She told them that they must be seen to turn to God. Their time at Millbank will include suffocating religious tutoring and they must bear it and play to it. After a few more instructions, specific to each of them, she awakened them and they remarked that somehow they felt better, and that their world was not ending as they previously thought, but only just now beginning.
Now they are arrived at the grand experiment atop the marshlands of Pimlico, where the weeds strangle the yellow-tinged building and its walls strangle hopes.
It is a prison of contradictions: clean, yet so rank with damp that filthy diseases race through the bodies of its convicts. The use of separate cells as punishment drives prisoners to seek company with the force of a magnet, often with violence; and the rule of strict silence is a mocking sort of entertainment, given that the ventilation system allows sound to travel so easily. Convicts will always find the ways and means to communicate.
The prisoners of Millbank are prohibited any news of the world outside. Visits with family members are carefully monitored. Despite this, the pentagons are full of sharp chatter when the news of the recent arrivals seeps into the prison’s population.
The Fowlers and their servants are received into the prison and led through corridors into the governor’s room where he sits at his large desk. They take their positions behind the rope, placed as it is across the room to serve as a barrier. The room is cast in almost complete darkness; a dim coating of light crawls through the double set of bars on the single window.
The governor whips out a large handkerchief and sprinkles it with a strong-smelling vinegar solution. The prisoners have the odour of Newgate upon them still. Normally they would have first been sent to the medical officer in the receiving ward to bathe, however, the governor senses the onset of one of his blinding headaches and must take to a darkened room before he passes out from nausea. This last task regarding these wretched thieves must be accomplished before he gives himself over to the laudanum.
The governor peers down at the neat pile of papers on his desk. The forefinger of one hand rests against his throbbing temple.
‘Your sentence of transportation has been commuted. The length of your sentence is reduced from twelve years to nine.’
He is met with silence and the top of their heads, as the new inmates look down at their feet.
The governor remains glued to his papers, but he is well aware that this news that greets his famous prisoners has hit them in a powerful way. His eyes lift slightly to catch the trembling legs and skirts of … hmm … three of the four who foul his room. The skirts of another remain quiet. With his finger still pressed to his temple he raises his head an excruciating inch. For a blessed moment the pain lessens as the vision of Clovis Fowler appears. God help him, he feels the spur of an erection.
‘Take them,’ he says abruptly.
The prisoners are ushered to reception.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
When a woman is very bad at Millbank, she is broken. She will not be reasoned with. When she begins to deteriorate it happens quickly and she often becomes outrageously violent. The matrons of Millbank are under instruction to identify those who would do war with them in the female pentagon. So well trained are they in confronting the female and her evil ways that they are unsettled when Clovis Fowler meets none of those expectations. When she was stripped naked Clovis bore her humiliation very well indeed. She projected just the right degree of shyness and a touch of humility but also, she subtly positioned her body in such a way as to enhance the curve of her back, and slowly turned a shapely thigh. By the end of her bath, and after they had spread the crack of her buttocks, she gained her first admirers amongst the hardened matrons.
When they cut her hair the moment of truth arrived. This was often the female inmates’ breaking point; the harsh sawing sound of dull scissors followed by clumps of their femininity falling to the floor. Yet Clovis sits patiently, careful not to show defiance, nor anger, yet helplessness is absent in her. There is nothing of her behaviour to criticize.
She closes her eyes while her head is jerked right and left and thinks of the cloak of protection she has been given. With every passing moment she becomes more certain that like Finn, Willa and Jonesy, she too has been given the ability to live when others would surely die. When the last snip of the scissors leaves her hair short and uneven, she knows within the deepest part of her that the reason for this lies with the boy, Rafe. The exuberance given to his protection, and the care and intensity of it, concerns the dark magic he must surely possess. He is Icelandic, and therefore, it is feasible that its supernatural hand has touched him – she can think of no other reason.
The matron who gives Clovis her prison cap remarks later to the chief matron that she had never before witnessed the kind of strange, disturbing smile she received from prisoner 1089 after being shorn. ‘It were of the other world, mistress.’
Another matron, while bent down gathering their filthy clothes, was unaware that Clovis noticed the moment her mourning necklace fell from under her jacket and dangled for a few seconds until she replaced it. Before the matron left to take the clothes to the laundry, Clovis stopped her.
‘Excuse me, may I speak?’
‘What is it?’
‘I am sorry for your loss,’ Clovis says, in a most meaningful and sympathetic manner.
‘But how … how did
