Affinity (5 page)

I smiled to hear her say it, and we walked further. Then, from the mouth of a cell a little way along the line there came a thin cry: ‘Miss Ridley? Oh, is that Miss Ridley there?’ A woman was at her gate, her face pressed between the bars. ‘Oh, Miss Ridley mum, have you spoke in my behalf yet, before Miss Haxby?’

We drew closer to her, and Miss Ridley stepped to the gate and struck it with her ring of keys, so that the iron rattled and the prisoner drew back. ‘Will you keep silence?’ said the matron. ‘Do you think I don’t have duties enough, do you think Miss Haxby don’t have business enough, that I must carry your tales to her?’

‘It is only, mum,’ said the woman, speaking very quickly and stumbling over the words, ‘only that you said you would speak. And when Miss Haxby came this morning she was kept half her time by Jarvis, and would not see me. And my brother has brought his evidence before the courts, and wants Miss Haxby’s word—’

Miss Ridley struck the gate again, and again the prisoner flinched. Mrs Jelf murmured to me: ‘Here is a woman who will pester any matron that passes her cell. She is after an early release, poor thing; I should say, however, that she will be here a few years yet.—Well Sykes, will you let Miss Ridley pass?—I should step a little further down the ward, Miss Prior, or she will try and draw you into her scheme.—Now Sykes, will you be good and do your work?’

Sykes, however, still pressed her case, and Miss Ridley stood chiding her, Mrs Jelf looking on, shaking her head. I moved away, along the ward. The woman’s thin petitions, the matron’s scolds, were made sharp and strange by the acoustics of the gaol; every prisoner I passed had raised her head to catch them—though, when they saw me in the ward beyond their gates, they lowered their gazes and returned to their sewing. Their eyes, I thought, were terribly dull. Their faces were pale, and their necks, and their wrists and fingers, very slender. I thought of Mr Shillitoe saying that a prisoner’s heart was weak, impressionable, and needed a finer mould to shape it. I thought of it, and became aware again of my own heart beating. I imagined how it would be to have that heart drawn from me, and one of those women’s coarse organs pressed into the slippery cavity left at my breast . . .

I put my hand to my throat then and felt, before my pulsing heart, my locket; and then my step grew a little slower. I walked until I reached the arch that marked the angle of the ward, then moved a little way beyond it—just far enough to put the matrons from my view, but not enough to take me down the second passage. Here I put my back to the limewashed prison wall, and I waited.

And here, after a moment, came a curious thing.

I was close to the mouth of the first of the next line of cells; near to my shoulder was its inspection flap or ‘eye’, above that the enamel tablet bearing the details of its inmate’s sentence. It was only from this, indeed, that I knew the cell was occupied at all, for there seemed to emanate from it a marvellous stillness—a silence, that seemed deeper yet than all the restless Millbank hush surrounding it. Even as I began to wonder over it, however, the silence was broken. It was broken by a
sigh
, a single sigh—it seemed to me, a
perfect
sigh, like a sigh in a story; and the sigh being such a complement to my own mood I found it worked upon me, in that setting, rather strangely. I forgot Miss Ridley and Mrs Jelf, who might at any second come to guide me on my way. I forgot the tale of the incautious matron and the sharpened spoon. I put my fingers to the inspection slit, and then my eyes. And then I gazed at the girl in the cell beyond—she was so still, I think I held my breath for fear of startling her.

She was seated upon her wooden chair, but had let her head fall back and had her eyes quite closed. Her knitting lay idle in her lap, and her hands were together and lightly clasped; the yellow glass at her window was bright with sun, and she had turned her face to catch the heat of it. On the sleeve of her mud-coloured gown was fixed, the emblem of her prison class, a star—a star of felt, cut slant, sewn crooked, but made sharp by the sunlight. Her hair, where it showed at the edges of her cap, was fair; her cheek was pale, the sweep of brow, of lip, of lashes crisp against her pallor. I was sure that I had seen her likeness, in a saint or an angel in a painting of Crivelli’s.

I studied her for, perhaps, a minute; and all that time she kept her eyes quite closed, her head perfectly still. There seemed something rather devotional about her pose, the stillness, so that I thought at last, She is praying!, and made to draw my eyes away in sudden shame. But then she stirred. Her hands opened, she raised them to her cheek, and I caught a flash of colour against the pink of her work-roughened palms. She had a flower there, between her fingers—a violet, with a drooping stem. As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow . . .

She did that, and I became aware of the dimness of the world that was about her—of the wards, the women in them, the matrons, even my own self. We might have been painted, all of us, from the same poor box of watery tints; and here was a single spot of colour, that seemed to have come upon the canvas by mistake.

But I didn’t wonder, then, about how a violet might, in that grim-earthed place, have found its way into those pale hands. I only thought, suddenly and horribly, What can her
crime
have been? Then I remembered the enamel tablet swinging near my head. I let the inspection close, quite noiselessly, and moved to read it.

There was her prison number and her class, and beneath them her offence:
Fraud & Assault
. The date of her reception was eleven months ago. The date of her release was for four years hence.

Four years! Four
Millbank
years—which must, I think, be terribly slow ones. I meant to move to her gate then, to call her to me and have her story from her; and I would have done it, had there not come at that moment, from further back along the first passage, the sound of Miss Ridley’s voice, and then of her boots, grinding the sand upon the cold flags of the ward. And that made me hesitate. I thought, How would it be, if the matrons were to look at the girl as I had, and find that flower upon her? I was sure they would take it, and I knew I should be sorry if they did. So I stepped to where they would see me, and when they came I said—it was the truth, after all—that I was weary, and had viewed all I cared to view for my first visit. Miss Ridley said only, ‘Just as you wish, ma’am.’ She turned on her heel and took me back along the passage; and as the gate was shut upon me I looked once over my shoulder to the turning of the ward, and felt a curious feeling—half satisfaction, half sharp regret. And I thought: Well, she will still be here, poor creature! when I return next week.

The matron led me into the tower staircase, and we began our careful, circling descent to the lower, drearier wards—I felt like Dante, following Virgil into Hell. I was passed over first to Miss Manning, then to a warder, and was taken back through Pentagons Two and One; I sent a message in to Mr Shillitoe, and was led out of the inner gate and along that wedge of gravel. The walls of the pentagons seemed to part before me now, but grudgingly. The sun, that was stronger, made the bruise-coloured shadows very dense.

We walked, the warder and I, and I found myself gazing again at the bleak prison ground, with its bare black earth and its patches of sedge. I said, ‘There are no flowers grown here, warder? No daisies, no—violets?’

No daisies, no violets, he answered; not even so much as a dandelion clock. They would not grow in Millbank soil, he said. It is too near the Thames, and ‘as good as marshland’.

I said that I had guessed as much, and thought again about that flower. I wondered if there might be seams between the bricks that make the walls of the women’s building, that a plant like that might thrust its roots through?—I cannot say.

And, after all, I did not think of it for long. The warder led me to the outer gate, and here the porter found a cab for me; and now, with the wards and the locks and the shadows and reeks of prison life behind me, it was impossible not to feel my own liberty and be grateful for it. I thought that, after all, I had been right to go there; and I was glad that Mr Shillitoe knew nothing of my history. I thought, His knowing nothing, and the women’s knowing nothing, that will keep that history in its place. I imagined them fastening my own past shut, with a strap and a buckle . . .

I talked with Helen to-night. My brother brought her here, but with three or four of their friends. They were on their way to a theatre, and very brilliantly dressed—Helen conspicuous amongst them, as we were, in her gown of grey. I went down when they arrived, but didn’t stay long: the crowd of voices and faces, after the chill and stillness of Millbank and of my own room, seemed awful to me. But Helen stepped aside with me, and we spoke a little about my visit. I told her about the monotonous corridors, and how nervous I had grown being led through them. I asked her if she remembered Mr Le Fanu’s novel, about the heiress who is made to seem mad? I said, ‘I did think for a while: Suppose Mother is in league with Mr Shillitoe, and he means to keep me on the wards, bewildered?’ She smiled at that—but checked to see that Mother could not hear me. Then I told her a little about the women on the wards. She said she thought they must be frightening. I said they were not frightening at all, but only weak—‘So Mr Shillitoe told me. He said I am to mould them. That is my task. They are to take a moral pattern from me.’

She studied her hands as I spoke, turning the rings upon her fingers. She said I was brave. She said she is sure this work will distract me, from ‘all my old griefs’.

Then Mother called, why were we so serious and so quiet? She listened shuddering when I described the wards to her this afternoon, and said that I am not to tell the details of the gaol when we have guests. Now she said, ‘You mustn’t let Margaret tell you prison stories, Helen. And here is your husband waiting, look. You will be late for the play.’ Helen went straight to Stephen’s side, and he took her hand and kissed it. I sat and watched them; then slipped away and came up here. I thought, If I may not talk of my visit, then I can certainly sit and write about it, in my own book . . .

Now I have filled twenty pages; and when I read what I have written I see that, after all, my path through Millbank was not so crooked as I thought. It is neater, anyway, than my own twisting thoughts!—which was all I filled my last book with. This, at least, shall never be like that one.

It is half-past twelve. I can hear the maids upon the attic stairs, Cook slamming bolts—that sound will never be the same to me, I think, after to-day!

There is Boyd, closing her door, walking to draw her curtain: I may follow her movements as if my ceiling were of glass. Now she is unlacing her boots, letting them fall with a thud. Now comes the creak of her mattress.

There is the Thames, as black as molasses. There are the lights of Albert Bridge, the trees of Battersea, the starless sky . . .

Mother came, half an hour ago, to bring me my dose. I told her I should like to sit a little longer, that I wished she would leave the bottle with me so I might take it later—but no, she wouldn’t do that. I am ‘not quite well enough’, she said. Not ‘for that’. Not yet.

And so I sat and let her pour the grains into the glass, and swallowed the mixture as she watched and nodded. Now I am too tired to write—but too restless, I think, to sleep just yet.

For Miss Ridley was right to-day. When I close my eyes I see only the chill white corridors of Millbank, the mouths of the cells. I wonder how the women lie there? I think of them now—Susan Pilling, and Sykes, and Miss Haxby in her quiet tower; and the girl with the violet, whose face was so fine.

I wonder what her name is?

2 September 1872

Selina Dawes
Selina Ann Dawes
Miss S. A. Dawes

Miss S. A. Dawes, Trance Medium

Miss Selina Dawes, Celebrated Trance Medium,
Gives Séances Daily

Miss Dawes, Trance Medium,
Gives Dark Séances Daily - Vincy’s Spiritual Hotel,
Lamb’s Conduit Street, London WC.
Private & Pleasantly Situated.

DEATH IS DUMB, WHEN LIFE IS DEAF

& it says that, for an extra shilling, they will make it very bold & give it a border of black.

30 September 1874

Mother’s injunction against my prison stories did not, after all, last long this week, for every visitor we have had has wanted to hear my descriptions of Millbank, and of the prisoners in it. What they have asked for, however, are dreadful details to make them shudder; and though my memories of the gaol have stayed very crisp, those are not at all the kind of points that I recall. I have been haunted, rather, by the
ordinariness
of it; by the fact that it lies there at all, two miles away, a straight cab’s ride from Chelsea—that great, grim, shadowy place, with its fifteen hundred men and women, all shut up and obliged to be silent and meek. I have found myself remembering them, in the midst of some plain act—taking tea, because I am thirsty; taking up a book or a shawl, because I am idle or cold; saying, aloud, some line of verse, merely for the pleasure of hearing the fine words spoken. I have done these things, that I have done a thousand times; and I have remembered the prisoners, who may do none of them.

I wonder how many of them lie in their cold cells, dreaming of china cups, and books, and verses? I have dreamt of Millbank this week, more than once. I dreamt I was among the prisoners there, straightening the lines of my knife and fork and Bible, in a cell of my own.

But these are not the details people ask me for; and though they understand my going there once, as a kind of entertainment, the thought of my returning there a second time, and then a third and fourth, amazes them. Only Helen takes me seriously. ‘Oh!’ cry all the others, ‘but you cannot mean really to
befriend
these women? They must be thieves, and—worse!’