“We traded the rabbits and eggs for flour and tea,” Mary tells her great-granddaughter. “But no one wanted turnip so we had to take 'em back. I remembers gnawing on one going home in the dark. I allow the trip killed the horse, leastways I don't remember him after that. I knows he wasn't there next winter when things got so bad—we would have et him.”
John Luke died. One morning Mary awoke knowing there was something different about the hut. She lay curled down against Tessa in the mound of dirty fur and wondered what it could be. She looked around at the rough walls, covered in white rime, at the shuttered hole where pale light seeped down around the edges of rabbit skin, at the small pile of brush near the firehole, at the iron pot, carefully balanced to protect a tiny flame that had smouldered all night. The room looked the same, dark and smoke blackened. As always, it smelled of oil and dirt, of sweat, boiled turnip and of the earth floor—a smell that was so much a part of her world that she did not notice it. That morning, though, something cold and strange was waiting in the room.
Then she realized that the strange thing was silence—there was no whimper, no mewing sound from John Luke. Mary neither looked nor moved, she lay curved spoon-like into Tessa waiting for something to happen.
Eventually Una stirred, woke, sat up and leaned over her son. She uncovered the miserable, yellow little body and cried. But only for a minute. Mary watched through half-closed eyes as her mother turned away from John Luke, stood up and started pacing around the room. She began picking things up, making a pile on the rough plank table, a mug, two knives, a small tin box she had pulled out from under a rock in the corner, the two remaining turnips and the flint. She put the last of the tea into the kettle, carefully shaking every grain out of the bag, poured boiling water into the pot and left it steeping on the hot ashes. Mary noticed that her mother was moving very slowly and that her hands shook as she poured the water.
“Get up,” she told Mary and Tessa, who were still huddled next to their dead brother. Their mother took a spade from behind the door and went out, letting an icy blast of air into the room. Since the girls had been wearing every garment they owned to bed for a month, it took only a second to pull on patched boots and the heavy jackets their mother made by brailling rabbit skins together with twine. The girls went over to the fire and held their hands as near as possible to the steaming kettle. As they squatted there, sniffing the smell of tea, Mary whispered to Tessa that John Luke was dead.
When Una came back, her face and neck were wet with perspiration, but she had not been able to dig in the frozen ground. Without a word to the girls, their mother went to the same corner she had lifted the box from and began to dig in the earthen floor of the hut.
When the hole was big enough she returned to the bed and rolled a sheepskin tightly around their brother. She started to pick him up but stopped and went to the table, gesturing to the girls to join her. When they were standing one on each side, Una eased up the lid of the rusty box and lifted out a brooch—tiny stones set in a circle of purple light. The girls gasped. Mary gazed covetously at the pin that seemed to draw every bit of light in the dark room into itself. It was the most lovely thing she had ever seen. How mean her mother was to have hidden it all these years! Tears gathered in the child's eyes and rolled down her cheeks. “What would it have hurt if me'n Tessa had been able to look at it betimes?” she thought bitterly.
Una picked up the glowing brooch and pinned it into Tessa's heavy jacket—on the inside where no one could see—she patted the jacket.
Mary was about to protest, when her mother reached into the tin again and pulled out two long hairpins. The wavy spikes were amber coloured, ending in miniature fans shaped from mother of pearl—it would be thirty years before Mary learned the name of the iridescent material. Una pushed the pins into Mary's thick hair, one on each side. Then her mother patted the pins, just as she had Tessa's jacket, in what might have been a blessing.
Left at the bottom of the little box was a single button, silver with the outline of a large bird on its tarnished surface. Una Sprig picked up the button, rubbed it across her lips and put it back into the tin. She closed the lid, and, taking it over to the body, tucked the tin down inside the skin she had wound around her son. She picked up the small bundle, slowly carried it across to the hole she had dug, laid it in the ground and shovelled the dirt back over it.
Her mother had stood there a long time, leaning on the spade and looking at the newly turned earth. Behind her, Tessa and Mary waited. Mary was sure her mother was going to fall forward and die. She reached over and took Tessa's hand, wondering what they would do with their mother when she was dead. But Una had not fallen. She turned, laid the spade against the wall, went to the fire and carefully poured the tea. They drank slowly, warming their hands on the bowls. There was enough tea for them to have a second bowlful. When the tea was gone, Una told the girls to take a quilt each, tie it around their shoulders and to put on their heavy caps. She did the same and, after adding the kettle and bowls to the pile on the table, she pulled the corners of the old cloth together to make a sack.
“Where's we goin'?” Tessa asked. It was the first time she had spoken that morning.
“To Coltsford,” their mother said, “there's nothing left to eat.”
“But what'll we do without a house ta live in?” Tessa's bottom lip quivered.
“I don't know,” Una looked around as if she might see an egg or bit of bread they had not eaten, but there was nothing. “Maybe I can get work in one of the big houses, or maybe the postmistress got somethin' for us from your father. We can't stay here and perish.”
They walked all day. It was slow, cold going. The ground was rock hard and in places the path had turned to ice. Dark came and they had still not seen the church spire that was the first sign of Coltsford. They tried to continue but when Mary stumbled into freezing water up to her knees they had to stop for the night.
They turned into a field where stubble stood stiff against the sky, tinkling like glass as they moved through it. Mary's feet were freezing. They tried to make a fire with the flint and bits of grass, but it would not light and after a time they were too cold to try any longer. Tessa rolled their two quilts together and pulled Mary down beside her. She hauled the wet boots off and rubbed her sister's feet and legs until blood began to circulate. Then the children curled against each other and slept, no less comfortably than they had the night before.
When the cold, grey dawn came their mother could not walk. Again and again she tried to stand but the willpower that had carried her through the previous day was gone. She told the girls to go on to the village and ask after Master Potts. Surely he would send someone out for her. They wrapped their blankets around her and left without a word. It was a long time before they reached the village and longer still before they could get anyone to understand and go for their mother.
Una was dead when they brought her, stretched out on the back of a longcart, into Coltsford. The two girls and the body were taken to the house of Master Potts who disclaimed all responsibility for the wretched family.
“It was only out of charity that I allowed the Sprigs to live in the house for as long as they have. There's nothing I can, or should, do for them,” he told the village constable who delivered the children to his door.
However, being one of the guardians of the poor for the county, William Potts did make arrangements to have Una laid away in a field behind the regular graveyard, a narrow strip of land where paupers, gypsies and others unworthy of the rites of the church were buried.
The girls were more difficult to dispose of. Master Potts gave Mary and Tessa a stern lecture on the trouble they were causing him and the village: “Coltsford is already supplying alms to a dozen families who, had they been provident, could have gotten along on their own. But no, they come to us saying it's the coldest winter in a hundred years—as if that was a reason why we should take in paupers from all over the countryside. Why, there'll be no end to it!”
The other guardians must have agreed with him, for the next day, after spending the night in a back kitchen of Master Potts' house (where the cook fed them the best supper and breakfast of their lives) Mary and Tessa were trundled off to Christchurch where the district workhouse was located.
The workhouse was a bleak two storey building with a graveyard on one side and a stable on the other. There was a church on the far side of the graveyard and a row of dingy houses facing. The girls were met at the front door by Mrs. Brockwell and an overpowering smell of disinfectant—the two were to be forever connected in Mary's mind.
Mrs. Brockwell had been recently appointed to her position as overseer of the workhouse after a bout of typhus had wiped out most of the inmates. She was well chosen, for never had such an enemy of dirt lived as Mrs. Brockwell. She barely gave Mr. Potts' driver time to deliver his message before she had the girls stripped, into a tub and scrubbed until their skin was raw.
Mary and Tessa lived in Christchurch workhouse for the next three years, scrubbing clothing, floors, dishes and the bodies of old, diseased and dying paupers who spent their last days there. The girls worked thirteen hours a day and lived mainly on watery soup and workhouse bread, which was made with flour the miller swept up from his floor each night.
“I s'pose you might think we were miserable, but you know, we weren't,” Mary tells her great-granddaughter.
“Betimes we thought of poor little John Luke buried under the ground in Master Potts' hut, and of our mother, cold and alone outside the churchyard in Coltsford, but we never gave a thought to our Da, nor expected to see him again 'tho we told Mrs. Brockwell often that he would surely be back one day and pay for our keep like Master Potts' driver told her.”
Although Mary and Tessa worked until their backs ached, until their hands were raw from lye and. water, they were young and hopeful and still had enough energy to join a group of town urchins who congregated in the churchyard each evening at dusk to play toss stick, hoist yer sails and run, or to sit on fallen headstones eating food the boys had stolen.
“Me sister Tessa was all there for a bit of fun, she could get us all splittin' our sides pretendin' to be Mrs. Brockwell. The poor woman, who was not all that bad to us now I thinks back on it, had this way of rollin' her eyes up to heaven and moanin' about the sin and filth of the world. 'Twas a fair treat to watch Tessa do her.”
A rat-faced youngster called Tim Toop, the smallest, although not the youngest of the thieves, became Mary's and Tessa's special friend. Mrs. Brockwell, who sometimes hired one of the boys to dig over the potato garden or do some job beyond the strength of even Tessa or Mary, refused to have Tim near the place because, she said, “He'd as lief steal from his friends as from his enemies, and cares not for God nor man!”
This was true. Tim was smart and quick, with darting little eyes and hands that followed in a flash. He could have a cake, a ribbon, or a coin, off the shelf and tucked into the folds of his ragged shirt without the person standing next to him being aware he had moved.
Tim was often in trouble with the band of thieves he ran with. He was greedy and liked to keep his loot to himself, sometimes refusing to relinquish it to the common pool the boys traded for clothing and food, or to pay the watchman who let them sleep in a shed down on the docks. Still he was perversely generous with Tessa and Mary, whom he called Blackie because, he said, “Ye're like a black cloud compared with Tessa.”
When Tim was in rebellion against the bigger boys he would stay behind when the others left the graveyard and share some special treat with the girls. Once he had a bag of strange, sweet nuts, another time a small loaf of white bread still warm from the oven. One glorious night they sat around a headstone sharing a complete chicken, stuffed and roasted.
As the years passed without any word of Tom Sprig, Mrs. Brockwell became more and more impatient.
“Good nature can only be taken so far. There's no reason I should be responsible for two big girls like them, especially now they're comin' to the age when they needs to be watched,” Mary heard the woman tell Reverend Wentworth, the pastor of Saint James Church.
“I can't be after 'em day and night, your reverence, they needs more instruction than I can give 'em, if you take my meanin'.”
It was unclear what instruction Mrs. Brockwell was referring to, since her only communication to the girls was to tell them which floor to scrub, which old person to clean, or what vegetables to dig for tomorrow's soup. Tessa and Mary had never, as the old minister assumed, received any religious guidance, could not count or tell A from B.
The next time the minister and his wife came to do the rounds of the workhouse, Mrs. Wentworth spoke of a friend of hers who was going out to the islands of the new world, “Mrs. Armstrong is a gentlewoman, married to an upstanding Christian man who has made a good deal of money trading in cloth to the Army. It seems he has a mind now to set up business in this place called Newfound-land.”
The minister's wife explained that her friend was in need of two or three maid servants to take along since the family had four small children.
Welcoming what she considered to be divine intervention, Mrs. Brockwell immediately arranged for Tessa and Mary to be inspected by the lady and her husband. She herself signed the necessary papers that bonded the girls into service for five years in exchange for their passage to the new world.
“Seems to me not right to be given over for five years just to get to some place we never heard of,” Tessa said bravely.
“Altogether too flick with that tongue of yours, you are—it'll get you into trouble yet, mark my words,” Mrs. Brockwell told her. “Why, there's hundreds paying pounds for the opportunity you girls is gettin' for nothing. I can't think why you're so ungrateful—but then I s'pose that's the way of it—we'll be rewarded in heaven.”