Avery & Blake 02 - The Infidel Stain (31 page)

Matty was carrying a bundle in which she had some food and clothing for her brother.

‘They let me bring him things cos he’s being transported so soon,’ she said by way of explanation. Since we had met before the gateway we had both been very correct and polite. She shivered and pulled her shawl closely around her shoulders, though whether from cold or the dismal effect of the place one could not have said. Mayhew clutched a worn leather bag to him to protect his middle. The wind blew his hair up in tufts.

The turnkey thrust his nose out of the door again.

‘If you doan come now, you won’t be able to get in at all,’ he said.

I sighed. ‘Perhaps we had better go in.’

Matty bowed her head. ‘I’m sorry that Mr Blake isn’t here.’

We stepped through the small door, through the space between the outer and inner walls, then into a small, stuffy, dirty gatehouse.

‘Back again?’ said the turnkey to Matty. He was an unprepossessing man dressed in a too-tight dark-blue uniform with a brass number pinned to his chest. It was plain she did not like him.

‘I’m allowed to see him until he’s transported.’

‘And who are these?’

‘No one said I couldn’t bring visitors.’

‘No one said you could, neither.’

‘The boy is lodging an appeal against his sentence,’ I said, in an attempt to sound official. ‘My colleague and I must see him in order to take testimony from him for his lawyers. Surely there is no problem, Warder?’

‘I ain’t heard nothing about it,’ said the turnkey. ‘You’ll have to wait until I’ve asked me superiors.’

I smiled pleasantly. ‘I have no wish to upset you,’ I said and, reaching into my pocket, I brought out five shillings and made to press it into his palm.

‘None of that now,’ he said sourly, looking around as if someone might be spying upon him. ‘I could lose me job. Right, let’s see what’s in there.’

Sullenly, Matty untied her bundle to reveal two small loaves, a chunk of cheese, two small withered apples, a bottle of small beer, a clean shirt, a small pot of ointment and a grey blanket of coarse wool. The turnkey picked up each item and examined it with exaggerated care. I suspected that had we not been there he would have taken something.

‘You’ll have to wait till I get a warder to take you in,’ he said, pointing at Matty. ‘You two – I dunno if you can even come in.’

‘I am sure the Governor would not want us to be turned away. Perhaps you might ask one of the warders?’ I said.

He bustled us into a bleak stone yard. There were more high walls all around, each with small, heavily barred windows. At the far end there was another stone archway, with a door armed with a row of spikes. Over the lintel was painted in black letters, ‘
CONSIDER YOUR WAYS! FOR YE SHALL ALL STAND BEFORE THE JUDGEMENT SEAT OF CHRIST
!’

‘Wait there. And if you must talk, talk quiet, it gets the prisoners going. They ain’t allowed.’

‘What, not at all?’

‘Rules of the prison. Surprised you didn’t know, you being in with lawyers and all.’ He disappeared back into his gatehouse.

I took out my pocket watch. It was fifteen minutes before three o’clock. A moment later the turnkey shot past as if chased by a bullet, and disappeared into another doorway. He returned several moments later, followed by a troop of warders all tugging on their jackets and fastening their buttons.

‘Captain Avery! You have waited for me.’ Lord Allington, graceful, firm of step, held a shining beaver hat and a plain but highly polished cane. He was followed by his footman, Mr Threlfall, who ignored me, and a little behind them, Lady Agnes in a veiled black bonnet. She also chose not to acknowledge me. There was no hint in Allington of the distress of the day before – indeed it was almost impossible to imagine that broken creature in the man before me.

‘Lord Allington, I cannot say how pleased I am that you came.’ I could not resist taking his hand and shaking it vigorously.

Mayhew and Matty stared at him, speechless. Matty blushed,
dropped a clumsy curtsey, looked at the ground and mumbled something.

‘May I introduce Matty Horner, Your Lordship, the sister of the prisoner.’

He took her hand and gave her a kindly look.

‘And Henry Mayhew, a writer and journalist—’

Allington’s expression turned as if he had just caught an unpleasant odour.

‘A highly respected inquirer into the conditions of the poorest and neediest,’ I went on.

Mayhew looked startled but simply nodded. It occurred to me with some pleasure that I was becoming quite an accomplished liar. ‘He is hoping to be able to write an article regarding the conditions in prisons,’ I said. This appeared to pacify His Lordship.

From a doorway emerged a grey-haired man with abundant mutton-chop whiskers, winged by two warders.

‘Your Lordship!’ he said, performing a deep bow. ‘I am Governor Chesterton. Had we known you planned to grace us with a visit—’

‘I very particularly did not wish for any fuss, Governor Chesterton,’ said Lord Allington loftily. ‘I have come only to view the conditions for children here, and with Captain Avery and his friends to visit one child in particular. As I am sure you know, I am Chairman of the Working and Visiting Society and am considering proposing a parliamentary committee to examine the welfare of children in prisons.’

The Governor begged Lord Allington to take tea in his house. Lord Allington declined. The Governor, smiling far too much, said he was certain Lord Allington would find much to commend in Coldbath, which he had overhauled in the ten years since he had taken up the governorship. He glanced anxiously at Mayhew’s notebook, and asked what the prisoner’s number was.

‘His number?’ said Allington.

He explained that prisoners were given a number. It made for more efficient organization with upwards of 1,300 inmates constantly coming and going.

‘He is number 926, sir,’ said Matty, tremulously.

‘You must address him as “Your Lordship”, young lady,’ said Lady Agnes.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Matty whispered anxiously.

One of the warders disappeared and returned with a heavy blue register. ‘Number 926,’ he said. ‘One of the convict boys going to Australia. His cell is on the first floor of the boys’ yard. He’ll be picking oakum, I’ll have him fetched.’

‘What is he convicted of?’ asked Lord Allington.

‘Larceny, sir. He stole five pounds and a tart. He was charged and found guilty. He is sentenced to transportation for seven years.’

Matty stared at the ground.

‘Twenty-five years ago,’ the Governor observed, ‘the boy would have been hanged. We have come a long way. Transportation removes him from the temptations of the London streets and the air in Australia is most healthy. After seven years he will be free to return to England, or to farm a smallholding for himself.’

‘The boy and his sister protest that while he has indeed stolen small items before, and been punished for it, he is innocent of this particular crime,’ I said.

The Governor and the wardens smiled thinly.

‘May I ask why he is in Coldbath Fields?’ said Mayhew. ‘It is not a convict prison, nor a boys’ correctional house.’

‘The London convict prisons are crammed full of prisoners. There are the hulks on the Thames,’ said the Governor, ‘but the magistrates do not like younger boys to be kept on them, and so they have seen fit to place convict boys with us until they are transported.’

‘And when will that be?’

‘There is no precise date yet, but I imagine two weeks, if that.’

‘May we see the child?’ Lord Allington said abruptly. He had not warmed to the Governor.

‘Of course. Perhaps I might walk you through the yards to the visiting-room? I think you will find it most interesting. I shall be delighted to answer your questions, but may I entreat you to speak in quiet tones? As you may know, we have introduced at Coldbath a new and advanced regime. The inmates are kept, as
far as is possible, in separate cells, and are forbidden to speak. Silence is the rule.’

‘No speaking at all?’ said Lord Allington.

‘No, Your Lordship. I found it an invaluable tool in the reintroduction of order in the prison. When I first arrived, ten years ago, the place was monstrously corrupt. The prisoners were entirely idle, those with money bought and sold prison positions, and the whole place was engaged in a vast illicit commerce of goods. I abolished all of that and, with it, all communication, in 1834. The silence helps in the maintenance of order: it prevents the relatively innocent from being further contaminated by the entirely unregenerate, and it forces the inmates to contemplate at length the seriousness of their crimes.’

A warder took out a large ring of keys and began to unlock the door with the spikes. It opened on to a long stone hallway which led on to a large yard. The Governor, Viscount Allington, Mayhew, Matty and I went ahead, and in a second group, slightly behind us, came His Lordship’s entourage and two warders. I was relieved we were to be spared Threlfall and Lady Agnes.

The first thing that struck one – aside from a couple of Scripture texts printed on paper and attached to the walls – was how relentlessly grey it was. There was no ornament of any kind, just grey stone and black gratings. The second was that though the yard was filled with pale men – all dressed identically in voluminous grey trousers, a loose grey shirt with a canvas square upon the back on which each man’s number had been inked, and a small grey cap – it was extraordinarily quiet and orderly.

‘Behold,’ said the Governor, stretching out his arm, ‘the treadwheel.’

Two long sheds had been divided into thirty stalls. In each stall there was a prisoner. Each prisoner appeared to be continually climbing steps, but it was the wooden steps that moved – downwards – not the prisoners. Those inmates not working the treadmill sat silently on the ground before it, resting from their labours.

‘We have eight treadwheels at Coldbath. Prisoners are employed throughout working hours. Each must make 1,200 steps a day. They
work for twenty minutes at a time, are given a five-minute break, and then start again.’

‘What does the treadwheel produce?’ Mayhew asked.

‘Produce?’

‘Does it grind corn or some such?’

‘No. It makes nothing,’ said the Governor. ‘It provides the prisoners with hard labour, as their sentences demand.’

We passed through three more yards, all very much the same. In the first the Governor informed us that these men had been imprisoned for larceny; in the next that these were in for more serious felonies such as assault; in the third that the men were serving sentences for vagrancy. At first I was impressed by the orderliness. I could see that the experienced criminals were prevented from recruiting the more innocent. But with each yard the sense of gloomy fruitlessness, the absence of voices, the feeling of the terrible isolation of each man, grew upon me. By the third yard I began to feel there was something dreadful in the way that the inmates, resting from their labours and surrounded by a hundred others, neither spoke nor even looked at their fellows. In the fourth yard, the Bible quotations set upon the walls seemed to mock the awful silence: ‘Behold, how good it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!’ and ‘Swear not at all!’

It seemed to me that the faces of the silent prisoners had become strangely vacant and unnervingly disengaged from the deliberate lack of human contact.

In the last yard we passed a shed in which some twenty or thirty small boys were pulling apart bits of old tarred rope – ‘picking oakum’, it is called – in silence.

‘This is our boys’ wing. We have another for women,’ said the Governor. ‘The boy will be on the first floor.’ He bowed low and took his leave of Lord Allington.

At the end of the yard, the warder opened a thick wooden door which led to a staircase, and up we went.

This time we waited in a small, dark, ill-ventilated room. There was a table and two chairs. Lord Allington sat upon one, and Lady
Agnes, who had not spoken a word, on the other. The rest of us remained standing. At length, the door opened slowly. There seemed nothing but darkness behind it.

‘Pen, it’s me,’ said Matty. ‘I’ve food and a clean shirt and something for your hands.’

There was a shuffling sound. From the darkness behind the door emerged a small, grey, stumbling child, like a little patch of twilight. I was taken aback by how very small he seemed – the effect accentuated by the tall warder behind him, the oversized regulation grey trousers and shirt, and the white braces that trailed after him like a ghostly tail. He gave us a quick, suspicious glance filled with apprehension; I saw that his cheeks were streaked with old tears.

‘’S’all right, lad,’ said the warder, ‘you can talk to your sister.’

He looked at us fearfully, then threw himself into his sister’s arms.

‘Matty,’ he mumbled, hiding his head in the folds of her shawl while she stretched her arms about him and pulled him to her. On the back of his grey shirt, bisected by Matty’s arms, was the canvas square with his number upon it, ‘926’.

For a few minutes the only sound was of the boy’s muffled sobs and Matty’s half-audible words of comfort. We all looked away, even the warders, who seemed surprisingly affected by the scene.

At last the boy’s warder prodded him gently and said, ‘Come now, boy, you don’t want to use up all your time clinging to your sister’s skirts.’

Gently, Matty pushed him away from her, took hold of his wrists and turned up his palms. They were red raw and very blistered.

‘Oh, Pen, they’re bad this week.’

‘’S’from the oakum,’ the boy said in a small voice, looking down.

‘I brought a bit of ointment for them,’ she said.

‘Won’t do no good now, girl,’ said the warder, ‘his hands have gotta harden. That’s the only thing what’ll keep ’em from bleeding.’

Matty smiled and ignored him. She laid her bundle on the table and took from it the small pot of emollient, quickly dabbing it on her brother’s palms. The boy, meanwhile, leant into his sister and muttered to her so quietly that we could not hear his words. He had
the pinched look of the London streets, but his skin still had the peach-like softness of a child and his eyes were frightened.