Evangeline paused, gagging at the foul odor. It evoked a long-ago memory: the killing room of the butcher shop in Tunbridge Wells, which she’d only entered once and vowed never to set foot in again. She couldn’t see the women in the cells, but she could hear them, muttering and groaning. The plaintive wail of an infant, coughing that sounded like a barking dog.
“Come along now,” the matron said.
Only the feeble glow from the candle lit their way down a narrow passageway, lined with cells on one side. There was a tap-tap-tapping as they passed, sticks against the iron grating on cell doors. Fingers touched Evangeline’s hair, grasped at her apron. She cried out and veered to the right, knocking her shoulder against the stone wall.
“You’re a fine one, ain’t ye?” one woman said in a mincing voice.
“That dress won’t stay clean for long.”
“What’d ye do, missy?”
“What’d ye do?”
The matron stopped abruptly in front of a cell door. Wordlessly she handed Evangeline the candle again and unlocked the door. Murmuring and rustling from the women inside. “Make room,” the matron said.
“No room to make.”
“Somebody fell over in ’ere, ma’am. She was awful sick. Now she’s cold as a wagon tire.”
“She’s takin’ up space.”
The matron sighed. “Move her to a corner. I’ll send someone in the morning.”
“I’m hungry!”
“Slop jar’s full.”
“Take the girl someplace else!”
“She’s coming in.” The matron turned to Evangeline. “Lift your skirts and I’ll remove your leg irons.” Before she knelt, she touched Evangeline’s trembling hand and said, in a quiet voice, “They’re more bark than bite. Try to get some sleep.”
As Evangeline entered the dark cell, she stumbled blindly over the stone lip and sprawled headlong into a huddle of women, hitting her shoulder on the floor.
Voices rose in a chorus of insult.
“What’s wrong with ye?”
“Clumsy oaf.”
“Get up, ye foozler.”
She felt a kick in the ribs.
Struggling to her feet, rubbing her unshackled wrists, Evangeline stood at the cell door and watched the faint glow from the matron’s candle retreat down the long hallway. When the door at the end clanged shut, she flinched. She was the only one who did.
One small window, high and grated, let in dull sooty moonlight. As her eyes adjusted, she surveyed the scene. Dozens of women filled the cell, which was about the size of the Whitstones’ small front parlor. The stone floor was covered with matted straw.
She sank against the wall. The smell near the floor—the metallic scent of blood, the fermented tang of vomit, the foulness of human waste—turned her stomach, and when bile rose in her throat, she doubled over and retched onto the straw.
The women near her stepped back, grumbling and exclaiming.
“Nasty wench, she shite through ’er teeth!”
“Ugh, disgustin’.”
Wiping her mouth with her sleeve, Evangeline mumbled, “I’m sor—” before heaving up what little remained in her stomach. At this, the women around her turned their backs. Evangeline shut her eyes and fell to her knees, dizzy and tired beyond sense, slicking her dress with her own bile.
After some time, she roused herself. She untied the bundle the matron had given her and tucked the tin cup and wooden spoon into the pocket of her apron. She spread one of the sackcloths above the muck-slick straw, wadded her petticoats beneath her knees, and sank to the floor, where she lay carefully on the too-small rectangle of cloth. Only this morning she had lain in her own bed, in her own room, dreaming about a future that seemed well within her grasp. Now all of that was gone. Listening to the women around her wheezing and snoring, grunting and sighing, she drifted into a peculiar half-sleeping, half-waking state—aware, even while dreaming, that few nightmares could compare to the misery she’d face when she opened her eyes.
Newgate Prison, London, 1840
The door at the end of the hallway clanged open, and Evangeline dredged herself from sleep. It took a moment to remember where she was. Soot-stained stones oozing damp, miserable clusters of women, a rusting iron grate . . . her mouth cottony, her petticoats stiff and sour-smelling . . .
How pleasant it had been to forget.
Daybreak wasn’t much to speak of: hazy light filtered from the window above. Grasping a bar, she pulled herself up from the floor and stretched her sore back. A putrid piss bucket squatted in the corner. The tap-tapping had started again, and now she saw its source: women hitting the iron grate and walls with their wooden spoons.
Two guards appeared in front of their cell with a bucket. “Line up!” one shouted as the other unlocked the door. Evangeline watched him dip a ladle into the bucket and slosh the contents into a prisoner’s outstretched cup. Digging into her apron pocket, she pulled out her own battered cup and flipped it upside down to remove the grit. Despite the dampness around her ankles, her full bladder, her aching limbs and nausea, she pushed her way to the front, hunger winning out.
When the guard filled her cup, she tried to catch his eye. Couldn’t he tell she had nothing in common with these pathetic wretches with faces as dirty as those of coal miners?
He didn’t give her a glance.
She stepped back and took a sip of watery oats, cold and bland and possibly rancid. Her stomach heaved slightly, but she willed herself not to vomit.
Women juggling cups and crying babies tripped over each other to reach the gruel, thrusting their cups toward the guards. A few hung back, too sick or defeated to fight their way to the door. One woman—probably the one they’d told the matron about the night before—wasn’t moving at all. Evangeline looked at her uneasily.
Yes, she might very well be dead.
After the guards left, carrying the unconscious woman, the cell quieted. A group of prisoners huddled in a corner playing cards fashioned from what appeared to be the torn pages of a Bible. In another corner, a woman in a knitted cap read palms. A girl who appeared no more than fifteen cradled an infant against her neck, crooning a tune Evangeline recognized: I left my baby lying here to go and gather blueberries . . . She’d heard women in Tunbridge Wells sing this strange Scottish lullaby to their children. In it a desperate mother whose baby disappears retraces her steps: I searched the moorland tarns and then wandered through each silent glen. The mother discovers the tracks of an otter, the wake of a swan across a lake. I found the trail of the mountain mist but ne’er a trace of baby, O! Clearly an admonition to new mothers to keep an eye on their infants, the lullaby now seemed to her cruelly grim, the specter of loss almost impossible to bear.
Evangeline felt a rough poke in her back. “So what’d ye do?”
She turned to face a ruddy-cheeked woman of substantial girth, half a dozen years older than her at least, with a frizzy blond bob and a snub nose.
Evangeline’s first impulse was to tell her to mind her own business, but instinct hadn’t served her particularly well lately. “What did you do?”
The woman grinned, revealing a row of teeth as small and yellow as corn kernels, with a wide gap in the front. “I took my due from a cad who didn’t pay what he promised.” She patted her stomach. “Soon to be a father, and now he’ll never know.”