Christina Kline - The Exiles

That was how this felt.

Passing the cells filled with prisoners, she noticed the ragged, dark-rimmed nails of a woman clutching an iron grate, the large eyes of a baby too weak or too hungry to cry. She heard the thudding flap of the guards’ boots, the dull clang of her leg irons. Under the pungent odor of human waste and sickness was the sour salty smell of vinegar, used every other week or so by the lowliest guards to scrub the walls and floors. A stream of liquid snaked toward a grate beneath her feet. She felt as if she were watching a play that she herself was in— The Tempest, perhaps, with its topsy-turvy world, its chaotic and menacing landscape. A line floated into her head: Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

“Including you,” the guard said, shoving her along.

She’d said the words aloud, she realized, as if reciting them to her father during a lesson.

Every few days, regardless of weather, a group of prisoners was led out of the cell, shackled, and marched to a desolate exercise pen, separated from other pens by high iron-spike-tipped walls, to plod in a circle for the better part of an hour.

“How long do you think until we leave?” Evangeline asked Olive as they tramped around the pen one gray afternoon.

“Dunno. I heard they fill a ship twice or three times a year. One left just before I was nabbed. Midsummer, if I had to guess.”

It was the beginning of April.

“I don’t understand why they’re sending us halfway around the world,” Evangeline said. “It’d be a lot less money and bother if we served our sentences here.”

“You’re missing the point,” Olive said. “It’s a government scheme. A racket.”

“What do you mean?”

“England used to send its dregs to America, but after the rebellion they had to find a new rubbish dump. Australia it was. Before they knew it there was nine men for every woman. Nine! Ye can’t found a settlement with only men, can ye? Nobody thought that through. So they came up with arse-backward excuses to send us over there.”

“Surely you don’t mean . . . ,” Evangeline said.

“Surely I do. By their reckoning we’re already sinners.” Slapping her belly, Olive said, “Look at us, Leenie! No question we’re fertile, is there? Plus we’re bringing new citizens inside us. Bonus if they happen to be female. And it doesn’t cost ’em much. Fix up a few slaving ships and they’re good to go.”

“ Slaving ships?”

Olive laughed. Evangeline’s naivete was one of her greatest amusements. “Makes perfect sense, if ye think about it. Dozens of seaworthy vessels just sitting there, rotting in the harbor, and all because a few do-gooders in Parliament got cold feet about owning human beings. Mind ye, nobody has any such qualms about breeding convicts.”

A guard came over and grabbed Olive’s arm. “Stop spreading gossip, you.”

She yanked away from his grasp. “It’s the truth, though, in’it?”

He spit on the ground at her feet.

“How do you know all this?” Evangeline asked after a few more turns around the pen.

“Hang around the pubs in this town after midnight. No telling what a fella will reveal when he’s had a few drinks.”

“They must be lying. Or exaggerating, at least.”

Olive gave her a pitying smile. “Your problem, Leenie, is ye don’t want to believe what’s in front of your nose. That’s what got ye here in the first place, in’it?”

On Sunday mornings the female inmates were herded into the prison chapel, where they were seated in the back, in a section of pews behind tall, slanted boards that allowed them to see the preacher but not the male inmates. A coal stove glowed below the pulpit, but its heat did not reach them. For more than an hour the women huddled in their flimsy dresses and heavy chains as the preacher rebuked, admonished, and berated them for their vices.

The gist of the sermon was always the same: they were wretched sinners paying an earthly penance; the Devil was waiting to see how much lower they could descend before they became irredeemable. Their only chance was to throw themselves on the stern mercy of God the Father and pay the price for their wickedness.

Sometimes Evangeline looked down at her hands and thought: these same fingers plucked flowers and arranged them in a vase. Drew Latin letters in chalk on a piece of slate. Traced Cecil’s face from his forehead to his Adam’s apple. Hovered over her father’s still features and closed his eyes for the last time. And now look at them—dirty, grasping, defiled.

Never again would she describe something as unbearable. Almost anything, she now knew, could be borne. Small white vermin infested her hair, lingering sores developed from small scrapes, a cough burrowed into her chest. She was exhausted and sick to her stomach much of the time, but she wasn’t dying. In this place that meant she was doing all right.

Newgate Prison, London, 1840

In the eternal gloom of the cell it was hard to tell how much time had passed, or even what time of day it was. Outside the small grated window, though, and in the shadow of the spiked wall of the exercise yard, the light from the sun grew warmer and lingered longer. Evangeline’s morning sickness subsided and her belly began to swell. Her breasts, too, grew larger and more tender to the touch. She tried not to think too much about the child she carried inside her—visual proof of her degradation, a mark of sin as unambiguous as the Devil’s red claw tracks on flesh.

Some time after breakfast one temperate morning, the gate at the end of the hall clanged open and a guard shouted, “Quakers here. Make yourselves presentable.”

Evangeline looked around for Olive and, seeing her a few feet away, caught her eye. Olive pointed toward the cell door: Get there.

Three women in long gray cloaks and white bonnets materialized in front of the cell, each carrying a large sack. The one in the middle, wearing a plain black dress with a white shawl under her cloak, stood taller and straighter than the other two. Her eyes were a milky blue, her skin unrouged, her gray hair parted neatly under her bonnet. She smiled at the women inside with an air of benign self-possession. “Hello, friends,” she said in a quiet voice.

Remarkably, except for a fussing baby, the cell had gone silent.

“I am Mrs. Fry. The ladies accompanying me today are Mrs. Warren”—she nodded to her left—“and Mrs. Fitzpatrick. We are here on behalf of the Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners.”

Evangeline leaned forward, straining to hear.

“Each of you is worthy of redemption. You need not always be stained by your sins. You may choose to live your lives from this day forward with dignity and honor.” Reaching through the iron grate with two fingers, Mrs. Fry touched the arm of a young girl staring at her wide-eyed. “What doest thou need?”

The girl shrank back, unaccustomed to being spoken to directly.

“Would you like a new dress?”

The girl nodded.

“Is there any poor soul here this day,” asked Mrs. Fry, tilting her chin toward the larger group, “who wants to be saved from sin, so that you may be saved from woe, saved from misery? Friends, hold fast your hope. Remember the words of Christ: ‘Open the door of thy heart, and I will overcome that by which thou hast been overcome.’ If thou dost trust in the Lord, all will be forgiven.”

When she finished speaking, a guard unlocked the door and the prisoners jostled to make room. Entering the cell, the Quakers handed out oat biscuits from a cotton sack. Evangeline took one and bit into it. Though hard and dry, it tasted better than anything she’d eaten in weeks.

With the help of the guards, Mrs. Fry identified the new prisoners and gave each one a parcel tied with twine. Pressing a bundle into Evangeline’s arms, she asked, “How long have you been here?”