but she knew well enough how to look after herself.

‘You eat more food than you let on,’ she said to me once.

‘I never do,’ I said.

‘Liar. If you really had as much bad days as you say you have, you’d of died months ago.’

I shrugged and didn’t say nothing.

‘You oughta share your stuff, you know. You oughta let me have some of it. If you do, then next time I rob a house, I’ll get you a blanket or a coat. And I’ll get your mother one, too, if she wants.’

Well, that was a promise I found hard to say no to. It wasn’t a warm life under that bridge, and although me and Evelyn did our best with the newspapers and old rags we found, keeping the cold out our bones wasn’t no easy thing.

So I said, ‘All right,’ and the next day, when I’d sung the breath outta my lungs and got enough coins for four hot cakes off the street vendor, plus a few bits of bread and a sausage I’d swiped when he wasn’t looking, I took em back to Lime Street to share with Katie-May.

She gobbled em down quick. ‘Tomorrow night,’ she said, ‘I’m going house-breaking with the boys. We know the place. We found it last week. It’s big, like a mansion. There’s just one lady living there that we can see, and she hasn’t been back these two nights together. Reckon she’s gone off somewhere for Christmas. So we’re gonna break in, get as much as we can, and I’ll get you something, too, to keep you warm.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, excited about the idea of being warm.

But when Katie-May come back the next night, with her cut and bleeding hands what’d got in a sorry state when she smashed the mansion’s window, she didn’t give me nothing. She made a proper show of laying out blankets and jumpers and such, so I went and sat down next to her, as a way of reminding her about her promise, but she ignored me, what I thought was rude.

In the end, I said, ‘You said you was gonna bring me a coat.’

‘I couldn’t. There wasn’t enough time. The police was on the prowl and I’d gotta get out as soon as I could. I could only get enough for me.’

‘That ain’t fair,’ I said, because I was a girl with a fair mind, even back when I was just thirteen years old, and I’d took Katie-May as being true to her word and reckoned she oughta share what she’d got equal, like what I’d done. And now when I remember that day, I reckon I oughta of seen it as being a sign of the trouble to come, and I get cross with myself for giving her another chance, and then another chance after that. But I s’pose that’s the lot of folk what have a trusting nature.

When I went back to Evelyn, I told her what’d happened and how Katie-May’d promised me a coat to give her, but hadn’t kept her word. I said I was sorry and cried a bit, too, because I knew Evelyn’d been looking forward to having some wool on her skin and I felt bad that I couldn’t give it to her, after all she’d done for me in the past.

But she just said, ‘Never mind, chey. It don’t matter. And anyway, it’s best not to go wearing stolen goods, because you never know if you might meet with their owner one day. You’d do well to stay away from thieves like Katie-May, and stick to earning a living with your pretty voice and your whistle. No one wants you going to a bad place, Miriam.’

I laughed a bit and put a kiss on her face when she said that, because of course, I knew myself to be lucky. It wasn’t everyone who’d got someone what cared if they went to a bad place or not, and I was thankful to Evelyn for keeping me, even though the tribe’d said when I was born that they couldn’t afford no baby.

I said, ‘I won’t go to a bad place, Dey.’

She said, ‘Let’s hope not, schej. Let’s hope not.’

And I reckoned when she’d been talking about a bad place, she must of meant hell, because I couldn’t think where else she meant, except maybe gaol, but a lotta folk wanted to go to gaol, for the roof it’d put over their heads, and I gotta admit, gaol wasn’t enough to stop me swiping a cake or two when I was hungry.

2

There’s always been laws meant for giving bad times to the Gypsies. Before I got born, the men in charge of England said how all Gypsy folk’d gotta get quick out the country, right there and then, and if any of em was ever found sneaking about in their wagons, they was gonna get straight away hanged and sent to the devil.

My mother, Anna, was just a child when they decided this, but it come to be the sorta thing what frightens a body for life. My old kumpania – the tribe what I’d sprung from – didn’t have no way of getting emselves the fare to some other country, so they had to take emselves off and hide for ever from the police and all them other folk what didn’t reckon much to Gypsies.

They packed up their wagons and off they went, far away from the south of England where they’d been travelling years and years round Devon and Somerset, and up into Cumberland and the Lakes. And there they headed for the mountains, because they reckoned the mountains’d be kind to em. They took their horses and three wagons and went as high as they could go, till they reached the top and found Stoney Rigg, where there was rocks for sheltering under, and grass for lying on, and tarns close by what give em water. There wasn’t no folk for miles, and so they stayed there. And cut in a crag they found a cave what was small and dark, and they crawled inside and it was enough to hide em.

So they give up their travelling ways, and stayed for years on the mountain. They burned nettles and sage and scratched prayers on tree trunks, and no one found em and they called emselves lucky.

A lotta years’d gone by, and after her mother’d died from some strange disease the river give her, and her father’d died from some strange madness the animals give him, Anna and the ones what was still left in her tribe got joined by another group of Gypsies what was trying to get away from the murdering gadje as well. My mother’s tribe wasn’t so keen on the new ones. They was strange Gypsies of a different sort – just one family of em, what’d come from countries far away and spoke words the others couldn’t always understand. The elders of my mother’s tribe said it was all right for em to stay, but they give a warning to their own folk that no one was to get too close to em, what mostly just meant my mother wasn’t to go falling in love with the boy they’d brung.

Anna’s heart was full of lonely by then, after the years what’d took away her parents and left nothing in the way of love or good luck. And the lonely got hold of her so hard, it pretty much took the tongue outta her, and she hardly knew no more how to talk to a body.

But the new boy, whats name was Joe, took a liking to her anyway. He’d got a kushti sorta heart in him, so Evelyn reckoned, and a talking way about him, and he didn’t seem to mind when my mother never said nothing back. He used to take Anna wandering over the hills, where he taught her how to hunt for rabbits and hedgehogs, and how to skin em and cook em in a stew. He was handsome and strong, and he took away some of that old lonely at her heart, and it wasn’t long before he fell to loving her, and even though the rest of the kumpania was dead set against it, Anna fell to loving him, too, until in the end they’d fell so far, there wasn’t a hope of em ever getting up again.

Evelyn was the only person in the whole kumpania what reckoned how this was a kushti thing because she could see how Anna’d got happy again at last. She’d kept her caring eye on Anna ever since her mother and father’d died. It were a promise she’d made to em, back when they was still alive but things was looking their worst. She tried her hardest to convince the elders that they oughta let em get married, but they only said no and didn’t approve, because the man my mother loved was a strange one and spoke a different language and they reckoned he’d got bad in his soul.

So they didn’t get married, but they got a baby what was me. They was frightened when they knew I was coming to em, and Anna tried her best to hide it, but after five months’d gone by, her belly got big and her hair got thick and there wasn’t no hiding to be done no more. The elders saw and they got full of anger. The men of the tribe got together and they beat Joe, and Joe got the fear in him so hard, he run away to no one knew where. Anna’s heart broke at losing him and she was cross that he hadn’t tried to take her with him because she’d of gone, given half the chance. But Evelyn, who was wise, said you never knew what went on in someone else’s heart or their head, for that matter, and Anna wasn’t to think bad of the boy. He was just young and afraid, and sometimes fear could turn out stronger even than love.

The elders didn’t have no pity. They said Anna’d brung em shame and needed punishing and talked about how they was gonna make things as hard for her as they could.

When she heard all this, Anna ran away. She ran to the bottom of the mountain, to where there was trees and Ullswater Lake. She wasn’t sure when the baby was coming, but once she’d got a sign it’d be some time soon, she waited till evening, when the sky’d be dark enough to hide her, and she trekked round the lake and into the village. She collected all the junk the gadje dumped. They left stuff everywhere – in the forest, by the road, outside their pretty stone houses. She got blankets, cushions, old dirty sheets. She was a Gypsy. She knew how to use it.

It was winter now, and Ullswater were frozen, but Anna couldn’t never sleep on no gadje’s sheet. She got a dead branch and smashed and smashed till the ice cracked open and the water come up to the top again. Then she sunk the sheets in the lake, scrubbed the gadje off em, and hung em up to dry in the trees. While they was hanging there, she walked round and round em, tying up knots in every one. The next day she walked the other way and untied em all again, so’s there’d be no knots in the cord when the baby come.

By the time that baby started on its way, the ground was full up with snow and Anna was cold. She crawled far under the tree and sent up prayers.

The snow turned red with blood. Anna’d got to the wild time. She wailed and grunted; she worried about the blood and the foxes.

She grabbed icicles off the weeping willow’s branches and sunk her teeth into em, suffocating under that huge, breaking belly. Later, she pushed and howled, and got the sound of tearing flesh, and a girl fell out of her onto the dark red snow, grey and silent, till Anna reached down and my cry took its place in the mountains.

Anna swaddled the baby in the old gadje sheets. She was weak and the snow all round her was bleeding red. The blood warmed the ice; the ice froze the blood. The baby cried.

Anna held me against her chest, and lay down in the snow. ‘Cry, baby,’ she ordered. ‘Cry.’

By the time Evelyn come walking by, hunting for her, Anna was dead. Evelyn heard the baby cry, and she followed the sound till it brung her to the weeping willow tree and the snow all around it what’d got stained with too much blood. She pulled back the branches and peered inside. The sight of it all made her gasp, but there wasn’t no time for tears. Quick and gentle, she took the baby off Anna’s chest and held it against her own, folding it up warm and quiet in her coat.

She looked at Anna, lying white as could be in all that bleeding snow. ‘Chey, chey,’ she whispered and stroked back her hair and kissed her face. ‘Chey.’

And she took me away, and I was hers.

So that was how I come to be Evelyn’s. She left Anna in the blood-red snow and carried me off up the mountain and back to the kumpania.

‘Anna is dead,’ she said when she got there. ‘And this here’s her baby. A girl. We’ve gotta keep her.’

The lady elder looked up from what she was doing – mending old clothes what’d got torn when they was drying in the trees – and sounded like she was interested. ‘Anna’s dead?’ she said, and Evelyn could hear shock and sorry in her voice.

She nodded and told em the sight she’d seen on the ground under the weeping willow. ‘We can’t leave the baby there to die as well. We must go back and take care of poor Anna, and say goodbye to her like we love her.’

But the man elder’s heart was hard. He shook his head. ‘Who will look after the child?’ he said. ‘Who will feed it now its mother’s gone? We ain’t got milk enough for ourselves. And the child is full of shame, Evelyn. Full of it. Parents ain’t married, no father around, and now the mother’s got punished and the child’s gotta live off the kindness of others. We ain’t having it, Evelyn. Can’t afford it, don’t need the shame of it.’

Evelyn got anger stirring in her heart. ‘Then I’m taking this baby and I’m gonna bring her up myself. I don’t care if there ain’t so much as air to feed her. I gotta try my hardest.’

And that night, when the kumpania was all sleeping, she hitched the old red wagon to the brown mare’s back, then took every sheet and bit of material what she could find, even including the purple silks what the tarot cards and rune stones was wrapped up in, and away we went down the mountain, where we got swallowed up by the gulp of the valley and off to a new life on our own.

Evelyn give me my names. The first was my true name, the real one what she whispered in my ear the night we left the kumpania and what she ain’t never breathed again since. A Gypsy don’t tell no one their real name, so they can trick the evil spirits and keep em away. Then there come my Romany name, the one I mostly went by, but what only other Gypsies could know. But the gadje all just call me Miriam. I don’t trust none of em enough to tell em my Romany name.

Evelyn’d got a Romany name what the Gypsies all called her, but I just called her Dey, like she was my real mother.

I s’pose maybe my real mother’d already give me a name, and maybe she whispered it in my ear the minute I’d got born, but Evelyn reckoned she probably had other things on her mind, because she was dying by then, so she give me a name as well, just to be safe. So maybe I’ve got two real names for keeping the evil outta my life, but if that’s the case, then a double helping ain’t seemed to make much difference so far.

The bad luck come when our wagon and horse got broke and we ended up in Lime Street, because it was them slums what killed Evelyn, and it was them slums where I met Katie-May, and she was the one what brung the trouble into my life.

We got through the worst of the winter well enough. Of course, there was the weather to contend with and hunger in our bodies, what we did our best to get rid of with fortune-telling and music-making. But then all of a sudden the cholera come.

There wasn’t no fighting it for the poor souls what got struck. You could hear em all moaning and groaning as it took hold of their bellies. Then their eyes’d sink deep into their skulls, their skin’d dry up, and their bodies’d start pouring out shit until the whole place was running with it and stinking like a sewer. Once they’d died, the bodies had to be got rid of, what wasn’t no easy thing, so a lot of em we had to just roll into the river, where they floated away to hell.

Me and Evelyn carried on with our lives as well as we could, taking ourselves to the city every morning, where I’d stand in doorways and play my tunes till my throat got sore and my jaw ached with the work of it. We tried our hardest not to drink no water or do anything what’d give us the disease, because by then the cholera’d got hold of the whole city and even the Christians was dying of it, so that was when we knew things was bad.

But it come for us, in the end. Evelyn come to my doorway to get me one afternoon, and as we was walking back to Lime Street, she complained how thirsty she was and how her stomach was aching, and we looked at each other with fear in our hearts because of course, we knew well enough what this meant.

And that night, Evelyn couldn’t hardly move, and she couldn’t hardly say nothing, neither, and I went creeping about the bridges, trying to find a blanket to wrap her up in, but even when I got one, it didn’t last long because it got covered in the cholera mess and I couldn’t do nothing but toss it in the river.

So for the next lotta days, I didn’t go off and do no singing or making music. I just sat under the bridge with Evelyn and give her water when I could. I listened if she talked and I made her promises about living a good life and took her hand and cried sometimes, until in the end her breath went away and she was dead.

So that was that. All I’d got in the world now was my tin whistle and Evelyn’s tarot deck, wrapped up in purple silk to keep the magic inside. Before she got ill, Evelyn’d been teaching me the tarot, and what the cards all meant. She used to sit with me in the evenings, show me the cards and make me talk about the things I saw in em – she said that was the way of training my fortune-teller’s instinct. And so, sometimes, after she’d gone, I’d sit on my own and study the cards myself, and there was days when I read futures for the other folk in Lime Street, as a way of practising for when I was old enough to make a living of it myself.

I read my own future, too, now and then, because I was feeling bad about things and wanted a bit of hope for the life what was ahead of me. But then I decided it wasn’t as easy to go reading your own future as it is to go reading others’. Folk with fortune-telling gifts affect the cards in strange ways, and they bring out futures of the wrong sort. Besides that, I’d also got myself a habit back then of throwing away the bad futures and only holding on to the good ones.

So now I can’t much remember what was in them bad futures I first read, but what I know for certain is that never, not never, did I see for myself a life as bad as what I’ve ended up with. Of course, I saw a few heartaches and a bit of a sorry state of affairs here and there, but I never saw no convict ships or no crafty, holy reverends and their sons. The only thing I did see once was this:

Some trouble come up in the shape of some stolen goods – I never saw what the goods was, but s’posed em just to be chickens or a gold ring, or some other such thing as the gadje’s meant to give poor folk to help make the world a bit fairer – and after the stolen goods come a judge. And then after the judge come death.

Well, this was one of them futures what I threw away, quick as a piss in the snow. But it played on my mind a bit, and it was a relief in a lotta ways when the trouble come and then went off again, because I thought then it was all over and got hopeful about the other future I’d took for myself – the one with the big house and the rich husband and all them other things folk have to make em happy, such as babies and rubies and the like. Though I admit, I never did quite deal me this future, but had to go spreading the pack face-up on the ground, and picking out the cards I needed, one by one.

Once Evelyn’d been dead a while, Katie-May come up to where I was huddled up in my spot under the bridge and said, ‘You’d better come and live with us. You won’t survive on your own.’

And because I hadn’t got no better offers, I decided that’s what I’d do.

Katie-May didn’t do no work at all to get her money. She just went robbing and begging. Every day, after I’d done my singing, she took me ducking in and out of streets and alleys, and we snatched food off the vendors’ stalls and out the bakers’ shops,