by Tim Vicary
A door opened. Footsteps, a rustling noise, skirts, women’s voices, furtive, excited whispers.
‘Sarah?’
Should she call out? Somehow the pressure of keeping hidden for so long kept her mouth shut. It was like a child’s game of hide and seek — just because the others call you don’t give your hiding place away. Anyhow, could she trust them?
The creak of a basket opening. Not hers. Cries of disappointment. ‘Sarah, where are you? Tell us, quick — are you all right?’
‘Yes, here.’ Her mouth was so dry it sounded like nothing to her. She shouted again and banged her hand feebly against the lid. A woman called out: ‘Alice! This one!’
The straps loosened, the lid was pulled back and there was sudden, glaring light. And there above her was Alice Watson. Round spectacles on the lined face, grey hair as ever pulled back into a severe bun, thin lips pursed with anxious determination. Like a nanny with a naughty child. Sarah began to laugh. She could not help it. And with the laughter, tears, so that she could not see well. She tried to get up, failed, flopped back.
Hands came down to help, untangling her from the sheets, beginning to lift her. Many hands, many women. Her sisters in the movement. Laughing, anxious, triumphant.
‘There now,’ Alice Watson said. ‘Put her down on her feet, gently, the poor dear lady. She weighs less than a ten-year-old child!’
23
WHEN SHE was out of the basket, she could not stand. Her legs crumpled under her. But there were arms all around — to hold her, support her, carry her gently to a chair in the corner of the big laundry store room. Women all around — tears, laughter, kisses, celebration, and a lady doctor testing her pulse, peering quickly into her eyes, her sore mouth, asking how she felt.
‘Wonderful!’
Sarah’s first word led to smiles, laughter, applause even. But Alice Watson had no time for that.
‘Then you must get out of that prison dress as quickly as you can. Here, I’ve brought one of your own. I’ll help you put it on. The others will turn their backs if you wish.’
‘What? No, no need. I’m not modest any more, I’ve nothing to hide.’
Indeed she had not, Alice thought, as she and the doctor bundled the dirty prison smock over Sarah’s head and saw the thin arms and legs, the narrow sinewy neck, beneath. She had been thin enough before she slashed the picture; since then, Alice thought, she could scarcely have kept a mouthful down at all. Hunger is an illness when it looks like this.
But the cure is freedom — and joy.
As Sarah stood, tottering slightly, in her own long blue woollen dress with little white stars around collar and cuffs — one that Deborah had chosen from Sarah’s wardrobe — Alice thought she understood, once again, what a striking figure Sarah must have made as a young bride. The beautiful society girl who had married the elegant rising young bachelor and prospective MP, Jonathan Becket. Someone combed her hair for her, and with a smile of relief on her face and a sparkle in her eyes, she looked radiant. Her bones were good — only one did not expect to see them quite so clearly, in such a starved, emaciated face.
She will look like that when she is old, Alice thought. When she looks back and remembers these days.
Sarah smiled, overjoyed at her reception. She tried a few steps in her dress, swayed, and sat down rather too abruptly on a hard wooden chair.
‘But how did you get this, Alice? It’s perfect — it’s my own!’
‘Deborah sent it.’ Alice Watson glanced up from a sack into which she was hurriedly stuffing Sarah’s heavy shoes and grey, arrow-striped prison dress.
‘Deborah? But how could she?’ Sarah asked, confused. ‘She’s at Glenfee!’
‘No. That’s where you’re going. Soon.’ Mrs Watson stood up, the sack in one hand, and smiled down at her friend quietly. Ruth had been right. Sarah’s mind was wandering. The bromide, perhaps. ‘Didn’t you get our letter?’ she asked gently.
‘Letter? Oh yes.’ Memory came back, slowly. Everything in the prison seemed so distant, already. A dream. Another country.
But Alice Watson was full of bustle and orders. She handed the sack to one of the laundry women, with orders to burn it immediately. Then she bent down, put one of Sarah’s arms gently round her neck, and raised her to her feet. The doctor, Rachel Camperdowne, took Sarah’s other arm, and they walked her quickly out through a small door at the back of the building. Then down an alleyway between some dustbins.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To a car, I hope.’
A car was waiting in a back street at the end of the alleyway. A gleaming yellow 6-cylinder Noiseless Napier, with a young woman in plus fours and a motoring helmet holding the door ready for them to get in, and a crowd of street urchins in flat caps and oversize jackets clustered around to gape.
‘Not perhaps as discreet as I could wish, but we’ll change to a taxi cab before we get to the hotel,’ Mrs Watson said. ‘The chief thing now is speed, and young Miranda here makes a speciality of that! I don’t want to have the air sucked out of my lungs or see any dogs run over, now, miss. We’ve an invalid aboard.’
What little they could see of the face of the young lady chauffeur grinned, and a gauntleted hand saluted. Then she walked round to the front to crank a handle, leapt aboard, and the car set off with an unfortunate jerk which dislodged three of the most curious street urchins from the back mudguard.
As they turned out into Holborn High Street, swerving between bicycles and grocers’ drays at twenty and sometimes even thirty miles an hour, Sarah sat back in her seat and laughed in sheer exhilaration at the sudden extraordinariness of it all.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To meet your sister, Deborah Cavendish,’ Mrs Watson said. ‘She’s in a hotel run by one of our sympathisers near Euston.’
‘But — why not home?’ Sarah asked. ‘I have to meet Jonathan sometime. It may as well be soon.’ At the thought of what she would have to say, all the joy went out of the unaccustomed sunlight, and a pulse began to beat unpleasantly in her neck. Alice Watson glanced at her oddly.
‘Well, you can’t meet him in Belgrave Square. Use your wits, dear — you’ve just escaped from Holloway, in open defiance of His Imperial Majesty’s government. The first place the police are bound to look for you is your home, so you can’t possibly go there. We hope they won’t realise for some time just how you got out, but the chances are they will, so we had to leave the laundry as fast as we could. Not every woman there sympathises with us, or has the sense to keep her mouth shut.’
‘But you said I was going to Glenfee — didn’t you?’
‘Yes. It seems the safest place. Deborah will tell you about it, later.’ She leaned forward to tap their young chauffeur on the arm. ‘This is it, Miranda. We get out here.’
The yellow car pulled up in a side street near Euston station. The three women got out and the car drove away quickly. They walked round the corner into the main road and Sarah suddenly felt dreadfully vulnerable, like a ten-year-old English child suddenly abandoned in Timbuctoo. The street was crowded with strangers, who understood nothing of how she felt. Her legs were shaky, and she could hardly stand, but she realised that to lean too obviously on Alice’s arm would attract unwelcome attention.
There was a policeman in the street, further down — she could see him, calmly strolling along with his hands behind his back, occasionally catching sight of himself in a shop window and preening his moustache. Everyone in the street — men, women, children — was a potential enemy, who could betray her without even meaning to. Would it be in the newspapers that she had escaped yet? Surely not. But still, any attention attracted to her was dangerous.
The doctor, Rachel Camperdowne, left them to go along to the station and hire a taxi. She disappeared in the crowd and Sarah felt even more dreadfully alone.
‘Why didn’t we just drive there?’ she asked irritably. ‘This is stupid, Alice — I can’t stand!’
‘Lean on me. Loo
k, if you do it like this it’s not so obvious.’ She stood very close to Sarah, holding her hand at waist level, shoulders touching. ‘She’ll be back in a minute. There are always taxis at Euston.’
‘But why didn’t we just drive there?’
‘That yellow car of young Miranda’s is too conspicuous. She was the only one I could trust to take us from the laundry but I don’t want anyone to remember where we’ve gone. Look, there’s Rachel already. You’ll be all right, Sarah.’
To Sarah’s vast relief the taxi arrived, and they got in. She sank back in the seat, exhausted. Her own weakness frightened her. Rachel Camperdowne felt her pulse anxiously, then pulled back the skin of her eyelids and looked underneath. Alice pulled the window across, so that they could talk without the taxi driver hearing. ‘When did you last eat?’
‘This morning. I think it was then. I had porridge.’
‘And before that?’
‘The day before. It was . . . difficult.’ Haltingly, Sarah answered the woman’s questions about her time in prison. Her fast, the forced feeding. The number of times she had vomited it all up. The bromide. Dr Camperdowne listened, appalled.
‘The man should be struck off the register!’
‘He will be, Rachel. Don’t worry,’ Alice Watson said. ‘But not for any of that. That was just government policy.’
‘Well, it’s a good bowl of beef broth for you, Mrs Becket,’ Rachel said. ‘And then bed. A long quiet sleep, I should think, with just a few friends and no emotional strain.’
‘You’re very kind,’ Sarah said. ‘But I don’t think I can. You see, there’s something . . .’
‘This is the place. Set us down outside that door, driver, would you?’
Sarah got out of the taxi carefully, and looked round. They were in a quiet side street with a motley terrace of tall buildings behind iron railings on either side. Directly in front of her was a tall narrow four-storey building sandwiched between two larger ones. The house was not very imposing. It had three small steps up to a brown door with a brass knocker and a fanlight above, in the glass of which she could see the letters Anglesey Hotel. There were net curtains in the windows, and colourful flower boxes on the sills outside. It looked clean and neat and comforting and feminine.
They walked up the steps and knocked on the door.
‘You last saw her when?’
Ten forty-six. ‘I couldn’t say when exactly, sir.’
Ruth stood on the carpet in front of the prison governor’s desk. It was a large room, comfortably furnished with a desk, fireplace, books, leather armchairs and a collection of pictures on the walls. The pictures were of ships on the Thames, sea battles, and bearded former holders of the governor’s office. The present governor, a small man with luxuriant side-whiskers and moustache over a pink bristly chin, sat upright in the large leather chair behind his desk, glaring at Ruth. Beside him, on either side, stood Martin Armstrong and the head wardress, Mrs Canning. Both looked furious but, underneath that, a little anxious too. Ruth wondered at that. Were they afraid? Why was that?
She was too afraid herself to pursue the thought. This is my whole career at stake — my liberty, in fact. If they find out what I’ve done I’ll be locked up straight away. Of course they’ll find out — how can they fail?
‘When more or less did you last see her, then, young woman?’ the governor asked, with heavy sarcasm. ‘Try to be as accurate about the time as you can.’
Ruth frowned. ‘Well, it was between ten and eleven, I suppose, sir. You see, we were getting the cells cleaned out and taking the linen down, and then there was that riot on C landing. I was up there trying to quieten the suffragettes. Nearly all of us were.’
That was true at least, she thought. Nearly all the wardresses had been there. Ruth had played as prominent a part in quelling the riot as she could, so that everyone would remember her presence. Presumably the other wardresses who had been summoned into this office before her had already testified to that.
At least that was a point of faint hope. If the governor had been certain Ruth had been involved in Sarah’s escape he wouldn’t have bothered interviewing anyone else. She squared her shoulders and waited for his next question.
‘When did you find out Mrs Becket was gone?’
‘When Dr Armstrong came to see her, sir. I unlocked her cell door and went in and there was just a blanket rolled up on the bed. It was about — eleven o’clock, I think.’
And now it is twelve thirty-four, she thought, as she glanced at the clock on the wall behind Mrs Canning’s scowling face. Joy burst in her like sunrise. Three hours since I fastened Sarah in the basket, two and a half since the laundry van went out of the main gates. If Alice Watson hasn’t got her out safe and free by now she never will. And still the governor doesn’t know how it happened!
Or are these three just playing with me?
‘You are smiling, Miss Harkness. You find something funny about this, perhaps?’
The smile drained from Ruth’s face. ‘No sir, of course not.’
‘Then why were you smiling?’
‘It . . . er . . . I was just thinking, sir, how odd it was to see those blankets there on Mrs Becket’s bed,’ she said lamely. And how very much odder it had been to see the face of Dr Armstrong in the cell. She had thought the man would have a seizure. He had snatched the blankets from the bed in his great hairy hands and flung them aside as though he thought he would find Sarah Becket hidden beneath them. Stupid man; all he saw was a cockroach. Then he had turned on Ruth. His face had been as white as a ghost and he was sweating, great big droplets of it standing out on that fat forehead, running down his heavy jowls.
‘Where is she, girl?’ he had roared. He had even seized her shoulders and shaken them, beside himself with shock.
But that was all it had been. Only shock. He had not suspected Ruth at all, so far as she could see. He blamed Sarah; he seemed to think she had somehow escaped all by herself. And now that man Armstrong is longing to be elsewhere, Ruth thought. She stole a swift, nervous glance at him. He was fidgeting, shifting anxiously from one foot to the other, gazing everywhere around the room but never particularly at her.
The governor was the real danger. And Mrs Canning.
‘Try to think back, Miss Harkness,’ the governor said. ‘Did you take Mrs Becket out of her cell this morning?’
‘Yes.’
‘For what purpose?’
‘To empty the sluice bucket as we always do. And then to change the linen.’
‘Did she carry her own bucket and linen?’
‘She did, sir. Yes.’
‘And then you took her back to her cell?’
Ruth hesitated. Only for an instant, but it was a fateful one. ‘Yes, sir. I did.’
The governor’s eyes met Ruth’s. She was aware that the other two were watching her intently too but she ignored them. Just kept her eyes cold and steady on the governor’s while she trembled and shook inside.
‘You took her back to her cell and locked her in? Are you sure?’
‘Yes, sir. Quite sure.’
Dear God, Father in Heaven, don’t let me blush now. Please if you have ever loved me don’t let that happen. I have never told a lie in my life before - why on earth did I tell this one?
She had not planned it. The idea had come into her mind out of nowhere. A gift from God perhaps. Or the devil . . .
Mrs Canning stared at her fiercely. ‘You were with her in the linen room, weren’t you, Miss Harkness? You are saying you took her back up to her cell and locked her in before you came on to help to quell the nonsense with the suffragettes?’
‘Yes, Mrs Canning. I did it for her own safety, you see. She was weak after her hunger strike, and I thought she might get hurt, so I locked her in. I think she lay straight down on her bed. Then I came on to C landing to help you.’
‘And you didn’t check up on her afterwards?’
‘Only through the judas, ma’am. She was asleep on her bed, or at leas
t I thought she was, so I saw no reason to disturb her, like.’
This is it, then. Condemned out of my own mouth. They must know I’m lying, surely. Why did I do it?
To Ruth’s surprise the governor and Mrs Canning began to confer in front of her.
‘It must have been to do with the suffragettes’ demonstration then, Mrs Canning. I’m sure of it. They started it deliberately to distract you and your staff. Then, when it was in full flight, one of them would have slipped over to D landing to unlock Mrs Becket’s cell door.’
‘But what with, sir? They wouldn’t have a key.’
‘A skeleton key or a copy, Mrs Canning. It’s been done before. These women are educated and determined. They have connections outside.’
‘But even if they got her out of her cell, sir, how could she leave the building?’
‘Over the wall, perhaps with a rope ladder? That disturbance of yours took some time to quell, I fear.’
‘It’s possible, sir, but unlikely. If one could get out, why didn’t they all go?’
The governor shook his head sagely. ‘Ah that, Mrs Canning, is a political question, the answer to which may only become apparent with time. It depends on what advantages in publicity they believe they can make out of this wretched affair. What the devil?’
Ruth looked over her shoulder, away from her inquisitors, who seemed for the moment to be ignoring her. A wardress stood in the doorway. She looked upset and shocked.
‘Excuse me, gentlemen, Mrs Canning. But there seems to be another suffragette demonstration. The prisoners on C landing are singing again and can’t be stopped.’
The truth of what she said was obvious. Even at this distance the sound of singing came clearly through the open door. Mrs Canning reacted quickly.
‘Right, then. I’ll put an end to that straight away! If you’ll excuse me, sir.’ She strode across the room. ‘Come on, Harkness. Come with me. It’s time those fancy bitches learnt a proper respect for Holloway — and they can start right now!’