Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [175]
It was wonderful of course to feel clean, to be free, to have a comfortable bed and good food to eat. Yet freedom was terrifying too, especially when Boswell drove her headlong into it, as he had at that first supper, making no allowances for her lack of knowledge of the world he lived in.
Boswell’s friends were all gentry, and when he took her to visit some of them in their homes, she felt she would rather be left below stairs with their servants than be studied as if she were some curious specimen brought from overseas.
There was guilt too. Many nights she’d lain awake in her comfortable bed and all she could think of was Emmanuel and Charlotte. It didn’t seem right that she was living so well now, when their short lives had been so wretched. Even now, a month later, she couldn’t get away from that thought, it cropped up again and again whatever she was doing. She would go over every part of their lives, looking for something she’d done, or hadn’t done, which had caused their deaths. And it always came back to the same thing. If she had stayed in Port Jackson, they might have survived.
These thoughts didn’t only come when she was alone. She could be riding in a cab with Boswell and see a mother and child together, and she would feel a stab of pain. When she saw little girls of Charlotte’s age in rags, out on the streets, she felt a surge of anger at a society which cared so little for its youngest members.
She also missed James, Sam, Nat and Bill desperately, not only for their company and the shared memories, but for the position she held in their group. She was the leader, the one whose intelligence, practicality and knowledge were valued. Outside Newgate she was an oddity, and people talked down to her as if she was dim-witted.
As the days went by she gradually adjusted. She accepted she would have to learn how to fit in with normal people again, that she would have to learn to make small-talk, and to live within the boundaries expected of women.
She found the courage to cross busy roads, weaving in and out of the carriages. She learned how to use a fork by practising at home and to put her hair up the way Mrs Wilkes taught her. She even mastered lacing up her stays by herself.
Mrs Wilkes was such a kind, good woman, old enough at over forty to be motherly, but still young enough to understand just how inadequate and overawed Mary felt sometimes. She admitted she sometimes found Mr Boswell a little too bumptious for her taste, but she put that down to his breeding and fame as a writer. She would make a cup of tea, invite Mary to sit with her in the kitchen and get her to talk about anything that worried her.
Mrs Wilkes explained anything Mary was embarrassed to ask Boswell about. She understood why Mary didn’t want to be put on show to his friends, and suggested ways in which Mary could make this clear to him. But above all she knew how strange it was for Mary to suddenly find herself out of her real station in life.
‘Don’t allow it to swamp you,’ she advised. ‘Learn as much as you can by watching and listening. Enjoy your fame without wondering how long it will last. After what you’ve been through, you deserve it. But above all, Mary, hold on to your courage, that’s what makes you so fascinating.’
When Mrs Wilkes wasn’t offering tea and advice, she dosed Mary up with malt, made her drink lemon juice for a clearer complexion, and took her shopping for new clothes. Even though Boswell believed he alone was teaching Mary how to be what he called ‘a middling sort’, a big step up from the poor but respectable roots of her childhood, in truth it was Mrs Wilkes who taught her most.
Yet along with the painful and bewildering moments there were many more joyful, happy ones. Mary had been to the Tower of London and seen the lions there, she’d visited St Paul’s and the Monument