Time too seems to have slipped in some strange way. The vaulted ceilings and windows set deep in the thick walls remind her of an ancient house that she and her brothers and sisters once came upon when the family went hunting for rabbits in Abbey Wood. Haunted by the ghosts of friars, they had said. But this place smells of fresh damp plaster and new paint, and the wood of the endless locked doors is unseasoned. They seem to be the only people in this entire vast citadel. The past has slid into the present.
Perhaps they are the only people left alive in the world.
The room into which Sarah is led is vast and echoing. She has been brought here alone, accompanied only by one wardress. Somewhere in the shadowy recesses of the room, drops of water fall one by one into a pool below. Each plop echoes hollowly around the grey vaulted space: a space dimly lit by the slits of windows on the far side. In the room are four deep circular depressions, like immense cauldrons, set into the stone-flagged floor. Three are empty, but one is half filled with turbid water.
‘Take off your clothes,’ says the wardress, her voice echoing through the cavernous space.
Sarah pulls off her damp dress and undershirt and leaves them in a pile on the flagstones. The air of the room is chill and moist, and the pool of water, when she steps into it, is tepid. The wardress pushes a metal saucer full of soft soap towards the rim of the bath with her toe.
‘Scrub yourself all over with this,’ she instructs.
Since she entered the crowded Newgate cells with their limited buckets of water for washing, Sarah has never removed her clothes to wash her body all over, and now that she sees her limbs in the hazy water of the bath, they seem entirely foreign to her – darkened with grime and wasted close to the bone, like a beggar-woman’s limbs, she thinks. As she scrubs these strange appendages, she is suddenly blinded, deafened and almost drowned by the bucket of chilly water which the wardress tips over her head.
‘Now get out,’ orders the wardress, as soon as Sarah catches her breath.
The wardress hands her a threadbare round towel with which Sarah wipes the water out of her eyes and rubs her hair and body as best she can, and as she does so, she sees that an elderly man dressed in a long black jacket and wearing an old-fashioned wig on his head has entered the room and is gazing at her intently, as though she were a specimen of some very rare creature which he had never chanced to observe before.
‘Raise your arms,’ says the man, ‘higher.’ His voice is hoarse and has a faint lisp.
Sarah stands in the centre of the echoing bath hall like a participant in some pagan sacrifice, while the wardress and the man gaze at her in absolute silence.
Then the man approaches her so closely that she can see the small white wart on one side of his nose, and the patterns of crowns on the brass buttons of his coat. He gazes into her eyes, and she gazes unblinkingly back. The man’s eyes are pale grey and entirely without expression.
‘Open your mouth,’ he says.
When she does so, he whips out a wooden file and thrusts it into her mouth, pressing down her tongue.
‘Now close your mouth and breathe in.’
‘Turn round.’ Sarah turns slowly in a circle.
As she comes face to face with the wardress, a tall thin woman with sunken cheeks and a protruding chin, Sarah sees the light flash on the sharp knife which the other woman holds in her hand. Before she has a chance to cry out, the wardress has seized her by the hair and is hacking the damp locks from her head. They fall to the floor like coils of damp weed.
‘Keep still, if you don’t want me to cut you,’ cries the wardress, pulling tighter on the remaining strands of hair as her barber’s blade skims closer to Sarah’s scalp.
When the operation is over, Sarah runs her hand unsteadily over the uneven stubble of her bald pate, doubly naked.
‘Have you, or has any member of your family, ever been insane?’ asks the man.
Sarah feels a wave of dizziness sweep over her.
‘No,’ she murmurs.
‘I can’t hear you.’
‘No,’ she repeats more loudly, and her lie echoes around the domed ceiling of the bath hall.
But at that moment she understands that she has become invisible. These people are staring at her body, but they cannot see it. They cannot see her wasted legs, or her swollen breasts, or the marks on her stomach. They are looking towards her, but they are looking through her, as though she were made of glass.
The man turns away and starts to write something in the book that he has been carrying under his arm, and the wardress thrusts a coarse, rust-brown dress into Sarah’s hands.
‘Put that on,’ she orders.
Every fibre of the dress rubs against the nerve-ends of Sarah’s newly washed skin. Its fabric feels like glasspaper.
She is marched down one long corridor, and then another, and then down a spiral staircase and along another corridor. A door is opened, she is pushed through into the room beyond and then the door closes behind her.
Sarah stands just inside the threshold, looking around in disbelief. The small room is decorated like a parlour. There are pink velvet curtains on the windows, two brocade armchairs in a deeper shade of pink, a patterned rug on the floor and a glass-fronted cabinet containing an array of porcelain tea cups. A bright fire burns in a fireplace at one side of the room, beneath a mantle-shelf adorned with two china statuettes of shepherdesses. Sitting at a table in the centre of the room is a diminutive woman with her greying hair swept back into a knot at the back of her neck. The only thing on the table is a glass vase containing a huge bouquet of pink roses which fill the room with an almost overpoweringly sweet smell.
The woman smiles at Sarah and motions to her to sit on a wooden chair by the table. Sarah grips her hands tightly together on her lap to resist the sudden impulse to reach out and touch the roses, whose petals look so silky that, but for their scent, she would have believed them to be made by human hands.
‘I am Mrs Chambers,’ says the woman, with the air of someone imparting important secret information, ‘and you are Sarah Stone.’
Sarah nods.
‘You are a child-stealer,’ continues the woman, without losing the smile on her face or changing the tone of her voice. ‘You committed a very dreadful crime by taking away an infant that belonged to another woman.’
‘She was my child!’ The words burst from Sarah’s lips in an explosion of sound before she can check them.
She cowers back in her chair, expecting a repetition of the rain of blows which descended on her head when she spoke those words in the Lambeth-Street Magistrates Office. But no blow comes. The woman’s smile does not waver. She just leans in a little closer across the table and says in the same calm and gentle voice, ‘No, Sarah. She was not your child. She was the daughter of Mr and Mrs Creamer. You stole that baby. What made you want to do such a wicked thing?’
Sarah’s voice falters. Her hands squeeze tighter and tighter together, so that the nails of one hand dig into the knuckles of the other.
‘I can’t remember,’ she whispers. And indeed, the fog has descended on her mind again, and nothing is clear. All she can remember is that one wintery morning, when frost clung to the cobwebs on the bushes like bridal veils, she went to St. Leonard’s with Mother, and with a tiny child snuggled in her arms, and the vicar bent over and pushed the cap back from the baby’s brow, and said, ‘What a pretty little creature she is!’
Mrs Chambers is still leaning across the table towards her.
‘But you are sorry for what you did, are you not, Sarah?’ she continues. ‘You are surely sorry for stealing that baby.’
And – perhaps because the words are spoken softly, almost gently – Sarah is suddenly convulsed with uncontrollable sobs. All the pain, all the confusion, all the terror of the past year rise up like a drowning wave from within her, and her body is wracked by the grief that turns to water as it reaches the air, and pours unchecked down her face.
Mrs Chambers watches her imp
assively, with the air of one who has seen such things many times before. The minutes pass, and at last Sarah’s tears begin, little by little, to subside. Mrs Chambers walks over to the hearth and pokes the coals in the fireplace. A small explosion of sparks bursts from the coals and vanishes up the chimney. Mrs Chambers returns to the table and gives Sarah’s hand a brief and tentative pat.
‘Calm yourself, Sarah,’ she says. ‘I can see that you may indeed be repentant. Remember that God loves nothing more than the penitent sinner. However black your sins, our dear Lord can wash them white as snow. That is why you are here: to reflect on your evil deeds, repent and be forgiven. You will learn a useful trade here, and if you truly examine your conscience and make the most of the opportunities which will be given to you within these walls, you may yet be rescued from the path of sin and perdition, and learn to walk on the path to paradise. You would like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ replies Sarah very quietly.
In the Castle of the Giant Despair
Sarah’s first impression was wrong. This place is not silent. The building speaks to itself. At night it groans and murmurs, as though plagued by troubled dreams. From time to time, it gives a little shudder.
For some reason, her tiny solitary cell never grows completely dark. Even in the depths of night, a hazy flickering light shines through the small barred window far above her head. By day, no sunlight enters. The flickering simply becomes stronger, filling the space with an uneven murky greyness.
When she first entered Newgate, Sarah had been horrified at the thought of having to share a ward with such a crowd of women. But now in Millbank, she misses the warmth of other women’s bodies pressed close to hers at night. She lies alone in this narrow space with its vaulted stone ceiling, and if she stretches her arms even a little way out from the straw-stuffed mattress on which she sleeps, they strike the walls on either side. It is like lying in a stone coffin, immured in a church crypt. She no longer knows how long she has been in this place. It might be two weeks; it might be a year.
The warders arrive late this morning. They come after dawn, with an unusual racket of shouting and banging and a clattering of metal. Some of the cell doors, it seems, have become jammed shut, and have to be prized open with crowbars and hammers. When the doors burst open, the women flock out into the corridors, clamouring and cursing in alarm.
‘Silence!’ roars one of the warders. ‘I will have silence here!’
The women’s voices subside, and they shuffle meekly in single file to the workroom, as they do every morning, to take their places on the long wooden benches and resume their sewing.
The sewing is endless. Red-brown hessian sailcloth, to be sewn into sacks, or into sack-like clothing for their fellow prisoners. As always in the mornings, Sarah feels light-headed with sleeplessness and hunger. She keeps her eyes fixed on her needle as it ploughs endlessly through yard after yard of brick-coloured cloth. The tips of her fingers have become reddened and hard from pushing the coarse needle through the coarse fabric.
As the prisoners sew, one or other of Mrs Chambers’s two daughters, seated in a high-backed chair at the head of the room, reads to them from a sacred book. On the grey stone wall behind the reader’s chair hangs an embroidered image of a huge eye, surrounded by leaves in variegated shades of green, so that it appears to be staring out from the depths of a jungle. Above the eye, the words Thou, God, Seest Me are embroidered in ornate script sewn in wool the colour of dried blood.
The daughters are as unalike as two siblings could be, the older being tall and bony, with dark hair tied in tightly braided coils over her ears, while the younger is a plumper and softer version of her mother. But they have almost identical voices – sing-song and monotonous, as though reciting an incantation in a language they do not fully understand. They have read the story of Cain and Abel, Martha and Mary, the parable of the lost sheep, and Jonah in the belly of the whale. Today it is Christian and Hopeful in the Castle of the Giant Despair.
If she sits long enough sewing, Sarah finds that her mind drifts quietly away from her body. It floats upward and through the barred windows, until she comes to rest in some completely different place, a place from her childhood, or perhaps some dream landscape that she has surely never visited in reality, but that seems oddly familiar. Today she is in a great field of red-brown earth that stretches endlessly towards a distant flat horizon. As she watches her fingers mechanically stitching the cloth, she sees them, not stitching, but ploughing. She is turning over the earth with a tiny plough, moving ever closer to the horizon, but even as she does so, the horizon recedes, remaining as far away as ever. While her fingers plough the earth, she hears the sing-song voice that seems to come from somewhere above her head.
‘“Brother,” said Christian, “what shall we do? The life that we now live is miserable: for my part I know not whether is best – to live thus, or to die out of hand. My soul chooses strangling rather than life; and the grave is more easy for me than this dungeon.”’
There is no end to this furrow that Sarah follows across the red-brown earth. Yesterday, today, tomorrow, a thousand tomorrows, it continues, and the horizon endlessly retreats, just as the voice above her head drones on.
‘“What a fool,” quoth he, “am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon, when I may as well walk at liberty! I have a key in my bosom called Promise; that will, I am persuaded, open any lock in Doubting Castle.”’
But here in Millbank all the keys are in the hands of the warders. For the prisoners, there is no promise: only the endless corridors, each identical to all the rest, down which they walk in silent procession, day after day. Sarah’s eyes droop a little as they focus on the furrow that she is ploughing across the field. There is one lone tree standing on the furthest edge of the field, near the horizon. A squat dark oak tree. Although it is so very far away, Sarah can somehow see each of its leaves perfectly distinctly, and hear the wind whispering in its branches …
A blow on the shoulder from one of the warders startles her into wakefulness. The sailcloth sack in front of her is almost done, and the elder Miss Chambers is still intoning:
Out of the way we went; and then we found
What it was to tread upon forbidden ground:
And let them that come after have a care,
Lest heedlessness makes them, as we to fare;
Lest they, for trespassing, his prisoners are,
Whose castle’s ‘Doubting’ and whose name’s DESPAIR.
On that triumphal note, Miss Chambers slaps the fat book shut and looks up at the assembled women.
‘You may eat your breakfasts now,’ she announces.
They set down their work on the tables in front of them. As they raise their bent heads, Sarah finds herself looking straight into the face of Eliza Dee, who sits at the bench opposite her. Eliza gives her a broad wink.
‘Eliza Dee,’ snaps the sharp-eyed Miss Chambers, ‘What is that expression I see on your face?’
Eliza bows her head repentantly. ‘So sorry, ma’am’, she murmurs. ‘It’s the palsy in me right eye. Had it ever since I was a little girl, ma’am.’
Eliza, astonishingly, always seems to persuade them. Her shorn hair has grown back soft and straight, and the man’s clothing that she sported in Newgate had been replaced with the drab uniform gown worn by all the Millbank prisoners. She looks like a penitent sinner from some old stained-glass window. In chapel on a Sunday she can bury her head in her hands with such a heart-wrenching gesture of remorse for wrongdoing that everyone seems convinced, except for Sarah, who sits close enough to Eliza to see her eyes gleaming with mocking irony as they peer askance from behind her concealing fingers.
Eliza is one of the four prisoners entrusted with the all-important task of collecting food from the kitchen and distributing it to her fellow inmates. Every morning, she tries to fill Sarah’s cup of cocoa a little fuller than the others, and every morning, Sarah pushes it away after a couple of sips. She is hungry,
but the thick liquid clogs in her throat and she cannot swallow it. The bread that comes with it is equally inedible, being rock hard and gritty, as though made of sandstone. Eliza, seeing Sarah’s undrunk cocoa, frowns severely, nudging Sarah and making drinking motions with her hand and mouth, but Sarah simply shakes her head, and pushes the tin cup back towards Eliza, who ends up drinking it herself with such a look of rueful sadness on her face that Sarah finds herself smiling despite the pain of hunger (or perhaps it is something more than hunger) that gnaws incessantly at her belly.
A violent shuddering wakes her in the middle of the night. There is a loud splintering sound just above her head. From somewhere far away, she hears a woman prisoner cry out in alarm – a cry that echoes down the long corridors like the scream of a night bird. Sarah lies in the half darkness, rigid with fear, staring up at the space above her in a vain effort to understand the noises and sensations around her. She lies there for what seems like eternity, until the faint light outside becomes strong enough for her to see what has happened to one wall of her cell.
A crack, which was certainly not there when she went to sleep, has opened up in the cell wall to the right of the window, running vertically, almost from ceiling to floor. Fragments of plaster have fallen to the ground and, in one spot, corners of brown brick beneath the plaster have been exposed. Without moving, or even reaching out her fingers to touch it, she stares at the crack. In places, the fissure is so deep and black that it seems like an opening into a strange infernal world beyond. And in the deepest and blackest point, about halfway down the wall, she can see something shining.
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