by Abigail Agar
The next sentence, indeed the next thought, was struck from her head by a vicious blow of Fitzwilliam’s hand. The swaying of the carriage took on a drunken, vertiginous motion and her vision dimmed.
The pinprick of pain where the blow had landed vibrated in her cheek, expanding from that point like a ripple in a pond until it filled her entire skull with unbearable agony. Her vision dimmed around the edges, and she felt at that moment the complete physical inequality between herself and this brute but never felt her intellectual superiority more sharply.
‘You cowardly shi–’ but she couldn’t finish the thought before a second blow fell, and the dimness in her vision spread to fill up the whole world, smothering all in a deep and dreamless sleep.
***
She woke in a cell, and when she shifted to look around a little, she found the right hand side of her face ached. When she touched it she could feel that her whole cheek was a bruise, and a lump about the size of a Cornish hen’s egg was forming on her temple.
Every noise was deafening: the scurrying sound of mice or – worse – rats, seemed to roar in her ear like waves breaking against a beach.
She cautiously opened her eyes and found herself in one of the round sandstone walled cells of the Bathcombe town gaol. It was a small building which was regularly emptied whenever Canary Phillips, the owner of all of Bathcombe’s prison system bought himself a new building into which to decant his landlocked inmates.
It took time to come to terms with her location, with the suddenness and completeness of her life’s collapse. The fleas, which kept finding the exposed skin of her ankles and wrists, left ugly marks when crushed, and the room stank of human occupation. There was a bucket in place of an outhouse, a single iron door with a hole the size of a letter box cut into it, and a high barred window near the roof.
On the straw covering the flagstones three other women were stretched out, and around the top of the wall had been plastered a printed etching entitled: Progress of a Woman of Pleasure, showing a busty and well to do young lady slowly becoming increasingly inelegant as her chosen profession took its toll. The sequence ended with her cast out of her employer’s house lest ‘the cost of her burial fall on the employer’s head.’
This was well above hand’s reach, but below it were the remnants of a less cautiously placed print which had been scratched away by previous inmates.
I wonder how many of these women are fallen in that way? she wondered. How does a dockyard punk view a murderess?
For several hours, Vera sat in the dark with these three women, each one only distinguishable from a corpse by the occasional rattling snore which issued from their drink sozzled throats. There was a strong smell of human waste in the room that made Vera want to gag.
She looked out of the slot in the door and could see only the stone wall opposite. A little further up was a door much like the one she was behind.
No amount of shouting could raise a guard, and it made her head hurt far worse than its effects could justify, so she quickly fell back on her inner resources.
She recited what poems she could in her mind, attempted to find new ways of proving some of Euclid’s ideas about hexagons, and translated the story of the fallen woman from the wall into Latin in her head.
***
The sun was low in the sky when eventually someone came by to speak to her. A tall thin man in a very finely tailored suit and silvery horsehair wig.
He entered the cell and offered a deep bow to each of the ladies present including those that were still wholly unconscious then, offering Vera his hand, said: ‘Miss Ladislaw, please come with me. I apologise for the accommodations, but William Fitzwilliam gave orders to my administrators that were quite in contrast to my usual policies concerning the daughters of gentlemen. Even those charged with – and I hope you will forgive me any offence – such deeply appalling crimes as your own.’
‘Thank you for your kindness, Sir. Might I know your name?’
‘Of course. I am Mr Phillips. I am your current landlord and charged with your good care for as long as the law sees fit to keep you against your will.’
‘I see, Mr Phillips. I must agree with you that the crimes I am accused of are most appalling. They concern the murder of my nearest and dearest of both kith and kin. That I, the victim of such crimes, stand here accused while the killer runs free, undoubtedly makes them all the more appalling.’
‘Quite, quite. Now, if you will allow me to escort you to a more suitable room.’
He led her through the narrow corridors of the prison past a dozen cells, each of which was full nearly to standing with miserable men who leered and whistled at her.
On the top floor of the prison she was led to a room, half the size of the one she had been kept in but containing a bed, a clean chamber pot, and a chair in which Lord Stanley was sat.
He rose quickly as the door opened and embraced her. ‘My love, my love, my love,’ he repeated over and over again, but when he stepped back and he saw her eyes, her heart fell. He was looking at her with badly disguised horror.
They embraced, and his kisses felt like a return home.
‘How is Caruthers?’ she asked, nervously.
‘He is much improved; he complains of aches now which he never did before, but he will live at least a little longer. He’s a tough old bird and had the finest of nurses to tend to him. I did not stay long to find out. When I heard the constables had taken you away, I rode to Fitzwilliam’s offices and had many words with him. I arrived with every intention of putting him to another duel, but he laid out the case against you and …’ He trailed off embarrassed.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘You don’t believe …’
‘You told me that the evidence against you was convincing. How can you be surprised when I am convinced by it?’
‘I need you to believe – if you don’t, then who will?’
‘I’ve come to say one thing, Miss Ladislaw. I love you. For that reason I will pay your gaolers and ensure you are kept well. But you have done terrible things, things that make the robbery you and your underworld cronies carried out on my home last night nothing more than a mild insult. And I do not know what place you have in my heart anymore. It is for that reason I must cut all other ties with you.’
Vera tried to speak, but something seemed to be blocking her throat. She could hardly breathe past it. Tears welled up in her eyes.
‘I wish you luck but cannot wish anything more for you.’
Before he left Vera asked, ‘Did you speak with Helen before you came?’
‘No I rushed straight here. And now I must leave.’
With an awkward bow, he bid her adieu, and left. Just like that.
She didn’t hear the others leave, or the door close and the key turn. She just stood staring at the chair in which Lord Stanley had been sat, willing all of this to be a nightmare. But no matter how long she stared, the world remained as it was.
Lord Stanley was gone, and with him, the last of her hope.
Chapter 18
Life in the prison cell wasn’t the horror that her brief stint in the cell downstairs had prepared her for. She was hemmed in on all sides by walls for sure, but patronage kept her safe from the worst excesses of Bathcombe gaol. Reformers had often come to Vera’s father on matters regarding Mr Philips’ treatment of his wards, and so she knew how lightly she was getting off.
One thing they had not lied about or exaggerated was the lack of justice in the holding of those with the money to pay their way. She received ale to drink each morning, tea at noon, a strong beer in the evening, and her rations were drawn from the bottom of the pot where the meat and vegetables sank in the thin broth. She received bread at every meal in filling quantities where those below received bread only with their evening meal.
Most importantly for her, she had privacy. She was given exercise with the two other gentlewomen also facing trial, and possibly the noose, who could afford more comfortable lodgings.
Catherine Metcalfe was a matronly old woman who took her imprisonment with docile practicality. ‘I believe the Lord will deal his justice on the wicked, and I am no crawling sneak thief,’ she said to Vera when they first met in the small courtyard of the prison. She wore the same grey woollen dress that Vera did.
From the main prison she could hear a man screaming.
‘Aye, you’re an upright sneak thief,’ said the other woman with them. A girl of a little over sixteen who had several nervous tics and talked in a fast whisper that made her voice difficult to understand.
She laughed softly and touched Catherine’s arm gently. It transpired that Catherine had been brought in by a shopkeeper on account of stealing a length of lace from haberdashers in Myton Brookleigh.
‘It’s all a lie. A terrible blackmail perpetrated on my husband. He wanted to run in a rotten borough you see. Try and breathe some life into the area. Lord Fitzwilliam has held the Brookleigh seat unopposed for nigh on five and twenty years. And his brother’s helped him keep it that way.’
The mention of William Fitzwilliam’s elder brother brought back the pain of losing her strange middle-life as Fidel.
‘I was challenged to a duel by Lord Fitzwilliam’s brother,’ said Vera, realising immediately how foolish she must sound. But she was beyond caring. She found a vast exhaustion had settled over her since Lord Stanley had abandoned her.
The pain didn’t last long; her mind was quiet, too slow to conjure up much thought before settling back into the depths. She listened to the younger girl whose name it turned out was Martha, poking fun.
‘She’s madder than they say I am.’
‘Mad? You don’t seem mad.’ Though now that the younger girl had said it, there was something a little strange, perhaps overly uninhibited.
‘I’m not. Well, maybe I am. It wasn’t madness that made me do it. I was just … I was angry, so angry. I wanted to – I wanted so many things. But there was nothing. Every day the same things. I learned to write neatly, and play piano, and sing, and thread needles, and the whole world was so close. Then one day my guardians brought a young man into the drawing room and right then and there told me I was to marry him in a fortnight.’
Pity passed across Vera’s mind, then died away unable to take root in the exhaustion and dislocation she felt. ‘What did you do?’
‘I cried all night. Begged and begged and might as well have been asking a stone to melt or fly off into the heavens. Then in the morning I went to the cowshed where the milk herd was kept with their calves in the bad weather. I took a flint and burned it down. Maybe I am mad; I don’t know why I did it, and the smell was something dreadful. And all those pretty calves screaming and their mothers lowing. I said I was sorry and that I’d marry the boy. But instead, they had me dragged away. I really was sorry.’
Catherine piped in with her motherly tones: ‘There there, lass. You did a very foolish thing, but how can they expect anything but foolishness when they treat us all like children. I’m here for my husband’s crime of running legally for office and you girl are here as much for the crimes done against you as for the crimes you committed.’
The girl smiled up at Catherine and took her hand. ‘You are a sweet old bird aren’t you, Cat.’ Then she turned to Vera and asked: ‘What crimes are you in here for?’
‘Murder.’
The two women drew away suddenly as if wafted back by their own intake of breath.
‘I am supposed to have killed my mother, my father, and the woman who lived and worked with us, who half raised me.’
‘Goodness,’ said Catherine.
‘Did you do it?’ asked Martha.
‘Does it matter? I mean, if I’ll hang for it either way?’
Vera’s mind serenely drifted up to the laudanum hidden in her cell. There was maybe a hundred doses in that bottle. More than enough.
‘It matters to God,’ said Catherine kindly.
‘Might even matter to the judge,’ said Martha.
‘It won’t. Not without witnesses, without proof.’
It won’t because I won’t make it to trial. Not if I can help it, she thought.
‘I really was sorry,’ repeated Martha, meekly as if to the air. ‘Really.’
After the exercise in the yard, she was sent back to the isolation of her room. Lord Stanley had arranged for a number of books to be sent to her cell to keep her occupied during the wait for her trial. They had arrived with a note: Farewell, beloved Vera. I hope these bring you comfort, as nothing can myself. – James
That word farewell brought tears to her eyes as she thumbed through the sixth volume of Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe; or the Story of a Young Lady. That he could sever what had built between them filled her with an anger and despair.
Men are weak, she thought to herself. ‘As nothing can myself’, try being on the block, my love.
She had read Clarissa before several times and flipped through to the scattered passages that were rendered as chaotic notes from the titular character’s pen after she had been drugged and ravished by the antagonist.
The words carried new meaning to her now that she was trapped in a cage and suffering her own decline. She felt truly mad as if nothing were quite real; she wanted to reach out. Vera took some reassurance from the solid feel of the book in her hand as she read:
Thou pernicious caterpillar, that preyest upon the fair leaf of virgin fame, and poisonest those leaves which thou canst not devour!
Thou fell blight, thou eastern blast, thou overspreading mildew, that destroyest the early promises of the shining year! that mockest the laborious toil, and blastest the joyful hopes, of the painful husbandman!
Thou fretting moth, that corruptest the fairest garment!
It put her in mind of the place where all this strange strain began. The shadowing streets of Bathcombe that had seemed to lead fatefully, inevitably even to The Worm in the Rose.
The strange marginalia of that passage of the book with its imprecations that the writer be sent to an asylum out of shame. A kind of self-punishment for sins perpetrated against her.
I have not lost hope so far as to blame myself, thought Vera and took some solace in the fact of her standing firm against some of the trials and tribulations that assaulted her.
She read again the line: So, suppose, instead of Bedlam, it were a private mad-house, where nobody comes!—That will be better a great deal.
She wondered if she could have herself imprisoned, rather than executed, on grounds of insanity, but it did not seem likely they knew she was not mad. Besides, it all seemed to matter so little now.
Like Clarissa, her mind jumped around. She read several of the letters in the book without taking in a word. Stopping to look at the aberrant printing of the marginalia and running her fingers over the smooth imprints of the letters in the thick paper.
She found her favourite passage: A Lady took a great fancy to a young lion, or a bear, I forget which—but a bear, or a tiger, I believe it was. It was made her a present of when a whelp. She fed it with her own hand: she nursed up the wicked cub with great tenderness; and would play with it without fear or apprehension of danger: and it was obedient to all her commands: and its tameness, as she used to boast, increased with its growth; so that, like a lap-dog, it would follow her all over the house.
Vera, as a child reading these words, had felt so strongly that sense of friendship with the lion that she had seen what followed as a terrible traitorous act on behalf of the lion, or bear, or tiger.
Now she just felt the inevitable tragedy of what was to follow: