The Star of the Sea (34 page)

He became a solo performer, the pavement his theatre, with a new drama for each new day. He prided himself on his scope and limitless energy, his lack of requirement for partners or props. Into the street he would saunter every morning, a gambler in a land of heavily stacked odds, outfitted with nothing except his imagination. Sometimes he was an impoverished mariner who had fought against
the French; a distressed widower with seven hungry children; a miner who had survived a terrible explosion; a man who had once owned a flower shop in Chelsea before being mercilessly cheated by his unscrupulous partner. Women would weep as he told his tales. Men would beseech him to take their last pennies. Often his stories were so completely convincing that he would even weep himself.

The other hard-luck men who worked the area accused him of being greedy and not giving them a chance. When he refused to accept their proposals for regulating the market, one of them ‘ratted him in’ to the police. The judge proved a less receptive audience than some Mulvey had known. Frederick Hall was found guilty of obtaining with deceptions and sentenced to seven years’ hard labour in Newgate. He was stripped in the Gate-House and carefully searched, being forced to bend low so they could investigate his rectum, then shorn of his hair and blasted with a fire hose and examined by a doctor who passed him as healthy. He was dusted with a powder that was said to kill lice; then invited to swallow a measure of saltpetre, which the guards said would quell your natural desires. Declining to swallow it, he was strapped to a chair and had it pumped down his gullet with the aid of a funnel. Naked except for a bloodstained towel, he was chained to a leash and led into the prison; through cast-iron gates, along whitewashed landings, up the metal staircase to the Governor’s office. There Prisoner Hall and two other newcomers were given a talk by the Governor’s assistant, a man with the gentle smile of a paedophile uncle. There was a plaque on his desk inscribed with the debatable words:
WE MUST CEASE TO DO EVIL
&
LEARN TO DO WELL
. They had probably heard many things about Newgate, he said, but they were not to believe these exaggerated tales. The institution only existed to help them. Punishment could be an act of deepest love.

The cell in which they lodged him was a seven-foot cube with an opaque leaded window the size of a handkerchief. Moonlight was vaguely discernible through the greasy grating. Mulvey sat on the floor and began to count the black bricks. By the time he got to a hundred ‘lights-out’ was called and what he had thought was the moonlight was briskly extinguished. He heard the slam of cell doors receding down his landing like the doors of a train preparing to leave a station. Something small with a tail scurried across his bare feet. It
was quite a short time afterwards when the screaming started; he heard it echoing up from the landings below. Mulvey didn’t understand it; there was little point in screaming. It was only the next day that he learned what lay behind it. The prisoners had more to contend with than mere incarceration. The Governor of Newgate had progressive ideas.

The loneliness of the cell at night was something for which Mulvey had had time to prepare. Solitude was part of the condition of Connemara. What stunned him was that isolation was also enforced by day. Companionship was bad for men in prison, so went the Governor’s idealistic policy; the evil of the hardened would infect the merely misguided. Association of any kind was not allowed: not even with the guards or the Visiting Committee. Any human relationship was the enemy of reform, an act of unchristian cruelty to the already unfortunate prisoner and by extension to the civilisation he might hope one day to rejoin. When he was taken from his cell for his exercise or his work detail each inmate was clamped into a black leather hood before being allowed to enter the yard. The mask had minuscule slits through which you might see and an arrangement of pinpricks through which you might breathe and it was bolted around your neck with a padlock and choke-chain that would strangle you if you raised your arms above your head. More to the point, it made each man equally unrecognisable; absolutely identical to all his fellows, as they broke the stones or turned the treadmill and ceased to do evil and learned to do well.

It was put about by the more enthusiastically progressive of the guards that they, too, sometimes donned the masks; so you could never tell exactly who was working beside you, who was screaming and clawing at the air. Were his agonies real or a matter of performance? If you were being reformed, that wouldn’t matter. You would be aware that conversation was forbidden under pain of the scourge. If an inmate was heard by a warder to have spoken to another, he would receive fifty lashes of the bullwhip for every word he had said. If he was unreformed or unwise enough to do it again, he was put into solitary confinement for the remainder of his sentence. There were men in the windowless depths of Newgate who had not seen another life-form for fifteen years. Not a prisoner, nor a guard, nor even a rat: for their cells were so thick that nothing
could penetrate them and in any case were kept in darkness every hour of every day. Even at chapel, isolation was maintained. Each inmate knelt in his own partitioned booth from which nothing was visible except the cross above the altar. But they were allowed to sing and to respond to the prayers; so attendance at chapel, though voluntary, was widespread.

Mulvey was regarded as an excellent prisoner. He gave no trouble and made no complaints and the only time he had to be punished – two hundred lashes for saying ‘I didn’t hear you’ – he had taken his scourging like a man. Alone in his cell he had wept that night, his back and buttocks flaming with pain, the base of his spine a nub of pure agony; but he discerned a small victory in what had happened. As soon as they opened his handcuffs and ordered him to rise, he had pulled on his britches and his sackcloth shirt and walked straight to the warder who had flailed the flesh off him and held out his hand in a gesture of thanks. He was so dazzled with pain that he could barely see his torturer. He could hardly even stand. But he made himself do it.

The warder, a Scottish sadist who had often raped insane prisoners, and had twice raped Mulvey and threatened to castrate him, had seemed astonished as he accepted his victim’s outstretched hand. Mulvey had put on a penitent face and given a series of small, humble nods. He knew the Governor and the Visiting Committee were watching from the gallery and he wanted to make an enduring impression. As he left the Correction Hall he passed directly beneath them, performing the sign of the cross as he did so. One of the visiting ladies was quietly weeping at the scene, as though the reformation she had just observed was somehow too much for her. Frederick Hall paused and bowed to the lady. As she sobbed and collapsed into the arms of the Governor, Mulvey knew he had won this battle. To allow yourself to be flogged without getting something in return was not just unmanly; it was stupid.

Never again was he whipped or punished. On the contrary, he began to be given small privileges. He noticed that the guards were opening his door before anyone else’s; leaving it ajar after lights-out was called. One night they failed to close it at all so he closed it himself as a warder was passing, making sure that the officer could see what he was doing. Learning that he could read, the Governor
arranged for him to be given some books. A bible at first, then a
Complete Works of Shakespeare
. Prisoner Hall wrote to the Governor to express his thanks, being careful to say he was undeserving of such luxuries and to ask for nothing else. A week later more books arrived, along with a tilly-lamp by which he might read at night. By now he had learned something important about English authority. The less you asked for, the more you got.

He read the bible completely, then all of Shakespeare, then the fables of Aesop and the lives of the poets. Milton quickly became his favourite; he read all twelve volumes of
Paradise Lost
. The description of Hell in the opening book – where ‘hope never comes that comes to all’ – reminded him strongly of tormented Newgate.
O how unlike the place from whence they fell
. But the thunder of the language utterly thrilled him: the fiery march of the imperial rhythms. It became his secret amusement to baptise the warders with the weird names of Milton’s devils. Moloch and Belial, Asmadai and Baalim. The Governor he silently thought of as Mulciber, the architect of Pandemonium.

He grew fitter and stronger than he had ever been. The regime meant regular food and regular sleep, both enforced by the dread of punishment. (Prisoner Refused Supper: thirty lashes. Awake After Lights-Out: a week in solitary.) Tobacco, snuff and alcohol were forbidden, so his lungs grew cleaner and his thinking more clear. Work had hardened his muscles to rocklike bulges. By the end of Mulvey’s second year in Newgate he was able to lift his own body-weight in broken stones. Even the solitude rarely bothered him any more. ‘The mind is its own place,’ Milton contended, ‘and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell.’ If that wasn’t quite true, it was certainly worth the effort. Mulvey came to think of the door of his cell as keeping out the crazies rather than keeping him in.

In time he was moved to a larger cell, the window of which looked down over the Gate-House. At night he could see the guards chatting and joking with the small army of beggars who congregated outside, pleading to be given shelter for the night. It was widely known among the poor of London that the Newgate screws would sometimes let you in for a penny; permit you to sleep in an unoccupied cell.

It took him a while to reckon how he might turn the view to
his advantage, but before too long the answer came to him. If you kept watch through the window early in the morning you could see prisoners being released at the end of their sentence. Their names were read aloud by the Sergeant-at-Arms in the gateway, and if you earwigged very carefully you might just make them out. Even if you didn’t, you could notice on your way to the yard which cells had been emptied that morning and were now in the process of being de-loused. If you put these facts together and waited for your moment you were in a situation of considerable power without danger.

No man in Newgate could inform on another and hope to live to the end of that week. But you could say what you liked about those who were no longer inside without any fear of retribution. Mulvey began a careful programme of reporting to the Governor, always snitching on a prisoner whom he knew had just been released. You couldn’t do it often or it would look too suspicious; but once in a while it could make you appear zealous, particularly if you did it in tones of regret. ‘Inmate C34 talked last night, sir.’ ‘B92 proposed an indecency to me, sir.’ ‘F71 told me his name, sir. I’m concerned he might be interfering with my being reformed, sir.’ Mulvey’s co-operative attitude to authority was noted; it began to gain him rich returns.

He sensed the other prisoners turn against him. In the yard they stopped looking at him, or handing him tools. Mulvey didn’t care. If anything, he was glad. The more he was ostracised, the more the authorities regarded him as one of their successes. He was asked to attend before the Visiting Committee where he gave a powerful speech in favour of the separation system. Mouse-droppings began to appear in his gruel; a shard of glass secreted in a cake of soap sliced open his forearm. He thought of these tribulations as forms of promotion, rites of passage to a higher state. He started slashing his own skin whenever that was possible, reporting attacks on his person that had never happened. Every time he did it he was moved to a more comfortable cell, until finally he was moved to the Governor’s own house, where only the very richest of criminals were lodged and the cells had feather beds and wallpaper.

Half-way through the fortieth month of his sentence he was given a special duty as a reward for his progress. One prisoner was
needed to tidy the lower yard at night, to grease the gears and clean the chain of the treadmill, to scrape the pigeon mess from the flagstones and bollards. Such a man, said the Governor, was a lucky man indeed, for he would be required to perform this important work alone and thus would be excused the wearing of his mask. He would also be permitted to speak to the warder-on-duty, but purely about matters of work. The official minutes of the meeting record that Prisoner Hall was seen to weep with gratitude. ‘God bless you, sir, for I don’t deserve it.’

The lower yard was bounded on three sides by the guardhouse and cellblocks. The fourth side was enclosed by a twenty-foot wall, mortared into the top of which was a barrier of rotating spikes; a
cheval-de-frise
in the English dictionary, ‘the death-horse’ in Newgate’s implacable vernacular. In the angle where the wall abutted on the guardhouse, about five feet below the iron-thorned summit, a small metal cistern was poorly secured; and in a tight space above it there were no spikes.

It seemed curious to Mulvey that such a space had been left unprotected. It was as though the cheval-de-frise had been made nine inches too narrow, or perhaps the wall had been built too wide. Respectfully he pointed out the oversight to one of the warders. Surely it was a temptation to the more ruthless of Newgate; to those unfortunates less reformed than Mulvey himself. The guard laughed quietly and looked up at the death-horse. The last wretch who had tried to escape had impaled himself so thoroughly that the only way to get him down was to cut away that section. He had died in such atrocious agony that nobody had attempted it again. His screams had been heard fully half a mile away.

The wall and its possibilities began to interest Mulvey.

As he worked, he would position himself in such a way that he could always see it; could note its cracks and small protrusions, the jags where the grout had fallen away. It became his habit to study that wall with the attentiveness of a detective scrutinising a forged banknote. Mentally he divided it into sixteen sections and he made it his task to memorise the details of each. With breadcrumbs and threads and flakes of loose plaster he sketched it out on the floor of his cell. A crumb was a stub-end of brick to which a hand might grasp; a thread was a tiny cleft where a toe could be inserted. With
powderings of mortar he attempted to join them, to trace a climbable course from flagstones to cistern. But no matter how you plotted it, it couldn’t be done: not unless you were to sprout an extra hand.