by Mary Hooper
We set off again, the turnkey whistling cheerily, and the rest of us – four girls and Betsy – followed in his wake as best we could. Reaching the next large cell, the women’s quarters, the gate was unlocked for us and we were told to get in quickly and not hang about or we would miss our roasted swan dinner. Betsy clutched my hand at this and looked up at me hopefully, and I had to tell her that it was a so-called joke on the part of the turnkey, and there were no roasted dinners of swan or anything else to be had in Newgate. One of the girls with us said that we should not expect any food at all that night, for we were too late to receive our daily allowance.
If I’d hoped that the women’s accommodation might be somewhat cleaner than the men’s then I was sadly disappointed, for it seemed to me even more disgusting – it certainly stank just as badly. There were perhaps sixty or seventy women in the large cell, most of them clustering around the brazier, and I could see immediately that some of them were drunk, for there were two or three fights going on, and one pair was actually on the floor, pulling each other’s hair and rolling in and out of the filth, screeching words which I didn’t want Betsy to hear.
Two of the girls in our group of new prisoners set off in an almost sprightly manner across the cell to greet acquaintances, but I, knowing no one, shuffled through holding tightly on to Betsy’s hand – though whether this was for her benefit or mine, I wasn’t sure. We reached the back wall of the vast cell and I stood there feeling strange and giddy, not knowing what to do or how to act. I felt as if I had somehow been removed to a strange place, a country I knew nothing about, where I could not speak the language. It could have been hell, except that hell is hot.
I looked about me. The girls and women were those types who are usually referred to as – I hate to describe my fellow inmates so, but ’twas the truth – the lowest of the low. There was not one clean face to be seen, not a single girl without ratted hair, nor a gown that was not grimy, ragged or had a hemline that was not caked in mud or worse. While most of the women surrounded the brazier, pushing in order to get a view of the fire, rowing, cursing or berating each other, there were many, I was to notice later, who stayed in corners, slumped over and seemingly overwhelmed by sadness, and did not ever speak as much as a word.
‘Hello . . .’ A girl of about seven had addressed Betsy, who immediately responded. The little girl was sitting on a bench placed along the back wall, beside a woman I presumed to be her mother, who was feeding a baby. Next to her was a middle-aged woman in a dark woollen dress which looked as though it had once been costly. There were two other children playing nearby and I could not help but be pleased to see them, for although it was a lamentable thing that they were there at all, they would surely make Betsy’s life a little more endurable.
Betsy said hello back to the girl, and in just a moment the two of them were talking together and she had opened her bag to show off her remaining corn dollies. I looked about me and, too fearful to try and join the large scrum of women around the brazier, moved towards the two women on the bench and asked, very politely, their permission to be seated beside them.
The woman in the woollen dress replied first, saying rather crossly, ‘We have paid for this bench, you know!’ Her voice, to my surprise, was almost aristocratic; a bit like Lady Cecilia’s, and she wore a lopsided wig, curls piled upon curls, a style which had been popular some years back.
I had been about to sit down, but I straightened up again. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said and, not knowing quite what to do next, bent to look at the grazed and sore patches where the leg irons had rubbed my skin.
‘The first thing you want to do is get those fetters off,’ the younger woman said. ‘Have you any money?’
‘A very little.’
She finished feeding, and her baby emerged from under its shawl covering and had its face wiped with a rag. ‘For tuppence, one of the turnkeys will knock them off for you,’ the young woman said. ‘It’ll make you feel better, believe me.’
It seemed rude not to take her advice, so I let her direct me to a turnkey who was willing to do this for, as she’d said, the sum of two pennies, and it took but a moment.
‘But you may sit with us now for a little while,’ the younger woman said, indicating the space on the bench. ‘May she not, Mrs Goodwin?’
The other woman shrugged. ‘I suppose she may.’
‘For our children have already begun to be friends.’ The woman smiled at me. ‘My name is Martha.’
‘Mine is Kitty,’ I said. I limped towards them and sat on the edge of their bench, knowing that I was only there under sufferance.
‘And this is Mrs Goodwin,’ Martha said, and that lady inclined her head towards me like a fine lady in a carriage acknowledging a greeting.
I took some shallow breaths while surveying the scene before me: the glimpsed sight of the glowing brazier, the quarrelling women, the stink, the squalor, the buckets of filth and – most probably – the rats. This was what I’d been brought to. Feeling tears coming, I closed my eyes tightly for a moment and wished with all my might that when I opened them I would be restored to my real life back in the dairy at Bridgeford Hall.
But the screams and the blaspheming and the quarrelling went on and I opened my eyes to find Martha looking at me curiously.
‘You have just this moment arrived?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘And you have been here before?’
‘Never!’
‘You were working the streets?’
I felt myself blush, but she spoke in such a matter-of-fact way that I wondered if this was her way of life. ‘No, not that,’ I said. ‘My charge, Betsy, was ill and it was so cold in our room that I broke up a chair and used it for firewood.’
‘Ah.’ She smiled at me sympathetically. ‘You were unlucky to get caught.’
‘And the landlord said I stole his chickens, too – though I certainly didn’t!’
‘That will be dismissed as being impossible to prove. But how much was the chair worth?’
‘Just a few pennies.’
‘Then you will be all right. ’Tis only when you dispose of something worth more than eleven shillings that they deem it a capital offence, you know.’
‘But he has said it was worth more. And they have used the word arson.’
‘Oh, that’s much more serious!’ said Mrs Goodwin, who had been listening. Her hair wobbled furiously. ‘Sometimes, if they want to make an example of you, they give a fearful sentence for arson.’
‘They will want to know if your crime was malicious, or if you were just seeking to warm yourself,’ Martha said. ‘They will also examine your character and try to discover if you have ever been in prison before.’
‘I never have!’
‘Then I’m sure you’ll be all right,’ Martha said reassuringly.
Realising that she must have had some previous experience with the law, I asked nervously if she knew what my sentence might be.
Martha checked her baby, who was asleep, then appealed to the aristocratic lady. ‘Mrs Goodwin, will Kitty get ten strokes of the lash for a first offence, do you think? Or be pilloried?’
Ten strokes of the lash! Wondering if I would be able to stand it, I asked, ‘Would that be better or worse than the pillory?’
‘The pillory and the stocks are both shocking, my dear,’ Mrs Goodwin said. ‘Spending a day and night with your feet or your hands locked in a wooden case whilst at the mercy of others is well-nigh intolerable, especially if the crowd takes against you.’ I nodded, thinking of the unfortunate felons we’d seen at Charing Cross the day we’d arrived. ‘Ten strokes on your bare back is perhaps the lighter sentence and might be expected for a first offence. And if you bribe the prison officer the lash will not fall on you as harshly as it might.’
I thought about this: ten lashes, and then I would be on my way. That was a better punishment, surely, than being locked into the stocks or pillory? But ten lashes . . .
Martha touched my a
rm. ‘I can see how your mind is going, but you won’t be able to choose, you know. It’ll be up to the judge.’
‘Of course,’ I said. I hesitated, wondering whether to be so bold, then, Mrs Goodwin appearing to have gone to sleep, asked why Martha was in there.
‘This time I am in for theft,’ she answered. ‘My daughter – Robyn, there – and I were down to our last crust and I went into the draper’s and stole a skein of knitting wool, just a trifling thing, which I exchanged for a pie. The draper came after me, but we had eaten the pie before he caught us, so there was no evidence. Now they are trying to find the draper, but he has run off with his master’s wife and is not to be found. In the meantime, I have to spend my days here. I have been imprisoned before – about once a year they take me in for some petty thing.’
‘But you have a baby . . .’
‘I have.’ She looked down at the little raggedy bundle. ‘And glad I am to have her, for I would have been transported to Australia last month had I not been on the verge of giving birth. Now I hope for a lesser punishment: that I may be sent into a workhouse with my two girls.’
I knew a woman could avoid certain sentences if she could prove she was with child, but was surprised that Martha was content to be sent to a workhouse. I’d never heard of the sentence of transportation, however, and had to ask where Australia was.
She shrugged. ‘I hardly know. Just that ’tis a land beyond the seas.’
‘Beyond the seas?’ I repeated wonderingly. How could that be? Beyond there was . . . nothing, surely? ‘But why would anyone be sent to such a place?’
Martha shrugged once more. ‘All I know is that you travel to Australia in a big ship and it takes more than a year. I’ve heard that there are sea monsters on the way – and when you arrive, wild men who will eat you. If they try to send me there again, I will certainly refuse to go!’
‘I don’t blame you!’ I said, in my head weighing up which was preferable: the stocks, the lash, or being sent to this Australia. I looked about me fearfully. ‘It is most terrible in here, yet you seem resigned to it. Whatever causes you to return to such a place?’
‘What else can a poor girl do? In London it’s steal or starve.’
‘Can you never find any honest work?’
‘Sometimes, in the summer, I can work a few hours on a market stall, and then I eke out what I earn for as long as possible and keep out of trouble. In the winter, though, if I did not pass the odd dud coin or steal sheets off a washing line, we’d go hungry.’
‘And does Robyn always come in here with you?’
She nodded. ‘I have no one to leave her with, and ’twould break my heart to have her taken away from me.’ She gestured towards Betsy. ‘But you were unlucky to bear a child so young.’
‘Oh, Betsy is not mine!’ I said immediately.
She smiled. ‘You don’t have to make up stories for such as me,’ she said. She indicated the baby. ‘This little one here, I could not say for sure who her father is.’
I had, I realised, led a very sheltered life before coming to London, and I tried not to look shocked. ‘She is a very pretty baby,’ I said, although I could not really tell, the baby being too well swaddled to see. ‘What’s her name?’
‘I haven’t decided on that yet,’ Martha said. ‘I am waiting to see what name she suits when she grows a little. So, your child, Betsy . . .’
‘No,’ I said, ‘she is really not mine. She is the sister of a friend – the friend I came to London to find.’
‘If she is not yours, why not ask an orphanage to take her in?’
I shivered. ‘I could not. I have heard them to be horrid places.’
‘This is a horrid place!’
‘It is,’ I agreed readily, ‘but at least she has me.’ I rubbed my cold arms to try and warm them, wanting to change the subject, for thinking of just why Betsy was here was making me feel uncomfortable. ‘ ’Tis monstrous cold!’
‘But you wouldn’t want to be here when ’tis hot, either – when fever spreads through the wards and people lie half-dead across the floor, groaning and vomiting by turn. Why, they die so fast that the other prisoners have to be employed as gravediggers to help bury them.’
I shuddered.
‘But where do you come from?’ Martha asked. ‘Your accent tells me you are not from round these parts.’
‘I come from Devonshire, where I was a dairymaid on a farm,’ I said. And as I spoke that past life of mine seemed so idyllic, so sweetly pastoral – and such a contrast from what was around me – that I began weeping.
Martha patted my shoulder, but after a while said gently, ‘It will do you no good at all to weep, Kitty. You’d be better occupied finding out when your case is to be heard and deciding what you’ll say in your defence.’
After a moment I sighed, dried my eyes as best I could on a corner of my sleeve and asked what I should do.
‘You must give the turnkey a penny and ask to see the guv’nor, who’s a fair man who can be bribed to do most anything for a pipe of baccy. Say you’ve a young child with you and you want to know how quickly your case can be heard.’
‘Shall I go to see him now?’
‘Not now,’ Martha said. ‘The brazier is being damped down and we must take our rest.’
‘Where must we go for that?’ I asked, picturing some sort of dormitory. Mrs Goodwin woke up with a start and Martha looked at me curiously.
‘Why, nowhere at all,’ said Martha.
‘But where are our mattresses?’
Mrs Goodwin gave a sudden shout of laughter. ‘Mattresses!’ she exclaimed. ‘Bless the young girl!’
‘It’s a quaint notion,’ Martha said, smiling.
I looked around. ‘Is there not even any straw for us?’
‘Not so much as a wisp!’ said Mrs Goodwin.
And so, after using the bucket in the corner, I spread my skirts on the floor, cuddled Betsy to me and prepared for my first night within the walls of Newgate Prison.
Chapter Seventeen
I did not sleep – of course not. The wailing, screaming, raucous singing and noisy arguments amongst the women went on and on throughout the night by the light of a flickering candle, so much so that I began to think that I had been consigned to a madhouse. It seemed that the women not only hated the prison, but hated each other, and many seemed always drunk, for those who could afford liquor were able to get a plentiful supply of it from the taproom. Indeed, I soon realised that if you had money you could get a plentiful supply of just about anything from the turnkeys, who derived most of their income in this way. Lying sleepless on the stone-cold ground I saw, too, both men and women slipping in and out of the ward gates, and discovered later from Martha that women who were willing to either visit the men’s quarters, or entertain a man in theirs, were well paid for it. Some women were even willing to do it for nothing in the hope of getting pregnant, for then they could plead their bellies and perhaps receive a lighter sentence.
It cost me tuppence to see the governor, and, although Martha offered to keep an eye on Betsy, I thought it best to take her with me. Martha seemed very nice – at least, for someone who was frequently in gaol – but as I had learned, I should trust no one. For all I knew there might be a thriving trade in child slavery in the gaol; there was certainly every other kind of depravity.
I had One-ear as my guide to the governor’s office and, though he was not very attractive to look at, he maintained a flow of interesting information about the prison and those who dwelt within it. Thus I discovered that there were several different areas within the gaol itself: one side containing those who, like me, could not afford to pay for their upkeep, which was known as the Commons’ Side. Another area, the Press Yard, contained those people who were notable or titled, while those who were rich had the distinction of residing on what they called the Master’s Side, which meant they were under the direct supervision of the governor and, as long as they could pay for it, could appeal to him for any little tri
fle they fancied.
‘They has the best of everything,’ One-ear told me. ‘They sends out for food, they has proper beds – four-posters, some of ’em – and clean linens afore they needs ’em. They has parties and folks in to visit when they please. It’s a reg’lar home from home. Some keep horses in the stables and come and go as they like.’
I stared at him in surprise.
‘And the gentlemen who don’t have their wives with ’em always has a steady stream of lady visitors. But I don’t mean ladies, if you get my meaning.’
He sniggered at this but I did not respond.
‘There’s a highwayman who comes in reg’lar and uses the gaol as his London residence. Plans his next robberies here, he does.’
‘But doesn’t he ever get caught and sentenced?’
‘Certainly he does,’ One-ear said, sounding shocked. ‘In he comes, and then he bribes or breaks his way out again, does another crime and comes back. It’s like he’s on a length o’ string!’
The stench got momentarily worse when we passed across what One-ear called a stream but actually was an open sewer into which the inmates could empty their buckets.
Betsy was both fascinated and appalled by the sight of this putrid and nauseating mess flowing sluggishly across our path. ‘What’s all that?’ she asked, staring down and holding her nose.
‘What do you think?’ I said, grabbing hold of her hand to pull her along. ‘Come along quickly now. We don’t want to get left behind.’
‘There’s the kitchen,’ said One-ear, pointing down a corridor. ‘It’s there that they cooks all them luvverly foodstuffs you’re going to have while you’re staying with us.’
Betsy looked at me and I shook my head to say that no, they were not going to be lovely. Despite missing our bread allowance yesterday, neither of us was hungry, for I had discovered that having a loathsome stench permanently in your nostrils quite took your appetite away, although both Martha and Mrs Goodwin assured me that this would pass.
