Angel Meadow Asylum, 18th September 1852
But Goblin and I hardly knew how to live when we were not in the Rents and it was not long before we drifted back to the world we knew – back to that thieves’ kitchen. We sat on either side of the fire and we laughed to find ourselves back where we had started. I had a fine dress, dainty shoes and bangles on my wrists, but Goblin had, nothing, nothing but bruises from the fights he had got into, for there were plenty of crooks who wanted me for their own – a clever girl who had learned to speak like a lady would be useful to anyone wanting to gull the quality out of a few sovereigns. How Goblin suffered because of it! But he never complained, and he never asked me for anything.
It wasn’t long before they found us. There is no honour among thieves, no matter what the penny bloods say. We were betrayed by our own kind, for there was a reward upon our heads paid for by Mrs Day, and what comradeship we thought we had found amongst those we had known all our lives was illusory. The remains of Mr Knight and Mr Day were never found, for the heat of that fire had turned their remains to cinders and blown them away on the wind. Whether they had been murdered or not was impossible to prove; whether the fire had been set could not be wholly established. But I had taken Mr Day’s keys and we had burgled his house. Our complicity was indisputable – and, when they came for us, I was sitting before the fire wearing Miss Day’s dress and Mrs Day’s jewellery.
It is said that the air of Newgate was enough to kill a man, and that those inside it numbered the worst, the most degraded and wicked men and women in all England. They are wrong. The worst men in England make up judge and jury, are masters and property owners who crush the rest of us and drive their carriages over our bones. My fellow prisoners might be vicious and selfish, but it was life that had made them so. Capricious and unfair, it was a life that put some men above others, made some rich and some poor, that forced those with nothing to seek comfort in the only way they knew how – by taking from those who had more than enough. I had only sympathy for the wretches who surrounded me, though they tore the ribbons from my hair and left me with nothing but the clothes I stood up in. We women were kept together in long airless wards, the windows high in the walls and thickly barred, so that the light that entered was dim and tainted. Inside there was such a crying and wailing — some had children with them, though how these fared in that hideous place I had no idea, for they must surely have suffocated, or else died of misery and want before their mothers were released. Many of the women were barely clothed, but covered themselves as best they could with whatever rags they could lay their hands on. We slept – if such an activity might be called sleep – laid out side by side, like bodies in a plague pit, though the noise raged all night. The air was thick with our own stink, and we were afforded no dignity whatever, obliged to manage ourselves, and all that made us women, with miserable fortitude.
I denied the murder of Mr Knight and Mr Day. I denied setting alight to the blacking factory. I admitted only the theft. The deaths of the two men and the destruction of their premises could not be proved to be my handiwork, but I had clearly profited from the death of my employer. I said he had tried to rape me, that I had been assaulted and molested. No one listened – I was the daughter of a whore, what more might be expected but that I would turn to similar pursuits? I was sentenced to hang. Goblin — younger, and therefore clearly led stray — received seven years’ transportation. I saw him in the courthouse. Only a few weeks had passed, but he was not the boy I had known. He had grown hard and fierce. His face bore the marks of ill-usage – a black eye, another missing tooth, a part of his ear lobe torn away. Poor Goblin. I never saw him again after that, and I can only hope that he found happiness; that he succeeded where I have failed.
I was to be hanged on 13th July. My mother did not come to see me. I heard she had died, and I was glad she had been spared the spectacle of watching her only child standing on the scaffold. I remembered how she had stitched and stitched as the light faded around us, the men’s feet heavy on the stair. She had left me with one certainty in my heart: that I would do all I could to keep from living a life like hers. Now, I would, not even have the chance to try. The only person who did come to see me was the Ordinary, as was the right of all of us who were to spend our last night on earth in the condemned cell. But there was nothing I wanted from him. What had God ever done for me? How might he help me now? And so I sent the man away. Alone, I watched the evening bleed into the night, the night seep into a crimson dawn. The window was small and double barred, the room itself a foetid dungeon hardly fit for a dog. My ankles were chained, though where I might run to was a mystery for the door was triple locked. I lay upon my narrow plank bed and felt the lice crawling on my skin, though I would be free of such petty torments soon enough. The crowd, I knew, expected a good death. I was to give them one they would never forget.