by Anna Mazzola
“I must see her,” Edmund said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice.
“No, not today,” the woman said blandly. “Probably not tomorrow neither. There’ll have to be an adjudication to determine what’s to be done with her.”
“I am quite sure,” Edmund said, “that Miss Gale would not have attacked someone unprovoked, especially not now, while the Home Secretary is considering my report. I need to speak to her.”
“As I say, Mr. Fleetwood, that won’t be possible, not while she’s in the infirmary. But don’t you worry: they’re taking good care of her for you.”
The expression on her face shifted momentarily and he saw the glint of something beneath.
• • •
“It’s molded on the face just after they die, you see,” Mr. Cope said. “They use plaster.”
Edmund had insisted that he be taken to the Governor’s room, a carpeted palace in comparison to the rest of the prison, with green velvet curtains, old paintings of Botany Bay hung over the desk, and busts of murderers on a shelf beside the door. Although Edmund had tried to speak to him immediately about Sarah, the Governor had insisted on showing him Greenacre’s death mask. His expression, eyes closed, was uncharacteristically benign, as though he had forgiven those who condemned him.
“You see that the nose is thicker than it was in life. The features are swollen: that’s because the blood vessels burst when they hang.”
For a second, Edmund had a vivid image of how Sarah’s death mask would look, the delicate features thickened and contorted by the choke of the rope. He pushed it from his mind.
“Madame Tussauds is to use the mask to make a likeness for her waxwork collection,” the Governor told him proudly, smoothing his hand over the cheek. “Several of our inmates have made it into her museum, but none yet into the Separate Room where the worst criminals are displayed. No doubt Greenacre will appear with his saw and cutting table.” He laughed and mimed a sawing action.
“Yes, Mr. Cope, but I must speak to you regarding Sarah Gale.”
The Governor raised his eyebrows. “What about her?”
“Miss Sowerton claims that she was in some kind of fight.”
The Governor shrugged. “Yes, common enough in this place. They fight like cats, the women.”
Edmund struggled to keep the impatience out of his voice. “Mr. Cope, you forget that I have spent much time with Miss Gale in the past few weeks, and I think it very unlikely that she would have initiated a fight. It is far more probable that she was attacked. Indeed, I suspect that she has been assaulted previously in your prison.”
The Governor suppressed a yawn. “Forgive me, Mr. Fleetwood, but when you have seen as much as I have of these creatures, you cease to be surprised by any of the things they do. Some of them seem more like wild beasts than women. Did you know that we had a convict last week fashion herself a weapon out of a chiseled piece of bone? She tried to attack one of the warders with it, but fortunately was disarmed.”
“Most fortunate, Mr. Cope, but what I’m trying—”
“What most people don’t appreciate is the sheer scale of female criminality in this country. One-third of the convicts in this kingdom are women,” the Governor continued. “And that doesn’t take into account those who seduce men to commit crime. In fact, the real proportion is likely to be far higher, given that women are far more devious and thus likely to evade justice.”
Edmund breathed out in frustration. “Will it be you who carries out the adjudication?”
“Myself and the matron, yes. Don’t worry, Mr. Fleetwood, we will consider all of the evidence and if she was indeed the victim in this little scrape, then we will punish the other woman accordingly.” He set the death mask down on his desk. “You know that Greenacre’s head has been sent to an esteemed medical surgeon for examination.”
“Oh, yes?” Edmund said, distractedly.
“Yes, we do this with all of the most serious cases. The surgeon is to examine the brain for any abnormality.”
“I see. And the rest of the body is…?”
“Buried in quicklime in the passage that connects Newgate with the Old Bailey,” the Governor said.
“Of course. Dead Man’s Walk.”
“There’s a rather neat symmetry to it, is there not, Mr. Fleetwood? For the dismemberer to be buried without his head?” He chuckled again.
“Yes, I suppose there is. I understand that Sarah, Miss Gale, is in the infirmary. I would like to speak with her.”
“No, no, Mr. Fleetwood. We can’t have visitors in the infirmary, as much for your sake as for the prisoners’. All sorts of nasty ailments you could catch. She’ll be out of there soon enough, no doubt. And then of course she’ll be leaving us completely, one way or the other.”
“Yes,” Edmund said, turning to leave.
“Although of course,” the Governor said, “if she is hanged here, she will never truly leave. For she’ll be buried within the walls, together with Greenacre.” He smiled. “Together even in death. That’s fitting, isn’t it?”
• • •
Edmund made his way to the Old Bailey and pushed his way through the clusters of worried relatives and bewigged barristers. Eventually, he found Morris, deep in discussion with some other clerks outside the main courtroom.
“I’m tellin’ you, Mr. Fleetwood, I’ve been doing my best to swank solicitors into sending briefs your way, but this Edgeware Road business has made people nervous as hens. Word’s got out you’ve recommended our Miss Gale be spared, and there’s some none too ’appy about it. Plus there’s some pleece officer goin’ ’round telling everyone you’re a gulpy.”
“Gulpy?”
“Dupe. Idiot. No offense, sir. You must ’a riled ’im.”
Edmund gave a tight smile. “Feltham. He didn’t appreciate my interfering with his investigation. But surely not everyone believes the word of a crooked police officer. Surely some people see that the conviction was unsound and that my recommendation was right.”
“Oh, there’s plenty want to employ the celebrated Edmund Fleetwood,” Morris said, gesturing toward the throng of poorly clothed, pinch-faced men and women waiting outside the court. “But they mostly can’t pay so much as half a crown.”
Edmund wended his way home, his hands in his pockets, thinking. Who had divulged the news of his decision? Spinks? When he arrived at his chambers, he found Bessie in a blue floral visiting dress—it was Thursday, her “at home” morning.
“Well, I have been snubbed,” she told him as soon as he had closed the door. “Hardly anyone visited today. Miss Pinkerton merely left a card. You know the cause of it.” She folded her arms.
Edmund removed his hat and gloves. “Yes, I suspect I do.”
“Mrs. Whipple, your colleague’s wife, condescended to visit—all airs and graces. She told me that you have sided with a woman everyone believes to be a wicked criminal.”
“Well, everyone is wrong. And it will be proved.”
“Will it? Will it, Edmund? Why are you so sure she’s innocent? Because she tells you so? A woman will say anything to save her neck. Surely you know that.”
“Bessie, you really don’t understand. I know you’re upset, but please do not comment on my cases when you have no knowledge of them.”
“But, Edmund, I have to comment when your work begins to affect us, me, our lives.”
“Will our lives be so much the poorer without visits from the Miss Pinkertons of this world?”
“It’s not just visits, Edmund. What will this do to your practice if people think you are sympathizing with the worst kind of criminal? You were hardly besieged with work before all of this started, and now…”
Edmund ran his hands through his hair. “I know, Bessie. I know that very well, but I’m confident that the truth will out. That people will come to accept that I have acte
d rightly.”
“But I ask you again how you know this Gale woman to be speaking the truth? Remember she has not only herself to save, but her child. I’d do or say anything for Clem. I’m sure she would do the same for her son.”
Edmund did his best to keep the annoyance out of his voice. “Bessie, I understand why you’re concerned, and I’m sorry you’ve been snubbed—it’s wretched, it really is. But these people are wrong and will be shown to be so. Miss Gale has been the victim of gross prejudice and of our supposed justice system. The police manipulated the evidence, the newspaper men have slandered and lied about her—you’ve seen the things that have been written, Bessie. Even her own lawyers undermined her. I cannot fail her as well.”
Bessie looked down. “Is she pretty?”
“What?”
“Is she very pretty? They say she is handsome.”
“Bessie, what a thing to ask. What does it matter if she is handsome?”
“It’s just…well, you have spent so little time with us recently. Clem misses his father. I miss you.”
“I’m sorry, Bessie. I know I’ve been…absent.” He was stung with guilt. He had, he reflected, been away much of late: at the prison, at the library, or locked in his study, working. He had begun to remind himself of his own father. He kissed her forehead. “This is something that I have to do, but it will be over soon. And then things will get better. I’ll get more work—good work. I promise.”
As he stroked her hair, his eyes alighted on an envelope on the mantelpiece, resting against the mirror. In its reflection he could see his name, written backward. He pulled away from Bessie and picked up the envelope.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “that came for you while you were out. Flora said that a woman delivered it. A woman in a gray dress.”
27
“O dreadful is the check—intense the agony—
When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb—the brain to think again—
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.”
—“The Prisoner,” Emily Brontë
She shifted to try to reduce the pain. The manacles cut into her wrists and whenever she made the slightest movement the iron cuffs bit deep into the already damaged flesh. Sarah could feel the blood on her back drying and sticking to her clothing. She thought she could taste blood in her mouth. She could see nothing at all.
Immediately after the attack in the dining hall the previous day, Miss Sowerton and the two rough-looking warders had dragged her down to the basement. She had fought against them at first, insisting it was Rook who had started it, shouting that Rook had been out to get her since the start. That, of course, had been a mistake. There was nothing worse, in this place, than a rat.
“You can protest your innocence all you like,” Miss Sowerton had said, “but I saw through your act a long time ago, and I think it’s time you admitted what you did.”
That was when they had taken her to the dark cells.
First, they bound her wrists. Next they manacled her so that she was facing the wall. Then they tore the dress from her back so that she was naked from the waist up.
She had stopped protesting by this point. Fear had made her numb, for she realized what they meant to do.
From behind her, she heard Miss Sowerton’s voice. “You think you’re better than the others, Gale. You think you’re better than us. But you’re nothing. You’re nothing at all.” She spoke then to one of the warders. “Start with ten.”
She had tried for as long as she could not to cry out. One stroke, two strokes, three. She clenched her teeth, clenched her whole self, and tried to stop herself from feeling as the leather whip tore into her flesh. Four strokes. A cry burst from her lips. Imagine you’re somewhere else. Imagine you’re outside your body. That was what she had tried to do with her father. It had never worked then, either. Five strokes. Were they going to kill her here? She could feel the skin of her back splitting, the blood running. Six. Breathe slowly. Stay calm. Seven, and she could no longer keep the pain in, but it burst forth as a scream and a howl and all dignity was gone as she begged and pleaded for them to stop.
“Oh, I’ll tell her to stop,” Miss Sowerton said, “when you confess what you did to that woman. You going to tell us?”
“I’ve already told.”
“You mean the lies you told the lawyer? I don’t believe them. Rook says she heard you were there.”
“No.”
“No?”
Sarah saw George’s face before her. She saw Rosina.
“No. Rook’s bluffing. She doesn’t know anything.”
A pause. Then: “Ten more lashes.”
“Please, God, no. No!”
Did anyone hear her screams outside the cell? Could Lucy hear her? Could God? If He could, He must believe, as these women did, that she needed to be taught a lesson.
• • •
At some point she lost consciousness. When she awoke, the darkness was so complete that she did not know whether her eyes were open or shut. She would not even have been sure she was alive, were it not for the searing pain that scorched along her back. The warders had shackled her to a low wooden bed and left, sealing the doors so that not a single beam of light reached her, nor the slightest sound from outside.
Would they come back? she had wondered. Would they flog her again, or apply some new torture? Or would they simply leave her to die?
The cell stank, of mold, piss, and vomit, perhaps her own. She could hear the squeal and splash of rats in a puddle of something in the corner. In her exhaustion and fear, Sarah felt her mind turning in on itself. She began to believe that it had all been pointless. She should have simply accepted what fate threw at her rather than trying to fight it, for what difference had she made anyway? The planning and the weighing and the worrying had all been futile because she would die here, in the dark. Her torn back, untreated, would become septic and poison her blood, or the warders would return and finish her. They would claim she had succumbed to a fever—that was common enough—or they would say that she had hit her head against the wall in a rage. Perhaps Miss Sowerton would say that, before her death, she had confessed to having killed Hannah Brown herself. And then all of it would have been in vain.
Was this how Hannah had felt before she died? The terror, the pain, the hopelessness. Or perhaps she had no idea of what would happen to her.
Sarah drifted off again, into sleep or unconsciousness. She awoke to see one of the warders, holding a lamp. The light, after such darkness, blinded Sarah and she could not look into the woman’s face, but managed to rasp, “Please. Some water.”
“Miss Sowerton wants to know if you’ve anything to say.” It was the gruff voice of one of the two warders who had been on duty in the laundry that day.
For a moment, Sarah considered saying that yes, Miss Sowerton was right, she had been there, she had helped James kill Hannah, had sawed her to pieces, mopped up the blood. Indeed, she was so thirsty and hungry, in so much pain, that she might at that moment have admitted to anything. But there must still have been some hope within her like a glow of amber in the dying ashes of a fire, for she could not bring herself to do it.
“I beg you,” she said. “Just give me some water.”
She felt the woman hesitate, but after a moment she moved away.
“Don’t leave me here!” she shouted at the woman’s retreating form. “At least give me a candle!”
The warder did not turn, but continued toward the door, taking the lamp with her, its flame wavering as she walked.
“Please!”
The door clanged shut and Sarah was plunged again into utter darkness.
• • •
Sarah slipped in and out of consciousness, in and out of time. She had no idea whether she had been in the cell
for hours, or days. At times she thought she was back in her childhood bedroom with Rosina, shut away in the dark for their misdemeanors. Once when she woke she sensed, as she had that time in her cell before, a presence. Above the squealing of the rats, she heard again the sound of labored breath.
“Hannah?”
No answer, but still the breathing: fast, then slow; fast, then slow. On it went like this, on and on. Sometimes Sarah was conscious and sometimes not, and often she was somewhere in between.
At some point it came to her that Hannah’s silence was not hostile. She did not respond, Sarah realized, because she could not. She was dying.
“It’s all right,” Sarah said into the darkness. “It’s all right, Hannah. It will be over soon.”
And then a light. First just a beam and then a brightness flooding the cell with a whiteness so intense that it seemed to reach inside her head. She screwed her eyes tight shut against it, but she could hear a voice. A voice she knew well.
• • •
“In order to discipline the mind, you must discipline the body.”
“I am not interested in why you decided to take her to the punishment cell, Miss Sowerton. Nor am I interested in why you lied to me.”
“You might not be interested, Mr. Fleetwood, but if you report this—”
“If I report this to the Home Secretary, Miss Sowerton, that will be the end of your tenure as Matron of Newgate.”
The matron glared at Edmund with such hatred he could almost feel her eyes boring into his skin. “The Home Secretary would understand my methods.”
“On the contrary, he would be aware you were committing a criminal offense. The whipping of women was outlawed some years ago, as you know perfectly well. If I hadn’t arrived when I did, she could have died.”
A young, freckle-faced warder was with Sarah now in the next cell, sponging her back with brandy and dosing her with laudanum to reduce the pain.
“Gale exaggerates, as she always does,” the matron said. “She suffered no great harm.”
“She was in a collapsed state, her back is latticed with appalling cuts, and she has been left without food and water in complete darkness for nearly forty-eight hours. I would say that was assault with grievous bodily harm. I would say a jury would agree with me.” His tone was measured, but there was steel beneath.