Death at Dartmoor (5 page)

The men, fewer than a dozen of them, all wearing their coarse uniforms with the distinctive broad-arrow stripe, their shaved heads bare, were already seated when Charlotte was escorted inside. The room itself was quite plain, with rows of wooden benches instead of pews and “Prince of Peace” emblazoned over the pulpit, which was backed by three tall stained glass windows and a mural painting of Christ ascending into the heavens. In fact, one might even forget that this was a prison chapel, if it were not for the tall stools on which the guards sat, strategically placed around the walls.

Charlotte walked down the aisle and stood at the side of the altar. She unloaded the books from the box held by the orderly and arranged them in two neat piles beside the altar.

The chaplain stepped forward. “Miss Lucas,” he said in a low voice, bowing. “I've had the men assembled, although I must say that yours was a rather unusual request. Only Scotsmen, as I understand it? Something about a bequest?”

“Yes,” Charlotte replied. She adjusted her Army bonnet, which had a way of going askew when she turned her head. “The Mission receives gifts of this sort from time to time. In this case, the donor who provided the funds through his will to purchase the Bibles left quite specific instructions for their distribution.” She looked out over the small group and was satisfied.

“I see,” the chaplain said. “Well, then, shall we begin?” He stepped forward and raised his voice. “Attention, men. This is Miss Charlotte Lucas, of the Salvation Army's Prison Gate Mission. She is here to distribute Bibles to men of Scottish descent, carrying out a special bequest from an anonymous donor. We will stand and repeat the Lord's Prayer in unison. Then you will file forward and she will give each of you a Bible.”

The men stood, bowed their bare, shaven heads, and dutifully mumbled the prayer. Beneath her lashes, Charlotte stole a glance at them. One in particular—a slender man with a sensitive mouth, a stubble of reddish beard crusting his prison pallor, and the number 351 sewn on his prison jacket—was watching her longingly, his feelings so evident that it was all she could do to keep from gasping aloud. She lowered her head and laced her fingers to keep them from trembling. The man wasn't the only one staring at her, of course. All of the men were starved for the sight of a woman, and her heart went out to them. Whatever their crimes, a sentence to Dartmoor was a sentence to a living hell.

When the prayer was finished, the men stood and came forward, one at a time, as the guards looked on watchfully. Charlotte took the small leather-bound Bibles one at a time from the pile, presenting one to every prisoner. “God bless you,” she said, looking into each face as she pressed their hands, murmuring the number of a verse to each. John 3:16, or Romans 8:28, or some other, each one different. Most of the men did not answer or return her glance, keeping their eyes averted from hers as if they did not want to risk her seeing into the darkness of their souls—all but two or three, whose looks were bold or insolent or frighteningly direct. To these, she gave a small smile as well as a blessing and a verse.

When number 351 stepped up to her, she turned to her left as if to check the empty box. As she turned back to face him, she brushed one of the piles, knocking one book off with a thud that echoed through the chapel. Impulsively, several of the men still in line started forward.

“Stand fast,” the guard barked. Number 351 had already bent to pick it up, and when he rose, their eyes met, his questioning.

As he replaced the Bible on the stack, she handed him the one she was holding. “Bless you,” she said.

When each man had received his Bible, the guards climbed down from the stools. “Form up!” came the command, and the men fell into a single line. “Forward!” The group marched away in a shuffling lockstep.

“Thank you, Miss Lucas,” the chaplain said, taking Charlotte's black-gloved hand. “I know the men are grateful for the interruption in the monotony of their days, if nothing else. You're going directly back to London? You'll see Commander Sloan on your return?”

“Yes,” Charlotte lied. “I shall see him this evening. Do you have a message for him?”

“Please give him my best wishes and tell him that I am thankful for the Army's continuing generosity.”

“I shall indeed,” Charlotte said. “God bless your efforts on behalf of these poor souls, Chaplain.”

“And yours,” the chaplain replied piously. “You and your colleagues are to be deeply commended for bringing salvation to the lost. Without your prayers and continuing efforts, these men would be damned indeed.”

Charlotte thought about these words as she stood on the platform in front of the Princetown railway depot a half hour later, waiting for the train that would carry her south to Yelverton and the hotel room she had rented for yet another night.

She hoped with all her heart that the chaplain was right.

“D
on't dally, Three fifty-one.” The guard behind him gave him a hard shove. “Leave that Bible in yer cell an' step back out here. ‘Nough shirkin'. Time ye wuz back in the bog fields.”

His face set, his mouth a thin line, Prisoner 351 did as he was ordered, then returned to Exercise Yard A with the rest of the men who had been briefly released from their afternoon's labor to receive the Bibles. They formed a column and marched to the North Wall Gate, where the doors opened and they could see the moors stretching away to the far horizon, vast and rolling as the ocean. Since the work party was a small one, it was attended by only two mounted warders, each carrying a loaded carbine. The column made to the right and descended the slope of Cemetery Hill, where were buried the hapless prisoners of war who had met their deaths in Dartmoor almost a century before.

Prisoner 351 kept his eyes forward, but his thoughts were bleak. If the Crown had its way, he would lie in just such a burial ground one day, under the cold, peaty sod of the moor and its filmy blanket of blowing mist. And from now until then, he would labor without ceasing in the windswept bog fields and the brutal granite quarry and sleep like the dead in the cold granite coffin of his cell, while around him men wept and cursed all through the night. He thought as he often did of the lines from Oscar Wilde's ballad, written while the poet was himself a prisoner.
“Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard. Some do it with a bitter look...”

The warder nearest him caught his eye and motioned with his carbine. “Step it up there, Three Fifty-one. Ye're laggin'.” But the rough voice was not unkind, and the prisoner thought he heard some sympathy in it. And why not? he reflected bitterly. The man could go home tonight to loving children and a trusting wife, while he—

He swallowed. “
Yet each man kills the thing he loves.”
And the thought came to him again, the frightful, gut-chilling thought that was never far from his mind, that Elizabeth was dead, and the baby within her, and that his bitter look was as much the cause of her death as the bloody poker that had smashed her skull. He might as well be punished for the one as for the other. Each was an equally hideous betrayal.

The other prisoners traded quips as they marched—the ban on conversation was unofficially lifted outside the walls—but 351, as usual, kept his silence, remote and alone. Within the half hour, they arrived at the bog fields, where they joined the men already at work digging up stones, loading them onto wooden barrows and horse-drawn sledges, and stacking them as boundary walls under the wary eyes of the sentries. The authorities called it “reclaiming the moor,” but what they expected to do with it when it was reclaimed was more than anyone could see. Bracken and heather and rank grass were the only plants that flourished in the peat soil, and no matter how many rocks were removed, that many yet remained.

His lips pressed tight together, the prisoner took up a long steel crowbar and began to pry up on a stubborn block of granite. The work actually came as a kind of relief, the effort loosening his muscles and making him sweat, its rhythms moving him into something of a meditative state. The other men worked together in noisy gangs, swearing and snarling at one another, but 351 preferred to labor alone, digging the stones and hauling them to the section of wall that he had taken as his responsibility. The task seemed to him something like that of a sculptor: envisioning the section of wall he wanted to build, selecting the proper stones, and wedging them into place against the force of gravity and the pressures of the other stones, in exactly the spot required to fill out and manifest his imaginary wall. Accustomed as he had been to working chiefly with his mind in what he now thought of as his “other” life, the life he had lived before he came to Dartmoor, there was something satisfying about the physicality of all this prying and lifting and fitting, under the open sky where the wind blew off the high tors hard enough to push a man right off his feet. The prisoner could feel his body growing stronger and more able, and after the first week of work in the bog fields, he began to imagine everything around him as empty spaces to be filled, while his mind searched for exactly the right shapes to fill them.

One of the other prisoners came up to him, his black brows pulled together in an envious scowl. “Wish I wuz a Scotsman,” he growled. “I don't much fancy Bibles, but I bloody well wud've liked t' lay me eyes on that mission‘ry 'oo wuz passin' 'em out. 'Aven't seen a woman in two bloody years.” He grinned toothlessly. “Lay eyes, did I say? Lay me 'ands, is wot I mean.”

The prisoner didn't answer. But the remark brought back the scene in the chapel, the young woman in the somber black dress and bonnet of the Salvation Army, her blue eyes passionate, her tremulous voice half breaking as she said “God bless you” and whispered the number of his verse, handing him the Bible in which he was meant to look it up. Her cheeks had been red-stained, her eyes brimming with tears, and he could smell her scent.

He arched his back and gave a mighty push down on the bar, and the stone began to lift. But at that moment a flowery perfume struck his nostrils with such a poignant force that he had to stop and sniff the air, half persuaded that the young woman in the Army bonnet had followed him here, to this very field. And then he realized that a delicate, ginger-haired young man, scarcely more than nineteen, had sidled up very close, warbling a London music-hall ditty in a lisping falsetto.

He put his mouth close to the prisoner's ear and sang the chorus softly: “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay, Ta-ra-ra Boom—”

“That'll do, Ginger.” A surly warder interrupted the serenade. “T' the wall wi' yez, an' stop actin' a damn fool, er I'll put yez on report.” To the prisoner, he growled. “Lay on that bar, Number Three Fifty-one. I wants t' see them bloody rocks bounce.”

Ginger minced away, and the prisoner returned to his labors. But he had been working for only a short time when a whistle shrilled. He leaned on his bar and looked up to see a wave of gray white mist tumbling like a foaming surf down the slope of North Hessary Tor.

“Down tools!” a warder barked. “Form up, boys. No talkin', now.”

Accustomed to this precautionary drill, the men assembled in small circles, standing shoulder to shoulder, facing outward. At times like these, the guards strictly enforced the prohibition against speaking, for they knew that in each man's mind the swirling, swift-moving fog awakened the hope of escape. Of course, it was a vain hope, for everyone believed that the moor itself was as secure a prison as Dartmoor's high stone walls, vanishing now into the enveloping mist. When the prisoners spoke surreptitiously of it among themselves, they agreed that the most favorable seasons of escape were the warmer months and the best possible direction of escape was to the east, toward Torquay, for in that direction the terrain was said to be firm enough to cross safely. It was well known that to attempt escape to the north, west, or south was to invite death in the treacherous mires, for the paths across them were few and known only to those who had lived their whole lives on the moor. Moreover, it was said that a stranger crossing the open ground, where there was little cover, would be instantly seen and reported by one of its inhabitants or by guards that were immediately stationed at certain checkpoints when an escape occurred. It would be only a matter of time before the bell sounded and the Prisoner Recaptured flag was hoisted over the prison gate. When each man was admitted to Dartmoor, the impossibility of escape was dinned into him repeatedly, and it was beyond reason to think that any would make the attempt.