Searcher

by T J Alexander

  Hands grip her arms on either side. Sarah does not bother to look at the people who are half pushing, half carrying her down the wooden steps from the dock. Instead, she watches herself as though from far away – a small figure in a grey gown being dragged down a stairway, through the arched door from the glittering brightness of the courtroom into the gloom below, from where the stench of the underworld rises up to greet the world above.

  As she passes through the archway that leads down towards the bowels of the building, she hears a woman’s voice from the courtroom behind her, shouting over the hubbub of the crowd, ‘Hang the whore! You should hang the whore!’ And then the approving roar of other voices.

  The words mean nothing. The roar means nothing. The word ‘guilty’ is as empty of meaning as the cry of an owl or the bark of a dog. She has heard only one word of the hundreds spoken in the courtroom. Only one word remains, echoing in her head as the gripping hands march her over the slippery flagstones of the passageway, under the iron grill of the birdcage back to Newgate Prison.

  One word. ‘Dead.’ Dead, they said.

  The woman Catherine Creamer said it first; lifting her gaunt tear-streaked face and pushing back a strand of her long greasy hair, she looked across at the judge and wailed, ‘She’s dead. Our Molly died last week.’ And then again as he summed up the case and sentenced Sarah, the judge had said it again, but quite coldly and indifferently: ‘the death of the infant.’ The infant is dead.

  At first it all seemed like a dream, or perhaps like one of those slightly cruel japes that Ned’s younger brother liked to play on people – tying the laces of visitor’s boots together or, on one occasion, putting a weasel he had caught in the laundry basket, so that Sarah’s mother, when she went to fetch the clothes for washing, was confronted with a snarling furry face with devilish eyes, and linen covered with weasel droppings.

  Surely this too – this mad world of prison walls, of insults and blows and angry faces – is just a cruel joke, or a bad dream.

  But perhaps the madness is inside her own head, not in the world around her.

  When she was about eleven or twelve years old, Sarah was terrified of her uncle, Josiah. In her earliest memories, Uncle Josiah, with his bulbous red nose and whiskery chops, seemed like a benign and slightly clownish figure, always ready to play games with the children and give the little ones horse-rides on his shoulders, even though Sarah and her sisters did notice that his breath often smelled of gin and he tended to be clumsy, breaking crockery and dropping his knife and fork on the floor. But then one night, coming home late from the inn, Uncle Josiah was knocked down by a post chaise, and lay for two days between life and death. He appeared to recover, but after that his games became stranger, more fevered and alarming. He took to covering his head with the coal scuttle and announcing that he was King George, and he would fly into a fit of anger if anyone laughed or contradicted him.

  A little later, the officers came and took him away to Bedlam, with the sleeves of his jacket tied in a knot in front of him. And after he was gone, Sarah was filled with fear that his madness had somehow infected her, and that the world she thought was real was just a dream world like Uncle Josiah’s fantasy kingdom.

  Now that icy fear has seeped back into her heart.

  Sometimes still, although she tries to push them away, memories return of the oddly beautiful late autumn morning last year when she went with her mother and the infant to St. Leonard’s to be churched. It was the first time she had been out of doors since the baby arrived, and, if she allows herself to do so, she can still recall how fresh and sweet the air felt on her face when she stepped out into the street. The morning was cold. A skin of ice covered the puddles, and frost glittered on the cobwebs that hung like bridal veils over the hawthorn bushes in the churchyard. The child nestled snugly asleep in her arms, wisps of hair like dark silk just visible beneath the lace of the miniature bonnet that her mother had sewed, and one tiny fist with dimpled knuckles protruded from the folds of a blanket. The sky was high above, and the future seemed full of light …

  But perhaps that memory too is no memory, only a madwoman’s dream. Her head seems so full of clouds that she can no longer be sure. Even Ned has begun to doubt her. When the officers first took her away to Newgate, Ned was full of confident anger, shouting after them, ‘She’s done nothing wrong. There’ll be the devil to pay for this! Never fear, Sarah, you’ll soon be free.’

  But when he visited her in prison three weeks later, his manner was changed. His words were still kind, and he managed quietly to press a half-crown into her hand, enough to buy beer and some clean cotton cloth from the turnkey. But he refused to meet her eye, and she could see in his face confusion and horror at the crowded prison yard with its stench of un-emptied chamber pots and its rabble of women who reached through the iron bars of the visitors’ enclosure, plucking at his clothes, trying to thrust their hands into his pockets, and lewdly joking and nudging one another all the while.

  He stayed only for a few minutes, and has not come back since.

  Sarah cannot help envying Eliza Dee, the strange tall woman who dresses in grimy sailor’s breeches and a man’s jacket, and is accused of hitting her brother-in-law on the side of the head with a skillet, rendering him partly deaf in one ear: an event about which Eliza’s only comment is ‘he deserved it.’ Eliza is visited every Monday by her mother, a wizened bird of a woman with a halo of white hair under her lace cap and piercing blue eyes. Eliza’s mother always carries a covered basket over one arm, from which she produces an array of wonders to be squeezed though the bars into her daughter’s waiting hands – freshly baked rolls, apples, and once a wad of chewing tobacco and a pack of cards. Although she does not like to ask, Sarah feels sure that Eliza Dee’s mother must have spent time in prison too. The old woman seems so comfortably at ease in the surroundings of Newgate, always knowing just when to slip a coin into the turnkey’s waiting hand. Sarah’s mother has never visited, which, in a way, is a blessing. The very thought of the tears and hand-wringings that would ensue seems too much to bear.

  After Ned’s one unhappy visit, until the time of the trial, Sarah’s refuge was to stand in a corner near the narrow window which looked out into the prison yard and the visitors’ enclosure beyond. From there she could see the tradesmen coming in the morning with their pails of milk and bundles of firewood, and sometimes, surprisingly grand gentlemen in satin waistcoats or ladies with fine feathers in their bonnets, who would arrive to inspect the prison, all with their faces stern and their noses lifted resolutely away from the squalor around them. Some of the other women in Sarah’s cell would squeeze their skinny arms through the windows or the barred doorways, snatching at the sleeves of the passing visitors and whining, ‘Give a poor woman a penny, ladies! I’m as innocent as the babe unborn.’

  But Sarah only watched the procession of passing faces, and when the visitors had gone, she watched the sparrows and pigeons pecking for crumbs between the grimy cobble stones, and the bony, sly black cat that sat, poised and taut, in a patch of shadow, waiting for unwary sparrows that strayed too close.

  Once, as she was gazing out of the barred window, Sarah felt the touch of a hand on her leg, and looked down in surprise. It was Tom, the small son of Catherine Wells, accused of jewel theft. Little Tom, who spent his days crawling at will amongst the prisoners in the ward, receiving treats and curses as they came, had crept close to her, and was touching her leg and gazing up at her with wide blue eyes and a bewitching smile on his grimy face.

  ‘Hello, young Tom,’ whispered Sarah, ‘have you come to watch the birds? Shall I lift you up to look at them?’

  The blow from Tom’s mother’s fist that struck her as she bent down towards the child sent Sarah sprawling on the floor, her ears ringing so that she could hardly hear the shouted words that followed.

  ‘Keep your thieving hands away from my boy, child snatcher!’

  After that, Sarah stayed away from the children, and spoke o
nly silently in her head to the cat and the birds, and to herself. ‘Innocent,’ she whispered. ‘I am innocent.’ But neither the cat nor the birds seemed to pay the least attention, and the more she said it, the fainter and more uncertain the voice in her head became.

  The time for her trial came, and then passed. They said there had been some delay. The prosecution needed more time to make their case. For a moment, a narrow window of hope opened. If they found her innocent, then the memories of that frosty morning in St. Leonard’s courtyard could become memories again, and she would again feel the warm weight of the child in her arms, and smell the milky sweet smell of the infant’s breath …

  But now in a new cell – the ward for the convicted women – Sarah makes her home as far away from the window as she can, in the darkest corner of the room. She is guilty; and the infant is dead. Her memories are the dreams of a madwoman.

  The lower parts of the wall, at which she gazes for much of the day, are green with a mossy growth. The damp that runs down in sluggish trickles has made streaks which sometimes look like the outlines of ghostly trees. In one place, about a foot above the floor, some long-vanished inmate has laboriously and unevenly carved the letters ‘forg’ into the wall.

  forg. Is it part of a name? Or a message, unfinished because the carver was interrupted before she could complete her task? And if so, what was the message? Forgery? Forget? Forgive me?’

  The letters have been hacked into the thick decaying plaster of the wall so deeply that they are still clearly visible, particularly when a faint beam of morning light slants through the grills of the cell and falls on them, even though the slimy green moss has crept into their crevasses too.

  How long ago were they carved? Ten years ago? Twenty? And what has become of the woman who carved them? And all those other women too. Sometimes she thinks of them: that long procession of women who have passed through this room over the years, to the gallows, to Van Diemen’s Land, to God knows where …

  At night, Sarah lies with her face towards the wall on which the letters are carved. Just a few inches behind her back, Eliza Dee, who sleeps next to her, snores loudly, from time to time waking with a sudden curse, or flinging her left arm out so that the back of her hand lands with a thud on Sarah’s shoulder. All of which makes little difference to Sarah, since she lies awake in any case, letting the darkness press against her eyeballs like a great soft hand, and seeing that long procession of ghost women passing before her. Above her head in the darkness, the bells of St. Paul’s chime the endless quarter hours with agonizing slowness.

  By day, Sarah takes out a little sharp pebble which she found in one corner of the cell, and has carefully hidden in her shoe so that no-one might take it from her. Slowly, laboriously, she scratches away at the moss on the wall, and into the plaster itself, carving the letters that will complete the unfinished word left to her by an unknown fellow-prisoner. An E and then a T. Sarah whispers the letters to herself as she carves. And then she whispers the completed word, again and again. Forget. Forget. Forget.

  When a hand grips her shoulder, Sarah turns in startled terror, as though she had been seized by the hand of the hangman himself. But it is only Leah Swift, with her incongruous soft pink and white smiling face and her shining golden ringlets.

  ‘You’re a strange one,’ laughs Leah, as she squeezes Sarah’s arm, ‘sitting in the corner muttering to yourself. I ain’t seen you take a bite to eat since they put you in this ward. That’s no way to behave, starving yourself to death. They may have found us guilty, but we ain’t condemned to death, you know. No point doing the executioner’s work for him. You’ve got to live. Seven years’ transportation, is that what they gave you? Seven years is nothing. Just keep on eating and breathing, and seven years’ll be gone before you know it.’

  Leah squats down beside her, fastidiously tucking up the skirts of her dress as she does so. Amongst this crowd of ragged, unwashed, pock marked, care-worn women, Leah Swift stands out like a peacock in a chicken coop. Yet oddly, though they tease her and mimic her airs and graces, the other women accept her presence with an envy tinged with admiration. For she has achieved the almost impossible: she has been brought back from the convict ship which should even now be carrying her away to the Antipodes, returned to the gaol on the orders of the Keeper himself, to help clean his quarters by day and (as everyone knows) to warm his bed on chilly nights.

  ‘Here,’ says Leah, opening a small leather flask that she has pulled out from the folds of her skirt. ‘Come on. Drink a bit. It’s brown ale. Make you feel better. Got it from me good gentleman himself.’

  She giggles and thrusts the flask into Sarah’s face. Too startled and confused to resist, Sarah opens her mouth and then chokes as the pungent liquid fills her throat. And yet Leah is right. The ale is warm and bitter, but its warmth seems to flow into her cold dry veins. She has not realized until this moment how parched her mouth has become. She grasps the flask and takes another deep draught of the liquid.

  ‘That’s the idea,’ says Leah. ‘Nothing much a good swig of ale won’t cure. Finish it off before the other women get their hands on it. Need to keep your strength up for that long journey you’ll be taking. There’s plenty that doesn’t make it to the other shore, so I’ve heard. ‘

  ‘What’s it like, on the ship?’ whispers Sarah. The sharp pebble is still in her hand, and as she speaks, she clenches her fist around it, feeling it cut into her palm.

  ‘Ah, it’s no better nor worse than here,’ says Leah, ‘though below decks it does get mighty gloomy, and they say that once you’re out at sea, the ship sways something terrible. There’s them that can stomach it, and them that can’t.’

  ‘And Botany Bay? Did you hear tell what it’s like if you reach Botany Bay?’

  ‘There was a sailor I made friends with who’d made the journey twice. Said the first time he was there it rained for weeks and there was mud everywhere, but the next time he hardly saw a drop of rain. You don’t want to go too far into the forests, he said. There’s snakes and savages and Lord knows what else. That’s what my friend the sailor said. But plenty of fish in the sea, he said, and land aplenty for them as can get it. He met this woman as was sent there for horse stealing, and married a man in the liquor trade, and now she’s a fine lady and wears silk every day and dines off dishes with little golden flowers on them. Saw it with his own eyes, he says.’ She sighs. ‘He was a mighty fine man, that sailor. Eyes like amber and a grand tattoo of the lion and the unicorn, one on each cheek of his arse. I was quite sad to leave him the day they brought me back here.’

  Botany Bay, whispers Sarah to herself. Botany Bay. That is where they will send me.

  Now when she lies awake at night, she begins to see herself there. There is a great dark forest in front of her, and as she walks into the forest she sees the green snakes that curl in the branches and hears the voices of strange people singing in the darkness, but somehow she is not afraid. She has heard say that Botany Bay is on the bottom of the world, and that everything there is upside down. But even upside down, she keeps on walking until she comes to a place where the trees end, and beyond the land stretches broad and green in every direction, patterned with golden flowers. Land aplenty for them as can get it.

  Everything here is upside down now, thinks Sarah. Perhaps if I can survive long enough to reach Botany Bay, the world may right itself again. If I can survive until I reach Botany Bay, maybe I might begin to live again.

  The strange noises wake her while the sky is still dark. After weeks of sleepless nights, sleep has begun to come in strange patches, like waves of fog that sweep over her mind, leaving everything blank and silent. She wakes every morning feeling dull and unrefreshed.

  But this morning something is happening. It is a sound of clanging and clanking at first: gates opening, chains striking cobbles. Around her, the other women begin to stir. Eliza Dee raises herself on one elbow, muttering, ‘Mother of God, what’s that racket?’ Then comes the sound of horse
s’ hooves and the rattle of cartwheels on the cobbles outside, and then the sound of men’s voices.

  ‘How many have we got in there?’

  ‘You’ll need another cart to take them all, Ben.’

  ‘Ahoy there, fellows! Bring another cart!’

  In the murky gathering light, she can see that the yard is full of people and horses. The door of the cell swings briefly open and a turnkey thrusts a basket of bread and a pail of water into the hands of Esther the wards-woman.

  ‘Better eat and drink while you’ve got the chance,’ mutters the turnkey.

  Now all the women are awake, seizing chunks of bread and filling their tankards with water.

  ‘They’ve come for you. You’re going,’ the wards-woman announces.

  The voices rise like the buzzing of a swarm of angry bees. Muttering and cursing, and then wails of grief rising above the hubbub. Sarah can hear the voice of one of the women, keening louder than the rest, ‘Jamie! Jamie! God have mercy, I ain’t had a chance to say goodbye to my Jamie!’

  There’s barely time to wolf down the bread before the door opens again, only for the light behind to be blocked by the massive form of a giant of a man in a soiled blue uniform, who pauses for a moment on the threshold, staring at them, a sardonic grin on his face.

  ‘Pack your bags, ladies,’ he shouts. ‘You’re off on the grand tour.’

  It’s the sight of ranks of men behind him that produces pandemonium: a crowd of men carrying chains and shackles, for all the world like an army of demons come to drag them to hell. The wailing of the women rises to a pitch that makes it almost impossible to hear the names that are shouted out, one by one.