Little Bones

by Janette Jenkins

  Ten

  Prisoner

  THROUGH THE CARRIAGE window, she could see nothing but black brick and sky. The sergeant talked with a constable about a horse race and the amount of spice his cook had used in a batch of pork pies. ‘Fair set my tongue on fire. Mind you,’ he added, ‘it was a good excuse for a drink.’

  Jane was numb. Frozen. She had not been handcuffed, but the seat was like a very narrow shelf and she was thrown against the door at every turn. At Bow Street, she was spat on by three pickpockets, freshly caught and bleating their innocence, though their vast collection of gentlemen’s wallets told a different story. ‘Serious crime,’ the sergeant told the desk clerk, indicating Jane, and the pickpockets gave her a cheer.

  She was taken behind the counter and into a room at the back. It looked like a well-managed parlour. A fire was burning, a table was set with a fine lace cloth, and hanging on the wall was a portrait of the queen. ‘Do take a seat,’ the sergeant told her. ‘Mrs Fletcher will bring us some tea.’

  ‘Tea, sir?’ Jane looked amazed. Why was the sergeant offering her refreshment when she had just been arrested and told she was a criminal?

  ‘Don’t you drink tea?’ he said, ringing a little bell, prompting the woman to appear, wheezing and tutting, putting down white cups and saucers, as if they were sitting in a tea room.

  ‘You have all your wits?’ the sergeant asked her.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Because if you are as witless as you look, we could save time and money and have you taken straight to the asylum.’

  Jane stared at her tea. It looked very brown. The woman, pencil-shaped and abrasive, was throwing coal onto the fire. The sergeant, keeping his eyes on Jane, dropped three lumps of sugar into his cup, mashing them down with his spoon. ‘I missed breakfast,’ he said. ‘I hate missing breakfast.’

  Jane said nothing. Through the door she could hear a scuffle turning into a fight. The sergeant yawned. ‘You do know why you are here?’ he said. ‘You understand your arrest?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘You don’t?’ He gave her a wry little smile. ‘You worked with Dr Swift, you told me so yourself.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘A gentleman, would you say?’

  Jane swallowed. ‘I would, sir.’

  ‘I spent a good few hours with the doctor last night,’ the sergeant said. ‘He was very generous and forthcoming. He told me all about you, Miss Stretch.’

  ‘Me, sir?’

  ‘How your family had left his house with a debt, leaving you behind, how his wife, a lonely childless soul by all accounts, took pity on you, and how you took advantage of them both.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he nodded. ‘Yes.’ He found a notebook inside a drawer and tapped a pencil deep into the paper. ‘While the doctor was busy examining his patients, you were doling out abortive mixtures behind his back. It seems you had a regular little business going on.’

  ‘No, sir,’ she told him. ‘I did not do that.’

  ‘You never offered women this?’ The sergeant pulled a bottle of the tincture from behind a small brass correspondence box. ‘Exhibit one.’

  ‘Yes, sir, but that’s the tincture, sir, the purgative.’

  The sergeant laughed, saying for such a moon-faced cripple she had a way with words. He looked closely at the bottle, examining the label. ‘So you gave the women this … purgative?’

  ‘Occasionally, sir. Though the doctor usually did it.’

  ‘No.’ The sergeant reddened. ‘You took bottles of this purgative from inside a locked cabinet.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Yes. Tell me, Miss Stretch, what does this mixture actually do?’

  ‘It releases things, sir,’ she said, feeling a nerve twitching in her eyelid. ‘But I only ever did what I was told.’

  ‘Oh, and I’ll bet you made a pretty profit,’ said the sergeant. ‘How much does a bottle like this fetch?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir, but you can buy it from any chemist shop in London.’

  ‘You can buy arsenic too, but it’s how you use the blessed grains that really matters.’

  ‘You can get it very easily, sir,’ she persisted.

  ‘So why did Mr Treble have to take one of your bottles from the cabinet? A bottle with your number on it? Why couldn’t he walk into a chemist shop and buy a bottle for himself?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir.’

  ‘And why would he need it?’

  Jane shrugged. Knotting her hands, then pulling the ends of her sleeves, Jane told the sergeant she had only ever done what the doctor had instructed her to.

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘I am, sir.’

  ‘And how are your ears?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I said, how are your ears?’ he bellowed.

  ‘They are very good, sir.’

  But the sergeant, now rising from his chair, was having none of it, saying he only had to look at Jane’s head to know the workings must be mangled. She must have misheard. What kind of respectable doctor would risk his career with illegal activities?

  ‘I did not mishear, sir.’

  ‘And I am saying that you did!’

  Pacing the room with his great meaty hands clasped behind his back, the sergeant said that Jane was in a most convenient position to take these bottles of purgative. Then he pondered the contents of the doctor’s cabinet. The inside of his bag.

  ‘Did you have a key to his cabinet?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ she blurted. ‘The cabinet was always unlocked,’ then she reddened, as if she had tripped herself up. ‘There was nothing in it,’ she spluttered. ‘Really, sir. The cabinet was empty of all his medical things.’

  The sergeant laughed. ‘A doctor’s cabinet empty of medical things? Now, I have heard it all! What did he keep inside this cabinet? Ming vases?’ He rang the bell and an eager-looking constable appeared. ‘Put her in a cell,’ the sergeant said. ‘Did you know I missed my breakfast? I’m famished.’

  At first the cell was strangely comforting with its bare quiet walls. Jane sat on the hard bench and a few strips of light came struggling through the great iron bars at the window. The cell was quiet, but soon her head was swimming with words: the girls praying for forgiveness; the doctor telling Jane to Hurry up, hurry up, we haven’t got all day! A poor wretch called Vicky is having a terrible time; turns out it might have been twins; her father singing; the priest saying the Eucharist; Mrs Swift wants another slice of pudding, three slices! Edie laughs; a few foreign words slip from the mouth of the Frenchman; Girls, says Johnny Treble, they kill you.

  With her face in her hands, Jane opened her eyes to concentrate on the warm dark space of her palms and the rhythm of her breathing. Why was she here? Why her? She thought about the doctor, walking up to the desk at Bow Street. The tincture bottles rattling. His appointment book lost, along with his certificates.

  Forty minutes passed, and all she could do was wrap her arms around herself, and though she had no appetite, she pictured the sergeant with his plate of greasy eggs, licking his lips, taking great long slurps of his tea. She examined every inch of her cell, the cobwebs, carvings (a skull and crossbones in her opinion showed great artistic talent), the plain iron candlestick sitting high and defunct on the wall, the gaslight with the mesh around it.

  When the door opened, Jane jumped to her feet and a policeman beckoned with his clattering hoop of keys, saying she looked like one of the freaks he had seen as a boy camping on Wandsworth Common. Next, she was marched into a room where a man sat at a high oak desk, looking rather like a vicar, a pen in his hand, his face dour and impassive, barely looking at Jane at all as he asked for her name and the sergeant quickly read out the charges. It was Mr Blake the magistrate who gave the nod and the long wheezy grunt which refused to grant bail, and they were to keep Jane Stretch incarcerated – he dragged out the word through his teeth. Then he was onto the next miserable specimen, a boy wh
o had burgled a fish shop.

  ‘Come on,’ said the policeman, kicking at her ankles. ‘We’re off.’

  Jane followed him through a hall, reeking of disinfectant, and into a bare draughty room where a raw-faced woman in a grey uniform was waiting with a pair of handcuffs. It was these chafing cuffs more than anything that made Jane want to cry. What harm did they think her poor free hands would do them? The warden wore a very cruel expression, taking pleasure it seemed from pulling Jane by her wrist and clamping her in iron.

  ‘We’ll be nice and close, you and me,’ the warden said. ‘I’ve been doing this job a dozen years or more and I haven’t lost one yet.’

  Turning her head, Jane tried to look for the sergeant, because surely she should be able to tell him all she knew? What about the magistrate? Did he really not care that Dr Swift was not a doctor? Jane had known within a couple of days. It was obvious! Couldn’t they see it? Why, if the sergeant looked into the doctor’s appointment book, he would find nothing but blank lined pages and an unpaid laundry bill.

  ‘We must wait outside in the yard,’ the warden said. ‘Fresh air, sky – a girl in your position shouldn’t take these things for granted.’

  ‘When is it my turn?’ said Jane.

  ‘Your turn for what?’

  ‘To speak.’

  The woman laughed. ‘Oh, I’m sure they will let you know when they’re in the mood for listening,’ she said.

  It was freezing in the yard. A gale was blowing hard across the tall spiked wall. In the corner a large black dog was slavering over a knuckle bone. Jane was shaking, but the woman seemed oblivious to the cold. Licking her pale lips, she appeared to be examining the clouds and enjoying the rush of cold air. ‘Here’s your carriage now,’ she said, as the Black Maria appeared, both sinister and grandly old-fashioned, with its stamping dray horses and the painted crest of the queen. It was like sitting in a dark, stinking cattle box.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Jane.

  ‘Why, to the pleasure gardens of course. Is that all right with you? It’s such a nice blowy day for a picnic.’

  On arrival at the prison she was pushed into a room where a haggard old woman in a greasy brown dress threw her a bundle of clothes. Her own things were put inside a labelled cardboard box. In another room she was told to stand quite naked, while a doctor examined her. After a scrubbing under an almost-warm tap, with soap that stung her eyes, she was dried and showered in lice powder. She was told to put on her prison garb, a badly made, ill-fitting dress. A number was put around her neck and her photograph was taken. The flash made her eyes close. She was told to read words set out on a card. Three small words. Did they think she was stupid? Her voice echoed. The words on the card read: God is Good.

  Walking down a corridor, lifting her dragging hem, through gate after clanking gate, she passed women with their heads bowed, pushing brooms, bent hags scrubbing floor tiles, and though a few stopped to look up at the cripple, most didn’t bother. Cripples were ten a penny in Newgate, unless they had a rare deformity, like the woman who had killed her three babies – she’d had no eyes to speak of, and her legs were so withered it was an amazement to most how she’d born children to kill in the first place.

  ‘Aren’t you lucky?’ said the warden. ‘You’ve one all to yourself.’ Her key let them into a small vaulted cell, containing a shelf, a row of stiff bedding and a hammock. The shelf held a Bible, a tin plate, a roll of blunt cutlery and a dented metal mug. ‘Quite a little palace now, isn’t it?’

  When the warden had slammed the door shut, and the key had rattled its way through the lock, Jane paced the room feeling trapped. How would her family ever know she was a prisoner? Where had they gone? She pictured Ivy and Arthur leading cows into a milking shed. Agnes cutting cloth at a dressmaker’s. She panicked. How would they know what had happened? Newgate was a closed island. They would never find her now.

  Jane remembered her mother’s old friend, Patsy Bramwell. Patsy had been in and out of prison all her life, sometimes preferring it, she’d say, to life with her husband and six snivelling chavies, because at least it was clean enough, the company wasn’t bad if you were lucky, and the meals were always regular. Patsy had been caught stealing pills from the Royal London Hospital and three loaves of bread from an upmarket baker’s. She had also been a prostitute – ‘first lesson in whoredom is get the money first’, she’d told Ivy, who it has to be said had no intention of getting into that line of work, saying she had neither the guts nor the stamina.

  When Bella Sutcliffe had diphtheria and had to close her gin shop, Patsy Bramwell had kicked down the door and taken it as her own. ‘Well,’ she’d told the judge, ‘I was only doing people a favour, there’s nothing like a woman who can’t find a jug of good gin, especially on a Friday. Did you ever try the gin shop, sir? A drop of gin is like a drop of magic.’

  Jane had always been frightened of Patsy. When she was seven years old, she had seen Patsy throw her three-month-old baby into the Thames, ‘just to see if the poor beggar floats’. He hadn’t floated. Another son (one of four), a gristly boy of eleven, had waded out to the stinking bundle and dragged him back to shore with a stick. ‘Babies,’ Patsy had said, raising her eyebrows to the sky. ‘They can’t do nothing, can they?’

  Had Patsy ever sat inside this cell? Jane wondered. Had she sat on this bench and thought about her sins? Jane shivered. She saw her mother’s friend shaking dirty river water from her son’s sopping blanket. He was green-faced and puking. Jane thought about the boot box. The blood stains spreading over Johnny Treble’s shirt. She closed her eyes. Perhaps they were both as bad as each other. Perhaps she, Jane Stretch, was worse.

  The day passed slowly. Jane went from crying, to seething with anger and frustration, to boredom. She thought about the rectory. Liza’s beads. She wept. Nobody came. At three o’clock, a warden, Miss Linley, brought a bowl of turnip stew. Jane started to talk, but the woman said, ‘I’m too busy, can’t you see I’m serving bowls of blasted turnips?’ The stew was soupy and greasy, but she was hungry enough to want it. No one came for the dirty bowl. Later, she tried to read the Bible, but the words were very small. She told herself to sleep but it was useless.

  It was October, and the rain that came brought an early darkness, the gas jets were lit, and a different warden brought cocoa. ‘The lights will soon be off,’ she said, pouring the liquid into Jane’s mug. ‘You’ve got ten minutes left of it.’ Wrapping her hands around the mug, Jane sipped her tasteless cocoa and read from John. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.

  In the darkness she floated in her hammock. Voices echoed. The blankets were scratchy, smelling of stale sweat and vomit. ‘I am in the attic room,’ she whispered. ‘Downstairs Mrs Swift will be snoring in her crumb-infested bed. The doctor will be attempting to remove his necktie. He will fall over his boots with the whisky. In Covent Garden, Jeremiah Beam will be strolling and touting his girls. Ned will be in Seven Dials, laughing with his sister. The costers will be loading up their barrows.’

  Newgate had an early morning alarm, an almighty clattering of keys and the pounding of cups on closed metal hatches. Jane woke aching, but she had slept after all, dreaming of the schoolyard, Miss Prosser ringing the hand bell, The Big Book of Knowledge tucked beneath her arm.

  A plate of gruel came for breakfast. The warden was more talkative. ‘No exercise or work for you yet,’ she said. ‘Did you hear the rain in the night? The yard flooded and they won’t give you work till you’re sentenced.’

  ‘Sentenced? But I haven’t had a trial.’

  ‘Oh, but you will have one soon enough, and then the work will come, the weaving, or the picking of oakum, or cooking yourself in the laundry.’ The warden scratched her head, pushing her finger into her little white cap. ‘We can’t have you idle, unless they put you in the hospital wing on account of your bones, or you’ve been a very bad girl and you swing for it.’

  Scraping her spoon around her bowl, Jane felt
very sick. Of course she would have to have a trial, but who on earth would speak for her? Who would tell the judge and jury that she had followed the doctor’s orders? And what about the doctor who was not a doctor at all?

  The rain started again. A few cold drops fell from the window and spattered onto the floor. Jane ran her finger through them. In her head she talked to Agnes. She told her to put on her good boots, to open her umbrella and walk very quickly to the prison gates. With her pretty face and coy expression, the guard would not hesitate in letting her through. ‘And then we will see each other, and we can squeeze our hands together, cry together, and then we can work out a plan.’

  ‘I am Mr Henshaw,’ said the man. ‘I am going to represent you.’

  ‘You are, sir?’ said Jane, almost falling at his feet. ‘Thank you.’

  Mr Henshaw grunted, scraping something from his lapel. ‘It will drag on,’ he said, ‘so you might as well make yourself comfortable.’

  Mr Henshaw was fair-haired with a round, puggish face. His fondness for the kidney pudding at the Blue Lantern, a public house near Lincoln’s Inn which he often referred to as ‘my club’, had his fancy waistcoat bulging. He had a habit of patting his stomach. Miss Linley brought him a chair. ‘All right,’ he said, crossing his legs, ‘tell me all about it.’

  ‘About what, sir.’

  Shaking his head, the man looked most aggrieved, and moved as if to leave her. ‘They told me that for all your deformities you had a good working brain, but they were obviously liars.’

  And though Jane wondered who ‘they’ might have been – the sergeant, the magistrate, or the wardens who came and went with only the tiniest scraps of conversation – she said, ‘Sir, how much do you want to know about my life with the doctor?’