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Matron Hutchinson handed Ludlow a clean Female Factory uniform but offered no clothing for Arabella. Mr. Hutchinson had already perused the thick black volume recording Mrs. Tedder’s literacy and good conduct aboard the Hindostan. Nurse, cook, housekeeper, and mother, she exceeded the expectations for a petty thief. Towering over the slight widow, the stodgy superintendent informed her that she was assigned to the new prison nursery on Liverpool Street back in the town’s center. Nothing was said about Arabella, and Ludlow dared not inquire. As for herself, she had just received the most favorable work assignment a prisoner could expect.

It was nearly half past six by the time all the Hindostan transports were processed. Before clanging the supper bell, Deputy Matron Cato assigned Ludlow to a mess of twelve. Arabella was content to follow her mum’s lead and dunked her allotment of brown bread into the watery soup. At seven o’clock, Mrs. Hutchinson rang the prison bell for evening chapel, held an hour earlier than during the summer schedule. Mother Tedder took her little girl’s hand as they walked toward the modest sanctuary and took a seat before the overstuffed Reverend Bedford. Her first night in the valley, Ludlow prayed for many miracles. As the Southern Cross fell behind Mt. Wellington’s black shadow, she draped an arm around Arabella’s waist. Before she knew it, mother and child lay snuggled asleep in a hammock that barely cleared the floor under their weight.

Morning muster was at six o’clock in the spring. Ludlow lined up for daily inspection in Yard One while Arabella peeked around from behind her. All shades of green burst across Mt. Wellington, and daffodils danced around its base. Soft pink apple blossoms and cherry trees in shades of dusty rose dotted the hilly farmland Ludlow could smell beyond the prison walls. Most of the women knew little about geography other than that they had been sent “beyond the seas.” The reversed seasons were no doubt a source of confusion as they witnessed their first September spring in the Southern Hemisphere.

This time of year, Cascades convict veterans worked an extended morning session from six thirty until eight A.M. The bells rang for a half-hour breakfast break, and then it was off to chapel for morning prayers before the workday began again in earnest. Reverend Bedford and supporters among the colony’s elite believed that forced labor redeemed the body’s worth, if not the soul’s. His captive congregation had little patience for his rather theatrical hissing and spitting from the pulpit. Twice daily, the aptly labeled Holy Willie chastised them for their evil ways and exhorted the virtues of industry for opening a window on redemption.

Widow Tedder’s atonement commenced officially after morning chapel. Tapping her foot on the chapel steps, Mrs. Cato impatiently jingled the bell that seemed permanently attached to her palm and summoned #151 to her side. Deputy Matron Cato was charged with escorting prisoners assigned to the Liverpool Street nursery. It was already half past eight; there was not a moment to waste in putting each woman to work. Performing her duty as prison midwife, Mrs. Cato had helped deliver many of the tiny babies now lodged in the new nursery.

Liverpool Street had opened only a year before in response to a newspaper exposé about the atrocious conditions at the Cascades nursery, named the “Valley of the Shadow of Death” by the Colonial Times.15 Inside the Female Factory walls, at least twenty infants died during the first three months of 1838.16 Authorities had failed to acknowledge that malnutrition and illness had raised the infant mortality rate to four times that of the colony’s free settlers. Instead, they blamed the convict mothers, accusing them of deliberately keeping their children near death in order to be with them in the nursery rather than returning to hard labor in Yard Two.

Matron Hutchinson herself understood the devastation of losing a child. She had given birth to twelve