Remember Me - Lesley Pearse [150]
The first time they were allowed out into the prison yard, Mary felt she was entering a select party. People greeted them with genuine warmth, offering drink from the tap-room, advice and friendship. James and the three other men accepted this with alacrity, especially the overtures from women prisoners. But Mary hung back.
While it felt good to be admired, rather than scorned or pitied, her emotions were too raw to want to talk and laugh with strangers, however well-meaning. All she wanted was to sit quietly in the sun, but this was denied her, for everyone wanted something of her.
Some were after details of the escape, others asked her about their friends and relatives who had been transported, some women even wanted to know her experiences in childbirth. Then there were men either trying to court her or making lewd suggestions.
Within a few hours Mary had seen and heard enough. She didn’t want to be a performer in this circus, or even part of the audience.
She had never before considered her feelings about the criminal world which she’d belonged to for so many years. Whether on the prison hulk, on the ship or in the penal colony, she was just another convict serving her time, doing whatever was needed to survive. As such she was loyal to her fellow prisoners, covering up, aiding and abetting sometimes in thefts from the stores and other wrong-doing, because that was the code by which they all lived.
But losing both her children had opened her mind wider.
She had never really been sorry she stole that woman’s bonnet in Plymouth. She was sorry she was caught, angry with herself for being so reckless. But she’d never put herself in that woman’s shoes and imagined how it was for her to be struck and robbed.
Now, when she thought about it, Mary felt deeply ashamed. She wasn’t actually starving at the time, she didn’t need the bonnet. She could look back on good people she’d known in her childhood, like Martha Dingwell in the baker’s who gave the unsold bread at the end of the day to those unable to buy any, or Charlie Allsop, the gravedigger, who would do little unpaid jobs for the bereaved, his way of showing his sympathy. These two, and others like them, had little enough themselves, and there were those who had sneered at them. But Mary could see now that the Marthas and Charlies of this world enriched life. Criminals only made it frightening and ugly, contaminating everything with their selfish lust for money and goods they hadn’t worked for.
As she looked around the prison yard, all she could see was people who cared for nothing but themselves. They had no remorse about lying, cheating, stealing or killing. The fact that they had money to bribe their way out here to boast drunkenly about their crimes proved that.
These were, she thought, without doubt some of London’s worst villains and thugs, hard-bitten whores and the most cunning of thieves. Whether from wealthy backgrounds or the gutter, they all used that flash lingo, the underworld language she’d become so familiar with in the colony. She could also sense a dangerous undercurrent flowing around in the yard – jealousy, sexual frustration, pent-up violence and unsettled old scores, simmering as people drank.
Mary was no prude. She knew drink was a powerful remedy for alleviating misery and fear. But however desperate she felt, she knew she would never sell herself for a glass or two of gin, and allow the sexual act to take place in full public view. That was what some women were doing, and with their own children looking on.
She had averted her eyes several times during the afternoon as men rutted like beasts with women so drunk they were almost unconscious, but it appeared some of them had a taste for children too. An elderly woman, who came and sat by Mary for a while, told her that some of the men bribed the gaolers to bring them a constant fresh supply of children from the common side. She had cackled with laughter, and Mary might not