Chapter Five

It took me by surprise to see Mrs Despard speaking to a crowd outside the prison, not at all the same quiet, gentle person who came to my aid on Christmas Eve. I’d never seen a woman speak out like that, not to a man. It unsettled me. I know, now, it was courage I was observing but it seemed to me then like a kind of madness, the way she held her face for all to see and her arms right up in the air, not like a lady at all. Anxious about being recognised, I wasn’t sure what I should do, so I stood back and hung my head to wait till the commotion was over but I heard everything she said. I understood the words ‘free and equal’ but the truth is, I didn’t understand what she meant. How could a woman be equal to a man?

I was concealed in a doorway, wondering how the reading of a book by a woman called Mary could be a crime, when Catherine looked my way. I saw that she’d recognised me and my stomach lurched. If she had waved, Mr Aris would’ve seen it, but she turned back again and walked on. I knew it was deliberate. The way her eyes rested on mine then flicked away was like a message. A secret shared. We’d spoken no more than a few words on the day I went to collect the Christmas goose, but she was trying to protect me. I felt as if our two minds had whispered, one to the other, across the wide street.

On the last night of the year, I was sitting late in the kitchen, not wishing to leave the fire. That afternoon, I’d overheard my aunt’s name spoken in the fishmonger’s; a woman buying jellied eels said she’d died alone in the workhouse, not one of her family there at the end. I wasn’t in a mood for conversation but the cook was gin-fuddled and the bottle makes for loose talk. She told me she’d birthed eleven children so she’d seen the signs of my entanglement before I did. Then she asked me if Mr Aris knew about the child. ‘You’d do well to tell him,’ she said. ‘The governor in’t a man who likes a surprise.’ I told her I wished I could take back one minute of my life on the day I went out with Lucy Burnes to sell her ribbons. If I could live it again, everything would be different.

‘Wish in one hand and shit in the other, and see which will be full first.’ Mrs Whiskin never minced her words. She was hard-shelled like an old oyster, but she had a woman’s wisdom and I was often glad of her company. When her head drooped onto the table, I took off my shoes and carried them up the stairs, thinking everyone else asleep, but there was a light showing beneath the governor’s door. Mr Aris had told me many times about the things I did that made him hurt me so I tried, every day, to make myself small. Quiet. Invisible. If I was beaten, it was all my own doing, he said, for taking too long to answer the bell or closing a door too loudly. For smiling or sneezing. For pegging out the linen or walking into a room. For being a woman, living and breathing. I stood no chance of escaping his anger because I never knew when it would come.

I was on the stairs to my room, one, two, three, four, when I heard my name, a whisper: ‘Sarah Evans.’ Had he caught the humming of my fear as I heard it myself inside my mind like a wasp trapped in a honey jar? For a moment, no longer than a second, I wanted my life to end there on the stairs of the house in Dorrington Street but then I felt something quick and sharp and I knew it was the child inside me. The thrust of a heel. I wanted to hold my little one in my arms more than anything else God might grant me. A life is a flimsy thing, no more than gaudy beads on a string. Some are counterfeit and cheap, others perfect, precious, yet all are strung together in a way mysterious to us. Like others before me, and after, I would do whatever was required in order to live.

Mr Aris closed the door behind me and took my hand in his. ‘Lay here,’ he said. ‘Put your head on my pillow and let me see you.’ He lifted my legs onto the bed and pulled at my stockings. Rolled them off. ‘Such tiny feet. Ah, my own little girl.’ I didn’t expect him to touch me as he did, his hands open and soft. The old year turned on its heel as he went about his business. The gentleness of his pressing palms and the tender names he called me were more alarming than the brutishness I was used to.

When he was done, he took a glass of spirits and drank it in a gulp. Grace had told him, he said. He called it my embarrassment. Then came the words I’d dreaded. ‘You can’t remain here in my house. You’re still a prisoner.’

My sentence was seven years. Was I to live out my time in the women’s cells at Coldbath Fields? Would they come for me at last, the convict-catchers, and send me to the town with the burning sky? Or was I to end my days like my father before me and die at sea, in a place so unknown to God that it has no name?

‘I must hope your troubles don’t become evident to others. I’ll make arrangements.’

Did he not see what was before his eyes? My troubles – his troubles – sprouted so full I couldn’t see my toes without leaning like a poplar tree in a breeze and if all of Middlesex did not see it too then blindness had come to town. I pulled my dress down and picked up my stockings. If I was lucky, they’d let me keep the child with me in prison till my time was done but if I was sent to the Colony, my life would be over and I’d never see my home again.

As I stood up to leave, I thought about New South Wales, dry like the deserts of Hades, and how thirst might feel as it kills you slowly.

Governor Aris pulled the blanket over him and turned away. ‘I’ll find a place for you,’ he said. ‘You won’t be far from me. I’ll never let you go. Never.’

There was ice across the inside of my window. My fingers were wrinkled with cold and there were four more hours before it would be time to rise again and light the fires. I took off my clothes, all of them. There was only an inch of water in the bowl but I made my hands into a cup and scooped it. I emptied it onto my skin, scraped myself. I rid myself of him and, as I scrubbed, a thought lit up in me. A thought not planted there by any other person. It was mine, and it burned like a fire through a Clerkenwell fog. A dangerous thing must be got rid of. Shame is to be distanced and yet I was to be kept close, somewhere nearby. I didn’t feel the icy air at all as I dropped my nightgown over my head. I’d seen something in Thomas Aris he didn’t know I’d seen. He had a secret. There was something he wanted. Something he needed. Something he could not do without.

Me.

The promotion was not a matter of luck. Henry Jones had spent twelve months entering names and numbers, checking them with the court papers and then checking them again. For ten hours at a time, he sat in the half-light and filled blank pages with faultless columns and rows. A perfect record. He had been hoping for advancement but not expecting it to arrive so quickly. The position of clerk at the Hatton Garden police headquarters would be temporary to begin with but it was the pathway he needed. A few weeks in one of the busiest offices in London, jostling every day with magistrates, constables, watchmen – and the parish beadles. Enough time to show himself to be worthy of a red-trimmed coat and a gold-topped staff. The chance to make a dream come true.

There was one thing he needed to do before he left the cellar beneath the Session House for the last time. Something had been on his mind ever since the wet afternoon when he had bumped into Sarah Evans on the street. Jones had a mind for dates, especially significant ones, and he knew without any doubt she had been among the prisoners on his first day as Clerk of the Cells at the Session House. Finding what he wanted was easy because everything was filed according to his own system and each box was named and numbered. It was just where it should be, marked in his own clear hand: Sessions Papers / 1798 / January – February. He flipped the pages to the right place in the book and saw that nothing had changed, nothing had been added to suggest she should be walking free on Dorrington Street. The prisoners’ names, their ages, the verdicts, all were nibbed as sharply in front of his eyes as they had been on the day he wrote them and blotted them dry. To be transported beyond the seas for the term of seven years. Not a word about a change of sentence to imprisonment in Coldbath Fields and there was no record of a Royal pardon that would have set her free.

Jones closed the book and slid it back into the box. He was not mistaken. Polly Evans’s daughter looked so much like her mother. Was it just a coincidence he had seen her a stone’s throw from the house where Aris the jailer lived? She had seemed terrified. The thought embedded itself in a corner of his mind and wriggled there like a maggot in a mackerel. As he climbed the stone stairs to the courtroom to hand over his key for the last time, the stench of corruption loitered around him.