The Dolocher

by European P. Douglas

  Chapter 11

  The lock of the cell door clanked and the hinges sang with a high whine when the guard brought in the bread that morning. He handed it out to the queuing women one by one, but when it came to Kate’s turn, he stopped.

  “None for you today,” he said and nudged her out of the way. The woman next in line stopped, as though unsure what she should do.

  “Why, what did I do?” Kate cried out.

  “You didn’t do nothin’, you stupid cow. You’re getting out this mornin’,” he said and poked the breakfast at the next woman in line, who took it happily now that she knew she wasn’t betraying anyone.

  “How come?” Kate asked, but she regretted asking as quickly as the words left her mouth.

  “Who cares, missy? Don’t question it,” the guard said with a half smile.

  It was sunny though very cold when she was let out just after nine o’clock. She had lost the coat she had been wearing when the Parish Watch hauled her in, and her clothes were so damp from the cell and her sweat that a chill ran through her almost at once; she was going to be coming down with a cold before the day was out. She looked about, but there was no one she knew waiting for her. She hadn’t expected there would be. She saw the huge blacksmith from the corner pass by, carrying heavy bags of various metal items. He didn’t look back at her, and she was able to study the scar on his face in the bright sunlight as he passed by.

  She began to walk briskly towards her lodgings when a carriage pulled up to block her path. She looked up, annoyed, and the door swung open.

  “In you come, out of that cold,” Mr. Edwards said to her, smiling. She knew him, and she jumped in straight away and sat across from him. He gave her a blanket, and she wrapped it around herself.

  “You got me out?” she asked, looking at him and shivering. He nodded.

  “I have been busy for a few weeks, but when I went to the House you were nowhere to be found. They told me you were in Newgate.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I couldn’t take much more of that place.”

  “I shouldn’t imagine you could. You look and smell terrible,” Edwards said with a look almost of revulsion on his face. She knew how she looked and how she smelled, but she was still hurt by his words. She blushed and looked out at the busy morning street. “You were in there for a week?” he said then.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “The night they brought Olocher in?” he asked. The name was unpleasant to hear.

  “The night before that.” He nodded and then looked out the window himself. She gazed up at him, and she wondered if he was drunk. She had often seen him and his friends go all day and all night with alcohol. “Where are you taking me?” she asked, noticing that they were going in the direction of neither her home nor the brothel.

  “I’m taking you to my house; you can get yourself cleaned up and have a decent sleep and something to eat.”

  “I have no clothes with me.”

  “I’ll get one of my servants to run out and get you something.”

  “Why are you doing this for me?” she asked. He had used her services at the brothel many times, and he had even brought her out in his carriage (not this one, though) once or twice, but he had before never shown any interest in her that didn’t involve sex.

  “I have some questions about the prison, so think of all this as payment for your cooperation.”

  She saw that they had crossed the river, and she was amazed at some of the houses they were now passing. The streets here seemed to be much cleaner, and there wasn’t anything like the bustle of Hell or the Liberties here. She could see inside some of the houses, and there were fantastic candle chandeliers with ornate glass pieces hanging from them. She could see thick velvet curtains, and she imagined how warm these houses must be in the evenings.

  Finally, the carriage came to a halt, and Edwards jumped out and closed the door behind him.

  “Take her in by the servant’s entrance,” she heard him say to the driver, and the carriage started up again. It was only two minutes before they arrived at the back door of the house. She got out and went to the door indicated by the driver; she was met in the hallway by a maid, who looked her over once and said, “Follow me.”

  She did, and she was amazed at almost everything she saw. She knew that Mr. Edwards had money, but she’d had no idea how much! Everything seemed to be gold plated or painted a luxurious white. The floors had thick carpets her feet sank into that she imagined would be more comfortable to sleep on than any bed she had ever been in. The same beautiful chandeliers were here too, hung from the ceiling of every room and hall she could see into. She came to a fabulous stairway, and she could smell the wax used to keep the bannister rails looking pristine; she put her hand on the rail, and she had never felt anything to be so smooth and sturdy.

  When they reached the first landing, the maid brought her into a room, and she was once more amazed by what she saw. It was a bedroom, with a huge bed covered in blankets and pillows and surrounded by some sort of frame that ran up from the posts right up to the ceiling, with beautiful carvings in the wood all the way and on the headboard and footboard. Again the carpet was thick, and in this room a deep-red colour she didn’t know the name of. The window was massive, draped on either side by curtains of the same colour as the carpet, but most wondrous of all to her eyes was the sight of the floor-to-ceiling mirror that occupied half of one of the walls of the room. She actually gasped when she saw it.

  “The bath is in through there,” the maid said pointing. “It’s already filled. There are towels and soaps for you to use in there as well…and some nightclothes too.”

  “Thank you,” Kate said, unable to say anything else.

  “I am to go get you something to wear, and when you come out from the bath, you are to use this bed to sleep until lunch. I’ll come and get you at that time.”

  “Ok,” Kate said, trying to take it all in.

  “And you are not to leave these two rooms until I come and get you, ok? We can’t have just anyone wandering the halls here.”

  “Yes, ok.”

  Kate sank into the hot water of the bath and submerged her head beneath the surface. No one else had used this water. She was in fresh, clean, hot water, and she loved the feel of it against her body. She watched as her skin grew pink from the heat, and she washed with the soaps that had been left out for her. She ran her frothy fingers through her hair and cleansed it as many times as she could without getting cramp in her hand, and then finally she got out and dried herself with towels she would kill to be able to use all the time.

  She put on the nightclothes, and then came back into the bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror. She was so excited at what she saw. She had never looked so fresh in her life, and she could smell the beautiful aromas of the soaps on her skin and in her hair. She looked around and, seeing that there was no one who could catch her, she ran and jumped onto the bed in excitement.

  She sank into it, and it felt so comfortable but oddly, the first thing that came into her head was that this bed would terrible to make love in. You would sink in too much, and you wouldn’t be able to do anything that you needed to. She put the thought out of her mind, determined to live in the present and to feel the moment she was in. She cleared a little space for herself at one side of the bed and wrapped a blanket around herself, and soon she could feel the warmth of her body, and she drifted off to sleep.

  She was awoken a few hours later by the same maid who had seen her in that morning. “Come on, up you get. Lunch is in fifteen minutes.”

  Kate stretched out, and then the feeling of the bed reminded her where she was. She sat bolt upright and hoped she had not done anything wrong.

  “What do I have to do?” she asked the maid with pleading eyes.

  “Getting dressed would be a good start,” the maid said.

  When she had done this, putting on the new clothes that the maid had brought for her (they were nothing fancy, just a little
more expensive than the clothes she would have normally worn), she was escorted back down the stairs and into one of the rooms she had passed this morning. She felt so fresh, and her body wanted to stretch out and enjoy the spacious surroundings.

  Mr. Edwards was at a table, reading a large newspaper. He glanced up as she came in, but he did not stand, nor did he say anything before looking back at his paper. Kate didn’t know what to do, and when she looked at the maid for advice, the maid did not look at her but faced her master with an indifferent expression. After a time, Edwards folded the paper and looked at them both.

  “Thank you, that will be all.” At this, the maid left the room without a word. “Sit down,” he then said to Kate, indicating a chair at the table.

  “Thank you,” she said and sat.

  “I expect you are hungry?” he said, lifting lids of the silver dishes that were spread about the table. “Take what you like.” Kate was stunned to see much at one meal, and only for two people. She again thanked him, and then she took some meat that she did not recognise and put it on her plate. She looked at the cutlery and saw that the table had settings for eight people. At all the other places, there were numerous knives, forks, and spoons of differing sizes, but at hers there were only a single knife, fork, and spoon.

  “It is just to make it less confusing for you, dear,” Edwards said, obviously noticing what she was looking at, which embarrassed her.

  He stood up, took her plate and filled it with food from each of the steaming dishes, and then placed it back in front of her. It was more food than she had ever seen on one plate in her life, equivalent to a week’s dinners.

  “Now, you get started on that, and I will get started with my questions,” he said, filling his own plate. She began to eat, and the hot food was something else her senses had missed so much. She closed her eyes to the feeling, and she could feel the nourishment already in her saliva.

  “Ok,” she said.

  “What happened the night that Olocher was brought in?” he asked, and the mention of that name again caused her to open her eyes. She looked about the place as if Edwards had just addressed him and he was in the room.

  “It was a horrible night,” she said.

  “How so?”

  “Well, the weather for one thing. It was streaming down.”

  “I’m not too interested in the weather. What happened when he got to the prison?”

  “They brought him in and took him straight up into the tower without any questions or anything like normal.”

  “Do they normally ask questions when they bring a prisoner in?”

  “Yes Jimmy the…Mr. Brick normally asks a lot of questions and has the person searched before you get thrown in a cell.”

  “Jimmy the Prick?” Edwards smiled, and again Kate blushed at her error. “You don’t have to blush on my account; that idiot is no associate of mine. Go on, what next?”

  “Well, it was a normal enough night then for a while. Nothing was going on, and then all of a sudden there was the noise of a woman screaming from up in the tower.”

  “A woman screaming?”

  “Yeah, that’s what it sounded like, anyway. And then there were animals outside.”

  “The pigs?”

  “Yeah, only a few at first, but then there were loads, hundreds maybe.”

  “Hundreds?”

  “Well, it was hard to tell from the dungeon, but that’s how it seemed.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, they all started squealin’. It was like they were being slaughtered, and then some of them tried to break in through the gates.”

  “Break in?”

  “Yes, they were thumping against the gates. We could see them moving from the inside.”

  “Remarkable.”

  “Yeah, it was, and then it stopped all of a sudden, just like it had begun.”

  “The woman screaming as well as the pigs squealing?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then?”

  “Then there was a big to-do with the guards, and they found out that he was dead up there.”

  “Olocher?”

  “Yeah, and then the soldiers came, and there were other people coming and going all night.”

  “Do you know who these people were?”

  “No, I didn’t know any of them.”

  “Were they in the military, do you think?”

  “I couldn’t be sure, but they weren’t wearing any uniforms.”

  Edwards was silent for a little, and he seemed to muse deeply on what she had said.

  “And the next morning was the riot outside the prison?”

  “Yeah, the people who went to see him hung showed up just as the body was being taken away. They went crazy and attacked the soldiers and took the body.”

  “Do you know who took the body?”

  “I could see them, but I don’t remember ever seeing their faces before.”

  “When the body was found, was it brought back to the prison?”

  “No.”

  “And when the body was being taken away, did you actually see it?”

  “Well, it was covered in a sheet.”

  “Were you able to tell for sure that it was Olocher?”

  “Well, no, but it must have been.” Kate was confused as to what he was saying.

  “Tell me about the night that the first guard was killed.”

  “We were asleep over at the wall, away from the window, trying to keep warm,” Kate said, and the thought of this made her put another hot piece of potato in her mouth. “And then there was this noise outside, and we could hear the guard crying out in agony.” She felt the hot flush of tears come to her as she remembered the event.

  “Could you see anything at all, a shadow even?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “And the noise you heard before the guard crying out, what was it?

  “I don’t know. It sounded like an animal.”

  “What animal did it sound like?”

  “I don’t know. They all sound the same to me, really,” she said, stifling her tears.

  “They brought this man into the prison?”

  “Yes, and then the doctor came.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said it looked like some animal had done it.”

  “Did he say what animal he thought it might have been?”

  “I think he said it could have been a dog.”

  “And they took him away to the hospital, where he died. Can you remember anything else about that event?”

  “No, it seemed to happen so fast.”

  “Ok, what about the second guard?”

  “I saw it that night; I was awake.”

  “You saw it?” He sat forward now and studied her seriously.

  “Yes, first I heard it growling outside.”

  “Growling? Like a dog?”

  “Could have been a dog’s growl.”

  “And you saw it?”

  “Yes, but I was so afraid that there were tears in my eyes when it passed by the cell window.” Again her tears were falling.

  “What was it?”

  “I couldn’t tell!” she cried out, feeling as though she had let someone down by not being able to say what it was.

  “Relax, it’s ok. Here, have a drink,” he said, pouring her some of the wine he was drinking. She took a mouthful and almost choked on the taste of it, much different that the “wine” she was used to drinking at the brothel. She coughed and then regained her breath again, embarrassed by her display. “Could it have been a man?” he asked her.

  “No, it was big and black, and I’m sure it was on four legs—oh, and those teeth!” She had just remembered this and she thought it odd that she should have an image of those sharp fangs now when she had not perceived them at the time.

  “The teeth?”

  “Yes they were huge, much bigger than you would expect for even a creature of that size.”

  “Did they bring this man into
the prison?”

  Kate looked at him as though he were stupid. “There was nothing left of him to bring in.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well, they had his torn clothes and his halberd, but that was all.”

  “Did the doctor come again?”

  “No, there was nothing for him to examine.” Again she wondered why he was asking such silly questions.

  “Did anything else happen that night?”

  “No.”

  “Did you notice anything odd on any of the other nights that you were there, anyone passing by the windows late at night or any strange noises in the area?”

  She thought about this, but nothing was coming to mind. She could just sense the stench of the place in her nostrils, and she almost retched at the thought of it. “No, nothing I can remember, anyway.”

  “Ok.” He thought for a while about what she had said. Kate took this opportunity to continue eating, and she took some more small sips of the wine, which was much better than she had thought after the first taste.

  Finally, he stood up, and she looked up at him.

  “I will have my driver drop you home or to the brothel or wherever you want to go in a little bit.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I just want you to do one more thing before you go,” he said with an evil smile as his hands began to undo his trousers.