The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  She found her way back to the entrance. Here two vast turrets the height of six men or more abutted the doorway. They had slits cut into them at intervals, behind which, in another century and in another hemisphere, a medieval archer might have crouched. Ornamental, Alice presumed, or perhaps a warning. The walls of the prison were carved from great slabs of sandstone that shone like blocks of gold in the afternoon sunlight. The marks of the convicts’ tools could be seen in many of them, scratches and sometimes initials. I was here, the convicts’ marks said, and do not forget it. The doors, black and solid, were firmly closed. And it was here, not so very long ago, that the people of Darlinghurst and beyond—for it was a great spectacle—had stood to watch murderers hanged. There had been a platform for the hangings over the doorway so the people below could watch. Her mother had come here as a girl to view a famous bushranger hanged. (‘We was not so civilised in them days,’ though she had spoken with wonder of the bushranger’s legs kicking in the air.) The platform was gone now and in its place these turrets built, and above the door a magnificent prancing lion and a unicorn, carved out of the stone right where the platform had once stood, as though such beasts, such craftsmanship, were proof of the civilisation of the people, of the city.

  Alice held her tram ticket tightly as one might a rosary or a good luck charm. While she still held it in her hand her journey had not ended. But she was ashamed of her dread; it seemed a poor thing indeed for a visitor who was here for an hour and then gone to be afraid when Milli was inside, a prisoner.

  She gazed up at the door. And her heart broke. The women prisoners had their hair shaved off, she had heard. But she thought, too, of the joy she was bringing.

  She knocked loudly on the door.

  Some small portion of the door—for she was not significant enough to warrant opening the whole thing—was slowly eased open and a sharp face observed her. What type of a man it was who worked in such a place seemed clear at once from his crudely carved features and the grim, grey uniform that clothed him, from the great slab of a paw that pulled open the little door and the small, black eyes that crawled over her person, at once suspicious and speculative. He stood barring her way, but as Alice could see other people like herself gathered in a little huddle beyond she saw that the man only stood in her way because it pleased him to do so.

  The door closed behind her and she stood in a tiled hallway, black-and-white squares beneath her feet, steps leading upwards to her left, a guards’ room to her right and another set of doors, closed, before her. Notices and signs every way she turned warned what she might do and what she might not do. Dire penalties were invoked. Were the men still flogged? Alice wondered. Or the women?

  It was not so long ago they had been a penal colony.

  The hall was uncomfortably crowded. A silent, shuffling, fidgeting crowd who stood about loosely or leaned against the wall scratching and picking at themselves. Their boots had holes in them and their heads were covered with shawls; they clutched sad little baskets of food close to their chests; they were reeling drunk. One—a young man in a torn shirt—held a Bible and murmured to himself; another—a youth with a lame leg—concealed a razor blade in his shoe and when the guards found it the boy was beaten and thrown onto the street. No one seemed surprised. No one watched. Alice was searched too, a giant of a man in a straining grey tunic with tiny staring black eyes and large callused hands who patted her roughly and thrust a hand inside her clothing and another up her skirt, turning her about this way and that as he pleased, laughing when she tried to stop him. No one seemed surprised. No one watched. The man smelled of damp earth and rotting food and stale sweat. When he had finished with Alice he thrust her away.

  A window was cut into the wall of the guards’ room and here a third guard was stationed. Behind him a small wood-burning stove smoked quietly, the remains of a meal could be seen. Hanging from the walls were truncheons and various other implements that might be pressed into service to supress a man or many men. And a telephone, incongruous amid the paraphernalia of an earlier and more brutal century.

  ‘What prisoner?’ the man demanded of her. He clasped a pen in his fist.

  ‘Milli Nimrod,’ Alice said. She spoke in a low voice, wanting no one else to hear her sister’s name spoken in such a place, though what difference it made she did not know. ‘Millicent.’

  The clerk wrote this down with a laborious hand, his pen scratching audibly on the thick parchment of his ledger.

  Another man appeared, more senior perhaps, for he looked over the man’s shoulder at what he had written and swore at him and pulled at the man’s arm to drag him away. Alice was left to wait, but it was not long before a door was unlocked and the sorry little crowd shuffled through to another place. Alice attempted to follow but the guard barred her way. He locked the door and leaned against it and looked at her. Now the hall was empty, just herself and him.

  And suddenly Alice was frightened.

  The guard pushed himself up off the door and his eyes did not leave her face. He took a step towards her and his gaze slid slowly over her. The smell in the small room had changed subtly. There was an acrid smell. The smell of fear. Her own fear. Alice kept her eyes on the man’s face, not for a moment leaving it, but another part of her, the part that had grown up on these streets, that had lived all those years in a room with Mr Purley, darted left and right about the small room, assessing it, taking in the two locked doors, the pen that the clerk had used and had left on the desk—was it within her reach?—and the walls themselves, thick and solid enough that a head bashed against it would render a man insensible for a time. She had nothing on her person save for the letter from the woman, Mrs Flowers, and her tram ticket. The ticket fluttered now to the floor.

  The guard had come no closer; he appeared to be waiting. There would be others then, not just one. Alice felt the panic rising in her. When the two guards who had left reappeared she braced herself, heard her own breathing, quick, jagged. Her fingers closed into fists.

  One of the guards put his head through the hole in the wall and indicated to her. ‘You! Come here.’

  She did not move.

  He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’ He consulted the ledger. Looked up. The other guard stood at his shoulder, ignoring his colleague and watching her, studying her it seemed. The first one spoke again. ‘Millicent Nimrod, was it?’

  Alice waited, then nodded.

  ‘Deceased,’ he said, closing the ledger with a snap.

  For a time no one spoke. None of the guards moved. They just watched her, in a detached way; curious, it seemed. And slightly amused.

  ‘No,’ said Alice, shaking her head. ‘She is here, my sister. Milli.’

  ‘No, she ain’t. I just told you. She is deceased. Dead. Hung herself. This morning. Found in her cell.’

  ‘Do not take our word for it. You shall read of it in tomorrow’s paper,’ said the guard who stood behind him and who seemed fascinated by the young woman’s reaction to the news.

  ‘Here is her things,’ said the first man, pushing a meagre parcel tied with string through the opening. ‘Take it.’

  But Alice could not take it. Alice could not move.

  ‘Give her some brandy,’ said one of them. ‘Oh, but I clean forgot—we are all out of brandy!’

  And they laughed.

  Alice took the parcel. She left the prison and walked down Forbes Street and this time she did not take the tram. This time she walked.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  OFFENCES AGAINST THE PERSON

  ‘Will you go to the police, sir, with the letter that warned of the accident on the line?’ said James Greensmith as they sat in the compartment of the afternoon express train on its return journey to the city.

  And thus was the existence of the letter, delivered that morning by the secretary’s own hand and up to this point kept from her by her husband, made known to Eleanor Dunlevy. Not the details of its contents, perhaps, but enough for her to understand it predicted d
ire calamity should the minister and his entourage venture to the west that day. The unfortunate Greensmith, whose indiscretion this was (earning him a look of furious disbelief from his employer), fell silent. He had stopped short of producing the letter—an illiterate missive penned in a childish hand that one no more heeded than a child’s toy hurled in a tantrum—but there was little point now in denying that the letter existed, that its warning had almost come true.

  No one spoke.

  Eleanor said nothing. She sat staring out of the train window and Alasdair was witness to every sort of emotion that now flitted across his wife’s face; indeed he could feel each one, her fury, her disbelief, her fear, perhaps (though of this he was less certain), and the compartment fairly crackled with it all the way home.

  As the front door closed behind them she turned to him, her anger white hot. ‘You knew? You had received a warning but you did nothing?’

  And it was as well that the maid, who ought to have opened the door to them but had not, was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Of course I did not know!’ Alasdair replied, his justifications already prepared, for it had been a long train ride home. ‘Certainly I received a vague threat in an anonymous note, which is nothing unusual in my position, though I do not always choose to share it with you. If I acted on every crazed threat that I received I should never go anywhere and these malefactors would have their victory.’

  She seemed hardly to hear him, was half turned away, her jaw set tightly, but now she spun back to him, her eyes flashing furiously. ‘I understood it was not a vague threat at all but a most precise threat concerning our train journey today.’

  And Alasdair damned his imbecilic and imprudent secretary.

  ‘I would not say so—’

  ‘Show it to me! The note: show me!’

  It crossed his mind to refuse—it was his right to do so—but the absurdity of this was too great and so he retrieved it from his pocket and handed it to her.

  She took the letter and opened it and her hand, he saw, shook a little. She read it quickly, for there was not much there other than the threat to their lives. And it proved her point, of course, that the threat was specific. She crushed the note in her hand and again turned away from him.

  ‘You would put all our lives in danger,’ she said quietly, but the fury had not gone; if anything, it was deeper now. ‘Not just yours and mine and James’s—’

  James, was it!

  ‘—but everyone on that train, every man, woman and child.’

  She did not look at him as she said this, but her fury was gone and he realised, finally, that his wife had been frightened.

  Alasdair located spills and a box of matches and after a few false starts lit the fire in his study, watching as the coals finally caught and began to glow. The night was noticeably milder here on the coast than it had been at Penrith earlier in the day, but he needed this fire. Yet the coals seemed to emit no heat, he felt nothing, neither heat not cold, not the carpet beneath his feet nor the spent match in his hand. He crouched before the fire, a little mesmerised by it, and the maid’s absence, an annoyance at first, no longer seemed so. He wished this fire to be his alone and no one else’s.

  After some little time, during which no thoughts disturbed him and his mind was still, he stood up. He rubbed his eyes.

  Someone had laid a pylon on the railway line with the sole intention of wrecking a train, or at least derailing it. And not just any train either: his train. They had not succeeded, but for those few precious seconds when the driver had spotted the obstruction and had slammed on his brakes, as the train had screamed to a stop and life—his life—had been held in the balance, he had experienced a feeling almost of euphoria. He had thought, What if it is to end now, what of it?

  But it had not. Life continued. His, Eleanor’s.

  He went to his desk. He retrieved a small key and opened each drawer in turn and went through its contents, pulling items out and, with a rapid appraisal, studying each and every one: parliamentary papers, old speeches, drafts and notes for speeches never given, correspondence with constituents, with secretaries, with other parliamentarians, with family members now long dead. There were scrawled notes, envelopes, bills, dockets, tickets, invitations, personal and ministerial diaries going back a decade and more, the original documents and plans for the house, his marriage certificate, a studio portrait of his mother and father—yellowed and mottled with age. And when he had gone through each drawer he started on the polished walnut bookshelves that lined two walls, floor to ceiling, and that contained volumes of parliamentary records and constitutional law and political biographies, and in among them old maps of the colony, school-era Latin and Ancient Greek texts, even some old sea charts and his worn and much-annotated copy of Watkin Tench’s explorations. He pulled out each book, searching inside their covers and behind them.

  Nothing. There was nothing.

  He stood in the centre of the room. The sweat glistened on his forehead and pooled on his upper lip and at the back of his neck, his shirt was damp and clung to his skin but his body felt cold. Clammy.

  He would not panic. Alasdair Dunlevy, Secretary for Public Monies, was not that sort of man, yet it was hard to ignore the myriad hectic thoughts darting about like tiny fish in a pond inside his head, and he could not catch a single one nor make sense of them singly or collectively.

  He went to his dressing room and rummaged through each trouser pocket, each coat pocket—but it was absurd! Anything left in his clothing would have long ago been found by the maid and, if not her, then by the laundry.

  If he had left something in a pocket …

  No, there was nothing, he was certain of it. And last night he had gone through this same exercise at his office in Richmond Terrace, just as thoroughly, just as frenziedly, and finding only what he had known was there—the original letter from the Woolloomooloo letting agent agreeing to Alasdair’s terms and delivered to a box at the post office and addressed to a name that was not his own, receipts for each month’s rent of the Woolloomooloo apartment (paid in cash, in advance), and one or two, perhaps five or six, notes from Verity herself, receipts and bills for items he had purchased for her and that was all—and all now destroyed. He had gathered it all up and gone into the park under cover of the early winter darkness and found an incinerator and had tossed the few items into it and watched them ignite. The embers had glowed then floated up into the night air and vanished. He had thought he would feel relief but instead, somewhere inside him, a voice had cried out in anguish.

  There was nothing of Verity Trent here at his home, he was sure of it, yet the fear that he had missed something had gnawed away at him all day.

  Alasdair pulled up a chair and sat down. He thought about lighting a cigar but something about the act smacked too much of self-satisfaction and he did not feel self-satisfied. A drink then. He dug out an unopened bottle of malt whisky from the bottom of a cupboard and a tumbler and poured himself a quantity.

  There were no documents left that might incriminate him, but what of those who had witnessed him, the people who had seen him and could connect him with Verity? The man, Orange, the letting agent, who knew him by sight, certainly, but not by name. The same could be said for the two neighbours, the elderly woman—who in any case was blind or close to it—and the rather helpful, rather too curious Miss Tiptree. He worried about Miss Tiptree. Had anyone seen him at the house during the months he had visited Verity there? He thought not, but how could one be sure? His visits had mostly been at night but not always, not that last time. That had been morning, broad daylight.

  And the folly of this struck him. Well, there was no helping it now.

  Then there was the elderly hospital clerk. Alasdair had sat across a desk from the man and conversed with him, told the man he was a minister of state (though not given his name, lied about his constituency) and provided a plausible reason, a justifiable reason even, for his interest in the girl. Surely he could only be implicated if
all these various persons were brought together and connected to him, and why should they be?

  He wondered if there might be anything at Verity’s apartment.

  He knocked back the whisky and walked to the window. The curtains were drawn. It was the first thing he had done on entering the room but now he tweaked the curtain aside and peered out into the darkness. He saw only his own reflection. The windowpane was cold beneath his fingers and his breath created a smear of mist on the glass.

  There were notes he had written to her, a dozen at least he estimated, mostly arranging appointments, some accompanying flowers and other gifts, but never signed, never with an address. In his handwriting, of course, but who could prove it? One of those notes to Verity, the last one, had gone missing. He wondered about that. She had claimed not to have received it. A ruse, presumably, so that she could miss the appointment with him. So that she might, instead, attend her own appointment with this … doctor.

  There was nothing else.

  He turned back to the room, surveyed it.

  He thought: Verity has done this, not me. The crime—an appalling crime!—had been committed by her, along with whatever unscrupulous doctor she had unearthed and colluded with. He, Alasdair, had not been a party to it.

  But had he, unwittingly?

  He returned to the bookshelf and pulled out a volume of criminal law. The Offences against the Person Act, 1861, Section 58. He could not recall ever reading it before. Any woman being convicted of offence of using drugs or instruments to procure abortion shall be liable to be kept in penal servitude for life.

  Life! And this was an amendment to the 1837 Act, which had previously specified the death penalty.

  He stood up and took a turn about the room. But there was more. Section 59 stated that anyone found to be supplying or procuring poison or instruments for the purpose of criminal abortion should be liable to be kept in penal servitude.