The Potato Factory

The harsh memories flooded back and Mary was most hard put to restrain herself from weeping.

'I'm sorry, sir, I may not accept. There be reasons I ca

Mr Emmett made one last effort to persuade her. It was apparent that he did not like being refused and now spoke with some a

'Then let me teach sir!' Mary pleaded urgently. 'So that we may make more of our children to read and write and meet with your 'ighest demands!'

'Teach? Where? Teach who?'

'The orphanage, sir. The prison brats. If I could teach three mornings a week I could still manage the gardens.'

Mr Emmett looked bewildered. 'Your suggestion is too base to be regarded with proper amusement, Mary. These are misbegotten children, the spawn of convicts and drunken wretches!' It was apparent that he had become most alarmed at the thought. 'They ca

'Ergo sum, "I am one",' Mary said quietly. 'I were born a urchin same as them, slack-jawed and vacant o' face the way you looks when you be starvin'!' She cocked her head to one side and attempted to smile, though all the muscles of her lips could manage was a quiver at the corners of her mouth. She reached up to her bosom and clasped the Waterloo medal in her hand. 'Only three mornings?' she pleaded. 'I begs you to ask them folk at the orphanage, sir.'

The chief clerk seemed too profoundly shocked to continue and for some time he remained silent. 'Hmmph!' he growled at last. 'I shall see what I can make of it.' He shook his head slowly, clucking his tongue. 'Clerks out of street urchins, eh? I'll wager, it will be as easy to turn toads into handsome princes!'

A week later Mary received a message to see the Reverend Thomas Smedley, the Wesleyan principal at the orphanage in New Town which had been given the surprising name of the King's Orphan School, though no teaching whatsoever took place in the cold, damp and cheerless converted distillery which served as a home for destitute and deserted children. With this invitation came a pass to leave the prison garden so that she might attend the meeting scheduled for the latter part of the afternoon.

The Reverend Smedley was a short, stout man, not much past his fortieth year, who wore a frock coat and dark trousers, both considerably stained. Neither was his linen too clean, the dog collar he wore being much in need of a scrub and a douse of starch. He wore small gold-rimmed spectacles on a nose which seemed no more than a plump button, and the thick lenses exaggerated the size of his dark eyes. Though it was a face which seemed disposed to be jolly, it was not. Any jollity it may have once possessed was defeated by a most profoundly sour expression. The Reverend Smedley was clean shaven and his cheeks much crossed with a multiplicity of tiny scarlet veins, a curious sanguinity in one so young and not a drinking man. He was a follower of Charles Wesley and, unlike his Anglican counterparts, was sure to be a teetotaller. Instead of adding a rosy blush, these scrambled veins upon his fat cheeks exacerbated further his saturnine expression. It seemed as though he might be ill with a tropical fever, for apart from his roseate jowls, his skin was yellow, while a thin veneer of perspiration covered his podgy face. To Mary he looked a man much beset by life who was in need of the attentions of a good wife or a sound doctor.

'What is your religion, Miss… er, Abacus?' Mary had been left to stand while Thomas Smedley had flipped the tails of his frock coat, and sat upon the lone chair behind a large desk in the front office of the children's orphanage.

'I can't rightly say, sir. I don't know that I 'as one.' Mary paused and shrugged. 'I be nothin' much o' nothin'.'

'A satanist then? Or is it an atheist?'

'Neither, sir, if you mean I believes in the opposite or not at all.'

The Reverend Thomas Smedley looked exceedingly sour and snapped at Mary in a sharp, hard voice which contrasted with his flaccid appearance.

'Do you, or do you not, have the love of the Lord Jesus Christ in your heart? Have you or have you not, been washed in the Blood of the Lamb? Are you, or are you not, saved of your sins? If not, you may not!' These three questions had been too rapid to answer each at a time and his voice had risen fully an octave with each question so that the last part was almost shrill, shouted at Mary in a spray of spittle.

However, at their completion he seemed at once exhausted, as though he had rehearsed well the questions and they had come out unbroken and, to his surprise, much as he had intended them to sound. Now he sat slumped in his chair and his head hung low, with his chin tucked into the folds of his neck, while his chubby hands grasped the side of the desk and his magnified eyes looked obliquely up at Mary as he waited for her reply.

'May not what, sir?' Mary asked politely.

'Teach! Teach! Teach!' Smedley yelled.

'I do not understand, sir? I shall not teach them either of lambs or washing of blood, or sins and least of all of God, but of the salvation of numbers and letters, sir.'

The clergyman looked up and pointed a stubby finger at Mary. 'I am not mocked saith the Lord!' he shouted.

Oh, Gawd, not another one! Mary thought, casting her mind to the dreadful Potbottom, though outwardly she smiled modestly at the Reverend Smedley. 'I had not meant to mock, sir, my only desire is to teach the word o' man and leave the business o' Gawd to the pulpit men, like yourself.'

'God is not business! God is love! I am the way, the truth and the light saith the Lord! Unthinkable! Quite, quite, unthinkable!' His eyes appeared to narrow and his fat fist banged down upon the desk. 'Unless you are born again we ca

'Who is teaching them now?' Mary asked, hoping to change the subject.

'They have religious instruction twice each day,' the principal shot back angrily. 'That is quite sufficient for their need.'

'Oh, you have used the Bible to teach them to read and write,' Mary said, remembering this was how the Quaker women had suggested they perform this task on board ship.

'We teach salvation! The love of the Lord Jesus and the redemption of our sins so that we may be washed clean, we do not teach reading and writing here!' the preacher barked. 'These children shall grow up to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, that is the place for which they are destined in the Scriptures. They are no less the sons of Ham than the blacks who hide in the hills and steal our sheep. These orphan children are loved by the Lord, for He loves the sparrow as well as the eagle, the less fortunate as well as the gifted child.'