The Ripper's Wife(93)

I followed the line to a long table where I was given one rough petticoat stenciled “AYLESBURY” in bold black letters, the mud-brown linsey prison uniform, a baggy long-sleeved sack of a dress, a pair of thick, ribbed beige woolen stockings, and big brown heavy-soled boots, stout enough to last a lifetime. No drawers or stays were permitted. Nor were nightgowns allowed; we must sleep in our uniforms.

The third thing I lost was my hair. That weighty golden glory I had once worn piled high in a gilded pompadour or cascading in curls was chopped off high at the nape of my neck. The matron in charge of my shearing gathered my hair tight in her big meaty fist, pulling so hard my scalp burned and tears pricked my eyes, and determinedly hacked away with her scissors. Every rasp of the blades broke my heart. She briskly wound a length of twine around my hair, forming what looked like a long gold horse’s tail, and handed it aside, to be put in storage with my clothes. Then, not content with leaving me shorn short as a man, she went to work with her shears again, cutting what was left of my hair as close as she could to my scalp. When she was done, she tossed a white linen cap into my lap and shouted, “Next!”

I was led down a long, dark corridor of thick, double-bricked walls. The matron paused to unlock a door, set with an abysmal little postage-stamp window, barred as though a grown woman could ever hope to shimmy and crawl through it when that would be hard for even a baby. And even if she got her hand through somehow what could she hope to grasp except air? The matron motioned me inside and locked the door behind me.

That was when I stopped counting what I had lost and started counting what I had. Seven normal-sized steps took me across the width of my cell, and another seven measured the length of it. One barred window, my only light, set with thick glazed glass, set up high, so that even when I strained and stood on my tiptoes I seemed to view the world through tears. A wooden plank bed covered with a thin mattress stuffed with coconut fibers, and a gray serge blanket. A bucket for one’s bodily needs sat beneath it. There was also a second bucket filled with cold water, for washing body and cell and eating utensils. A stool and a small table that I might use at my labor and my little leisure. On a shelf, set recessed into the wall, not nailed there lest some clever or deranged convict pry it loose and wield it as a weapon, sat a tin plate, bowl, cup, and spoon, a small dish of salt, and an ounce of soap, a whole week’s allotment, a comb, a slim volume to instruct me in prison etiquette, a hymnal, and a Bible.

I would be permitted a bath, a fresh uniform, and barbering once a month as needed, essentially a repetition of the deplorable process I had just endured. After the initial to-the-scalp shearing, my hair would be allowed to grow no longer than my earlobes, but if any vermin were detected I would be shorn down to the scalp again.

This would be my life from now on, a living death entombed by bricks piled and mortared double thick, suffered in silence, always silence. There were moments when I longed to scream just so I could remind myself what my own voice sounded like, to lose myself completely and be like the madwomen whose tormented banshee shrieks sometimes shattered the silent nights. Sometimes when one of the matrons, the warden, or the chaplain spoke to me, allowing me to speak in return, I’d stumble over the simplest words, they had grown so unfamiliar to my tongue. I must have sounded like a simpleton, dumbly groping for words that once rolled off my tongue smooth as silk. I never thought I’d live to see the hour when a sneeze, a cough, or even a fart would be welcome because it broke the omnipresent silence without inviting dire punishment.

I had thought the days in which I stood in the dock, on trial for my life, then those, after I was condemned, when I sat in my cell waiting to die were the darkest days of my life, but I was mistaken. I think now, no matter how bad things may seem, there is always something worse.

Every morning I must rise at six o’clock. I must be waiting, standing at the door, with my bowl and cup, for weak tea and lumpy gruel with a few morsels of gristly mutton and a hunk of brown bread so hard and gritty it was murder on the teeth and jaw. By the time the bell rang for chapel I must have thoroughly scrubbed my cell, down on my knees, with cold water that caused my hands to crack and left my knuckles rough and raw, carefully portioning out my meager supply of soap. At seven o’clock we were led out, leaving our scrub buckets and brushes outside our cell doors as we went, walking a full three paces one behind the other, to the prison chapel for a thirty-minute service. Then it was back to our cells for work duty.

Sewing shirts for soldiers, that was mine. I was required to produce at least five completed shirts each week, with no faults or sloppy stitches, as each would be minutely inspected. If I failed or disappointed in any way my rations would be cut, my weekly library book and letter and visitation privileges revoked, and a notation made in my record. Every evening when I heard the matron making her rounds to collect our sewing implements I stitched all the faster, praying for time. There were nights when I went to bed and couldn’t sleep for worrying over an unfinished shirt, fearing that I would fail to meet the requisite quota by the week’s end.

At noon we paused in our labors for another meager meal of tough mutton, weak tea, and brick-hard bread. For the following hour, we were let out into the prison yard, walking, three paces between each body, round and round in circles, never stopping, staring straight ahead, mouths sealed lest the vigilant matron suspect us of talking. What else was there to look at except the backs of one another’s heads? Only the high stone walls, the flat gray flagstones beneath our boots, and the sky above, mocking us each moment with its expansive blue freedom and clouds that could drift wherever in the world they wished. By two o’clock we were back at our labors.