Another fist slams into my face.
They take turns beating me till we reach our destination, and by the time we are there, I am bleeding from my nose and mouth and there is a cut above my left eye, put there by Bliffil's ring.
Dazed, I realize that we have clattered through a very familiar courtyard. We pass what I know to be the gallows and stop in front of a barred gate.
"I do hope you will enjoy your stay in this fine establishment." Flashby grabs my hair and lifts my hanging head so that I might hear his words. "But take heart, as I am sure your time here will be short—about as short as a hangman's rope. Take her."
The two thugs on either side lift me up and haul me out of the coach, then stand me up, weaving on my pins, before Flashby.
"Mr. William Brunskill is the hangman here, and he favors the short drop—only twelve inches or so. Thus, you won't die right off. You will gasp for breath and struggle in vain, yet no breath will get past the rope, and I shall watch you twist and turn until the life finally goes out of your wretched body. I'll be there and I shall watch your worthless form being taken down and thrown into the lime pit. And I will spit upon it, you may count on that!"
I am spun around.
"Take her!" yells Flashby. "Take her and throw her in the Condemned Cells, for that is surely where she will spend her last miserable days. Do it now!"
The two guards slam me hard against the outside wall for good measure, and then I am dragged through clanging gate after gate into the very bowels of the place, until...
I am thrown into a dark, dirty cavern. My face meets the grimy floor and the blood oozing from my face mixes with the dirt. I rise up on my forearms to look about me. I see smoked-stained curved vaults overhead and stone ledges below, and over all, the stench of an uncovered privy pervades the dankness. Haunted eyes from the forms huddled in rags upon the ledges stare down upon me. I hang my head in deep despair.
I am in Newgate Prison.
Chapter 10
It's been three whole days and nights since I was first thrown into this vile hole, and because I have seen no one except my cellmates, I know that I am to be allowed no visitors. Oh, I'm sure that Higgins is out there doing his best, and I do have other friends, so there is a small glimmer of hope—a very small one, to be sure. But it is there and I nurture it, trying to stave off the Black Cloud and not fall into an abyss of self-pity. But it is hard, so hard ... However, if I am to be hanged, I shall want to go to my end with some dignity, if only a shred, so I try to keep up the spirits.
Remembering how we had cared for our clothing back on the Bloodhound, I soon doffed my white dress and rolled it up, inside out, to keep it as clean as possible. I do have my cloak to wear over my undergarments. If I am to be hauled before some court, I will not want to look like a low beggar. There were already some stains on the front, blood that had spilled from my split lip, but I couldn't help that—and maybe those stains will gain me some sympathy. We'll see.
I look up at the narrow slits of light high above and reflect how me and the gang used to be able to get into Newgate Prison to deliver messages and small parcels of food from friends and family of the confined. But that was only into the other parts of the place, where they kept debtors and suchlike. We were never able to get right into the Condemned Cells, nay. They were locked up tighter than a churchman's purse. Oh, we could pass a note through the bars sometimes, but that's about it.
In spite of my present condition, I smile as I think back to those days when I, for a shilling a week for milk money for my baby Jesse, would slip in and out of Newgate on errands for the prison reform crusader Elizabeth Fry and her Quaker do-gooder cohorts. I knew her then as Miss Gurney, before she married Preacher Fry, and a fierce one was she. It is rumored that because she had some influence, she being from a banking family and all, she connived one day to arrange for certain ladies of the court—handmaidens to royalty and wives of judges and such—to be gathered in their carriages for a g*y Monday outing, and while enroute they were driven to the gallows at Newgate at just the right time so that the shocked ladies within could witness, up close, the last twists and struggles of a sixteen-year-old girl. The poor condemned one, hanged for stealing a hairbrush, had been counseled and comforted by Mrs. Fry during her final terrified days. Most of the fine ladies lost their fine breakfasts on the floor of their carriages that fine day, and many an influential courtier and many a stern, bewigged judge was denied access to his lady's bed that evening and many more... until something is done, Sir! And I mean it!
But, alas, I can't slip in and out of Newgate now, not like I once could, oh, no.
There are three girls in here with me, all condemned to hang the Monday after next.
The youngest of them is Mary Wade, a small scrap of a thing and all of ten years old, condemned to death for the stealing of a shawl. "This rich girl come down to the market and I was so cold and she had this purty thing 'round her shoulders and I didn't think. I just grabbed it and ripped it off her and ran ... There was another girl in my gang wi' me and when we was caught, she peached on me to get herself off. Now I gots to choke for it. 'Tain't fair..."
Then there's Molly Reibey, age fourteen, convicted for stealing a horse. "It was a joke, a lark, but then my uncle who put me up to it said he didn't have anything to do wi' it and there I was on this horse ... and ... people said I was there in town tryin' to sell it ... and I was taken and tried ... and here I am. Didn't do nothin wrong ... just a joke, just a prank ... and now I'm gonna die for it..."
And there's Esther Abrahams, a very beautiful girl of sixteen who was apprenticed to a milliner who accused her of stealing a piece of black lace. She protests her innocence— "I didn't do it, I didn't"—for all the good it's gonna do her. She is cultured, and has some social graces ... and she's a Jewish girl, too, which probably helped her get condemned.
Sometimes I think certain house mistresses accuse the young help of petty crimes just so they can be rid of them. Why? Perhaps a husband's wayward glance at a comely servant, or for mere convenience, I don't know. Sort of like drowning unwanted kittens, 'cept you don't have to watch their struggles as they die—unless you want to. It sickens me.
My face is still swollen a bit, but I feel around my teeth, and though my lip is split, I feel no other damage—prolly afraid of hurting their knuckles, the bastards—and though I wish to see those two rotters in hell, I realize, with a sinking feeling, that the truth is I'll prolly get there 'fore them. Well, if that's the case, then I'll stoke up the fires, by God, to make sure that things are really hot for them when they come.
Idle, stupid thoughts.
On the second day, I am amazed to see that Elizabeth Fry herself is granted entry into our cell to lend solace to the doomed girls within. Just how she managed that, I do not know, but she seems to have her ways.
"Missus Fry," I say. "Do you remember me?"
She squints at me in the gloom and then takes my hand.
"Yes, I remember you, child ... Mary, is it...? With the baby? Our messenger several years ago?"
Again I nod, the tears welling up at the kind touch of her hand.
"I am sorry to see you in here, Mary. Are you..."
"Condemned? Not yet, Mrs. Fry, but it seems certain..."
"Are you right with God?"
"I don't know, Missus."
"Then come and pray with us."
And I do.
This evening, it being Sunday, we are taken out and herded into the chapel room, where we stand in the balcony and are made to look down upon the condemned who are scheduled to perish the next day. They are down below, bound and arrayed around an open coffin and treated to a sermon concerning their very soon demise. They have been on bread and water the past three days and have nothing to look forward to except a grisly death to end their suffering. All males, this time, they make great lamentations, but the preacher above has no mercy, condemning them to hell for their crimes. It is such a cruel world.
Next Sunday it will be the girls' turn to be down next to the coffin.
Maybe me, too.
Chapter 11
As dawn breaks on Wednesday, the four of us lie huddled under my cloak in a corner of the cell, the past night being chilly and damp. We take some comfort in each other's nearness, as well as from the warm cloak, and so we make no move to rise. What is there to get up to? A mean bucket of the slops they call food? Some hard crusts of bread, so hard they make your gums bleed? Nay, no need to get up for that.
There is a jangling of the lock and the door to our cavern of despair opens. Thinking it is the arrival of the breakfast gruel, we moan and stretch in our bed of stone.
It is not, however, that.
Two men, dressed somewhat better than the usual prison wardens, come into the cell, and one says, "Mary Faber, come with us."
"Why?" I ask fearfully.
"Today you shall be tried at Justice Hall for the crimes laid against your name. The court and the jury will be seated within the hour, and you will stand at the bar for judgment. Surely you have something to put on to make yourself more decent, girl." I stand before them in my undergarments.
They wait for me while I put myself back into my once white and stainless dress.
When I have done it, I go to each of the girls in turn and hold their hands and kiss them on the cheek. "Be brave, Sisters, and please, keep my cloak ... I'm sure to be back with you shortly."
If not, at least they shall be warm until the day when ... oh, God...
I turn to the two men.
"I am ready," I say. I thrust out my crossed wrists to be bound, as I know they will have to be.
After that is accomplished, I am pulled out and sent down a hall. There is bedlam all about me as I go—some jeering, some shouting defiance, some offering comfort, some quite mad.
We come to a low archway and duck down into it. Lighted by small slits in the masonry high above, it opens out into a long, bricked passageway. I know where we are going—to the Old Bailey itself and prolly to my doom. After we have walked maybe a hundred yards, I lift my hands to my face and I pretend to cry. That is not at all hard, since I really feel like doing it.
But I am not crying. What I am doing is feeling for the cut above my left eye, put there by Bliffil's fist in the carriage that day when they first brought me to Newgate.
Flashby had slapped me around some, yes, but it was Bliffil who used the knuckles, pounding me again and again, and eventually opening up a cut above my eye. "Here's one for getting my nose broke and here's another for..." At last Flashby restrained him—"Come on, old boy, we want to see her hang, don't we? Let's not kill her here, as there's scant sport in that, eh? Believe me, we'll have courtside rooms at Newgate for that special hanging, eh what? With some fine sporting ladies to keep us company and a few jugs of good whiskey. I know just the rooms, and I shall hire them. We'll stand there with a whore in each hand and watch her dance her last. We'll send off the little slut with a shot of whiskey and a curse. Won't that be fine?"
And Bliffil did stop beating me at the prospect of that fine day, and I was allowed to slump back between the guards and pass out.
So now, today, I lift my hand to that same cut above my eye. It had essentially healed, but I shall not let it rest. During my time in the condemned cell, I had taken the fingernails of my right hand—since I used them to pluck my guitar, they were quite long—and I filed them to points on the rough rocks of the cell wall, thinking to give myself some sort of weapon in the absence of my shiv. Now I turn the sharpest one on myself and dig it into the cut above my eye.