Affinity by Sarah Waters Page B

him ! I wished she would die.’ She took the baby to a church, and asked the priest to bless it; when the priest would not, she says she blessed it herself—‘We may do that,’ she said modestly, ‘in our Church.’ She took a room, passing herself off as a single girl, hiding the baby in her shawl to stop its cries; but the shawl fell too close about the baby’s face, and killed it. Her landlady found the little body. Cook had placed it behind a curtain, and it had lain there for a week.
    ‘I wished she would die,’ she said again to me, ‘but I never murdered her, and when she was dead, I was sorry. They found the priest I went to and made him speak against me at my trial. It looked then, you see, as if I had meant to harm my baby from the start . . .’
    ‘A terrible story, that one,’ I said to the matron who released me from her cell. This was not Mrs Jelf—who had been obliged to chaperon some prisoner to Miss Haxby’s office—but Miss Craven, the coarse-faced matron with the bruised arm. She had come to the gate when I called, and gazed at Cook, and Cook had gone meekly back to her sewing and lowered her head. Now, as we walked, she said briskly that she supposed some people might call it terrible. The prisoners that were like Cook, however, and hurt their own little children—well, she never wasted her tears on them .
    I said that Cook seemed very young; but that Miss Haxby had told me that sometimes they had girls, in the cells, that were little more than children?
    She nodded: They had, and that was a sight. They had had one there once that used to weep every night for the first two weeks, for her dolly. It was cruel to have to walk the wards and hear her. ‘And yet,’ she added, laughing, ‘she was a demon when the mood was on her. And her tongue—what a foul one! You would never hear such words as that little creature knew, not even on the men’s wards.’
    Still she laughed. I looked away from her. We had walked almost the length of one whole passage, and ahead of us was the archway that led to one of the towers. Beyond that was the dark edge of a gate, and now I recognised it. It was the gate at which I stood last week, the gate to the cell of the girl with the violet.
    I slowed my step, and spoke very quietly. There was a prisoner, I said, in the first cell of the second passage. A fair-haired girl, quite young, quite handsome. What did Miss Craven know of her?
    The matron’s face had grown sour when talking of Cook. Now it grew sour again. ‘Selina Dawes,’ she said. ‘A queer one. Keeps her eyes and her mind to herself—that’s all I know. I’ve heard her called the easiest prisoner in the gaol. They say she has never given an hour’s trouble since she was brought here. Deep, I call her.’
    Deep?
    ‘As the ocean.’
    I nodded, remembering a comment of Mrs Jelf ’s. Perhaps Dawes, I said, was something of a lady? That made Miss Craven laugh: ‘She has a lady’s ways, all right! Yet none of the matrons, I think, much care for her, excepting Mrs Jelf—but then, Mrs Jelf is soft, and has a kind word for everyone; and none of the women will have much to do with her, either. This is a place for “palling up”, as the creatures call it; yet no-one has made a pal of her . I believe they are leery of her. Someone got her story from the newspapers, and passed it on—stories will get passed, you see, for all our pains! And then, the wards at night—the women fancy all kinds of nonsense. Someone gives a shriek, says she has heard queer sounds from Dawes’s cell—’
    Sounds . . .?
    ‘Spooks, miss! The girl is a—a spirit-medium they call them, don’t they?’
    I stopped, and gazed at her, in surprise and also a kind of dismay. I said, a spirit-medium! And then, again: a spirit-medium—and there, in gaol! What was her crime? Why had they got her there?
    Miss Craven shrugged. A lady, she thought, had been harmed by her—also a girl; and one of them afterwards had died. The