The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [28]
A quick trip to the boardinghouse gave the Glasgow girls a place to stash their latest plunder. Before heading back to King Street, Agnes couldn’t help herself and succumbed to temptation. She tore off her smelly socks and pulled on a pair of the sinfully soft wool stockings. In her hurried excitement, she forgot to remove Janet Rankin’s hosiery label.
It was now four o’clock and time for one final stunt before the shops closed for the day. The seller of sundries looked particularly inviting, with draped fabric displays and trimmings of ribbon and lace. Now it was Agnes’s turn to shoplift. It was also her misfortune to get caught exiting the shop with stolen beads pressed into her palm.17
It didn’t take long before the full ensemble, the trio plus one, was hauled down to the police station, where the officer immediately focused on Agnes’s new hosiery. The clean stockings looked unusually bright in contrast to her shift’s fraying hem. Upon questioning, Agnes told the officer they were a gift from her sister. Her lie was naïvely transparent. When she was ordered to remove the stockings, damning evidence immediately identified them as stolen. The Rankin’s tag was still attached. 18
Kilmarnock’s low crime rate had skyrocketed overnight, the charm of the village interrupted by the rustle of rogues from the north. Agnes, Janet, and Helen had blown into town like a gale-force wind, joining forces with the hapless Daniel Campbell. With the troublemakers arrested, calm returned to the township.
The book Robert Burns published in Kilmarnock included the poem “To a Mouse” and the line, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley.” This translates to “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” prophetic words for fifteen-year-old Agnes McMillan, arrested just a block from where Burns’s poem was published. Errors of desperation had lowered the curtain on the daring troupe. Their case would be tried on the first of the month in Ayr, the county’s capital at the time.
The four scoundrels spent the next five days in the dusty little holding cells underneath Kilmarnock’s council chambers. Built on the arch of a bridge, the government offices also housed a few lockup cells in “the most objectionable parts of the building, being low-roofed, almost without light or air.”19 At sunrise on February 1, 1836, the youngsters crept from the cramped holding cell, heads bent down like trolls emerging from a subterranean dwelling. Chained together at the wrists, the band was put in the back of a wagon for the thirteen-mile ride to Ayr.
The prisoner cart crossed the arched Auld Brig over the River Ayr, built in the fifteenth century and immortalized in Burns’s poem “The Brigs of Ayr.” Only wide enough for one vehicle to pass at a time, the stone bridge had been financed by two maiden sisters whose fiancés drowned when they attempted to ford the brackish water.20
Auld Brig converged with Weavers Street, where the cart of captives turned down the capital’s Main Street. Ayr’s town hall, erected eight years earlier, stood under “perhaps the finest spire in Scotland,” rising two hundred twenty-five feet toward a cloudless sky.21 A short ride from Newmarket Street to Sandgate brought Agnes and friends to the Wellington Square courthouse, where their tomorrows would soon be decided. The rhythm of the horses’ hooves began to slow as the driver pulled on the reins and townspeople peered at the young prisoners in chains. Because of its coastal location along the Firth of Clyde, rarely is Ayr covered in fog. The view was crystal clear from the sprawling fenced lawn. A huge courthouse with eleven bays and a “scowling fourcolumned Ionic portico” housed the heavy hammer of British law.22
As the gaol wagon rolled away, Agnes, Janet, Helen, and Daniel bore the gravity of an impending county court trial. They scuffled against the marble floor in small steps, the sound of their leg irons echoing off two semicircular staircases that rose off the entrance hall. Large stained-glass windows, casting bands of red