The Lantern Moon Read Online Free Page B

without saying a word. She had been a baby when her father went away so she did not remember him at all. ‘Perhaps he got sick and died like Mr Evans always tells you. If you marry Mr Evans we should not have to sew gloves.’
    â€˜What? Are you going to marry Mr Evans?’ Annie looked at her mother in disbelief.
    â€˜Your father is not dead,’ said Kezia fiercely. ‘One day we will all be together again. His time will be up in three years and he will have his liberty.’
    â€˜It’s not fair,’ said Annie, ‘it’s all Master Evans’ fault.’
    Her mother measured out a length of linen, wet the end in her mouth and threaded her needle. She did not want any more of this talk. ‘If it hadn’t been for Mr Evans, your father might have been hanged, Annie. And William would not have been able to go to the Grammar School. Remember that and try to think well of him for, without him, we would all have been in the workhouse.’
    Annie snorted. Four years earlier, her father, John Spears, a tanner, had been sentenced to hanging at the Shrewsbury Assizes for passing a forged banknote. It was only on account of a letter that Leonard Evans, the glove merchant, wrote to the judge asking for leniency, that his sentence was reduced. Instead of being hanged, he had been transported to the penal colony of New South Wales for seven years. The judge had not asked John Spears where he had got the banknote or he might have learned that Evans had given it to him in his wages.
    In the four years that they had been alone in England, they had had only two letters, both almost in tatters now from having been read and re-read so often. They had been sent from the convict ship Julius Caesar before he left, telling his wife and children that he was to be sent into exile at the other end of the world.
    â€˜My heart is broken,’ he wrote, ‘at the thought of having to part from all of you whom I love so dearly. To be cut off and sent into exile without having done any wrong to anyone is very hard on me. Forgive me the shame I have brought upon you and believe in my innocence always. May God protect you, my dear wife and children, and be merciful to me.’
    When that letter came, Kezia Spears had written to everyone she could think of, from the Shrewsbury judge to the Prime Minister himself, asking to be allowed to travel out to Australia to join her husband. ‘Spare me the dishonour of throwing myself and my children at the mercy of the parish,’ she wrote, ‘for I have no means to gain a living but by what I can earn by my needle and the work is very poorly paid. In Sydney, my skills in dressmaking and glove-making may be of value to the colony.’
    Although a few families were sometimes allowed to travel out on the convict ships and start a new life in Australia, Kezia Spears’ request was turned down. Before Annie’s eighth birthday came around, she and her mother were working round the clock as glove-makers for Mr Evans. Libby, then only two, would not have to begin work for another couple of years.
    In those early years, her brother William went to the school near the Mill Street Gate, with Mr Evans paying the fees, but what the glove merchant gave with one hand he took back with the other. The rent for the house in Corve Street was soon nearly as much as Kezia and Annie couldearn with their sewing. They gave up the lower floor and moved into the one room upstairs. One Friday William threw down his slate and told his mother he had left school. At first he took a job as a servant for Abraham Smart and his wife in Quality Square, but within months they had made him their apprentice hat-maker.
    â€˜Give me a glove to hem,’ said Annie, at last, to her mother, ‘and let me help you for I will not be able to sleep if you are still at work and the candles burning.’
    â€˜It’s not fair, Annie, my love,’ said Kezia. ‘You have your own