by Sarah Waters
When I am dressed I generally go down to Mrs Brink & we sit for an hour, or she will take me to a shop or to the gardens at the Crystal Palace. Sometimes her friends will come, to make dark circles with us. They see me & say ‘O, but you are quite a young girl! You are younger even than my own daughter.’ But after we have sat they take my hand & shake their heads. Mrs Brink has told everyone she knows that she has me with her, & that I am something out of the way special - I think however, that there must be many media she has said that about. They say ‘Will you see if there is any spirit near me now, Miss Dawes? Will you ask it, has it any little message for me?’ I have been doing those things for 5 years, I could do them on my head. But they see me doing them in my nice dress, in Mrs Brink’s fine parlour, & are astonished. I hear them saying quietly to Mrs Brink ‘O, Margery, what a talent she has! Will you bring her to my house? Will you let her lead a circle, at a party of mine?’
But Mrs Brink says she would not dream of letting me water my gifts by attending gatherings like that. I have said she must let me use my powers to help other people as well as her, since that is what I was given powers for, & she always answers ‘Of course, I know that. I will do that, in time. It is only that, now I have you, I want to keep you to myself. Will you think me so very selfish if I do that, just a little while longer?’ And so her friends come in the afternoon, but never at night. The nights she keeps for us to sit in. She only has Ruth come sometimes, bringing wine & biscuits if I grow faint.
28 October 1874
To Millbank. It is only a week since my last visit, but the mood of the prison has shifted, as if with the season, and it is a darker and more bitter place now, than ever. The towers seemed to have grown higher and broader, and the windows to have shrunk; the very scents of the place seemed to have changed, since I last went there—the grounds smelling of fog and of chimney smoke as well as of sedge, and the wards reeking of nuisance-buckets still, of cramped and unwashed hair and flesh and mouths, but also of gas, and rust, and sickness. There are great black, blistering radiators at the angle of the passages, and these make the corridors very airless and close. The cells, however, remain so chill that the walls are wet with condensation, the lime upon them turned to a kind of bubbling curd, that marks the women’s skirts with streaks of white. There is, in consequence, much coughing on the wards, and many pinched and sorrowful faces and trembling limbs.
There is a darkness to the building, too, that I am not used to. They are lighting lamps there now at four o’clock, and with their high, narrow windows black against the sky, their sanded flags lit by pools of flaring gas-light, their cells dim, the women in them hunched, like goblins, over their sewing or their coir, the wards seem more terrible and more antique. Even the matrons seem touched by the new darkness. They move about the passage-ways with softer treads, their hands and faces yellow in the gas-light, their mantles black against their gowns like cloaks of shadow.
They took me, to-day, to the prisoners’ visiting-room, the place in which the women receive their friends and husbands and children—I think it is the dreariest place that I have seen there. They call it a room, but it is hardly that; it more closely resembles some sort of shed, for cattle, for it is made up of a series of narrow stalls or niches, which are arranged in a row, on either side of one long passage. When a prisoner receives a visitor at Millbank, her matron escorts her to one of these stalls and places her in it; above her head is fixed an hour-glass, and the salt in this is now set running. Before the prisoner’s face is an aperture, with bars upon it. Exactly opposite to her, on the other side of the passage-way, is another aperture—this one with mesh across it only, rather than bars. This is where the prisoner’s visitor is permitted to stand. There is another little hour-glass fixed here, which is turned to keep time with the first.
The passage-way between the stalls is, perhaps, seven feet wide, and a watchful matron continually patrols it, to ensure that nothing is passed across the space. The prisoner and visitor are obliged to raise their voices a little, in order to be heard—the din, therefore, is sometimes fierce. At other times a woman must call to her friends, and have her business overheard by all about her. The salt in the hour-glasses runs for fifteen minutes, and when it has done so the visitor must leave, the woman return to her cell.
A prisoner at Millbank may receive her friends and family, in this manner, four times a year.
‘And they may come no nearer to one another than this?’ I asked the matron who had escorted me, as I walked with her along the corridor in which the prisoners’ stalls are set. ‘May a woman not even embrace her husband—not even touch her own child?’
The matron—not Miss Ridley, to-day, but a fair-haired, younger woman named Miss Godfrey—shook her head. ‘Those are the rules,’ she said. How many times have I heard that phrase, there? ‘Those are the rules. They seem harsh to you, Miss Prior, I know. But once we let prisoner and visitor together, there come all manner of things into the gaol. Keys, tobacco . . . Infants may be taught to pass on blades, in their very kisses.’
I studied the prisoners she led me by, gazing at their friends across the passage, across the patrolling matron’s shadow. They didn’t look as if they longed to be embraced only to have a knife or a key smuggled to them. They looked more wretched than I had seen any of the women look before. One, a woman with a scar upon her cheek straight as a razor’s cut, put her head to the bars, the better to hear her calling husband; and when he asked her was she well? she answered, ‘As well, John, as they will let me be—which is to say, not much . . .’ Another—it was Laura Sykes from Mrs Jelf’s ward, the woman who presses the matrons to petition for her with Miss Haxby—was visited by her mother, a shabby-looking lady who could do nothing but flinch from the iron mesh before her face and weep. Sykes said, ‘Come now, Ma, this won’t do. Will you tell me what you know? Have you spoke yet, with Mr Cross?’ But when the mother heard her daughter’s voice, saw the passing matron, she only shuddered the more. And at that Sykes gave a cry—Oh! There were half her minutes gone, her mother had wept them clean away! ‘You must send Patrick next time. Why isn’t Patrick here? I won’t have you come, only to weep at me . . .’
Miss Godfrey saw me looking, and nodded. ‘It is hard on the women,’ she conceded. ‘Some, indeed, cannot bear it at all. They sit waiting for their friends to come, marking off the days and fretting; but we bring them here and, after all, the upset proves too much for them. They tell their friends not to come at all, then.’
We began the walk back to the wards. I asked her, were there any women who received no visits, from anyone?—and she nodded: ‘Some. They have no friends or family, I suppose. They come in here and seem to be forgotten. I cannot say what they must do when they are sent out. Collins is like that, and Barnes, and Jennings. And—’ she struggled to twist a key inside an awkward lock ‘—and Dawes, I believe, on E ward.’
I think I had known she was about to say the name, before she said it.
I asked her no more questions then, and she took me up to Mrs Jelf. I made my way, as usual, from one woman to another—I did it in a flinching sort of way at first, for it seemed terrible, after what I had just seen, that I, who am nothing to them, should be able to call on them just as I please, and they must speak with me. And yet of course, they must speak with me or stay silent, I couldn’t forget that; and I saw at last that they were grateful to see me at their gates, and glad to come and tell me how they did. Many, as I have said, did badly. Perhaps because of this—and perhaps because, even through the thickness of the prison walls and windows, they have sensed the subtle shifting of the season and the year—there was much talk of ‘times’ and when they were due, such as: ‘It is seventeen months to-day, mum, to my time!’ And: ‘A year and a week, Miss Prior, off my time!’ And: ‘Three months, miss, to my time. What do you think of that?’
This last was Ellen Power, imprisoned—as she says—for letting boys and girls kiss in her parlour. I have thought much of her since the wea
ther turned colder. I found her looking frail and slightly trembling, but not as ill as I had feared. I had Mrs Jelf shut me in with her and we talked together for half an hour; and when I took her hand at last I said that I was pleased to feel her grip so strong, and to see her so healthy.
I said it, and she grew crafty. She answered, ‘Well, you are not to say a word, miss, to Miss Haxby or Miss Ridley—indeed, you must pardon me for asking, for I know you would not. But the truth is, it is all thanks to my matron, Mrs Jelf. She brings me meat from her own plate, and she has given me a length of red flannel to wear about my throat at night. And when the air is extra chill, she has a bit of rubbing stuff she puts upon me here’—she touched her chest and shoulders—‘with her own hand; and that makes all the difference. She is as good to me as my own girl—in truth, she calls me “Mother”. “We must have you quite ready, Mother,” she says, “for your ticket-of-leave” . . .’
Her eyes gleamed as she spoke the words, and then she took her coarse blue kerchief and pressed it for a moment to her face. I said that I was glad that Mrs Jelf, at least, was kind to her.
‘She is kind to us all,’ she said. ‘She is the kindest matron in the gaol.’ She shook her head. ‘Poor lady! She ain’t been here long enough to learn proper Millbank ways.’
I was surprised at that: for Mrs Jelf is so grey and careworn, I should never have guessed her to have had a life, so recently, beyond the prison walls. But Power nodded. Yes, Mrs Jelf had been there—well, not quite a year, she thought. She did not know why a lady like Mrs Jelf should ever have come to Millbank, at all. She never saw a matron suited less to Millbank duties, than her!
The exclamation might have conjured her up. We heard footsteps in the corridor and raised our heads to see Mrs Jelf herself, making her patrol past Power’s gate. She saw our faces turned her way and slowed her step, and smiled.
Power grew pink. ‘You have caught me a-telling Miss Prior about your kindnesses, Mrs Jelf,’ she said. ‘I hope you won’t mind it.’
At once, the matron’s smile grew stiff, and she put her hand to her breast and turned to look, a little nervously, along the corridor. I understood she was afraid Miss Ridley might be near, so I said nothing about the flannel and the extra meat, only nodded to Power, then gestured to the gate. Mrs Jelf unlocked it—still, however, she wouldn’t catch my eye, nor acknowledge the smile I turned on her. At last, to put her at her ease, I said I had not known that she had come so recently to Millbank. What was it that she worked at, I asked her, before the gaol?
She took a moment to secure the chain of keys upon her belt, and to brush a streak of lime-dust from her cuff. Then she made me a kind of curtsey. She had been in service, she said; but the lady she maided for having been sent abroad, she had not cared to find out a place with another.
We had begun to walk along the passage-way. I asked if her work suited her?—She said she would be sorry to leave Millbank, now. I said, ‘And you don’t find the duties rather hard? And the hours? And haven’t you a family? The hours must be very hard on them, I should have thought.’
She told me then that, of course, none of the wardresses there have husbands, but are all spinsters, or else widows like herself. ‘You must not be a matron,’ she said, ‘and also married. ’ She said that some matrons had children, who must be put to nurse with other mothers; but that she herself was childless. She kept her eyes lowered all this time. I said, Well, perhaps she was a better matron for it. She had a hundred women on her wards, all helpless as infants, all looking to her for care and guidance; and I thought she must be a kind mother to them all.
Now she did gaze at me, but with eyes made dark and mournful by the shadow of her bonnet. She said, ‘I hope I am, miss,’ and brushed again at the dust upon her sleeve. Her hands are large, like my own—the hands of a woman rendered lean and angular, through labour or through loss.
I didn’t like to question her further then, but went back to the women. I went to Mary Ann Cook, and to Agnes Nash, the coiner; and finally, as usual, to Selina.
I had crossed the mouth of her cell already, in order to move into the second passage; but I had kept back the visiting of her—just as I have kept back the writing of her, here—and when I passed her gate I turned my face to the wall and wouldn’t look at her. It was, I suppose, a kind of superstition. I remembered the visiting-room: now it was as if there was an hour-glass that would be turned upon our visit—I didn’t want a single grain to slither through the glass before the salt was properly set running. Even while I stood before her gate with Mrs Jelf, I would not gaze at her. Only when the matron had turned her key, then fussed another moment with her belt and chain, then fastened us into the cell and gone on her way, did I raise my eyes at last to hers. And when I did—well, then I found that after all there was scarcely a feature to her upon which my glances could settle and be quite calm. I saw, at the edges of her bonnet, her hair, which had once been handsome and now was blunt. I saw her throat, that had had velvet collars buckled to it; and her wrists, that had been fastened; and her little crooked mouth, that spoke in voices not her own. I saw all these things, all these tokens of her queer career, they seemed to hang about her poor pale flesh and blur it, they were like the signs of the stigmata on a saint. But she was not changed—it was I who was changed, by my new knowledge. It had worked upon me, secretly and subtly—as a drop of wine will work upon a cup of plain water, or as yeast will leaven simple dough.
It made a little quickening within me, as I stood gazing at her. I felt it—and with it came a prickle of fright. I put a hand to my heart, and turned away from her.
Then she spoke, and her voice—I was glad of it!—was quite familiar and quite ordinary. She said, ‘I thought you might not come. I saw you pass the cell and go to the next ward.’
I had moved to her table and touched the wool that lay upon it. I must visit other women, as well as her, I said. Then, because I felt her look away and seem to grow sad, I added, that I would always, if she wished it, come to her at the last.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Of course, she is like the other women, and would rather talk to me than be confined to silence. So when we spoke, it was of prison things. The damp weather has brought great black beetles into the cells—they call them ‘blackjacks’, she said she thinks they come there every year; and she showed me the smudges upon her limewashed wall where she had crushed a dozen of them with the heel of her boot. She said that some simple women are rumoured to catch the beetles and make pets of them. Others, she said, have been driven by hunger to eat them. She said she doesn’t know if that is true, but has heard the matrons say it . . .
I listened as she spoke, nodding and grimacing—I didn’t ask her, as I might have, how she had known about my locket. I didn’t tell her that I had gone to the offices at the Association of Spiritualists, and sat there two and half hours, talking of her and taking notes upon her. But still I could not look at her without remembering all I had read. I looked at her face, and thought of the portraits in the newspaper. I studied her hands and remembered the wax moulds on the shelves.
Then I knew I could not go from her and leave those things unmentioned. I said that I hoped she would tell me more about her old life. I said, ‘You spoke, last time, about how it was for you before you went to Sydenham. Will you tell me now, about what happened to you there?’
She frowned. She said, why did I want to know it?—I said I was curious. I said that I was curious about all the women’s stories, but that hers—‘Well, you know yourself, it is a little rarer than the others . . .’
It seemed rare to me, she said after a moment; but if I was a spiritualist—if I had moved all my life among spiritualist people, as she had—well, it wouldn’t seem so curious then. ‘You ought to buy a spiritualist newspaper and look at the notices in it—that will show you, how common I am! You would think, looking at those, that there were more spirit-mediums in this world than there are spirits, in the other.’
No, s
he said, she had never been rare, in the days with her aunt, and then at the spiritualist house at Holborn . . .
‘It was when I met Mrs Brink, and she took me to live with her: that was when I became rare, Aurora.’
Her voice had fallen, and I had leaned to catch it. Now, hearing her say that foolish name, I felt myself blush. I said, ‘What was it about Mrs Brink that changed you? What did she do?’
Mrs Brink had gone to her, she said, while she was still at Holborn. ‘She came to me, I thought she had come only as an ordinary sitter—but the fact is, she had been guided to me. She had come to me for a special purpose, that only I could answer.’
And the purpose was?
She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again they seemed a little larger, and green as a cat’s. She spoke, and it was as if she spoke of something wonderful. ‘She required a spirit bringing to her,’ she said. ‘She required me to give up my own flesh, for the spirit-world to use it for itself.’
She held my gaze, and from the corner of my eye I saw a quick, dark movement upon the floor of her cell. I had a very vivid vision, then, of a hungry prisoner, prising the shell from the back of a beetle, sucking the meat from it and biting at the wriggling legs.
I shook my head. ‘She kept you there,’ I said, ‘this Mrs Brink. She had you there, performing spirit-tricks.’
‘She brought me to my fate,’ she answered—I remember her saying this, quite clearly. ‘She brought me to myself, that waited for me at her house. She brought me to where I could be found, by the spirits that searched for me. She brought me to—’
