Affinity (3 page)

She is a very small lady, and her hair is perfectly white. Her eyes are sharp eyes. Behind her desk, screwed tight to the limewashed bricks, there is set an enamel tablet bearing a piece of dark text:

Thou hast set our misdeeds before Thee, and our secret sins in the light of Thy confidence.

It was impossible, on entering that room, not to long to walk at once to one of its curving windows and gaze at the view beyond it, and when Mr Shillitoe saw me looking he said, ‘Yes, Miss Prior, come closer to the glass.’ I spent a moment then, studying the wedge-shaped yards below, then looking harder at the ugly prison walls that faced us, and at the banks of squinting windows with which they are filled. Mr Shillitoe said, Now, was that not a very marvellous and terrible sight? There was all the female gaol before me; and behind each of those windows was a single cell, with a prisoner in it. He turned to Miss Haxby. ‘How many women have you on your wards, just now?’

She answered, that there were two hundred and seventy.

‘Two hundred and seventy!’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Will you take a moment, Miss Prior, to imagine those poor women, and all the dark and crooked paths through which they have made their way to Millbank? They might have been thieves, they might have been prostitutes, they might have been brutalised by vice; they will certainly be ignorant of shame, and duty, and all the finer feelings—yes, you may be sure of it. Villainous women, society has deemed them; and society has passed them on, to Miss Haxby and to me, to take close care of them . . .’

But what, he asked me, was the proper way for them to do that? ‘We give them habits that are regular. We teach them their prayers; we teach them modesty. Yet, of necessity, they must spend the great part of their days alone, with their cell walls about them. And there they are—’ he nodded again to the windows before us ‘—perhaps for three years, perhaps for six or seven. There they are: shut up, and brooding. Their tongues we still, their hands we may keep busy; but their hearts, Miss Prior, their wretched memories, their own low thoughts, their mean ambitions—these, we cannot guard. Can we, Miss Haxby?’

‘No, sir,’ she answered.

I said, And yet, he thought a Visitor might do much good with them?

He knew it, he said. He was certain of it. Those poor unguarded hearts, they were like children’s hearts, or savages’—they were impressible, they wanted only a finer mould, to shape them. ‘Our matrons might do this,’ he said; ‘our matrons’ hours, however, are long, and their duties hard. The women are sometimes bitter with them, and sometimes rough. But, let a lady go to them, Miss Prior, let a lady do that; let them only know that she has left her comfortable life, solely to visit them, to take an interest in their mean histories. Let them see the miserable contrast between her speech, her manners, and their own poor ways, and they will grow meek, they will grow softened and subdued—I have seen it happen! Miss Haxby has seen it! It is a matter of influence, of sympathies, of susceptibilities tamed . . .’

So he went on. He had said much of this before, of course, downstairs, in our own drawing-room; and there, with Mother frowning, and the clock upon the mantel giving its slow
tut-tut
, it had sounded very well.
You must have been sadly idle, Miss Prior
, he had said to me then,
since your poor father’s death
. He only called to take a set of books that Pa had once had from him; he didn’t know that I had not been idle, but ill. I was glad he did not know it, then. Now, however, with those bleak prison walls before me, and with Miss Haxby gazing at me, and Miss Ridley at the door, her arms across her breast and her chain of keys swinging—now I felt more fearful than ever. For a moment I wished only that they might see the weakness in me, and send me home—as Mother has sent me home sometimes when I have grown anxious at a theatre, thinking I should be ill and have to cry out while the hall was so still.

They did not see it. Mr Shillitoe talked on, about Millbank’s history, about its routines, its staff and its visitors. I stood and nodded at his words; sometimes Miss Haxby also nodded. And then, after a time, there sounded a bell, from some part of the prison buildings; and hearing that, Mr Shillitoe and the matrons all made a similar movement, and Mr Shillitoe said that he had spoken longer than he had meant to. That bell was the signal that sent the prisoners to the yards; now he must leave me to the matrons’ care—he said I must be sure to go to him another time, and tell him how the women seem to me. He took my hand, but when I made to walk with him towards the desk he said, ‘No, no, you must stand a little longer there. Miss Haxby, will you come to the window and watch with Miss Prior? Now, Miss Prior, keep your eyes before you, and you shall see something!’

The matron held the door for him, and he was swallowed by the gloom of the tower staircase. Miss Haxby had drawn near, and now we turned to the glass, Miss Ridley stepping to another window to gaze from that. Below us stretched the three earth yards, each separated from its neighbour by a high brick wall that ran, like the spoke on a cart-wheel, from the governess’s tower. Above us hung the dirty city sky, that was streaked with sunlight.

‘A fair day, for September,’ said Miss Haxby.

Then she gazed again at the scene below us; and I gazed with her, and waited.

For a time, all was still: for the yards there, like the grounds, are desperately bleak, all dirt and gravel—there is not so much as a blade of grass to be shivered by the breezes, or a worm or a beetle for a bird to swoop for. But after perhaps a minute or so I caught a movement in the corner of one of the yards, and then a similar movement in the others. It was the opening of doors, and the emergence of the women; and I don’t think I ever saw such a queer and impressive sight as they made then, for we watched them from our high window and they looked small—they might have been dolls upon a clock, or beads on trailing threads. They spilled into the yards and formed three great elliptical loops, and within a second of their doing that, I could not have said which was the first prisoner to have entered the ground, and which the last, for the loops were seamless, and the women all dressed quite alike, in frocks of brown and caps of white, and with pale blue kerchiefs knotted at their throats. It was only from their poses that I caught the humanity of them: for though they all walked at the same dull pace, there were some, I saw, with drooping heads, and some that limped; some with bodies stiff and hugged against the sudden chill, a few poor souls with faces lifted to the sky—and one, I think, who even raised her eyes to the window that we stood at, and gazed blankly at us.

There were all the women of the gaol there, almost three hundred of them, ninety women to each great wheeling line. And in the corner of the yards stood a pair of dark-cloaked matrons, who must stand and watch the prisoners until the exercise is complete.

Miss Haxby, I thought, gazed at the plodding women with a kind of satisfaction. ‘See how they know their places,’ she said. ‘There must be kept a certain distance, look, between each prisoner.’ If that distance is breached, the offending woman is reported and loses privileges. If there are women who are old or sick or feeble, or if there are very young girls—‘We have had girls in the past—haven’t we, Miss Ridley?—of twelve and thirteen’—then the matron sets them walking in a circle of their own.

‘How quietly they walk!’ I said. She told me then that the women must keep silent, in all parts of the prison; that they are forbidden to speak, to whistle, to sing, hum ‘or make any kind of voluntary noise’ unless at the express request of a matron or Visitor.

‘And how long must they walk for?’ I asked her then.—They must walk for an hour. ‘And if it should rain?’—If it should rain, the exercise must be forfeited. Those were bad days for the matrons, she said, for then the long confinement made the women ‘fidget and turn saucy’. As she spoke she peered harder at the prisoners: one of the loops had begun to slow, and now turned out of sequence with the circles in the other yards. She said, ‘There is’—and here she named some woman—‘making the pace of her line grow slack. Be sure to speak with her, Miss Ridley, when you make your round.’

I thought it marvellous that she could tell one woman from another; when I told her that, however, she smiled. She said, that she had seen the prisoners walking the yards every day of their terms there, ‘and I have been seven years as principal at Millbank, and before that was chief matron here’—before
that
, she told me, she was ordinary matron, at the prison at Brixton. All in all, she said, she had spent twenty-one years in gaol; which was a longer sentence than many convicts serve. And yet, there were women walking down there, too, who would outsuffer her. She had seen them come; she dared to say she would not be there to see them leave . . .

I asked if such women didn’t make her work the easier, since they must know the habits of the gaol so well? She nodded. ‘Oh yes.’ Then: ‘Is that not true, Miss Ridley? We prefer a longer-server, do we not?’

‘We do,’ answered the matron. ‘We like the longer-servers, with the one offence behind them—that is,’ she said to me, ‘your poisoners, your vitriol-throwers, your child-murderers, that the magistrates have turned kind on and kept from the rope. Had we a gaolful of such women, we might send our matrons home and let the convicts lock themselves up. It is the petty regulars, the thieves and prostitutes and counterfeiters, that vex us most—and they are devils, miss! Bred to mischief, most of them, and look for nothing better. If
they
know our habits, they know only what they can get away with, know what tricks will trouble us the most. Devils!’

Her manner stayed very mild, through all this speech; but her words made me blink. Perhaps it was only the association of the chain of keys—which still swung, and sometimes tumbled unmusically together, on the chain of her belt—but her voice seemed to me to be tainted with steel. It was like a bolt in its cradle: I imagine she might draw it back, harsh or gently; I am sure she could never make it soft. I looked at her for a second, then turned again to Miss Haxby. She had only nodded at the matron’s words, and now she almost smiled. ‘You may see,’ she said, ‘how sentimental my matrons grow over their charges!’

She kept her sharp eyes upon me. ‘Do you think us harsh, Miss Prior?’ she asked after a moment. She said I would, of course, form my own opinion of the characters of her women. Mr Shillitoe had asked me to be Visitor to them, and she was grateful to him, and I was to pass my time with them as I thought proper. But she must say to me, as she would say to any lady or gentleman who came to walk her wards: ‘
Take care
’—she gave the words a dreadful emphasis—‘
Take care, in your dealings with Millbank’s women!
’ She said I must take care, for example, of my possessions. Many of her girls were pickpockets in their former lives, and if I were to place a watch or a handkerchief in their way, then I would tempt them into their old habits: she asks me therefore
not
to place such items in their way, just as I would ‘keep my rings and trinkets hidden from the eyes of a servant, so as not to worry her with the prospect of the taking of them’.

She said, too, that I must take care in how I speak to the women. I must tell them nothing of the world beyond the prison walls, nothing of what happens in it, not even so much as a notice from a newspaper—especially not that, she said, indeed, ‘for newspapers are forbidden here’. She said I might find a woman seeking me out as an intimate, a counsellor; and if she does that, then I must counsel her ‘as her matron would—that is, in thinking shamefully on her crime, and in making her future life a better one’. But I must make no woman any kind of promises while she is kept in the gaol; nor must I carry objects or information between a woman and her family or friends outside.

‘If a prisoner were to tell you that her mother was ill and about to die,’ she said; ‘if she were to cut off a lock of her hair and plead with you to take it, as a token, to the dying woman,
you must refuse it
. For take it, Miss Prior, and the prisoner will have you in her power. She will hold the knowledge against you, and use it to make all manner of mischief.’

She said there had been one or two notorious cases like that, in her time at Millbank, that had ended very miserably for all concerned . . .

Those, I think, were all her cautions. I thanked her for them—though, all the time she spoke, I found myself terribly mindful of the smooth-faced silent matron who stood nearby: it was like thanking Mother for some piece of hard counsel, while Ellis took the plates away. I gazed again at the circling women, saying nothing, thinking my own thoughts.

‘You like to look at them,’ Miss Haxby said then.

She said she had never had a visitor yet that didn’t like to stand at that window and watch the women walk. It was as curative, she thought, as gazing at fish in a tank.

After that, I moved from the glass.

I think we talked a little longer, about the routines of the gaol; but soon she looked at her watch and said Miss Ridley might now take me on my first tour of the wards. ‘I am sorry I cannot show you them myself,’ she said. ‘But look here,’—nodding to the great dark volume on her desk—‘here is my work for the morning. This is the prisoners’ Character Book, that I must fill with all the reports my matrons make me.’ She drew on her spectacles, and her sharp eyes grew sharper. ‘I shall see now, Miss Prior,’ she said, ‘how good our women have been this week—and how wicked!’

Miss Ridley led me from her, down the shady tower staircase. On the floor below we passed another door. I said, ‘What rooms do you keep here, Miss Ridley?’ She said that those were Miss Haxby’s own apartments, in which she took her dinners and also slept—and I wondered then how it must be, to lie in that quiet tower, with the gaol outside one’s windows, rearing up on every side.

I look at the plan beside my desk, and see the tower marked out upon it. I think I see, too, the route Miss Ridley took me on now. She walked very briskly, picking out her unswerving way through those monotonous passages—quite like a compass needle, continually swinging north. There are three miles’ worth of such passages across the prison as a whole, she told me; but when I asked her, were the corridors not very difficult to tell apart?, she snorted. She said that when women come to Millbank to be matrons, they put their heads upon their pillows in the night and seem to be walking, walking, walking down the same white corridor. ‘That happens for a week,’ she said. ‘After that, the matron knows her way all right. After a year, she wishes she might grow lost again, for the novelty.’ She herself has been matron there longer even than Miss Haxby. She could be blinded, she said, and still perform her duties.