The grey walls of Newgate shadowed the street, and the stench of human despair reached out, as much a bodily presence as the guards at her side. Prue feared it would drag her through the felons’ door and into the prison.
She froze in the street, and one of the guards shoved her forward, roughly but without malice. “Not going to get better if’n you stand here,” he told her.
Inside, the system moved into ponderous action. She, and the charges against her, were journalled, and she was passed into the hands of the prison staff. She felt a wave of horror as the guards left her alone with the turnkeys, as if her last connection with the outside world was walking away.
No. Tolliver would not abandon her. She had only to endure until he could make arrangements. David would let him know, would he not? Surely he would.
“P. Worth. Thief and murderer,” the turnkey who had spoken to the guards reported, as he ushered her into a dirty, cramped little room where two turnkeys waited, one behind an untidy desk and the other hunched over a meagre fire.
“Accused, awaiting trial, and innocent,” Prue said, amazed her voice was calm when she had to force it through a throat stiff with panic.
The turnkeys both snorted their amusement. “How much?” the one behind the desk asked.
Prue had no idea what he was talking about. “How much what?”
“Money. How much can you pay for a bed? For food?”
The Runners had taken all of her money, along with the money and jewels planted in her belongings. She had nothing. Tolliver would come. She had to believe that.
“A friend of mine is coming. He will bring whatever money I need.”
“Your friend,” he managed to invest the word with salacious meaning, “isn’t here now. We need money up front, not a thieving whore’s promises.”
“I have no money on me, but my friend will take care of it when he comes.” She would not panic. She could endure this.
The man behind the desk shook his head. “Have to be paid, sweetheart. Cash or kind.”
The other man, the one in front of the fire, spoke for the first time, “We could be kind if she was kind. What do you say, Merton?”
They leered at her, and she glared back. “Mr. Wakefield will avenge any insult to me,” she told them, David’s name crowding Tolliver’s off her tongue before she realised it.
Something got through to them. Her assumed confidence, perhaps, or David’s name, or her upper-class accent. They exchanged uncertain glances, then frowned at her. The bully behind the desk came to a decision. “Right, then. We’ll ’ave that dress. Worth a bob or two, that is.”
“And the shoes,” chimed in his accomplice. “Three shillings the shoes, two shillings the dress. Get you a bed in the main ward for a week, that will. Can’t do fairer than that.”
Prue backed against the wall. They weren’t seriously intending to take her dress and shoes, were they?
They were. “Come along, off with them. I could ’elp you, if you like.” The accomplice approached her, his leer stirring old ghosts so thoroughly that she had to swallow against a suddenly closing throat.
She untied her laces and slipped her feet out of the shoes, then began slowly undoing the buttons down the front of her dress until she realised the man behind the desk was palming himself, his mouth slack as he watched her avidly. She rushed the buttons then, and pulled the dress over her head, her cheeks burning. She wrapped the boots in the dress and thumped the bundle on the desk.
“Hold them safely,” she instructed coldly. “Mr. Wakefield will redeem them when he comes.”
The stone of the floor struck cold up through her stockinged feet, and cold radiated off the grimy stone of the passage walls as the two turnkeys escorted her through the prison in her shift. She was battered on every side by the constant din—shouting, screaming, screeching, crying, and various unidentified bangs and clatters. And the rank smell grew the closer they came to the place where she was to be confined.
One turnkey unlocked the door, while the other attempted to put his arm around Prue. “Don’t have to go in there if you was nice to us.” She slid sideways to evade him.
He gave her a brutal shove through the doorway. She stumbled and almost fell. The door clanged shut behind her, audible even through the tumult her entry had barely dented.
She was in an open space—a courtyard about forty feet long and ten wide, made smaller by the sheer number of women and small children occupying it. Three tiers of rooms had barred windows facing onto the courtyard. The door of the nearest one at ground level was open to show rows of pallets covering the floor.
Slowly, her eyes began to make sense of the constant churning movement: children running in and out of groups of women arguing, gossiping, playing cards and throwing dice, cooking over small fires, nursing babies, disciplining toddlers, drinking, eating, and shouting. In one corner, an argument descended into a hair-pulling fight, and further down the yard, a group of women who had been singing suddenly broke into a high-kicking dance, arm-in-arm in a long line.
The noise was indescribable, but not as intensely offensive as the smell: rotting food, human waste, unwashed bodies, all blended into a stench that clung to the inside of her nostrils.
She would burn her stockings and shift when she was free of this place.
It took Prue a moment to realise she was being addressed. The clump of women who approached her centred on a short dumpy woman with improbably red hair and hard, pale-blue eyes. The woman’s pudgy face twitched into a contemptuous snarl, and she repeated what she’d said. It made no more sense to Prue the second time—the accent so thick Prue couldn’t tell what the sounds meant, or where one word ended and another began.
“I beg your pardon,” she said, “I do not understand.”
The woman made another unintelligible string of sounds, this time to the women who trailed in orbit around her, each as mean and as hard as their leader. They laughed, a threatening noise rather than an amused one, watching Prue with avid eyes like cats waiting for the mouse to make a run for it.
The leader spoke again, and this time Prue managed to translate a few words. Queen? Better than us? By the sneer and the gestures, she was accusing Prue of considering herself superior to the other prisoners.
The more the woman spoke, the more easily Prue could tell what she was saying. “There’s one queen in Newgate, my dears. Who’s the queen of Newgate?”
“You are, Connie,” came the answer, in chorus.
Connie crowded into Prue, backing her up against the door. “I be queen, and don’t forget it. You hear me?”
Prue needed room. If it came to a fight, she still had the small dirk she carried in a sheath within her half-corset, but she would have to take out the leader first thing. She was a lot lighter than this Connie. If the woman grabbed her, it was all over.
She had only one advantage, but it might give her the edge. Connie had already assessed her threat potential and dismissed her.
Another string of sounds, which she untangled to: “Give me your hosen, and you’ll not croak today.” Hosen. Hose: stockings. The bully wanted Prue’s stockings as a bribe to forgo a murder.
If she had to stay in this hell, she’d have to confront Connie. Now that the bully had marked her a victim, she wouldn’t stop till Prue was naked and broken. Should she concede and hope Tolliver hurried? Or fight back now and hope the turnkeys intervened before she was killed by Connie’s followers?
She wasn’t moving fast enough to suit the woman, who suddenly struck out with the flat of her hand, a slap that Prue evaded before she could consider the appropriate reaction. Decision made, then. Connie couldn’t ignore the insult of someone refusing to stand still to be hit.
Prue edged toward the door. The small barred window into the passage was her best chance of attracting the turnkeys.
“Will you be kind enough to give me a moment, ma’am?” she asked. This polite request, as she’d hoped, prompted a chorus of laughter and derision, distracting Connie and her followers while Prue retrieved her knife.
The door was just to her left now. It swung open as she reached it, and Connie’s pack stopped their baying to gaze at the man who stood there.
“Ah, Mrs. Worth, there you are,” Lord Jonathan Grenford said, as casually as if he’d just come across her in a crowded beau monde ballroom. “I do hope I have not kept you waiting long. The traffic was fierce, and the people here…” He gave a dismissive flick of the fingers. “Not as helpful as one might have hoped. If you would like to step this way, I have arranged a private room.”
Connie recovered her poise, and stepped forward, saying something that Prue translated as: “a king’s hat and your pretty coat to let the bitch go.”
The young lord smiled sweetly. “That is far enough, I think.” His hand appeared from under the edges of said pretty coat, a fashionable affair with multiple capes, that he wore casually draped over his shoulders. His benign, amused expression didn’t change, but the small pistol he aimed directly at Connie’s ample breast spoke its own language and the bully stopped in her tracks, expression uncertain for the first time since Prue had stumbled into the courtyard.
“I do not wish to rush you, Mrs. Worth,” Lord Jonathan said. He moved forward so that Prue could slide between him and the doorframe and out into the corridor, then he stepped back and the turnkey with him slammed the door closed.
The gun went into a pocket, and Lord Jonathan swung his coat off his shoulders and around hers, enveloping her in warmth and some spicy scent. She snuggled into it for a moment, the contrast from the biting cold rendering her speechless.
“Mrs. Worth’s room, Tom,” Lord Jonathan said to the turnkey, who was re-locking the door.
“If you and the lady would follow me, my lord,” the turnkey said, trying to bow and walk at the same time.
The coat made all the difference. Prue’s feet still hurt, her stockings no protection from the cold floor or occasional puddles whose origins she didn’t want to consider. But at least the rest of her was beginning to warm. She focused on the warmth, refusing to remember how vulnerable she had felt in just her shift, and how frightened she had been in the felons’ courtyard.
Behind her, Lord Jonathan chatted on, a soothing flow of words half-drowned by the continued din of the prison. He was describing the troubles he’d had with a stalled carter and other congestion between Miss Diamond’s house and the prison.
A passage, several flights of stairs to take them higher up the building, another passage, and the turnkey stopped, unlocked a door, and ushered them into a small, bare room with a narrow iron-framed bed and a table and chair under one window.
“It ain’t what the lady is used to,” he said, uncertainly.
“Oh, we’ll soon have her comfortable, Tom,” Lord Jonathan said. “Here, take a seat, Mrs. Worth. Will you be all right for a short time while I fetch your things from the hackney? And Tom, would you please get some hot water, so Mrs. Worth can wash?”
In moments, they were both gone, and Prue was alone, sitting at the table. The window looked out into a courtyard and across at another granite wall set with barred windows, very like this one.
She thought of drawing her feet up into the warmth of the coat. After they were washed, perhaps. She wouldn’t think of what she had stepped in. Soon, she would be clean again.
What was David doing right now? He must have sent Lord Jonathan, surely? And just in time, too. No. She wouldn’t think of that.
The room faced south. Small though the window was, it let in enough sunlight to bathe the chair where she sat. From the angle of the sun, it must be mid-afternoon. Perhaps three hours since she was arrested. A lifetime. She wouldn’t think of that, either.
The room had nothing in it but the furniture and a mattress. Had Lord Jonathan thought of sheets? How much would all this cost? She had some savings: she could pay. She would pay to stay here in this bare little room rather than go back to the insanity of the common courtyard. But for how long could she afford it? Again, she wrenched her thoughts from a direction she didn’t want to go.
A knock at the door was a welcome distraction.
“Enter,” she called, keeping her voice calm and firm.
The turnkey unlocked the door, and lugged in two buckets of clean, steaming water, which he put down by the wall. He looked at her a little helplessly. “You’ll likely need a towel?” The rising intonation made it a question. She resisted the urge to snap at him, saying, “That would be very helpful. Thank you.”
As he left, Lord Jonathan returned, her small trunk perched on his shoulder as if it weighed next to nothing. The keeper closed and locked the door behind him, and Lord Jonathan put the trunk at the end of the bed.
“I have sent the jarvey for sheets and blankets, and some other bits and pieces, Mrs. Worth,” he said. “We’ll soon have you as comfortable as we can arrange.”
To her horror, Prue dissolved into tears.
She felt his arms go around her, one hand pulling her head to his shoulder, the other patting her back. “I’m not the weepy sort,” she assured him, though the words came out in broken pieces as she fought the shuddering sobs that wracked her.
“You have had a trying day,” he said calmly. “You have needed to be strong and brave, and now you are safe. Cry away, Mrs. Worth. I’ve been cried on before, and it doesn’t harm me.”
His understatement—a trying day, indeed—made her chuckle in the middle of her tears, and helped her to get them under control. He probably intended that result. There was more to Lord Jonathan Grenford than met the eye.
When she was calm again, she straightened her back. “Here,” Lord Jonathan said. He had been kneeling in front of her. He reached backwards without rising, and wet one corner of a handkerchief in the hot bucket.
She let him wash her eyes, then took the handkerchief to blow her nose.
“I beg your pardon, Lord Jonathan. I fear I have left a damp spot on your shoulder.”
“Call me Gren. We are to be friends, are we not? And as to the wet shoulder, I can’t count the number of times it has been baptised by one of my sisters or one of my brother’s ex-lovers.” He picked up her slight flinch. “Not Wakefield, of course. My other brother. I didn’t even know Old Stone Face had feelings until I saw him this day, torn between running after you to subdue the Newgate dragons, and staying behind to question the staff so he can get you out again.”
“Old Stone Face?” That description of David made her smile. Did he know Gren called him that? And David was worried about her and was working to prove her innocent.
“Now, Mrs. Worth—or may I call you Prue?” he stopped, awaiting permission, which she gave with a nod. “Now, Prue, here is what I suggest. I’ll go down and wait for the jarvey, and you take advantage of that water while it is still hot. Do you have something you can use to dry yourself?”
“The turnkey was fetching me a towel,” Prue replied, just as there was a knock on the door.
“That will be him now. Enter!”
After Gren and the turnkey left, she found dry, clean clothes in the trunk, removed the soiled ones, washed, and dressed again, her body moving swiftly through the familiar tasks while her mind focused on her situation. Gren was right. The weepiness was just a reaction to the sudden zig-zag changes of the day. She was over it now, in control again.
She needed to think carefully, order the events of the last forty-eight hours in her head, and be ready to report them to Tolliver when he came. He would get her out of here. And David would prove her innocence. She refused to consider any other outcome.