The hour is upon them and the open cart bearing the Fowlers, Willa, and Jonesy, approaches ‘the tench’ in fits and starts. In the wake of the pandemonium at Newgate to transport the now notorious passengers, a mistake was made and the new Black Maria police van departed without them. Heads will roll, but in the meantime, the prisoners are escorted through the London streets with as much visibility as those who at one time were paraded to Tyburn.
They sit on boxes in the crude wagon, cuffed, but without an officer. At the same hour that the wagon nears Millbank, from the outer gates a queue of convicts marches by. Chained together in groups of ten, they shuffle down to the riverside where embarkation awaits them.
Rather than cast their eyes at the place of suffering that lies before them, the Fowlers crane their necks to soak up the last view of freedom behind them. It is low tide, and an old bargee has run his boats aground, making them the first to form a plank leading to the steam tug that will take the shackled queue of prisoners to the ship. Old Dan has an agreement that allows him this scheme. This morning, as the fog lifts in that religious way it is wont to do, his attention strays from the shackled men and falls upon the ginger-haired prisoner in the wagon who wholly distracts him. He waves at Clovis and puckers, gives the air a big kiss, grabs his crotch, and then laughs at her. Old Dan pollutes her last view of the river before the wagon jerks away.
The feeling of a dead zone persists. A stagnant moat surrounds the building, most likely meant to enforce its fortress-like position. An unfriendly blanket of low cloud covers the cobblestones, rumoured to protect the bones stacked underneath in one of the pits of the Great Plague. Things do manage to grow in the fevered, waterlogged earth, vegetables in the prison garden and such, but they are seeded adjacent to Millbank’s own recently buried dead.
During her short stay in Newgate, Clovis gathered information on how to become a model prisoner, if events should turn this way. Her concern is not a question of survival, for that is a given now, her concern is rather, how to survive well. ‘Don’t cry over your hair,’ she was told. ‘Matrons sort out the weak from the strong when they shear women and men like sheep.’ Good to know. ‘Don’t play mad – they is clever, those warders is. They is seen too many and knows those that is false.’ Clovis will use that, too.
Then Clovis worked up her saliva and in a demonstrative gesture she swallowed her fear. And, when the fright of what was to become of her, of them, had been digested and put forever to rest, she faced the new possibility that had slipped into their lives. The delicious, quicksilver gift, that seems entirely impossible, but nevertheless stares her in the face. It is the thing that she will fiercely contemplate during her days and nights at Millbank – her immortality.
As the cart wobbles along, Jonesy studies Clovis, perhaps for the last time before they are all gobbled up by the giant starfish. He wonders why her eyes dance and glitter. He is confused that she is not at all panicked, unlike Willa, whose fingers have not stopped tapping against her cuffs. Or why, he asks, is his mistress not comatose with fear and bewilderment like her husband? And what is wrong with her that she, who is supposedly a talent for the magnetism, cannot see the ghost of his ancestors who sit beside him and float above his head? After all, he, Willa and Master Fowler, should all be dead. Perhaps he is actually dead, he thinks, and the messengers are taking him to the god of walls and moats for his preliminary hearing. This seems to be most likely, because in front of them a lifeless moat circles the unspeakably intimidating turrets. Jonesy is certain he is destined for the tenth court of hell for immediate rebirth.
Clovis, aware that Jonesy watches her, tries to stand but cannot keep her balance without the use of her hands and is thrown back. She recovers and summons his attention.
‘Remember what I told you,’ she says.
Last night, when they were still on the vile plot of Newgate land, she sat with each of them privately, two chairs, one facing the other. First, she made solid eye contact, which drew upon their exhaustion and made them drowsy so quickly that she was taken aback. She held their hands until they tingled and grew warm. The faces and figures of those around them dissolved until they vanished completely and the only face that was in their consciousness was hers.
‘Bow your head a bit,’ she instructed each of them.
When their chins rested calmly on their chests, she leaned into them, so close they could sense her beating heart and the light lift of her breasts as she breathed. She put her lips to their ears and, one by one, she whispered until the only thing in the world they desired was what she desired. She comforted them with the assurance that they would be together, that she would make it so. The years coming would seem like minutes flying by. They have all the time in the world. She whispered, until she too believed every word she said.
‘Something has happened to us. It is a great secret that belongs only to the four of us. You must never tell anyone.’
And to her husband she said, ‘If anyone asks why you still live, say that you do not know, it surely must be a miracle. When you come back to your senses from your ordeal, and when
