Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [160]
‘I wish I could read,’ she said regretfully. ‘I am very ignorant of world affairs.’
He put his hand on hers again. ‘Mary, you can learn to read if you wish for that. But do not say you are ignorant, for you have a greater intelligence and wisdom than many people I know who consider themselves clever.’
He got up then. ‘I must go now. Try not to fret, and be sure you will be on my mind all the time I am in Cornwall.’
He kissed her on the cheek. ‘Wear the dress, Mary, it might make you remember the days before your young life turned sour.’
Mary did wear the dress, a great deal. And Boswell was right, it did make her remember her girlhood. She thought of running to meet Thomas Coogan in Plymouth, the way he used to catch her in his arms and spin her round, and the heady delights of kissing him.
There were no looking-glasses in Newgate, but she could tell by the way men looked at her in the dress that she wasn’t as worn and plain as she had previously thought. Knowing that helped her; she found herself thinking of freedom more and more, and despairing sometimes that it would never come.
Chapter nineteen
‘What ails you, Mary?’ Boswell asked, reaching across the table in the Newgate visiting room to take her hand. ‘You’ve hardly said a word to me today!’
Mary had been imprisoned for seven months now, and it was a bitterly cold February day. She was wearing a man’s great-coat, one of two that had been given to James Martin by his lady admirers. She had thick woollen stockings, and mittens on her hands, but she was still so cold she felt she might just die from it. But it wasn’t only the cold which was making her so morose, she had lost heart.
‘Will we ever get pardoned?’ she asked in a small voice. ‘Tell me now if it isn’t going to happen, Bozzie. I can’t go on waiting and hoping like this.’
Each time Boswell came to see her he told her how busy he’d been on her and her friends’ behalf. He said he was making a nuisance of himself to everyone, browbeating Henry Dundas and anyone else who was influential. But as the months crawled by, Mary couldn’t help but suspect Boswell’s promises were empty ones.
‘It is seven years now since you were first arrested,’ Boswell said gently. ‘You have borne that with such fortitude. Surely you can be patient for just a little longer? Or is it that you’ve lost faith in me?’
Mary didn’t want to admit that was the case, for she was very aware of how little she knew of the world outside the prison gates, or of lawyers, judges and Home Secretaries. Boswell tended to talk to her as an equal, telling her about famous people he’d met, parties he’d been to, the theatre or concerts, assuming she knew who or what he was talking about. But how could she? She was an illiterate country girl. The closest she’d come to a concert was seeing a marching band in Plymouth. Not once in her life had she sat down to dinner at a table laid with silver knives, forks and crystal glasses.
When Boswell spoke of Lord Falmouth, Evan Nepean and Henry Dundas, people he was seeing on her behalf, they were just names. She didn’t know who or what these people were. For all she knew he could be inventing them to make himself sound busy.
Her father used to have a saying: ‘In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is King.’ She had only come to understand what was meant by that when she was in Port Jackson. There she was smarter than most of the other prisoners, many of the Marines, and indeed some of the officers too. She had come to believe she was astute about people and capable of coping with almost anything.
But London and Newgate were a very different kettle of fish to Port Jackson. Everyone was sharp here, they might not have any more book-learning than she, but they were cunning. All of them, convicts, gaolers or visitors from outside the prison walls, had far more breadth of knowledge and experience than she did.
She might have been to the bottom of the world and back, but since arriving