Searcher

by T J Alexander

  They are standing in the narrow, dimly-lit antechamber of the Millbank penitentiary. Adah has glimpsed the prison from afar several times before, on each occasion being reminded of a childhood fairy-tale her father used to tell her about an ogre who built his castle on the banks of a river so that he could swallow up ships which sailed too close. But this is the first time that she has approached the building closely enough to comprehend its full enormity.

  Although Raphael has written in advance to arrange their visit, they are kept waiting for half an hour or more outside the grill window in the prison wall, and then, after being admitted to the antechamber through a small side door, kept standing for many more minutes while one official goes in search of Miss Day, and another sits with his back ostentatiously turned towards them, scribbling energetically in a large leather-bound book.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Eliza. There’s gentry to see you,’ remarks the scribe, without looking up, when a door on the far side of the antechamber finally opens to admit the startling figure of a woman.

  Adah was expecting a demure, smiling person in a lace cap – a younger version of Elizabeth Fry, perhaps. But Eliza Day is severe and rather masculine, and almost as tall as Raphael himself. Her dark hair is cut straight across her forehead, and although she is now a free woman, she wears a grey gown which looks very much like prison uniform.

  When they hand her the letter of introduction from Mrs Fry, Eliza Day opens it slowly and stares at it in silence for a while. Adah wonders how well this woman is able to read.

  ‘As Mrs Fry writes,’ she says gently, ‘we are here in search of a woman named Sarah Stone, who was convicted of child-stealing some eight years ago. She was sentenced to transportation, but we think it possible that she may have been sent here to Millbank.’

  Her quest has been so long and arduous that Adah is fully expecting more blank stares and shaken heads, and is almost taken aback when Eliza Day replies simply, ‘Yes. Sarah Stone was sent here. We came here together.’

  ‘But perhaps she has been released by now? If so, do you know her whereabouts?’

  Eliza Day looks at them rather oddly.

  ‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘Sarah Stone was not released. Sarah is still here.’

  ‘Can you take us to her then?’ asks Adah eagerly.

  The woman stares at her again for a moment. ‘What is your business with Sarah Stone?’ she asks.

  ‘We have found evidence which leads us to believe that she may have been the victim of a miscarriage of justice, and we would like to share this evidence with her.’

  Eliza stands in silence for a moment again, as though deep in thought, until Adah begins to wonder whether this woman is perhaps a little weak-minded.

  But then she says sharply, ‘Follow me’, and leads them at a brisk stride across a courtyard which separates the antechamber from the main body of the prison. They walk in an awkward silence which Raphael tries to break by saying, ‘Mrs Fry has told us about the fine charitable work that you do in the penitentiary.’

  Eliza Day responds without turning her head. ‘It’s not charity,’ she says, giving the word a slightly scornful emphasis. And then, dispelling Adah’s doubts about her intelligence, she adds severely, ‘It’s atonement.’

  Although she is a former inmate, Eliza Day seems to have the trust of the prison officials, for she carries a large bunch of keys chained to a belt, from which she selects a particularly large one to open the heavy wooden door that leads into the prison beyond.

  They find themselves in a very long, stone-flagged, vaulted corridor, with rows of small closed doors on either side. Each door is fitted with a metal grill, through which Adah can see cell-like stone rooms within, all of them apparently empty. At the end of the corridor is another locked door, which Eliza Day opens to admit them to a spiral staircase, and at the top of the staircase they enter another corridor exactly like the first.

  They walk single file, without speaking, Adah following Miss Day, and Raphael bringing up the rear. There is an oppressive, monastic silence about this place. Talking aloud would seem as sacrilegious as laughing in church. The walls and floor are a uniform yellowish grey. Even the sound of their own footsteps seems muffled. When they reach the fourth long corridor, they find that one side opens up into a balcony with a stone balustrade, from which they can look down upon a large room below, where rows of benches are set facing one another along either wall. On each row of benches sit a dozen or more women, all dressed in the same reddish-brown uniforms, each with her head bent, silently intent on her sewing.

  Beyond, they descend another staircase which brings them to a small brown-painted door in an outer wall of the building. Eliza Day extracts a key from the bundle on her belt and opens the door, and, to Adah’s surprise, they step out into what appears to be a huge kitchen garden, surrounded by a very high wall built of yellowish brown stone. The wall is surmounted by fearsome looking iron spikes, but the garden itself is a picture of order and fertility. Row upon row of slightly raised beds are planted with vegetables: most of them cabbages, some now starting to go to seed, but to one side Adah also sees beds of potatoes and onions. There is a strange atmosphere about this garden. Unlike the building they have just left, it is not silent. Adah can hear the chatter of starlings, and, from somewhere beyond the high wall, the sound of hammering. And yet there is an odd stillness in the place, as though the silence of the penitentiary were leaking out into the open air from under the locked door behind them. The unmistakable smell of river mud fills the air.

  At the very furthest side of the great garden, Adah can see the figures of two women.

  Eliza Day has halted just beyond the door through which they have passed, but Adah hurries eagerly ahead of her towards the women, wondering which of them is Sarah Stone. One is leaning on a shovel with which she has been digging the earth, while the other is bent over, apparently pulling up weeds. The shadow of the wall falls over their figures, making it difficult to see their faces at first, but as Adah approaches, the woman with the shovel turns towards her.

  Adah’s stride falters. The woman facing her is surely too old. Her hair is as white as snow, and her wrinkled face is that of an old crone. But the other woman, Adah can now see, is barely a woman at all – seemingly little more than a child of thirteen or fourteen.

  She turns in confusion to Eliza Day, who has silently come up behind her.

  ‘Surely neither of these women can be Sarah Stone?’ she says.

  ‘Oh no,’ replies Eliza in her slightly hoarse, mannish voice, ‘they are not Sarah Stone.’

  ‘Then where…?’ asks Adah.

  Eliza gives a shrug, and extends her arms on either side towards the vast expanse of the cabbage garden.

  ‘Here …’ she says, ‘here she is.’

  Adah looks around her again, seeing what she had failed to see before. Row upon row of raised beds: ten or twelve rows, each containing a dozen or more small mounds of earth. Hundreds of them. Each mound exactly the same size. Each about six feet long and two feet wide, or perhaps a little less, marked not with stones or crosses, but with tidy rows of cabbages and onions …

  ‘They would not tell me which one is Sarah,’ says Eliza Day. ‘Perhaps they do not know themselves. If they had told me, I would have put flowers there every day.’

  They are both silent as Adah absorbs these words, and then Eliza Day continues. ‘I knew she was innocent all along, of course. They all knew, or would have done, if they had used their eyes. She had the marks of childbirth on her belly. Anyone could see she had borne a child.’

  ‘But why? How? How could this happen?’ cries Adah, aghast.

  Eliza Day shrugs again. ‘Typhus, dysentery, lung fever, poor food, or too little food, neglect, despair,’ she replies, and then adds, ‘killing the body might not be so bad, if they had not first killed the spirit.’

  ‘But how can this be?’ exclaims Adah again, still reeling from the shock of Eliza’s words. ‘Surely, if people knew what is happeni
ng here … I have heard that mistakes were made in this prison in the early days, but surely they are being rectified now. Good people like Mrs Fry are working so hard for prison reform. She told us herself how things are slowly improving. Too slowly, for sure. But we are a civilized nation. For heaven’s sake. Poor Sarah. How can such things happen? How can they be allowed to happen?’

  She looks around to find Raphael, and sees him standing some distance away – too far, she thinks, for him to have heard Eliza Day’s words. Yet he seems to have understood without the need for explanation, for he is gazing with an expression of deep sadness at one row of particularly small mounds of earth in a far corner of the cabbage patch.

  ‘I have much respect for the work of Mrs Fry,’ says Eliza Day, her face turned away so that Adah cannot read her expression, ‘but as for civilization and improvement, I do not believe that men are so easily improved and made civil. I have been in Newgate and I have been a prisoner here, Mrs Flint. The difference between them is that here the cruelty is more distant and more refined, so that those who inflict it can keep their fingers cleaner.’

  And as Adah struggles to think of a response, she adds harshly, ‘You mark my words, Mrs Flint, in a hundred years’ time, in two hundred years, they will still be locking up the innocent as well as the guilty in places as inhuman as this. They may find ever more civil and clever ways to do it, and they may keep their fingers ever cleaner. But the innocent will still be locked up in places as inhuman as this. And they will still be calling it justice and mercy.’

  And Eliza Day bends down to tug at a stubborn weed with all the angry strength in her large calloused hands.

  Evening is starting to fall as Adah and Raphael walk home together. This is surely the end of the search. Adah’s heart aches at the thought of Sarah Stone. How must it feel to go to such a forlorn grave, knowing that you are innocent, but believing that all world has judged you guilty? All the world, that is, except for that strange young woman Eliza Day. If only, she thinks, if only we had reached her in time. Now so much remains unknown, and will forever be unknowable. The solution to the child theft, which seemed for a moment so close, has dissipated again into the swirling crowds and fogs of the city, vanished into voids of silence and random words. But we have done what we could do. All that remains is the uncertain fate of the one survivor: the small child who still occupies the untidy back room on the ground floor of Raphael’s house. What will become of her?

  They walk through the London streets for a long time in silence, until at last Raphael touches Adah lightly on the arm and says, ‘It has been a long day, and a dispiriting one. Will you not come to my house for a little, Adah, and take a glass of wine? I have a fine bottle of madeira that my uncle gave me just last week.’

  She thinks for a moment, imagining the fire burning brightly in Raphael’s study, and Stevens bringing a cut glass decanter, and the two of them raising their glasses to one another in the circle of the flickering firelight … But then she hears the mournful cascade of church bells in the distance shakes her head.

  ‘No, thank you kindly, Raphael,’ she replies. ‘As you say, it has been a long day, and I am rather tired. Another time, maybe. Today I had best go home to my children.’

  The Child’s Story

  March 1823

  WHEN SPRING COMES, THEY go out to plant parsley in the herb garden of the big house. The woman she calls Annie holds her hand and leads her down the brick path. After long months shut up in the house in London, she likes to take three big breaths as she walks along the path, drawing in the smell of earth and cut grass. There are thin lines of greenish-brown moss in the cracks between the bricks. The old man whom Annie calls Grandpa walks behind them, carrying the tools.

  In the herb garden, the old man helps her make small holes in the earth for the parsley plants.

  ‘Just little holes, Lily. Not too deep.’

  They call her Lily, but she doesn’t mind, although it is not her real name. She knows her real name, and could speak it if she wished. But if she made that sound, it would open a window through which the past might flood like a black river into the present. So she was happy when the old man said, ‘Let’s call her Lily. A new name for a new life.’ She even says the name herself. She likes the feel of it on her tongue. Lily.

  The soil is rich and dark. Fresh grass and dandelion leaves are pushing up through its surface.

  ‘Not too close together, mind. Space them out nicely,’ says Annie.

  On the back of a dock leaf she finds a strange grey creature, elaborately furrowed and coiled, with black spots and a sharp yellow nose: a miniature monster.

  ‘What have you found there, Lily?’ asks Annie, bending down to see what she is looking at. ‘Why, it’s a chrysalis. Do you know what’s inside it?’

  The child shakes her head.

  ‘A butterfly. A cabbage white, I should think. Any day now it will come out and stretch its wings and fly away.’

  ‘Chrysalis,’ says the child. She reaches out her hand towards its crusty grey surface, but she doesn’t quite like to touch it.

  They go together into the greenhouse with its warm smell of fertile decay. The old man carries out the tray of parsley seedlings to plant in the holes they have dug. The knuckles on his hands are gnarled like the roots of trees where they stick out from the ground.

  Once they have planted the seedlings, they push back the earth around them, being very careful not to bury any of the ants and small beetles that are crawling on the surface.

  ‘Now I have an important task for you, Lily,’ says the old man. ‘Are you ready?’

  They leave the herb garden and cross the wide lawn, under the cypress tree, along the edge of the flowerbed. As they pass it, the child reaches out her hand to touch the flowers, as she always does, speaking the name of each – ‘Daffodil, hellebore, crocus, Solomon’s seal.’

  The old man laughs and pats her on the head with his loamy hand. ‘My clever little Lily. We’ll make a botanist of you yet.’

  At the far side of the lawn is a deep hole which he and Annie have dug already, with a bucket of water beside it.

  ‘Do you want to put the water in?’ asks Annie. ‘Pour a bit into the hole. Just enough to fill it half full.’

  Some of the water slops onto the child’s shoes, soaking through to her toes.

  A small sapling, bare of leaves, stands in a pottery tub on the grass. The old man gently tips the sapling out of the pot, and places its roots in the child’s cupped hands. The soil feels slightly warm, and tiny filaments of root dangle between her fingers. Very carefully, the child places the roots into the cold pool of water in the hole. Then they shovel earth back around the roots, and the old man pats it down.

  ‘It’s a copper beech,’ he says. ‘Look over there.’

  He points towards the big house, where a vast tree stands, spreading its lattice of branches high into the pale spring sky. Small buds are just starting to appear on the ends of the branches.

  ‘When you reach my age,’ says the old man, ‘this little sapling will look just like that great tree.’

  She looks closely at his crooked pointing finger. Someday my hand will be like that – weathered brown, seamed with crevasses, with deep black cracks on the fingertips and knuckles like tree roots. The old man seizes hold of her hand and gives it a small squeeze.

  The child runs across the lawn to the tree and presses her face against the great copper beech’s trunk. The bark is covered with powdery green lichen which has a sharp, bitter smell. Her arms barely reach a quarter of the way around the trunk. She looks up into the heart of the copper beech tree, which is an entire world in itself. A spider creeps up the tree trunk, and chaffinches flutter in the lower branches. It seems impossible that the fragile sapling they have just planted could ever become a world like this. The child closes her eyes, and rests her cheek against the smooth bark. She stays like that, quite still, until Annie comes to fetch her.

  ‘Come on, Lily,’ says Annie,
‘we’d better wash your hands before lunch.’

  She leads the child to the pump behind the cottage. The child stands on the slippery green flagstones, watching how the light leaps and sparkles in the water as she plunges her fingers into its stream while Annie plies the creaking black iron handle of the pump. Then they walk in silence together, through the open cottage door and into the kitchen, where they can hear the kettle singing quietly to itself on the hob, and smell the bread that is almost ready to be taken out of the oven.

  Epilogue

  Norton Folgate

  July 2015

  THE RAIN IS STARTING to fall – softly, tentatively – as I get off the bus at Liverpool Street Station and make my way through the back-streets in the direction of Spitalfields Market. The brick terraces that line the narrow streets have changed little in the past century, but behind them soar towering cliffs of glass and steel: objects from some other inhuman world, reflecting grey London skies.

  Spitalfields Market: Discover the Authentic London says a sign at the entrance to the great covered emporium. The skylights above are suspended on webs of metal girders, and children rollerblade and practice cartwheels along the broad walkway within. In the echoing clamour of the market, I catch snatches of French, Chinese, Korean, Italian, English with a multitude of accents. An African woman – Ethiopian, maybe? – smiles rather sadly at her customers as she serves them pancakes from under a multi-coloured umbrella. An elderly man gazes in fascination at the array of dress-maker’s dummies, each with a top hat perched on her head. Beyond the market, as the rain is falling harder now, I take refuge in a neo-Japanese restaurant offering ‘detoxifying drinks’. I have come from the other side of the world by a circuitous route, and feel in need of detoxification.

  In Folgate Street – once known as White Lion Street – many of the windows are adorned with little posters saying SAVE NORTON FOLGATE. Some of the eighteenth century houses that once lined the street are still standing, though the Norton Folgate courthouse has long since been pulled down and replaced by a twentieth century edifice of particularly impressive ugliness, itself evidently scheduled for demolition. It was on this spot that my great-greatgreat grandmother Adah Flint, who became a Searcher of the Liberty of Norton Folgate following her husband William’s sudden death, lived and raised her children.