Women of Courage (29 page)

‘Porridge, yer ladyship.’

The young wardress stood in the cell door, a mocking smile on her face. She was the big, sturdy young woman, Ruth Harkness, the one Sarah thought of as a coalheaver because of her build and the strength of her forearms. Her face was heavy, with wide eyes, solid flat features and a skin that was usually pale and unhealthy. Because of spending so much time in the dank, foetid air of a prison, Sarah thought. The wardress glared at Sarah with an intent, sullen malevolence. Damn you, Sarah thought. What’s the matter with the girl, is she jealous because I have this wonderful room to myself?

She ignored the wardress for a moment, continuing to comb her hair and gaze at the wall as though it were a fine, inlaid mirror. Then she sighed and indicated the table in front of her. ‘Thank you. You may put it down there for a moment if you must, and take it away again when you are ready.’

The young woman scowled. ‘Right then.’ She dumped the steaming bowl of porridge in the middle of the table, rather closer to Sarah than Sarah had intended, and plonked a spoon beside it. Then she stood back and watched, arms folded, with a deliberate, hostile glare.

The draught from the door sent the steam from the porridge into Sarah’s face. The scent of it was, as usual, delectable. Sarah sat quite still and took a deep, nourishing breath. Then a second and a third. Then, very carefully, she began to comb her hair again.

The wardress stared for several minutes without speaking. Sarah glanced at her once, then ignored her. She combed all the right side of her head very thoroughly, then the back, then the left. When she was beginning on her fringe the wardress said: ‘You’re a stupid, bloody-minded madwoman, Becket. Do you know that?’

Surprised, Sarah glanced at her, and smiled ironically.

‘Well, Miss Harkness, how kind. That is really the nicest thing anyone has said to me all week.’

The wardress scowled once more. ‘I didn’t mean it kind. I meant it’s stupid, to turn up your nose at good healthy food like that, when you know that later in the day the doctors’ll be shoving tubes down your throat again, and like as not I’ll have to help them. It don’t get you nowhere, so why bother?’

Sarah combed her fringe carefully before she answered. Her pause was not meant as a snub; it was because she was so unused to having a real conversation — even an argument — with anyone, that she found the words did not come straight away. At least it was a sign that this woman cared, for her to break the rules and speak to her at all.

‘What would
you
do then?’ she said at last.

‘Me? What do you mean?’

‘If you were in my position. You know why I’m here, you’ve seen how I’m treated. You’re a woman too, Miss Harkness. What would you do?’

‘I wouldn’t be in your position, would I? I don’t break the law.’

‘No, but imagine for a moment if you did. Not to steal or hurt anyone or to be unkind, but the way I did it, to help other women. And then if you had decided not to eat as a protest against the injustice of the law. Would you give in just because doctors came and tortured you with the loathsome tube?’

‘Well, I . . .’ The young wardress hesitated. Sarah saw the confusion drift across her face and thought, now she’ll walk out because she can’t answer and anyway she isn’t supposed to talk to prisoners at all.

But to her surprise Miss Harkness stayed. And said: ‘I wouldn’t let no man do that to me, never. I’d punch his face and kick him where it hurts, if I could. That’d stop him!’ She laughed. ‘I’m strong, see. Men don’t mess with me!’

‘Maybe not. But if the man brought in four or five strong women like yourself to hold you down, as you held me?’

‘That ain’t the point. I’m not daft like you, I don’t break no laws. Listen, Becket.’ She stepped forward, and Sarah realised, by the intensity of the look in her eyes, the low, earnest voice, that this was what Miss Harkness had really come to say. ‘That ain’t true what you told Dr Armstrong the other day. You’re wrong about it and you’re daft to say it, too. The doctors here are respectable, decent men. They wouldn’t have this job if they weren’t! Holloway’s a clean prison!’

Sarah stared at her, astonished. There was definitely a flush in the girl’s pallid cheeks, and her solid arms and bosom were trembling with emotion. She had the impression the young woman might hit her at any moment, or scream or break down in tears.

Sarah put down her comb and said, very carefully: ‘That’s very interesting. Why are you so sure?’

‘Sure about what?’

‘Sure that what I said was untrue.’

‘Well, because . . . it’s obvious, ain’t it? I mean, a man like that, he’s a respectable doctor, he’s got his name, his reputation to think of. He wouldn’t never do a thing like that. Even if there was money in it, he’d be daft to take the risks.’

Silence. The clang of buckets in the corridor. Sarah’s mind was racing. There’s something strange here, she thought, something very odd. And I have only a couple of minutes to find out what it is, because wardresses never stay to talk, they’re not allowed.
Why does this one want to?

‘So you think there’s money in it, do you?’

Miss Harkness laughed scornfully. ‘‘Course there is! You la-di-dah fancy suffragettes, you don’t understand nothing, do yer? Best way for a girl to earn a few bob - most of the East End does it, given ‘alf a chance. Not for posh hoity-toity ladies like you, you wouldn’t understand. But girls who can only get a job shoving bristles into brushes fifteen hours a day in some cellar, or fishing rubbish out the sewers to sell for a few coppers - ‘course they go on the game if they can. Good luck to ‘em I say. I might have, too, if I’d ‘ad the looks. And if my old man hadn’t brought me up proper. To know what’s right and what’s a sin.’

‘Children too?’

‘Maybe.’ Miss Harkness glanced over her shoulder, then said bitterly: ‘‘Course that’s a sin, that’s disgustin’, that is. But it happens.’

‘And people don’t mind?’

‘They do, yeah. Me, I think it’s sick. But they ain’t got no religion, people like that. They’re not respectable, like you an’ me - they don’t understand that it’s a sin you can be damned for. They just think it’s better’n starving, most of ‘em. After all, some of ‘em ain’t got no dad an’ their mum’s inside. An’ the mums encourage ‘em, so’s they get clothes on their backs an’ food in their gobs, poor little mites.’

So it
does
happen, Sarah thought. And this girl knows it does. Very quietly and calmly, she said: ‘But you must understand, that sort of dreadful choice is exactly the sort of thing we suffragettes are fighting against. Mrs Pankhurst is not rich, you know — she has worked among poor women all her life, and so has her daughter Sylvia and hundreds of others. And we do think it’s wrong — very wrong — for women and young girls to be exploited in this way or any other. It’s all part of men’s inhumanity to women. Of course there should be decent work and proper wages so women don’t starve. But the only way for us to get that is to get the vote.’

‘Well, you won’t get it by telling lies about Dr Armstrong! He’s respectable, he
couldn’t
be involved in wicked things like that. He says you’re a madwoman, now, and I believe he’s right!’

‘Do you really think I’m mad?’

‘If he says so. Yes, ‘course I do.’ The wardress’s eyes bored into Sarah’s with hatred and distrust, then looked away hurriedly above her head at the wall, as she had been trained to do. But she had also been trained not to talk to prisoners at all.

Sarah took a deep breath, pressing her fingertips on the table in front of her until they went white. She felt anger rising in her and struggled to control it.

‘All right. I understand that you respect Dr Armstrong, and I suppose your loyalty does you credit. But what if I were to tell you that I had definite evidence that he is involved in prostitution?’

‘You couldn’t.’

‘Couldn’t I? Just you listen. I had a letter, a threatening letter, telling me to stop suffragettes bothering Dr Armstrong because he was a good friend to prostitutes and my own husband was involved. I didn’t believe it, so I stood outside your precious Dr Armstrong’s consulting rooms in Kensington and saw my husband go in with my own eyes —
and stay in there after the doctor had come out!
Then I saw another man go in with a woman who was painted and dressed and behaved in a way that could only mean that she was a prostitute. Those rooms were directly above Dr Armstrong’s surgery — he must know what goes on there!’

‘Doesn’t prove nothing!’ Ruth Harkness looked uneasy, but her heavy face remained set, stubborn. ‘You’re making it up, Becket. You’re seeing things that ain’t there. You’re just so upset about your husband that you’ve imagined all the rest.’

‘No I haven’t. And when I was in the collecting cell at the police station before I came here, I heard two women talking about putting one of their daughters — ‘on the game’, is that whatit’s called? And one of them actually told the other to take the girl to a house in Red Lion Street, Hackney, which was owned by a doctor called Armstrong. What more proof do you want? If he can be connected with prostitution in one place, why can’t he be connected with it in another?’

‘Because he’s a decent respectable Holloway doctor, that’s why! We don’t do things like that here!’

‘Oh no? You just torture suffragettes, is it? Is that the clean, decent work you’re so proud of? Torturing innocent women who tell the truth?’

Sarah had risen to her feet. For a moment the two women faced each other, and Ruth Harkness felt her hands itching with an urge to seize the slender, skeletal woman in front of her and shake her until she saw sense. Instead she said: ‘You’re wrong! You must be! The lack of food’s gone to your head. If you carry on telling those lies he’ll carry on force feeding you and he’ll be right to do it. And I shall have to help him.’

‘That’s your choice, Miss Harkness. But I believe I am telling the truth and I cut the picture in the National Gallery precisely to draw attention to the monstrous evils that men inflict on women both inside prison and out of it. Only when we get the vote will we get decent treatment for all women, and put men like Martin Armstrong behind bars instead of me. If my death were to make that happen it would be worth it, Miss Harkness, don’t you think?’

For a long moment Ruth Harkness stared at the thin, intense woman in front of her, without speaking. The pale, almost translucent skin on Sarah Becket’s face made her dark eyes unnaturally large, haunting; and there was a seriousness in them which made it difficult to look away once one had looked into them. Ruth shuddered as she thought of the thick, heavy frame of Martin Armstrong scrunching along the corridor towards his office in his wide leather shoes, and the way he had intoned with relish to anyone within earshot: ‘Insane, definitely. I shall certify the woman as clinically mad, suffering from delusions brought on by self-inflicted absence of food. Never seen a clearer case in all my days, or a better justication for continuing forced feeding in the patient’s own interests.’ And she wondered what her conscience would make her do if for one moment she believed what the prisoner Becket had said. And what would happen to her if she did it.

She snatched up the porridge bowl and opened the cell door.

‘Like I told you, Mrs Becket,’ she said. ‘You’re a stupid, bloody-minded madwoman. And you deserve anything you’re going to get.’

But that doesn’t mean I don’t know courage too, when I see it, she thought to herself bitterly, as she strode furiously away along the corridor.

15

D
EBORAH WAS glad that Jonathan had left her on her own that morning. If he had not, she would have had to find some excuse to be rid of him.

All night she had been unable to sleep. Confused images kept drifting through her mind — of Sarah, with a knife in her hand, of Holloway with its high rows of tiny, barred windows and that smarmy pompous doctor, of Jonathan coming to her bed with that dreadful charming smile, of her husband drilling an army of soldiers with wooden guns, of her son Tom riding up to Charles on his grey Connemara pony with the light of hero worship in his eyes, of herself rocking a cradle in the nursery at Glenfee . . .

And of James Rankin.

The baby in the cradle, if there ever was one, would have thick dark hair and twinkling green eyes like Rankin. It would not look like her husband Charles at all. Charles would look at it with that glacial, superior face of his and throw her out of the house. She would be on the road like a gypsy, with her baby and the clothes she stood up in and nowhere in the world to go.

No, that was wrong! Charles would throw her out long before the baby was born. As soon as he realised she was pregnant with a child that could not possibly be his.

She had wondered if she should tell Jonathan about this but she had not dared. Especially not now. There was only one person to whom she could go for help. The child’s father, James Rankin.

He was in London but she didn’t know where. He had not written to her or left an address. All she knew was that there was some kind of dispute among the dock workers, and he had come to be part of it.

So I will have to go to the docks, she thought. And what then? The docks in London must be huge, I can’t expect to just bump into him by walking about.

If there’s a union it must have a headquarters somewhere, a place where the leaders meet. He’ll have gone there. But if he’s not there when I arrive, will anyone know who he is?

A big black-haired Irishman with a green silk scarf round his throat, who can make some of the most electrifying speeches I’ve ever heard?

They’ll know him all right. If Rankin’s there, they can’t possibly have missed him.

Cheered by this thought, Deborah waited until Jonathan had gone, then went up to her room to dress. It was difficult to decide what to wear. She was going to the docks, so she did not want to dress too well, or she would look out of place. On the other hand, she had to look attractive to Rankin. The whole purpose of going was to appeal to him to care for her, take her back. He wouldn’t do that if she looked a fright.