Night in Eden by Candice Proctor

quietly, staring down at the hands she held clenched in her lap. "I was hoping they might find him alive. Or at least find his body."
    She raised her head. Her face was white with a pallor that had little to do with her months in prison, and in her eyes was naked, soul-wrenching grief and an all-consuming guilt that was terrible to see. She looked smashed, destroyed.
    Felix cleared his throat and glanced away. "Never much chance of finding him alive, no. Not along that stretch of coast. Especially with a storm rising." His chair scraped across the stone floor as he pushed it back and stood up. "So," he said with forced heartiness. "I will see you next week, at the assizes."
     
    Somewhere in the gloomy depths of the prison cell, water dripped against stone. The constant, hollow, echoing sound went on and on, always there, behind the rustle of the rats in the straw and the wail of someone's newborn baby and the moans of the sick and the dying and the mad. Sometimes Bryony thought that if anything about this place finally drove her insane, it would be that monotonous drip, drip, drip.
    She shivered in the fierce, biting cold and drew the filthy rag of a blanket up around Madeline's thin shoulders. Hunger gnawed at her pregnant belly. Hunger and despair and raw, endless fear. There was so much, so very much to fear here.
    There were other sounds, but she was careful not to turn toward them. She heard a woman's whimper and a man's labored breathing, and then Bryony shut her ears to the animal-like grunts of the coupling going on beside her. It was impossible to tell whether or not the woman lay willingly beneath the man who was taking her so fiercely; even if she were not willing, she was likely too weak or too afraid to resist.
    There was so much here to fear.
    It was ever present, the fear. The fear and the hunger, the grinding, dehumanizing treatment, and the appalling filth. Once the stench of unwashed bodies and excrement and untreated disease that hung so thick in the air here would have made her retch. Once the rats, the lice, the creeping, scuttling creatures would have made her shudder. But eventually one grew accustomed to living under even the worst of conditions... or, at least, one almost ceased to notice it. There were few alternatives. One grew accustomed, one went mad, or one died.
    Madeline stirred beside her. Bryony laid her hand on her daughter's hot forehead, and her own body trembled with fear and twisting, knifelike dread. The child was burning up with fever.
    Dear God, don't hurt my Maddy. Not my little Madeline.
    She prayed more out of habit than conviction. God hadn't been listening to her much lately.
    No, that's not true, she told herself quickly, suddenly fearful lest He indeed be listening now and decide to wreak His vengeance on her for her lack of faith. After all, she hadn't been burned as a husband-killer. And although she'd been sentenced to hang for manslaughter, at the end of the assizes the sentence had been transmuted to transportation for seven years.
    There'd been another woman—a girl, really, only fifteen—who'd been tried at the same assizes as Bryony. She'd stolen five yards of ribbon. They'd sentenced her to hang, with her body to be delivered up afterward to the surgeons for public dissection.
    Sometimes, when Bryony lay shivering in her straw at night, she could still hear that poor girl screaming as they dragged her away.
    Madeline coughed, a harsh, body-racking cough that cut through Bryony's thoughts. Dear God, it was always so cold. The children in the prison had been dying regularly throughout the winter. Lately just keeping Madeline alive had become a bigger worry to Bryony than gaining permission from the Crown to take the little girl with her on the transport ship. Felix Fraser had put a petition through for her after the assizes, but so far they'd heard nothing back. It was already the end of February, and rumor had it a ship—the Indispensable —was being readied to sail