‘Surely it works both ways—don’t the subscription fees help to support the College of Nursing?’
‘Of course they do, but the purists choose to forget that. If we’re not careful, we’ll find ourselves split right down the middle—and I don’t know how the club
Having joined with a foot in the nursing camp but since abandoned that for another career, Josephine found it all too easy to see both sides of the argument. ‘Where do you stand?’ she asked, nodding to Geraldine as she sat down at the next table and trying to ignore her grin.
Celia sighed. ‘Oh, I’m all for mixing things up a bit. Lady Cowdray always said that women get far too narrow-minded if they don’t spend at least some of their leisure hours with people from other professions, and I’m inclined to agree with her. Anyway, I feel obliged to fight for her original vision, but I fear that it’s not going to be easy. And to cap it all—this is just between you and me, you understand—we’ve got an outbreak of petty theft on our hands. A couple of members have reported things going missing. Nothing very valuable—a scarf here, a bit of loose change there—but distressing, nonetheless, and I’ve had to involve the police. Discreetly, of course. Ah— here’s Tilly with our drinks.’ Josephine looked round and saw a young waitress carrying two large gins over on a tray. ‘I took the liberty of having these brought up for us. If you want me to relive the story of the Finchley Baby Farmers, I’ll need some Dutch courage, and I refuse to drink on my own.’ She glanced at the papers on the card table. ‘Is that what you’d like me to look at?’
Josephine nodded and pushed the typescript over to Celia, marvelling at how easy it was to slip back into the old teacher-pupil relationship. She looked on as the older woman read slowly through the pages, and thought back to the first time she had ever heard the names Amelia Sach and Annie Walters. It was during the summer of her final year at Anstey, shortly before the end-of-term examinations, when evenings were long and tempers short. The pressure of achievement—and, for the older girls, the urgency of securing a position in the world outside—weighed heavily on the whole college, and the common room was unusually silent as half a dozen of the seniors made the most of every last second of prep time. Usually, Celia Bannerman’s tall, authoritative figure could command a room from the moment she entered it, but that night she must have been there for some time before anyone noticed her: when Josephine glanced up, she was already standing over by the window, gazing at the girls in her care with an immense sadness in her eyes. One by one, they looked up and saw her and, when she had their full attention, she spoke, calmly but gravely. Elizabeth Price, a first-year student, had been found dead in the gymnasium; the body was hanging from one of the ropes and there was no question that the girl had committed suicide—a note had been discovered in her room. Miss Bannerman went on to explain that Elizabeth’s real surname was Sach, and that she was the daughter of a woman who had been hanged for the terrible crime of baby farming. She was adopted as a young child and, until recently, had no idea of her true identity. Somehow, though, she had found out the truth, and her note made it clear that it was more than she could bear. The teacher normally moved with the grace of a dancer but, as she left the room that night, her steps were slow and heavy. Only later did Josephine learn that she blamed herself for Elizabeth Price’s death.
Celia took her time in reading Josephine’s manuscript and, when she had finished, she went back to check a couple of passages. Eventually, she put the papers down on the table and reached for her drink. ‘You don’t have to be kind,’ Josephine said, annoyed with herself for feeling the need to break the silence. ‘I can take criticism these days.’
Celia smiled. ‘Kindness doesn’t come into it. It’s very powerfully done. A little too powerfully for my taste, perhaps—reading that brings it all back. No one can really know what it’s like to live through an execution unless he or she has been there—but this is close. Can I make a couple of comments?’ Josephine nodded. ‘It’s up to you, of course, and it depends how far you’re prepared to let truth stand in the way of a good story, but those last few hours would never be that peaceful. I can see that you want to highlight the relationship between the prisoner and the warder but, if you’ll excuse a rather tasteless pun, it was actually like Finchley Central in that cell. The world and his wife passes through on the morning of an execution: first the governor, and then the chaplain. I can’t speak for Walters, of course, but the chaplain was with Sach for some time. Oh, and the governor always asks the prisoner if she wishes to make any final statement.’
‘And did she?’
‘No.’
‘No last-minute confession, then?’
‘No. Neither Sach nor Walters ever made any sort of confession. Somebody once told me that Walters said she didn’t mind dying as long as Sach did, too, but I don’t know if that’s true. There was a great deal of bitterness between them at the end. Walters felt betrayed by Sach, who did everything she could to save her own skin; and Sach by the justice system, because she genuinely believed she was innocent. It was Walters who did the actual killing, you see, and Sach was careful never to get blood on her own hands. She was always very keen that we understood that, me and the other women who looked after her.’
‘Isn’t that worse? Getting someone else to do your dirty work?’
‘She certainly didn’t see it like that. In fact, I was surprised that her defence didn’t argue more strongly along those lines during the trial.’
‘So how exactly did Sach and Walters work things between them? The newspapers only tell half a story, and I’d rather hear it from someone who knew them.’
‘Well, Sach ran a nursing home and took in young women for the period of their confinement. Most of them were unmarried mothers, desperate to hide their shame and willing to go along with anything that would get them off the hook. Apparently, Sach told them she knew lots of women who were keen to adopt a child and offered to find their baby a good home.’
‘For a small fee, I suppose.’
‘Not so small. Most of them paid around thirty pounds, which was a lot of money then, especially for women of their class.’
‘So they handed over the money and never saw their baby again?’
‘Exactly. They all believed the children were going for adoption—or so they said, although I think some of them were too desperate to care what really happened—but in fact Walters took them and disposed of them. She was found carrying a dead child one day, and wasted no time in leading the police straight to Sach. Sach denied all knowledge of the killings, but no one believed her.’
‘Do
‘You can’t think about innocence and guilt when you’re in that position—it’s not your job, and the only way you can do what you’re asked to do is by placing your faith in the system. Looking back, I think it was the right verdict, although both women felt very hard done by. They didn’t set eyes on each other from the moment of sentencing until the morning of the execution, but they were in adjoining cells and you could often hear them banging on the walls and accusing each other of being the guilty party.’
‘Was it your first execution?’
‘First and last, thank God. It was three years since a woman had been hanged in this country. Much was made at the time of its being the first female execution under the new king, as if a change of reign were somehow going to make a difference. And it was the very first hanging at the new Holloway. I suppose you could say they were trying it out.’ The bitterness in her voice was unmistakeable, and Josephine wasn’t surprised: hanging was a terrible death, and the fact that it was organised was scarcely likely to remove any of its horror. ‘None of us had ever assisted at anything like that before, and the fact that it was a double execution made it unbearably grim. To tell the truth, we were all hoping for a reprieve so that we didn’t have to go ahead with it. Even the hangman was dreading it, apparently.’
‘That was Billington?’
‘Yes, with two assistants—his younger brother and one of the Pierrepoints.’
‘It must affect you very deeply, being that close to a prisoner,’ Josephine said quietly, aware that she was stating the obvious but keen to get a better understanding of how Celia had really felt. ‘It’s a very strange relationship.’
‘I suppose it takes people in different ways. Some of the older warders were hardened to it by the time I met them. I’m sure they’d spent years trying to shake off the emotional impulses that are so instinctive to most of us. Some were so terrified by it that they had to leave the prison service altogether. But you’re right—no one was immune to it. It was destructive to us all in some way.’
‘And I dare say one or two enjoyed the notoriety. I can see that the more sadistically minded could dine out
