Little Bones (22 page)

‘We’ll be nice and close, you and me,’ the warden said. ‘I’ve been doing this job a dozen years or more and I haven’t lost one yet.’

Turning her head, Jane tried to look for the sergeant, because surely she should be able to tell him all she knew? What about the magistrate? Did he really not care that Dr Swift was not a doctor? Jane had known within a couple of days. It was obvious! Couldn’t they see it? Why, if the sergeant looked into the doctor’s appointment book, he would find nothing but blank lined pages and an unpaid laundry bill.

‘We must wait outside in the yard,’ the warden said. ‘Fresh air, sky – a girl in your position shouldn’t take these things for granted.’

‘When is it my turn?’ said Jane.

‘Your turn for what?’

‘To speak.’

The woman laughed. ‘Oh, I’m sure they will let you know when they’re in the mood for listening,’ she said.

It was freezing in the yard. A gale was blowing hard across the tall spiked wall. In the corner a large black dog was slavering over a knuckle bone. Jane was shaking, but the woman seemed oblivious to the cold. Licking her pale lips, she appeared to be examining the clouds and enjoying the rush of cold air. ‘Here’s your carriage now,’ she said, as the Black Maria appeared, both sinister and grandly old-fashioned, with its stamping dray horses and the painted crest of the queen. It was like sitting in a dark, stinking cattle box.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Jane.

‘Why, to the pleasure gardens of course. Is that all right with you? It’s such a nice blowy day for a picnic.’

On arrival at the prison she was pushed into a room where a haggard old woman in a greasy brown dress threw her a bundle of clothes. Her own things were put inside a labelled cardboard box. In another room she was told to stand quite naked, while a doctor examined her. After a scrubbing under an almost-warm tap, with soap that stung her eyes, she was dried and showered in lice powder. She was told to put on her prison garb, a badly made, ill-fitting dress. A number was put around her neck and her photograph was taken. The flash made her eyes close. She was told to read words set out on a card. Three small words. Did they think she was stupid? Her voice echoed. The words on the card read: God is Good.

Walking down a corridor, lifting her dragging hem, through gate after clanking gate, she passed women with their heads bowed, pushing brooms, bent hags scrubbing floor tiles, and though a few stopped to look up at the cripple, most didn’t bother. Cripples were ten a penny in Newgate, unless they had a rare deformity, like the woman who had killed her three babies – she’d had no eyes to speak of, and her legs were so withered it was an amazement to most how she’d born children to kill in the first place.

‘Aren’t you lucky?’ said the warden. ‘You’ve one all to yourself.’ Her key let them into a small vaulted cell, containing a shelf, a row of stiff bedding and a hammock. The shelf held a Bible, a tin plate, a roll of
blunt
cutlery and a dented metal mug. ‘Quite a little palace now, isn’t it?’

When the warden had slammed the door shut, and the key had rattled its way through the lock, Jane paced the room feeling trapped. How would her family ever know she was a prisoner? Where had they gone? She pictured Ivy and Arthur leading cows into a milking shed. Agnes cutting cloth at a dressmaker’s. She panicked. How would they know what had happened? Newgate was a closed island. They would never find her now.

Jane remembered her mother’s old friend, Patsy Bramwell. Patsy had been in and out of prison all her life, sometimes preferring it, she’d say, to life with her husband and six snivelling chavies, because at least it was clean enough, the company wasn’t bad if you were lucky, and the meals were always regular. Patsy had been caught stealing pills from the Royal London Hospital and three loaves of bread from an upmarket baker’s. She had also been a prostitute – ‘first lesson in whoredom is get the money first’, she’d told Ivy, who it has to be said had no intention of getting into that line of work, saying she had neither the guts nor the stamina.

When Bella Sutcliffe had diphtheria and had to close her gin shop, Patsy Bramwell had kicked down the door and taken it as her own. ‘Well,’ she’d told the judge, ‘I was only doing people a favour, there’s nothing like a woman who can’t find a jug of good gin, especially on a Friday. Did you ever try the gin shop, sir? A drop of gin is like a drop of magic.’

Jane had always been frightened of Patsy. When she
was
seven years old, she had seen Patsy throw her three-month-old baby into the Thames, ‘just to see if the poor beggar floats’. He hadn’t floated. Another son (one of four), a gristly boy of eleven, had waded out to the stinking bundle and dragged him back to shore with a stick. ‘Babies,’ Patsy had said, raising her eyebrows to the sky. ‘They can’t do nothing, can they?’

Had Patsy ever sat inside this cell? Jane wondered. Had she sat on this bench and thought about her sins? Jane shivered. She saw her mother’s friend shaking dirty river water from her son’s sopping blanket. He was green-faced and puking. Jane thought about the boot box. The blood stains spreading over Johnny Treble’s shirt. She closed her eyes. Perhaps they were both as bad as each other. Perhaps she, Jane Stretch, was worse.

The day passed slowly. Jane went from crying, to seething with anger and frustration, to boredom. She thought about the rectory. Liza’s beads. She wept. Nobody came. At three o’clock, a warden, Miss Linley, brought a bowl of turnip stew. Jane started to talk, but the woman said, ‘I’m too busy, can’t you see I’m serving bowls of blasted turnips?’ The stew was soupy and greasy, but she was hungry enough to want it. No one came for the dirty bowl. Later, she tried to read the Bible, but the words were very small. She told herself to sleep but it was useless.

It was October, and the rain that came brought an early darkness, the gas jets were lit, and a different warden brought cocoa. ‘The lights will soon be off,’ she said, pouring the liquid into Jane’s mug. ‘You’ve got ten minutes left of it.’ Wrapping her hands around
the
mug, Jane sipped her tasteless cocoa and read from John.
I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you
.

In the darkness she floated in her hammock. Voices echoed. The blankets were scratchy, smelling of stale sweat and vomit. ‘I am in the attic room,’ she whispered. ‘Downstairs Mrs Swift will be snoring in her crumb-infested bed. The doctor will be attempting to remove his necktie. He will fall over his boots with the whisky. In Covent Garden, Jeremiah Beam will be strolling and touting his girls. Ned will be in Seven Dials, laughing with his sister. The costers will be loading up their barrows.’

Newgate had an early morning alarm, an almighty clattering of keys and the pounding of cups on closed metal hatches. Jane woke aching, but she had slept after all, dreaming of the schoolyard, Miss Prosser ringing the hand bell,
The Big Book of Knowledge
tucked beneath her arm.

A plate of gruel came for breakfast. The warden was more talkative. ‘No exercise or work for you yet,’ she said. ‘Did you hear the rain in the night? The yard flooded and they won’t give you work till you’re sentenced.’

‘Sentenced? But I haven’t had a trial.’

‘Oh, but you will have one soon enough, and then the work will come, the weaving, or the picking of oakum, or cooking yourself in the laundry.’ The warden scratched her head, pushing her finger into her little white cap. ‘We can’t have you idle, unless they put you in the hospital wing on account of your bones, or you’ve been a very bad girl and you swing for it.’

Scraping her spoon around her bowl, Jane felt very sick. Of course she would have to have a trial, but who on earth would speak for her? Who would tell the judge and jury that she had followed the doctor’s orders? And what about the doctor who was not a doctor at all?

The rain started again. A few cold drops fell from the window and spattered onto the floor. Jane ran her finger through them. In her head she talked to Agnes. She told her to put on her good boots, to open her umbrella and walk very quickly to the prison gates. With her pretty face and coy expression, the guard would not hesitate in letting her through. ‘And then we will see each other, and we can squeeze our hands together, cry together, and then we can work out a plan.’

‘I am Mr Henshaw,’ said the man. ‘I am going to represent you.’

‘You are, sir?’ said Jane, almost falling at his feet. ‘Thank you.’

Mr Henshaw grunted, scraping something from his lapel. ‘It will drag on,’ he said, ‘so you might as well make yourself comfortable.’

Mr Henshaw was fair-haired with a round, puggish face. His fondness for the kidney pudding at the Blue Lantern, a public house near Lincoln’s Inn which he often referred to as ‘my club’, had his fancy waistcoat bulging. He had a habit of patting his stomach. Miss Linley brought him a chair. ‘All right,’ he said, crossing his legs, ‘tell me all about it.’

‘About what, sir.’

Shaking his head, the man looked most aggrieved, and moved as if to leave her. ‘They told me that for all your deformities you had a good working brain, but they were obviously liars.’

And though Jane wondered who ‘they’ might have been – the sergeant, the magistrate, or the wardens who came and went with only the tiniest scraps of conversation – she said, ‘Sir, how much do you want to know about my life with the doctor?’

Mr Henshaw, tilting his head, shifted in his seat. ‘And your brains work quite well?’ he said, surprised.

‘Better than most, sir,’ she told him.

‘Good, I am very glad to hear it, but take this as a warning, you must not sound too clever or pompous in court, a cripple with brains will only get their gander up. Now, tell me everything,’ he said. ‘Mind you, I only deal in the truth, and it is entirely up to me how we will stretch it later on.’

Jane felt giddy with relief. Gabbling and breathless, she told her story at last, from her arrival at the Swifts, to the whole sorry business of the boot box. She had expected Mr Henshaw to look pleased, because she had told him the truth and the judge would know who to blame.

‘This is worse than I was led to believe,’ he said, wondering if he would make the Blue Lantern that lunchtime, or whether he would have to start working on the case. A generous father and lack of ambition had made him very lazy. He was paid a stipend for these penniless nobodies. What did he care about the boy who had stolen his neighbour’s six hens, or the woman who had tried drowning herself in the Regent’s
Canal?
But the case of Jane Stretch was a different thing altogether. The girl was unusual. A character. It would headline all the papers. It would make his name and show Miss Annabel Cullingworth that he was not to be laughed at when he went calling with a bunch of white carnations and a box of violet creams.

‘You will plead guilty, of course?’

She nodded. Yes, she had always felt guilty.

‘Then I will do my very best to present your case in the best possible light. We must hope for a lenient judgement.’

When he left, sucking very hard on his bottom lip, saying he’d be back, Jane told herself that things were looking up. Mr Henshaw seemed a good sort of man. He would do his very best for her. After all, he must have offered his services, which showed that he was charitable.

In a better frame of mind, she went back to the Bible. The very small type made her concentrate. It took her mind away from her dismal surroundings, the thick stone walls which seemed to be pushing themselves towards her, the bars at the window, the sounds of the keys rattling down the corridor – and this was how the Reverend James Rutherford found this new inmate, a girl obviously in need of spiritual nourishment, hunched over the book of Job, her eyes so intent she barely looked up as the warden admitted him.

‘Stand up!’ the warden shouted. Jane sprang to her feet in alarm, only to be greeted by what appeared to be a very old turkey in a dog collar. He sat on the small chair that the warden had brought.

‘You believe?’ he said, nodding at the Bible.

‘I suppose I do,’ said Jane carefully. ‘Yes.’

‘You suppose?’ the vicar spluttered, his neck flapping, his little yellow teeth gnashing against his lips.

‘Yes, sir,’ said Jane, who did not like the look of this red-faced gobbler, with his hair that was very black and springy, and his tobacco-stained fingers which he tapped across his knees as if playing on a keyboard.

‘And you are obviously a sinner,’ he said, with a closed, tight smile. ‘I have heard you have blood on your hands.’

‘You have heard only half-truths, sir. I am not the guilty party in all this,’ and though she sounded like a girl brimming with confidence, she could feel the tears coming, because she did feel guilty. She had been a part of it. She could have walked away.

‘Only you and God know that,’ he said. ‘And the judge will decide if it is true.’

‘And if he is wrong?’

‘Oh, the judge is never wrong,’ he told her, with something of a smirk, ‘because God in His heaven will be guiding him.’

Jane felt cold. She could hear a bird fluttering near the wet window. The Reverend’s yellow fingers had not stopped tapping. ‘Am I allowed to write letters?’ she asked, seeing a spot of ink on his cuff.

‘Can you write?’ he asked.

‘Yes, sir, I would not have asked if I couldn’t put pen to paper.’

‘You are impertinent,’ he said.

‘I am sorry, sir,’ she said, lowering her head, and the Reverend’s face softened slightly as he stood and attempted to pace what little space there was, his hands
in
loose knots, the way he liked to walk amongst his parishioners, especially when he wanted to avoid any physical contact.

‘Your mind must be very overworked,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Would you like to pray?’

‘I think a prayer would help,’ she said, still thinking of the ink stains and the letters she might write.

The Reverend folded his hands and bowed his head. ‘Our Lord in heaven, look upon this sinner with pity, show her the truth and the light, let her walk in the path of Your glory, for ever and ever, amen.’ He smiled at her. ‘The Lord will hear our prayer. He has helped Sara Thomson. He will help you.’