I could not enjoy this morning’s perambulation as I usually do. There was no fault in the botanical gardens. I fear the sense of dissatisfaction had its origin inside of me.
Gardeners were turning the beds, releasing the fresh breath of soil. Here and there, a pink worm. The birds waited. They had their sights set on a feast.
I do not wish to believe my fellow creatures are all akin to these scavengers: ravenous, skulking in the shadows, awaiting their opportunity to strike. But after what has happened, I begin to doubt. Do we not treat inmates in New Oakgate Prison with the highest level of compassion? Do we not give them all we can to make sure they are comfortable and well occupied? Yet still they betray us with their behaviour.
So deep was my melancholy that I took Tilda’s arm to feel the warmth of another soul next to me. She does not walk fast. Strolling at her slower pace, I was aware of the clouds moving in the wind, and the dampness in the air. It would have been better to stay indoors.
But no. That would mean forgoing my glimpse of David, however brief. Today he was on patrol, as I knew he should be, crossing the gardens at the regular time like a well-wound watch.
Dear David. He shall not disappoint me. Let other hearts be as black as night, I know his will never change. When he stopped and tipped his hat to us, compassion was written across his beloved face.
‘Miss Truelove. Forgive me, but I heard what happened, at the prison. I must ask if you are all right?’
I rallied myself to raise a smile. ‘Oh yes, I am quite well, thank you. I was not in the infirmary, you know, when the riot took place. But we have lost a window, and a quantity of bed linen in the fire. All of the committee are deeply distressed.’
‘That’s only natural. You’ve had a shock, and you must take care of yourself.’ Perhaps he heard the tenderness creeping into his voice, for he quickly turned the subject. ‘And what will be done, to punish those responsible?’
I wonder if I am not partially responsible myself. Had I continued to visit the sick in the infirmary, instead of neglecting my duty to converse with Ruth, I might have spotted signs of growing discontent.
‘The leaders are confined to the dark cells for a week. But I am afraid all of the prisoners must pay a price. The committee has decided that we were too lenient, feeding them meat. Eating flesh only inflames the criminal mind … The diet shall be much plainer from now on.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘I shouldn’t think they’ll like that. But I can’t say it doesn’t serve them right. Someone could have been seriously hurt.’
‘Thanks be to God, there are only cuts and bruises. Our staff are to be commended.’
‘Indeed they are. It makes you think, something like that. Makes you realise that life doesn’t go on forever.’ He fixed eyes of entreaty upon me. ‘And no one should delay an action they really mean to perform.’
Tilda cleared her throat. Odious to admit, but she was right. We had stopped quite long enough for a chance conversation.
David scratched his cheek. He looked boyish, abashed. ‘Well, I’d best be getting along. Good day, Miss Truelove. I’m glad to see you unharmed.’
‘Yes. Good day.’
I do not comprehend how my feet can ever bear to do it: how they turn and walk away from him without a stumble. And my eyes! What agonies it costs them to look upon something else, when they know that he is there.
David lacks my discipline, even with his police training. I always feel his gaze, warming the back of my shoulders as I stride from view. It is not cautious, it is not discreet. But I find that I love him better for it.
I wish I were the same: disingenuous and earnest with the Mental Vital, a head shape so rarely seen in a male subject. But alas, I am full of deceit. The first thing I said to Tilda when we were out of earshot was: ‘I do not mean to tell Constable Hodges about my invitation to Heatherfield Manor. Please take care not to mention it in his presence, it would only upset him.’
‘Me, miss? When do I even open my mouth?’
She has a point, I suppose. I find myself jittery, struggling to trust those around me. It is the riot, I expect, and the letter from Matron. Sometimes it is difficult to know what to do for the best.
The days are wearing on and Ruth’s trial grows nearer, and still I am no further along in my studies than I was at the genesis.
The horror of her recitation! Such unspeakable occurrences … from a girl of only sixteen. Once more, I am faced with the same question: is she telling the truth? For now I have read her skull, the waters become murky.
It seems preposterous to me that any woman should dress as a man, outside of the ‘breeches roles’ you see on stage, but then Mrs Metyard was manifestly not a healthy individual. And the work of the alienists leads me to believe there are more diseases of the brain than we have hitherto discovered. Once, we had an inmate who went by two names. You could not tell which alias she would choose, but her voice, her posture, her entire deportment altered dependent on her selection. I wished to measure her crania in both guises, to see if the organs shifted between the two, but alas she was removed to Bedlam before I had the opportunity.
Could Mrs Metyard be such another? Either these terrible events really happened, exactly as Ruth said, in which case I pity her from my very soul – or they are a deliberate falsehood. This sickening tale has come from her own imagination, for her own amusement, and what sort of a person makes up a story like that?
The answer is of more consequence than ever, now that I have received a request from Matron. With all the infirmary bed linen lost in the fire, she requires twice as many prisoners to work in the sewing room. So far, Matron has held off sending Ruth – neither of us like to absolutely force a prisoner into a task that upsets them. Yet now there is the need, and Ruth can turn a stitch.
I must be honest: there is a fear in me. However silly, however outrageous Ruth’s claims about needles are, I hesitate to let her hold one. Could she really cause hurt?
There, see, I am talking nonsense! I have let her dupe me, I have let her make me believe such dross!
I will not be lied to any longer. It is time to take a firmer stand. Ruth shall go to the sewing room. We will ‘call her bluff’, as they say.
I shall write to Matron now, before I change my mind.
Where do you think I have been today? I have taken myself off to debtors’ gaol!
What with the riot, and my little upset over Ruth’s skull, I found myself disinclined to return to New Oakgate Prison. Yet I must be occupying myself, so when Fanny Awning mentioned she was paying a visit to the captive debtors, I felt compelled to accompany her.
I wish that I had not.
The first sign of warning was the basket that Fanny packed shortly before we departed. She squeezed in some tinder, a bottle of wine, cheese, bread: all the usual provisions for the poor. Then she placed a sort of board over the top, and began afresh with several smaller bundles.
‘Whatever is that?’ I asked her.
‘Why, it is a false bottom for the basket.’
‘Fanny!’ I cried. ‘You are not smuggling into the prison?’
She gave me a wry smile and simply replied, ‘You will see.’
Like most of Oakgate’s institutions, the debtors’ gaol is modelled on its larger London counterpart – although the Marshalsea Prison in the capital had the advantage of being pulled down and rebuilt about thirty years ago. No such arrangement has been made for our poor. A more sunless and chill place you never did see: everything studded with iron, more like a castle keep than anything else. As we walked across the broken cobbles, the shadow of a tall, iron-spiked wall fell over us, and with it came a smell so sweet, so musky, that I thought I should be ill.
‘Remember your handkerchief,’ said Fanny.
Obediently, I raised it to cover my nose and mouth. She had bid me soak it in bergamot before coming – how grateful I was that she did!
A dirty fellow stood beside the great iron door; or portcullis, I should say. He leered at poor Fanny. However, she seemed to know his tricks, for she addressed him immediately. ‘Here I am again, you see, Collins.’
‘And what have you got for me?’ He peered into the basket that hung from her arm.
‘Why, this is for the debtors, Collins. I will give you your usual sixpence.’
‘You’ll give me sixpence and that bottle,’ he ordered. ‘Or you ain’t coming in.’
Fanny made the exchange cheerfully, having put a cheap bottle of gin on the top of her basket. For myself, I thought it a disastrous bargain. Sixpence, to be admitted into a prison yard little better than a cesspit, with rats running about like dogs!
The yard was a square space, overlooked by a quadrangle of dull-brick buildings. Smudged faces appeared through the windows, miserable and gaunt.
We passed a wagon in the centre of the yard, waiting for its load. A boy of about ten years of age teased the horse.
‘Does that filthy conveyance bring the food and drink supplies in?’ I asked Fanny, aghast.
‘It does,’ she said sadly. ‘And it takes the bodies out.’
They are not divided into male and female in this prison: they converse in groups, with poor tattered children hanging about their legs. Of course the women are allocated separate sleeping quarters, but these are above – of all places – a taproom.
The stairs we climbed to reach them were sticky and reeked of beer. No matter how close I pressed my handkerchief, it did not cover the smell. To think that we have murderers awaiting trial, fraudsters and thieves all kept cleanly in New Oakgate Prison, when these people live like animals simply for the crime of being poor! It embarrassed me that I had not been aware of the fact beforehand. No wonder Ruth’s mother so feared this place.
The ‘room’, when we gained entry to it, was a dank, coffin-shaped space hardly big enough for a bed. Yet there was a chipped, worm-eaten bedstead in the centre of the floor, fusty with the sweat of no fewer than three sleepers. All of them were elderly women. I marvelled they had managed to survive so long.
Fanny was greeted as an old friend.
‘She’s a treasure, she is,’ I was told by a scrawny, malnourished woman. ‘I don’t know what we’d do without her.’
She gave way to a hacking cough, which continued for so long that it frightened me.
As we began to unload the basket, I ventured to ask how the turnkey had dared to demand money and alcohol beside.
‘They charges for everything!’ the emaciated woman cried. ‘For food, for coal. We pays rent, and for this bed, which Martha brought here herself!’
‘And if they find out we get a gift, like this,’ put in her room-mate, ‘they take a cut of it too!’
‘This is madness,’ I whispered to Fanny. ‘They are put in here because they cannot pay back their debts. How are they ever to do it, if they are granted no opportunity to make or save money?’
‘They do not do it,’ Fanny said shortly. ‘Many only get out in that wagon you saw.’
A short enquiry informed me that the prices charged for necessities such as candles and coal were in fact double the price of those I could purchase outside the prison. It is nothing but extortion.
We helped the women tidy and air the room as best we could. The bedclothes were infested with lice. Imagine spending the winter of your life in such discomfort, without even liberty to cheer you. The poor on the street are pitiful, but at least they may wander where they please.
‘You can see why the fellows get drunk,’ Fanny said, aside to me. ‘But they become disorderly, and more than one woman has been attacked.’
The old lady named Martha showed me a scar along her neck, where another prisoner had launched themselves at her.
Money – all this evil because of money! I smelt its coppery tang mixed with the urine and sweat, I heard its chink in the footsteps running outside. Even Martha’s wrinkled eyes appeared, to me, like two dirty pennies.
David tells me money does not matter but – oh! – it does, it does.