Little Bones (26 page)

‘Are we having cake?’ said Mrs Abbott.

The ladies sat with their teacups, one or two of them yawning. Jane tried not to think about her cell, and that cold hard bench or the hammock with its moth-eaten blankets. ‘We haven’t had much of a debate,’ said Mrs Moss. ‘Your bones,’ she said, thrusting out her neck. ‘Have they been a great hindrance? You didn’t really say.’

After a fat slice of Madeira, Jane felt too full to think and talk properly. She was sluggish. She wanted to shrug the question away, but this was what she was here for and she had to earn her cake. ‘I have been able to do most things, ma’am,’ she said. ‘Though I am judged by my appearance, and people think I am stupid, or that my life must be worth less than that of an animal.’

‘An animal?’ Mrs Niven looked distressed.

‘That’s right, ma’am,’ said Jane. ‘I’ve been spat at, pelted with stones, and once I was pushed in front of a cart, but the driver saw and veered the horse away, which was lucky. Small girls behave as if I might be the bogeyman. But for the most time, I am completely ignored because people think I am worthless.’

The mouse giggled.

‘The ignorance!’ said Mrs Moss.

‘But how do you know what people think?’ said Mrs Abbott with a frown. ‘If they are ignoring you, then perhaps they have given you no thought at all.’

‘Exactly. They haven’t given me a thought, ma’am,’ said Jane, ‘because in their eyes, I am not worth thinking of.’

‘But you cannot be sure?’

‘No, ma’am, I cannot be sure.’

Mrs Abbott sat back in her chair with an
I told you so
humph. Mrs Niven looked upset. ‘You have certainly set me thinking,’ she said.

‘Always a good thing at these debates,’ said Mrs Moss.

‘Are you all right, Sophie?’ said Mrs Talbot. ‘You do look very pale.’

‘I was thinking about India,’ said Mrs Niven.

‘Ah,’ said Mrs Moss. ‘Philip.’

Mrs Niven shook her head. ‘No, for once I was not thinking of my darling little boy, but those other children, not only the children, but the beggars, the lame, the hungry, they were everywhere, and when they came near, we simply shooed them away like flies.’

‘Of course you did,’ said Mrs Abbott. ‘Who wouldn’t?’

‘But like Jane told us, those people had feelings.’

‘They were Indians,’ giggled the mouse.

‘And aren’t they human too?’

The women sat for a moment, looking around the room, Mrs Abbott tapping her fingers on the chair arm. ‘Perhaps we could start a charity or something,’ said Mrs Talbot. ‘Though there are so many nowadays. There are charities for everything. From the war heroes of Mafeking to the poor souls with leprosy. There are girls selling paper flags on every street corner.’

‘It isn’t money,’ said Mrs Niven. ‘It is attitude.’

‘I am sure that money would help,’ said Mrs Moss.

‘And prayer,’ added the mouse. ‘We should pray.’

‘Do you pray?’ Mrs Abbott asked Jane, who was now almost asleep, her eyelids dropping, before opening again with a start.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said. ‘I often pray to St Jude.’

‘Jude?’ asked Mrs Niven. ‘Why on earth do you pray to St Jude?’

‘Because he’s the saint of hopeless cases,’ Jane told her.

Mrs Abbott sniggered.

‘You are not a hopeless case,’ said Mrs Niven, putting down her teacup. ‘You haven’t had your trial yet – why, this time next month you could be enjoying a stroll in a park.’

‘Or you could be walking around Fortnum & Mason,’ said the mouse.

‘Ah, Fortnum’s,’ said Mrs Abbott, ‘they do a very good liver pâté. You would swear it was home-made.’

‘What do you think, Jane?’ asked Mrs Niven.

‘I don’t know, I have never been to Fortnum & Mason, ma’am.’

‘No,’ she smiled, ‘I meant about the charity. Do you think it would be worthwhile to set up an educational organisation, teaching people not to look the other way?’

‘And how do we do that?’ said Mrs Abbott. ‘Really! People will look where they want to look, and if something looks unpleasant, why subject themselves to the view?’

Jane said that in her opinion, anything was better
than
nothing, but they should not expect miracles. ‘I too have looked the other way,’ she said. ‘I am as guilty as everyone else.’

Mrs Abbott laughed. ‘Just don’t tell that to the judge! And let’s hope you don’t get Judge Harding, who hasn’t a charitable bone in his body.’

‘Judges aren’t meant to be charitable,’ said Mrs Talbot. ‘If judges were charitable, we would be living amongst monsters and thieves.’

Mrs Niven left her chair and went to look through the window, where the rain was starting to spatter. ‘Some of us already are,’ she said.

At eight o’clock, when they turned out the lights, Jane fell into her hammock and wept. She could hear the ladies’ voices and their high excitable chatter. They had talked about nothing. They lived their lives outside the prison walls. They used scented soaps and powders. Ate food from Fortnum’s. They went to concerts, theatres, parks.

And now Jane’s grey cell walls were swimming with colour. There were pot plants, pictures, a tall sash window with pretty silk curtains. Outside, and perhaps not too far away, the mouse would be twitching her nose and worrying about complicated restaurant menus.
Do I like capers? Perhaps I’ll stick with the goulash
. Mrs Abbott’s hands would be dipping into a chocolate box.
Caramel? Marzipan? Raspberry cream?
Mrs Moss would be writing letters, or doing good deeds.
Dear Friends of Lambeth Orphans
… Mrs Talbot – she had no idea what Mrs Talbot would be doing. Perhaps visiting the Opera House.
Oh I do like
Così fan tutte! And Mrs
Niven
, not ten minutes away, would be sitting in an armchair, perhaps the green one by the fire. Snowbell would be curled at her feet. She would be reading a book of poetry, lifting her eyes now and then as her husband plucked the white hairs from his trousers, thinking about India, the groping hands of the beggars and the son they’d left behind. And here was Jane. Locked in a small cold room, alone – with no one thinking about her. No restaurant menus, or chocolates. No musical entertainments, or a cat to shed its fur. She was nothing. With her head pressing into the canvas, she thought about Ned, and wept all over again.

Dear Jane Stretch,

I have heard you can read and write as well as I can. I have read all about your misdoings and I have seen your name all over town. I can hardly believe it. I don’t suppose you remember me? I used to know your sister, Agnes, though we fell out over a scarf of all things, and we haven’t spoken since. She always thought she was better than most. Mind you, with a criminal in the family, she won’t be so high and mighty now, will she?

I remember you from those days. Agnes once sent you to buy some apples, and on your way back a couple of shoeblacks pinched them and used them to hit you with. Agnes nearly fell over from laughing.

Your father sang at my brother’s wake. For such a thin man he had a very big voice. He nearly broke my mother’s heart. My brother was called Jackson, but everyone called him Jacks. You might remember him. He was a great one for fighting. He was famous for it. He could beat the hide off anyone. Apart from Tommy Wicks who went and killed him.

I am writing to you because I have never known a famous person before. My Uncle Wallace once said hello to Captain Webb, the man who swam all the way to France. He signed his name in pencil on an envelope. My uncle said he had very big arms.

What is prison like? I saw a very good likeness of you in the
Mail
. It showed you looking very sad and crooked in your prison cell. Do you remember me at all? I hope you do. I once gave you a quarter of my orange. It was a hot day and you looked very thirsty.

Please write back and sign your name on the letter.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Yr old friend,

Emma Hunt

Dear Miss Stretch,

I am on the whole a level-headed woman, and I do not believe in calling people criminals or worse before they have stood a fair trial, however, for you I make an exception. My poor sister K went
to
see a woman in Clerkenwell, who gave her a dose of the tincture you happily provided. She doled it out as if it were nothing more than cough syrup. My sister was desperate. She was a respectable married woman, simply tired, with five small children to keep. After a dose of the tincture, nothing happened. A further dose was given. Then another. Later that night, the woman doused her insides with carbolic and disinfectant. She did not live to see the morning. Her children are motherless. The woman’s name was Frances Potter. She is now serving two years in prison. It isn’t long enough. I hope you get worse.

Anon.

Dear Jane Stretch,

I am a retired schoolmaster with time on my hands. My wife encourages me to take up hobbies, but none of them seem to suit. I have tried carpentry, a painful occupation, moth collecting, billiards and poetry. Mr Tennyson I am not.

In between times, I have been following your crime in the newspapers, most of the stories being repetitive, and in my opinion full of surmise, as your case has not been heard inside a court of law. I understand that you are an intelligent cripple who, due to lack of schooling, fell into a life of devious crime. I am sure if you had attended to your lessons you would have made a useful life for yourself and you would not be in Newgate today.

My school was attached to a small Anglican church in the county of Suffolk, a countrified place with a scattering of Quakers. One of these Quaker families had a son, who was just as crooked as you appear in the artist’s sketches, but he was a good boy, with a mind as bright as a button. Every morning his father carried him to the seat at the front of the classroom, where he would spend the day learning his letters. Years later, he is setting metal letters in a printer’s shop, which is an honest way of life.

What I suppose I am trying to say, is that people need an honest occupation, whether it is working in a grocer’s shop or making clay pots. If you had used your little education in the way God had intended it to be used, then perhaps you would not have helped those wicked girls.

I hope you get another chance.

Sincerely,

John (Jack) Wilcox

Dear Miss Stretch,

I am a barren woman and I think you should burn in hell for what you did to those unborn children of God. I am a barren woman but I have a husband and a home filled with happy children. My children are all well beloved, and though they did not come as my own flesh and blood, they feel just like my own. If their poor unfortunate mothers had met you and taken your poison, I would not
have
my sons and daughters. You would have murdered them.

Agatha Monk

Dear Jane Stretch,

Many years ago, I was a girl like you. I worked for a man who called himself a doctor, but he was really an injured coal miner. Sometimes he wore a white butcher’s coat. Everyone believed him.

The doctor treated girls in his deceased mother’s kitchen. If they were pretty he might have relations with them. He was a very wicked man.

I had to work for him. I hated the devil but my dad owed him money. I was lucky. I escaped. One night when he was in the kitchen with a girl, I slipped through the front door and I never went back. I slept in mission houses and although they were filthy rough places, for once I felt safe. I found work in a factory salting beef. I met a good man and I have never been happier. He doesn’t know that I ever worked for that peg-leg of a coal miner. Or that I was one of the girls he treated with his knitting hook.

I am sorry you are in prison. I am sorry you got caught. I know what it’s like to be trapped. You are not wicked. You are not the only one.

All my best wishes,

J. E.

‘HERE, TAKE THIS,’
said Mr Henshaw, holding out a small silver hip flask. ‘It’s good stuff, expensive, it’s French.’

‘I couldn’t, sir.’

‘You will regret it,’ he said. ‘I have already seen what’s waiting outside, and that’s before we even reach the Old Bailey’s back door.’

‘What is waiting, sir?’

‘A crowd, ten deep, they don’t look too happy and I think it’s starting to rain.’

Jane took the flask. The brandy burned her throat but she felt a little lighter for it. Since four that morning she had been pacing her prison cell, imagining the courtroom. The rows of upturned faces. The doctor. Her past life re-enacted and embellished like a melodrama. They would hate her.

She had been given a plain grey dress from Our Lady of Fatima, a charitable institution that helped prisoners and mistakenly believed Jane to be a Catholic. After dressing, she had read Mr Henshaw’s list until she’d had enough of it. Later, Miss Linley had kindly sprinkled sugar over her gruel. The gruel had looked
disgusting
, but Jane managed to force it down, not wanting to bore the judge with breaking Mr Henshaw’s rule No. 10: fainting.

Mr Henshaw had introduced Jane to Mr Collins, the barrister, who repeated everything Henshaw had told her, but in a sharper tone. ‘He’s good,’ Mr Henshaw whispered. ‘You’re lucky.’

Yet Jane felt anything but lucky as Mr Henshaw checked his watch and told her it was time to leave for the court. They parted company at the end of the corridor. ‘You will be taken in the Black Maria for your own safety,’ he told her.

‘Will the doctor be inside it?’ she worried.

‘No,’ Mr Henshaw shook his head. ‘He’ll have a Black Maria of his own.’

‘And take no concern over the stones, or whatever else gets thrown at you,’ said the driver. ‘These horses are used to it.’

Standing behind the gates, shivering in the fine mist of rain, waiting for the horses to turn, Jane could already hear the baying crowd. Beneath the flimsy soles of her boots she could feel the ground shaking. ‘Listen,’ she breathed, to no one in particular. ‘They would like to kill me.’

Inside the carriage, she could hear the stones being pelted on all sides. The crowd were turbulent. Roaring. Jane was grateful she was hidden from their faces, though one or two ran alongside the cab, jumping up and looking in. When they arrived at the Old Bailey, the warden ushered Jane inside. ‘Quick as you can,’ he said, ‘before any real damage is done.’