Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [1]
The sound of sobbing made Mary look at the woman sitting on her left. Her age was impossible to ascertain for her face was ravaged by pock-marks and she clutched a tattered brown cloak around her head to try to conceal it.
‘Crying won’t do no good,’ Mary said, assuming the woman was to hang too. ‘At least we know now what’s coming to us.’
‘I didn’t steal anything,’ the woman gasped out. ‘I swear I didn’t. It was someone else and they got away and left me to be blamed.’
Mary had heard that same story over and over again from other prisoners since her arrest in January. She had believed most of them at first, but she was harder now.
‘Did you tell them that today?’ she asked.
The woman nodded, her tears flowing even faster. ‘But they said they had a witness to it.’
Mary had no heart to ask for the full story. She wanted to fill her lungs with clean air, fill her mind with the sights and sounds of the bustling town of Exeter, so that when she got back to the filthy, dark cell she would have some memories to draw on. Hearing this woman’s tale of woe would only bring her down even further. Yet her natural sympathy wouldn’t let her ignore the poor creature.
‘Are you to be hanged too?’ she asked.
The woman’s head jerked round to look at Mary, surprise registering on her ravaged face. ‘No. It was only a mutton pie they said I took.’
‘Then you’re luckier than me,’ Mary sighed.
Once back in the Castle, thrust into a cell with around twenty other prisoners of both sexes, Mary silently found herself a space against the wall, sat down, adjusted the chains from her shackles so she could pull up her knees, wrapped her cloak around her tightly and leaned back to take stock of her situation.
It was a different cell to the one she’d been taken from this morning, better in as much as fresh air was coming in through a very high grille on the wall, the straw on the floor looked marginally cleaner, and the buckets weren’t yet overflowing. But it still stank, with an all-pervading stench of dirt, body fluids, vomit, mould and human suffering which she inhaled with every breath.
There was an ominous hush. No one was talking loudly, swearing or screaming abuse at their gaolers, as they had in the previous cell. In fact they were all sitting much as she was, submerged in thought or despair. Mary guessed that meant they were all sentenced to death, and as stunned by it as she was.
She couldn’t see Catherine Fryer or Mary Haydon, the girls she’d been caught with, although they’d all been taken together to the Assizes that morning. She had no idea whether they were still back there waiting to be tried, or if they’d escaped with a lighter punishment than her.
Whatever the reason, she was glad they weren’t there. She didn’t want to remember that but for them she would never have considered robbing anyone.
It was too gloomy to see her other cellmates clearly, the only light coming from a lantern in the corridor the other side of the grilled door. But at a cursory glance, aside from the fact that there were men there too (her previous cell had been all women), they didn’t appear very different from those she’d been imprisoned with for the last couple of months.
The age range was wide, from a girl of about sixteen, who was sobbing on an older woman’s shoulder, to a man of perhaps fifty or even older. Three of the women might have been whores, judging by their colourful and even quite elegant gowns, but the remainder were very ragged, women with hard faces, bad teeth and stringy hair, and gaunt-faced men staring silently into space.
There were two women from her previous cell. Bridie, in a red gown with a tattered lace collar, had confided in Mary that she’d robbed a sailor while he slept. Peg was much older, one of the very ragged women, but she had steadfastly refused to say anything about her crime.
Mary guessed from the experiences in that cell that however subdued they all were now, within a few hours the naturally dominant types, like Bridie,