Authors: Sarah Waters
When they came & unfastened me however, they found that the ropes had chafed my wrists & ankles & made them bleed. Ruth saw that & said ‘O, what a brute that spirit is, to do this to my poor mistress.’ She said ‘Miss d’Esterre, will you help me take Miss Dawes to her own room?’ Then they led me here & Ruth put ointment upon me, Miss d’Esterre holding the jar. Miss d’Esterre said she was never so surprised as when Peter came to take her to the cabinet. Ruth said he must have seen a little sign about her, something to lead him straight to her, some sort of specialness that none of the other ladies have. Miss d’Esterre looked at her, & then at me. She said ‘Do you think so?’ She said ‘I do feel, sometimes,’ then she looked at the floor.
I saw Ruth’s eyes, looking at her, & then Peter Quick’s voice might have come whispering the words in my own head. I said ‘Ruth is right, Peter certainly seems to have picked you out for something. Perhaps you ought to come & see him a second time, more quietly. Should you like that? Shall you come another day? & then, shall I see if I can’t call him back, for just the 2 of us?’ Miss d’Esterre said nothing, only sat looking at the pot of ointment. Ruth waited, then said ‘Well, think of him tonight, when you are alone & your room is quiet. He did like you. It may be, you know, that he shall try & visit you without his medium to help him. But I think you had better meet him here, with Miss Dawes, than on your own in your dark bedroom.’ Miss d’Esterre said then ‘I shall sleep in my sister’s bed.’ Ruth said ‘Well, but he shall still find you there.’ Then she took the ointment & put its lid on it, saying to me ‘There miss, you are made all better now.’ Miss d’Esterre went back downstairs, saying nothing.
I thought of her then, when I went in to Mrs Brink.
28 November 1874
To Millbank to-day—a horrible visit, I am ashamed to write of it.
I was met at the gate of the women’s gaol by the coarse-faced matron Miss Craven: they had sent her to me as a chaperon in place of Miss Ridley, who had business elsewhere. I was glad to see her. I thought: That is good. I shall have her take me to Selina’s cell, and Miss Ridley and Miss Haxby need never know of it . . .
Even so, we did not go immediately to the wards, for as we walked she asked me, Was there not another part of the gaol I should like to be shown first? ‘Or are you keen,’ she said dubiously, ‘to go only to the cells?’ Probably it was a novelty to her to lead me about, and she hoped to make the most of it. But as she spoke, she seemed to me a little knowing—and then I thought that, after all, she might have been charged with the watching of me and I ought to take care. So I said that she should lead me where she pleased; that I imagined that the women on the wards would not mind waiting for me, a little longer. She answered, ‘I am sure they won’t, miss.’
Where she took me, then, was to the bathroom, and the prison clothes stores.
There is not much to say about them. The bathroom is a chamber with one large trough in it, in which the women are obliged, on their arrival, to sit and soap themselves, communally; to-day, there being no new prisoners, the bath was empty save for half a dozen blackjack beetles, that were nosing at the lines of grime. In the clothes store there are shelves of brown prison gowns and white bonnets, in every size, and boxes of boots. The boots are kept tied at the laces, in pairs. Miss Craven held up a pair she thought would fit me—monstrous great things they were, of course, and I thought she smiled as she held them. She said that prison shoes were the stoutest of all, stouter even than soldiers’ boots. She said that she heard of a Millbank woman once who beat her matron and stole her cloak and keys, then made her way quite to the gate, and would have escaped, except that a warder who looked at her there saw the shoes on her, and knew her by them for a convict—then the woman was taken again, and put in the darks.
She told me this, then cast the boots she held back into their box, and laughed. Then she led me to another storeroom, that they call there the ‘Own-Clothes Room’. This is the place—I hadn’t thought before, that there must of course be such a place there—where are kept all the dresses and hats and shoes, and bits of stuff, which the women carry with them into Millbank when they arrive.
There is something wonderful and terrible about this room and all that it contains. Its walls are arranged—after the Millbank passion for queer geometry—in the shape of a hexagon; and they are lined entirely, from floor to ceiling, with shelves, that are filled with boxes. The boxes are made of a buff kind of card, studded with brass and with brass corners: they are long and narrow, and bear plates with the prisoners’ names upon them. They resemble nothing so much as little coffins; and so the room itself, when I first stepped into it, made me shudder—it looked like a children’s mausoleum, or a morgue.
Miss Craven saw me flinch, and put her hands upon her hips. ‘Rum, ain’t it?’ she said as she looked about her. She said, ‘Do you know what I think, miss, when I come in here? I think:
buzz
,
buzz
. I think, Now I know just how a bee or a wasp feels, when it comes back home to its own little nest.’
We stood together, gazing at the walls. I asked her, Was there really a box there for every woman in the gaol? and she nodded: ‘Every one, and some to spare.’ She stepped to the shelves, pulled out a box quite randomly, and set it down before her—there was a desk there, with a chair at it. When she drew off the lid of the box there rose a vaguely sulphurous scent. She said they must bake all the clothes they store, for most come in verminous, but that ‘some frocks, of course, can bear that better than others’.
She lifted out the garment that lay within the box she held. It was a thin print gown, that had clearly not been much improved by its fumigation, for its collar hung in tatters and its cuffs seemed singed. Beneath it there was a set of yellowing undergarments, a pair of scuffed red leather shoes, a hat, with a pin of flaking pearl, and a wedding ring, grown black. I looked at the plate on the box—
Mary Breen
, it said. She is the woman I visited once, who had the marks of her own teeth upon her arm, that she said were rats’ bites.
When Miss Craven had closed this box and returned it to its place upon the shelf I moved closer to the wall, and began to look, quite carelessly, across the names; and she continued to finger the boxes, lifting the lids of them and gazing inside. ‘You would think it wonderful,’ she said, peering into one, ‘what few sad little bits some women come to us with.’
I stepped to her side and looked at what she showed me: a rusty black dress, a pair of canvas slippers, and a key on a length of twine—I wondered what the key unfastened. She closed the box and gave a low
tut-tut
: ‘Not so much as a hankie for her head.’ Then she worked her way along the row, and I moved with her, peeping in at all the boxes. One held a very handsome dress, and a velvet hat with a stiff, stuffed bird upon it, complete with beak and glittering eye; yet the set of underthings beneath were so blackened and torn they might have been trampled by horses. Another contained a petticoat splattered with grim brown stains that I saw, with a shudder, must be blood; another made me start—it held a frock and petticoats and shoes and stockings, but also a length of reddish-brown hair, bound like the tail of a pony or like a queer little whip. It was the hair that had been cut from its owner’s head when she first came to the prison. ‘She will be keeping it for a hair-piece,’ said Miss Craven, ‘for when she is let out. Much good, however, it will do
her
! It is Chaplin—do you know her? A poisoner, she was, and went almost to the rope. Why, her fine red head will have turned quite grey, before she gets
this
back again!’
She closed the box and thrust it back, with a practised, peevish gesture; her own hair, where it showed beneath her bonnet, was plain as mouse-fur. I remembered then how I had seen the reception matron rubbing at the shorn locks of Black-Eyed Sue the gipsy girl—and I had a sudden, unpleasant vision, of her and Miss Craven whispering together over the severed tresses, or over a frock, or the hat with the bird upon it: ‘
Try it on—why, who is to see you? How your young man would admire you in that! And who will know who wore it last, four years from now?
’
The vision and the whispers were so vivid I found I had to turn and press my fingers to my face to chase them away, and when I next looked at Miss Craven she had moved on to another box, and was giving a snort of laughter at what she saw within it. I watched her. It seemed all at once a shameful thing to do, to look upon the sad and slumbering remnants of the women’s ordinary lives. It was as if the boxes were coffins after all, and we were peeping, the matron and I, at their little occupants, while their mothers mourned, all unawares, above us. But what made it shameful also made it fascinating; and when Miss Craven moved on idly to another shelf, for all my squeamishness I couldn’t help but follow. Here there was the box of Agnes Nash, the coiner; and that of poor Ellen Power, with a portrait in it of a little girl—her grand-daughter, I suppose. Perhaps she had thought they would let her keep the picture in her cell.
And then, how could I help but think of it? I began to look about me, for
Selina’s
box. I began to wonder how it would be, to gaze at what it held. I thought, If I could only do that I should see something—I didn’t know what—something of hers, something of her—some thing, anything, that would explain her to me, bring her nearer . . . Miss Craven went on plucking at the boxes, exclaiming over the sad or handsome costumes they contained, sometimes laughing at an antique fashion. I stood near her, but did not look to where she gestured. Instead I raised my eyes and gazed about me, searching. At last I said, ‘What is the sequence here, matron? How are the boxes placed?’
Even while she explained and pointed, however, I found the plate I sought. It was above her reach; there was a ladder against the shelves, but she had not climbed it. Already, indeed, she had begun to wipe at her fingers, in readiness to escort me back to the wards. Now she rested her hands at her hips and lifted her eyes, and I caught her murmuring idly, beneath her breath: ‘
Buzz buzz, buzz buzz . . .
’
I must get rid of her; and could think of only one way to do it. I said, ‘Oh!’—I put my hand to my head. I said, Oh, I believed that all the gazing had made me faint!—and of course I did feel dizzy now—with apprehension—and I must have paled, for Miss Craven saw my face and gave a cry, and took a step towards me. I kept my hand at my brow. I said I would not swoon, but, could she—might she just—a cup of water—?
She led me to the chair and made me sit. She said, ‘Now, dare I leave you? There are salts in the surgeon’s office, I think; but the surgeon is at the infirmary, it will take me a minute or two to fetch the keys—Miss Ridley has them. If you was to fall—’
I said I would not fall. She put her hands together—oh, here was a piece of drama she had not bargained for! Then she hurried from me. I heard the ring of her chain, and her footsteps, and the banging of a gate.
And then I rose, and seized the ladder, and brought it to where I knew I must climb; and then I lifted my skirts and climbed it, then pulled Selina’s box to me and knocked back its lid.
There came, at once, the bitter smell of sulphur, that made me turn my head aside and narrow my eyes. Then I found that, with the light behind me, I was casting my own shadow into the box—I could make out nothing of what lay inside it, but must lean awkwardly from the ladder, placing my cheek against the hard edge of a shelf. Then I began to distinguish the garments that lay there—the coat, and the hat, and the dress, of black velvet; and the shoes, and the petticoats, and the white silk stockings . . .
I touched and lifted and turned them all—looking, still looking, though I did not know for what. But, after all, they might have been any girl’s clothes. The gown and coat seemed new, almost unworn. The shoes were stiff and polished, with unmarked soles. Even the plain jet earrings I found, knotted into a corner of a handkerchief, were neat, their wires untarnished—the handkerchief itself was very crisp, with a black silk edging, quite uncreased. There was nothing there, nothing. She might have been dressed, by a shop clerk, in a house of mourning. I could find no trace of the life I think she must have led—no hint, from any of those garments, of how her slender limbs had held them. There was nothing.
Or so I thought—until I turned the velvet and the silk a final time, and saw what else lay in that box, coiled in its shadows like a slumbering serpent—
Her hair.
Her hair, bound tight and plaited into one thick rope, and fastened, where it had been cut from her, with coarse prison twine. I put my fingers to it. It felt heavy, and dry—as snakes are, I believe, for all their glossiness, said to feel dry to the touch. Where the light caught it it gleamed a dull gold; but the gold was shot through with other colours—with some that were silver, some that were almost green.
I remembered studying Selina’s picture, and seeing the fancy twists and coils of her hair then. It had made her vivid to me; it had made her real. The coffinlike box, the airless room—it seemed suddenly a dark and terrible place for her hair to be confined in now. I thought,
If it might only have a little light upon it, a little air . . .
And I had again that vision of the whispering matrons. Suppose they should come and laugh over her tresses, or stroke and finger them with their own blunt hands?
It seemed to me then that, if I did not take it, they would certainly come and spoil it. I grasped it, and folded it—I meant, I think, to thrust it in the pocket of my coat or behind the buttons at my breast. But as I held it, fumbling, still reaching awkwardly from the ladder, still feeling my cheek ground hard against the shelf—as I did that, I heard the door at the end of the passage-way slam, and then the sound of voices. It was Miss Craven, and with her, Miss Ridley! The fright of it made me almost fall. The plait of hair might really have been a snake, then: I flung it from me as if it had suddenly woken and shown me its fangs, then I pulled at the lid of the box, and stepped heavily to the floor—the voices of the matrons coming closer, closer, all the time I worked.