by Sarah Waters
Miss Ridley answered that it was in the Christian lady’s household that the theft had taken place; and with a piece of the Christian lady’s property that the officer had been assaulted. When all the points had been properly noted, she gestured for Williams to move back, and for one of the other prisoners to step forward. This one was dark-haired—dark as a gipsy. The reception-matron let her stand a moment while she added some fresh detail to her book. ‘Now then, Black-Eyed Sue,’ she said mildly at last, ‘what’s your name?’
The girl was named Jane Bonn, was two-and-twenty, and had been sent to Millbank for procuring an abortion.
The next—I forget her name—was four-and-twenty, and was a street-thief.
The third was seventeen, and had broken into the cellar of a shop and set a fire there. She began to weep as the reception-matron questioned her, raising a hand to her face to rub miserably at her streaming eyes and nose, until Miss Manning stepped forward and handed her a napkin. ‘There, now,’ said Miss Manning. ‘You are only crying because it is so strange.’ She put her fingers to the girl’s pale brow and smoothed her curling hair. ‘There, now.’
Miss Ridley looked on, but said nothing. The reception-matron said ‘Oh!’—she had found a mistake at the top of her page, and now leaned, frowning, to re-write it.
When all the business in this chamber had been completed the women were taken into the next; and no-one suggesting to me that I ought now to pass on to the wards, I thought I might as well go with them, and see the process to its close. In this room there was a bench, on which the women were instructed to sit; and a single chair. The chair stood, rather ominously, in the centre of the floor, beside a little table. The table had a comb upon it, and a pair of scissors, and when the girls caught sight of these they gave a kind of collective shudder. ‘That’s right,’ said the older woman then with a leer, ‘you shake. This is where they has the hair off you.’ Miss Ridley silenced her at once; but the words had done their work, and the girls now looked wilder than ever.
‘Please, miss,’ cried one of them, ‘don’t cut my hair! Oh please, miss!’
Miss Ridley picked up the scissors and gave a couple of snaps with them, then looked at me. ‘You would think I was after their eyes, wouldn’t you, Miss Prior?’ She pointed with her blades to the first of the trembling girls—the arsonist—and then to the chair. ‘Come along, now,’ she said—and then, when the girl only hesitated: ‘Come along!’ in a terrible tone that made even me flinch. ‘Or shall we fetch some keepers, to hold your legs and arms down? They are fresh off the men’s wards, mind, and apt to be rough.’
At that the girl reluctantly rose, and sat shivering in the chair. Miss Ridley plucked her bonnet from her, then worked her fingers over her head, loosening her curls and drawing out the pins that kept them tight; the bonnet was passed to the reception-matron, who made an entry regarding it in her great book, whistling lightly as she did so, and turning a sweet—a white mint—upon her tongue. The girl’s hair was a rusty brown, and stiff and dark in places with sweat or hair-oil. When she felt it fall against her neck she began to cry again, and Miss Ridley sighed and said, ‘You silly girl, we must only cut it to the jaw. And who will there be to see you, here?’—this, of course, made the girl weep harder. But while she shuddered the matron combed the greasy tresses, then gathered them together between the fingers of one fist and prepared to cut. I became suddenly conscious of my own hair, which Ellis had lifted and combed, with a similar gesture, not three hours before. I seemed to feel each single strand start up, and pull against the wires that pinned it. It was horrible, to have to sit and look on while the scissor-blades rasped, and the pale girl wept and shuddered. It was horrible—and yet, I could not turn my gaze. I could only watch along with the three fearful prisoners, fascinated and ashamed, until at last the matron lifted her fist, and the severed hair hung limp; and when a strand or two of it sprang to the girl’s damp face, she twitched, and so did I.
Miss Ridley asked her then, did she wish the hair to be kept?—The prisoners, it seems, may have their shorn hair bound and stored with their things, to take with them when they are freed. The girl gazed once at the quivering pony’s tail, and shook her head. ‘Very well,’ said Miss Ridley. She carried the tresses to a wicker basket, and there let them fall. ‘We have uses for hair,’ she said to me, darkly, ‘at Millbank.’
The other women were brought up for their barbering then—the older prisoner submitting to it with a grand display of coolness; the thief as miserable as the first girl; and Black-Eyed Susan, the abortionist—whose hair hung long and dark and heavy, like a hood of tar or treacle—cursing and kicking and ducking her head, so that the reception-matron had to be summoned to come and help Miss Manning hold her wrists, and Miss Ridley, cutting, grew breathless and red. ‘There now, you little brute!’ she said at last. ‘Why, what a great lot of hair you have, I can barely close my hand around it!’ She held the black locks high, and the reception-matron stepped to study them, and then to rub a tress or two beneath her fingers. ‘Such a fine bit of hair!’ she said admiringly. ‘Real Spanish hair, they call that. We must have a thread, Miss Manning, to put about it. That will make a handsome hair-piece, that will.’ She turned to the girl—‘Don’t you look so fierce! We’ll see how glad you are to have your old hair back, six years from now!’ Miss Manning brought a string, the hair was fastened, and the girl returned to her place upon the bench. Her neck showed red where the scissors had caught it.
I sat through all this, feeling increasingly awkward and strange, the women occasionally sending sly, fearful glances my way, as if they wondered what terrible role I was to play in their incarceration—once, when the gipsy girl struggled, Miss Ridley said, ‘For shame, with the Lady Visitor watching! She shan’t be visiting you, now she’s seen your temper!’ When the hair-cutting was completed and she had stepped aside to wipe her hands upon a cloth, I went to her and asked her, quietly, what was to happen to the women now? She answered in her usual tone that they would undress themselves, then be taken and made to bathe, then passed over to the prison surgeon.
‘We shall see, then,’ she said, ‘that they have nothing about themselves’—she said the women sometimes carry objects into the gaol, like that, about their persons, ‘plugs of tobacco, or even knives’. After their examinations they are given their prison costumes, and are addressed by Mr Shillitoe and Miss Haxby; in their cells they are visited by the chaplain, Mr Dabney. ‘After that they are visited by no-one, ma’am, for a day and a night. That helps them think the better on their crimes.’
She returned her towel to a hook upon the wall, then looked past me to the miserable women on the bench. ‘Now then,’ she said, ‘let us have the dresses off you. Come along, look sharp!’ The women, like so many lambs, grown dumb and meek before their shearers, began at once to rise and fumble with the fastenings of their frocks. Miss Manning produced four shallow wooden trays, and placed them at their feet. I stood a second watching the scene—the little arsonist shrugging off the bodice of her gown to expose the filthy under-clothes beneath; the gipsy girl raising her arms and showing the darkness of her armpit, then turning, with a hopeless modesty, as she worked at the hooks of her stays. Miss Ridley leaned nearer to me to ask, ‘Will you go in with them ma’am, and watch them bathe?’—and the movement of her breath against my cheek made me blink, and I looked away. I said no, I would not accompany them there, but would go on to the wards. She straightened, and her mouth twitched, and I thought I caught a flash of something behind her pale, bare gaze—a sour kind of satisfaction, or amusement.
But what she said was: ‘As you wish, ma’am.’
I left the women then, and didn’t look at them again. Miss Ridley called to a matron she heard passing in the corridor beyond, and had her escort me to the prison proper. As I walked with her I saw, through a half-open door, what must have been the surgeon’s chamber: a dismal-looking room with a tall wooden couch, and a table with instruments laid out upon it. There was a gen
tleman there—the surgeon himself, I suppose—he didn’t look up as we passed by. He was standing with his hands held to a lamp, paring his nails.
The woman I walked with now was named Miss Brewer. She is young—I thought her very young for a matron, but it turned out she is not a matron at all, in the ordinary sense, but clerk to the chaplain. She wears a different-coloured mantle to the matrons on the wards, and her manner seemed kinder than theirs, her speech gentler. Her duties include handling the prisoners’ post. The women of Millbank, she told me, may send and receive one letter every two months; there being so many cells, however, there is generally post for her to carry every day. She said her job is a pleasant one—the pleasantest one in all the gaol. She never grows weary of seeing the expressions on the faces of the prisoners when she stops at their cell gates and hands them their letters.
I saw something of this, for I had caught her as she was about to make her round, and walked with her on it; the women she beckoned to gave screams of delight, and clutched at the letters she passed to them and sometimes pressed them to their bosoms or their mouths. Only one looked fearful as we approached her gate. Miss Brewer said to her quickly, ‘Nothing for you, Banks. Don’t be afraid’—and she told me then that that prisoner has a sister in a very poor way, and every day expects a letter bringing news of her. That, she said, was the only unpleasant part of the business. She would be very sorry to have to carry that letter—‘for, of course, I shall know what is inside it, before Banks does’.
All the letters, to and from the gaol, pass through the chaplain’s office, and are inspected before they leave it by Mr Dabney or by her. I said, ‘Why, then you know all the women’s lives here! All their secrets, all their plans . . .’
She heard that, and coloured—as if she had not thought of it in quite that light before. ‘The letters must be read,’ she answered. ‘Those are the rules. And the messages in them, you know, are very commonplace.’
We climbed the tower staircase then, past the penal wards, and reached the highest floor; and here I thought of something. The packet of letters grew smaller. There was one for Ellen Power, the elderly prisoner; she saw it, and then me, and winked: ‘One from my little grand-daughter,’ she said. ‘She never forgets me.’ We passed on like this, drawing nearer to the angle of the ward, and at last I moved closer to Miss Brewer and asked her, had she anything for Selina Dawes? She looked at me, and blinked. For Dawes? Why, nothing! And how odd that I should ask it, for she was just about the only woman in the gaol for whom she never had a letter!
Never? I asked her.—Never, she said. She could not say as to whether any letters had come for Dawes when she was first admitted—that was before Miss Brewer’s time there. But there had certainly come nothing for her, nor had she sent a single letter out, within the past twelve months.
I said, ‘Has she no friends, no family, to remember her?’ and Miss Brewer shrugged: ‘If she ever had, she has quite cast them off—or they, of course, might have cast off her. I believe that happens.’ Now her smile grew stiffer. ‘You see, there are some women here,’ she said, ‘who keep their secrets to themselves . . .’
She said it rather primly, then moved on; and when I caught up with her she was engaged in reading aloud a letter to a woman who—I suppose—was unable to read it for herself. But her words had made me thoughtful. I went past her, then walked the little distance to the second line of cells. I stepped softly, and before Dawes raised her eyes to mine I had a second or two in which to gaze at her, through the bars of her gate.
I hadn’t thought much before about who there might be, in the outer world, to miss Selina Dawes, to visit her, to send her letters that were commonplace or kind. To know that there was no-one made the solitude and silence in which she sat seem to grow thicker. I thought then that Miss Brewer’s words were truer than she knew: Dawes does keep her own secrets; she keeps them even there, at Millbank. And I remembered, too, something another matron told me once—that, handsome as Dawes was, no prisoner ever sought to make a pal of her. I understood that now.
And so I looked at her, and felt a rush of pity. And what I thought was: You are like me.
I wish I had only thought that and moved on. I wish I had left her. But as I watched she raised her head, and smiled, and I saw then that she looked expectant. And then I could not leave her. I gestured to Mrs Jelf, who was further down the ward; and by the time she had brought her key and opened the gate, Dawes had put her needles aside and risen to greet me.
Indeed, it was she—once the matron had united us, and fidgeted over us, and hesitantly left us to our business—who spoke first. She said, ‘I’m glad you’ve come!’ She said that she was sorry not to see me, last time.
I said, last time? ‘Oh yes. But you were busy with your school-mistress.’
She tossed her head. ‘Her,’ she said. She said they think her quite a prodigy there, because she is able to remember in the afternoons the lines of Scripture read to them at chapel, in the morning. She said she wonders what else they think she has, to fill her empty hours up.
She said, ‘I would far rather have spoken with you, Miss Prior. I’m afraid you were kind to me, when we last talked; and I didn’t deserve it. I have been wishing, since then—well, you said you came to be my friend. I don’t have much cause to remember the ways of friendship, here.’
Her words were satisfying ones for me to hear, and made me like and pity her all the more. We talked a little, about the habits of the gaol. I said, ‘I think you might be moved from here, in time, to a kinder prison—perhaps, to Fulham?’—and she only shrugged, saying one prison was as good as any other.
I might have left her then, and gone on to another woman, and been tranquil now; but I was too intrigued by her. At last I could not help myself. I said that one of the matrons had told me—quite in the friendliest fashion, of course—that she received no letters . . .
I asked her, Was that true? Was there really no-one, beyond Millbank, to take an interest in her sufferings there? She studied me for a moment, so that I thought she might grow proud again, and not answer. But then she said, that she had many friends.
Her spirit-friends, yes. She had told me of them. But, there must be others, from her life outside, who missed her?—Again she shrugged, saying nothing.
‘Have you no family?’
She had an auntie, she said, ‘in spirit’, who sometimes visits her.
‘Have you no friends,’ I said, ‘who are alive?’
Then I think she did grow a little proud. How many friends, she wondered, would come to visit me, if I were put in Millbank? The world she moved in before, she said, it wasn’t a grand world, but it wasn’t a world of ‘thieves and bullies’, like many of the women’s there. Besides, she ‘doesn’t care to be seen’, she said, in such a place. She prefers the spirit-people, who do not judge her, to those people who have only laughed at her in her ‘misfortune’.
That word seemed carefully chosen. Hearing it I thought, reluctantly, of those other words, marked on the enamel tablet outside her gate: Fraud and Assault. I told her that the other women I visit sometimes find it comforting to talk to me about their crimes.—She said at once, ‘And you would have me tell you about mine. Well, and why shouldn’t I? Except that there was no crime! There was only—’
Only what?
She shook her head: ‘Only a silly girl, who saw a spirit and was frightened by it; and a lady who was frightened by the girl, and died. And I was blamed, for all of it.’
I had had this much already, from Miss Craven. I asked her now, Why was the girl made afraid? She said, after a second’s hesitation, that the spirit had turned ‘naughty’—that was the word she used. The spirit had turned naughty, and the lady, ‘Mrs Brink’, saw it all and was so startled—‘Well, there was a weakness about her heart that I never knew of. She fell in a faint, and later died. She was a friend to me. No-one ever thought of that, all through my trial. They only must find some cause for it, some thing that they could unde
rstand. The mother of the girl was brought to say her daughter had been harmed, as well as poor Mrs Brink; and then the cause of it all was found to lie with me.’
‘When all the time it was the—naughty spirit?’
‘Yes.’ But what judge is there, she said, what jury—unless a jury made of spiritualists, and God knows how she longed for that!—what judge is there, that would believe her? ‘They only said it couldn’t be a spirit, because spirit-people don’t exist’—here she pulled a face. ‘In the end they made it a case of fraud, as well as assault.’
I asked her then, What had the girl said—the girl who was struck? She answered that the girl had certainly felt the spirit, but had grown confused. ‘The mother was rich, and had a lawyer that could make the best of things. My own man was no good, and still cost all my money—all the money I earned, through helping people, all gone—like that!—on nothing.’
But if the girl had seen a spirit?
‘She didn’t see him. She only felt him. They said—they said it must be my hand she had felt . . .’
I remember her now pressing her two slender hands close together, and slowly working the fingers of one across the rough and reddened knuckles of the other. I said, Had she had no friends, to support her? and her mouth gave a tilt. She said she had had many friends, and they had liked to call her a ‘martyr to the cause’—but only at first. For she was sorry to say that there were jealous people, ‘even in the spiritual movement’, and some were very glad to see her brought low. Others were only frightened. In the end, when she was found guilty, there was nobody to speak in her behalf . . .
She looked miserable at that, and terribly delicate and young. I said, ‘And you insist it was a spirit that should have the blame?’—She nodded. I think I smiled. ‘How hard it seems,’ I said, ‘that you were sent here, while it got off quite free.’