Affinity (25 page)

2 November 1874

I have come to my room, for the stir downstairs is frightful. With every day that takes us nearer to Pris’s wedding, they find some new thing to add to the frenzy of ordering and planning—seamstresses yesterday, cooks and hair-dressers the day before. I cannot bear to see any of them. I have said I shall have Ellis dress my hair as she has always dressed it, and—though I have consented to narrower skirts—that I shall keep my gowns grey, and my coats all black. This, of course, makes Mother scold. She scolds so hard, she might be spitting pins. If I am not handy she will scold Ellis or Vigers—she will even scold Gulliver, Prissy’s parrot. She will scold until he whistles and beats his poor clipped wings, in sheer frustration.

And Pris sits at the centre of it all, calm as a skiff at the eye of a storm. She has resolved to keep her features very steady until her portrait is complete. Mr Cornwallis, she says, is a very faithful painter. She is afraid of making shadows and wrinkles that he will be obliged to add to the canvas.

I would rather sit with the prisoners at Millbank than sit with Priscilla now. I would rather talk with Ellen Power, than be chided by Mother. I would rather visit Selina, than go to Garden Court to visit Helen—for Helen is as full of wedding talk as any of them, but Selina they have so removed from ordinary rules and habits, she might be living, cold and graceful, on the surface of the moon.

So, anyway, it has seemed to me before to-day; this afternoon, however, when I arrived at the gaol, I found it upset, and Selina and the women very distracted. ‘You have picked a sad time to come, miss,’ said the matron at the gate. ‘A prisoner has broken out, and caused all sorts of bother on the wards.’ I stared at her—of course, I thought she meant a woman had escaped. But when she heard that, she laughed. What they term
breaking out
there is a mad sort of fit that they say takes the women sometimes, sending them smashing up their cells in fury. Miss Haxby explained it to me. I met her on one of the tower staircases. She was climbing it rather wearily, with Miss Ridley at her side.

‘It is an odd thing, the breaking-out,’ she said, ‘and quite peculiar to female gaols.’ She said there is a thought that prison women have an instinct for it; she knows only that, at some point in their terms at Millbank, her girls will nearly all of them submit. ‘And when they are young and strong and determined—well, then they are like savages. They shriek and crash about—we cannot get near them, but have to send for the men. The entire gaol hears the racket, and it takes all my power to calm the wards. For when one woman has broken out, another is sure to follow. The urge, that has been slumbering, is woken in her; and then she almost cannot help herself.’

She passed a hand across her face. The woman that had broken out this time, she said, was Phœbe Jacobs, the thief, on D ward. She and Miss Ridley had been called to inspect the damage.

‘Will you come with us,’ she said, ‘to see the broken cell?’

I remembered D Ward, with its cell doors all shut fast, and its sullen inmates, and its fetid, coir-choked air, as the ghastliest passage in the prison; now it seemed more grim than ever, and peculiarly still. We were met at the end of it by Mrs Pretty, rolling her sleeves down and dabbing at her wet top lip—she might have come fresh from a wrestling-ring. When she saw me she gave an approving nod. ‘You have come to view the smash-up, ma’am? Well—ha, ha—it’s a rare one!’ She made a gesture, and we followed her a little way along the ward, to where a cell gate stood unfastened. ‘Watch your skirts there, ladies,’ she said, as Miss Haxby and I drew near to the doorway. ‘The devil has overturned her nuisance-bucket . . .’

I tried to describe the chaos of Jacobs’ cell, to-night, to Helen and Stephen; they sat, shaking their heads, but I could tell they didn’t think it much. ‘If the cells are so bleak already,’ asked Helen once, ‘how can the women spoil them or make them bleaker?’ They could not imagine the scene I saw today. It was like some little room in hell—or more, like a chamber in some madman’s epileptic brain, after a fit.

‘It is astonishing, their ingenuity,’ said Miss Haxby quietly, as she and I stood in the cell and gazed about us. ‘The window—look, the iron guard pulled free, to expose the glass for smashing. The gas pipe torn away—we have had to stop that up with a piece of rag—do you see?—to save the other prisoners a gassing. The blankets not just ripped but
shredded
. They do that with their mouths. We have found teeth, in the past, that they have lost in their great fury . . .’

She was like a house agent, but with an inventory of violence: tick, tick, tick she seemed to go, drawing my eye to every wretched detail. The hardwood bed smashed up to splinters; the great wooden door, dented by the blows of a prison heel, and gouged at; the prison rules torn down and trampled; the Bible—most terrible of all, Helen blanched when I told her of it—mashed to a bilious gruel at the bottom of the overturned slop-box. The fastidious reckoning went on and on, and all in the same dull murmur; and when I asked a question in an ordinary tone Miss Haxby put a finger to her lips. ‘We mustn’t speak too loudly,’ she said. She feared the other women would find a pattern in her words, and copy it.

Eventually she stood aside with Mrs Pretty, to talk with her about the tidying of the cell. Then she took out her watch. She said, ‘Jacobs has been in the darks for—how long, Miss Ridley?’—For almost an hour, the matron said.

‘Then we had better visit her.’ She hesitated, then turned to me. Should I like to see that, too? she asked. Should I like to go with them, to the dark cell?

‘The dark cell?’ It seemed to me I had been round and round the pentagon a dozen times; and I had never heard them mention such a place before. The dark cell? I said again—what was that?

I had arrived at the prison a little after four, and in the time it had taken us to climb to the broken cell and study it, its corridors had grown gloomy. I am still not accustomed to the thickness of the Millbank night, the lurid glare of the gas-jets; now the silent cells and towers seemed all at once quite unfamiliar. We took a passage, too—Miss Ridley, Miss Haxby and I—that I did not recognise; a passage which, to my surprise, led away from the wards, towards the heart of Millbank—a passage which wound downwards, via spiralling staircases and sloping corridors, until the air grew even chiller and more rank, and vaguely saline, and I was sure we must be below the level of the ground—perhaps, below the level of the Thames itself. At last we passed into a slightly wider corridor where there were several antique wooden doors, all rather low. Miss Haxby paused before the first of these and, at her nod, Miss Ridley unfastened it and stepped to light the room that lay beyond.

‘You may as well also see this,’ Miss Haxby said to me as we moved inside, ‘since we are here. It is our chain-room, where we keep our shackles, jackets and the like.’

She gestured to the walls, and I gazed at them with her, but in a kind of horror. They were not whitewashed, like the walls above, but rough, unfinished, and quite glistening with damp. Each was densely hung with iron—with rings and chains and fetters, and with other, nameless, complicated instruments whose purposes I could only, shuddering, guess at.

Miss Haxby saw my expression, I think, and gave a mirthless smile.

‘These items mostly date from Millbank’s earliest days,’ she said, ‘and hang here as a kind of exhibition, merely. You’ll see that they are clean and kept well-oiled, however: we can never be sure that a woman won’t arrive within our walls, so vicious as to require us to fetch them out again! Here we have handcuffs—some for girls, look—look how dainty these are, like a lady’s bracelets! Here we have gags,’—these are strips of leather, with holes punched in them to let the prisoner breathe ‘but not cry out’—‘and here, hobbles’. She said the hobbles are used on women only, never on men. She said, ‘We use them to restrain a prisoner when she has a mind—as they often do!—to lie upon the floor of her cell and kick her feet against its door. Can you see how, when the hobble is fitted, it would grip? This strap fastens the ankle to the thigh; this fixes the hands. A woman in this must rest quite upon her knees, and a matron must feed her her supper from a spoon. They soon tire of that and grow meek again.’

I fingered the strap of the hobble she had caught up. It was marked quite clearly, with a ridge and a polished, blackened groove where the buckle had been tightened on it. I asked, did they use such things often? and Miss Haxby replied that they resort to them as often as they must—she thought, perhaps five or six times in the year. ‘Would you say, Miss Ridley?’ Miss Ridley nodded.

‘Our main form of restraint, however—and that a pretty adequate one,’ she went on then, ‘—is the jacket. See, here.’ She stepped to a closet and drew out two heavy, canvas items, so rough and shapeless I thought at first they must be sacks. She passed one to Miss Ridley, and held the other one up against herself, as if trying out a gown before a glass. Then I saw that the thing was indeed a crude kind of over-dress—only, with straps about the sleeves and waist instead of braid or bows. ‘We place these over the women’s prison frocks, to stop them tearing at them,’ she said. ‘Look at the fastenings’—these were not buckles but stout brass screws. ‘We have keys for them, and can make them very fast indeed. Miss Ridley there, has a strait-waistcoat.’ The matron now shook
her
jacket out, and I saw that its sleeves were of tar-coloured leather, unnaturally long, closed at the cuff, and tapering to straps. Like the straps upon the hobbles, these had marks upon them where they had been repeatedly drawn against a buckle. I gazed at them, and felt my hands, inside their gloves, begin to sweat. They begin to sweat as I remember now, for all that the night is such a chill one.

The matrons made all neat again then, and we left that ghastly chamber to proceed further along the passage until we reached a low, stone archway. Beyond this point the walls were barely wider than our skirts. There were no gas-jets, only a single lighted candle in a sconce, which Miss Haxby seized and held before us as we walked, her hand about it to shield its leaping flame from some salt, subterranean breeze. I looked about me. I had not known there was a place like this, at Millbank. I had not known there was a place like this in all the world, and for a second I felt a rush of terror. I thought, They mean to murder me! They mean to take the candle and leave me here, to find my own, blind, groping way to light, or madness!

Then we reached a set of four doors and Miss Haxby stopped before the first of them. Miss Ridley fumbled, in the uncertain candle-light, at the chain at her waist.

When she turned her key and seized the door, she did not swing it to as I expected, but rather slid it: I saw then that it was thick, and padded like a mattress—they have it there to drown the curses and the weeping of the prisoner in the room beyond. She, of course, now caught the movement of it. There came, suddenly—and horribly, in that dim, small, silent space—a single great
thud
upon the door, and then another
thud
, and then a cry—‘You bitch! Have you come to watch me rotting! Damn you, if I don’t choke myself the next time you are gone!’ The padded door being now put back, Miss Ridley unfastened a wicket panel in the second wooden door that lay behind it. Beyond the panel there were bars. Beyond the bars there was a darkness—a darkness so unbroken, so intense, I found my eyes could make no purchase on it. I stared, and became aware that my head was aching. The shouting had ceased, the cell seemed quite still—then all at once, looming out of that unfathomable dark to press itself against the bars, there came a face. A terrible face—white and streaming and bruised, with blood and spittle at its lips and its eyes wild, yet also squinting against the feeble light of our candle. At the sight of it Miss Haxby flinched, and I stepped back; and the face was turned on me then—‘Damn you for gazing at me!’ the woman began. Miss Ridley slapped with the heel of her hand upon the wood, to silence her.

‘You watch your filthy manners, Jacobs, or we’ll have you down here for a month, do you hear?’

The woman placed her head against the bars, kept her white lips fastened, but continued to fix us all with her wild and terrible gaze. Miss Haxby moved a little way towards her. ‘You have been very foolish, prisoner,’ she said, ‘and Mrs Pretty, Miss Ridley and I are very disappointed in you. You have spoiled a cell. You have hurt your own head. Is that what you wanted, to hurt your own head?’

The woman took a ragged breath. ‘I must hurt something,’ she said. ‘As for Mrs Pretty—that bitch! I shall shake her to pieces, and not care how many days in the dark you make me serve for it!’

‘That’s enough!’ said Miss Haxby. ‘That’s enough. I shall call on you again tomorrow. We shall see how sorry you are after a night in the dark. Miss Ridley.’ Miss Ridley moved forward with her key, and Jacobs looked wilder than ever.

‘Don’t you fasten that lock on me, you cat! Don’t you take that candle from me! Oh!’ She ground her face against the grate, and before Miss Ridley closed the wooden flap I caught a glimpse of her jacket where it showed at the neck—the strait-waistcoat, I think it was, with its blunt black sleeves and its buckles. Once the key was turned there came another
thud
—she must have used her head to butt the wood with—and then a muffled cry, in a different, higher tone: ‘Don’t leave me here, Miss Haxby! Oh! Miss Haxby, I’ll be good as anything!’

This cry was worse than the curses. I turned to the matrons, saying, They surely could not mean to leave her there? They could not really mean to leave her there alone, and in such darkness? Miss Haxby stood very stiff. She said there would be officers sent, to watch her; and in another hour they would bring her bread.—‘But such darkness, Miss Haxby!’ I said again.

‘The darkness is the punishment,’ she answered simply. She moved away from me, taking the candle with her, her white hair showing pale in the shadows. Miss Ridley had closed the padded door. The woman’s cries had grown very muffled, but were still clear enough—‘You bitches!’ she cried. ‘God-damn you—
and the lady too
!’ I stood for a second and watched the light grow dimmer; then the cries grew even higher and I stepped after that dancing flame so hastily I almost stumbled. ‘You bitches, you bitches!’ the woman still cried—she might be crying it still. ‘I shall die in the dark—do you hear me, lady? I shall die in the dark, like a stinking rat!’