The Tin Ticket_ The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women - Deborah J. Swiss [38]
A few pence went a long way in gaol, where everything was available for the right price. Bribes to the guards could buy a pint of beer from Newgate’s prison tap, an extra source of income for the wardens. The tap flowed continuously, even when food ran out. Cheap gin was also for sale. Consequently, many prisoners were drunk day and night.
Still adjusting to the dim haze of near darkness, Elizabeth and Anna looked toward the blurry outlines surrounding them. They were the ghostlike remains of women whose stooped frames clung tenuously to the remnants of existence. As the two Quakers moved closer, they were greeted by vacant stares, many too numbed from life’s weariness to speak.
Heavy-lidded eyes crusted thick with grit and infection opened slowly as women from all corners squinted to focus on their unexpected visitors. Their matted hair ran wild with lice and fleas. Most had learned to ignore the live vermin that continually ravaged their tired bodies. Rats brushed against their flimsy clothing, skittering around their legs. Beetles and cockroaches moved in a constant parade across the floor, where the women lived, ate, and slept. Lying on the stone floor, scratching half heartedly at scabies and other itchy rashes born of filth, scores of women and children lay covered in oozing sores raw with infection and neglect. Most were pockmarked. Some stank from the rotting odor of syphilis. Others squatted along the cell’s perimeter to relieve themselves.
The two finely dressed ladies had no choice but to breathe in the cell’s stagnant air, thick with the taste and smell of urine, unwashed bodies, and rotting afterbirth from infants born in prison. Unshaken by the stench, Elizabeth stood straight up to her full height and stepped forward. Immediately, her heels sank deeply into the muck of mud, menstrual blood, rotting straw, and human excrement carpeting the entire cell. Never once did Elizabeth look down, her blue eyes level with the curious mass that pressed closer to examine her. Not for a moment did the Quaker minister avert her glance in the manner expected from a woman of her stature.
Captivated by the three hundred pairs of eyes riveted on her face, Elizabeth felt drawn to a young mother who cowered against the stone, anxiously cradling a tiny infant to her breasts. Eyes lit with compassion, so many times a parent herself, Fry reached forward to comfort the mother and child, unfazed by the lice as she stroked the baby’s fine hair. This gesture of touch, pure in intent and unmarked by judgment, composed the chaos and hushed the room to an eerie silence. The Quaker’s gentle manner shocked the condemned as it drew them yet closer.
Compassion was a rare commodity at the turn of the nineteenth century. The wealthy rarely spoke to those outside their class, save to bark orders at their servants. Neither Elizabeth nor Anna carried the slightest hint of moral condescension into Newgate’s dungeon. Three hundred women immediately connected with the two Quakers, the lines of caste erased by an act of human decency. In this grey mildewed pen, the boundary between England’s black-and-white social orders dissolved for an instant. Dignity entered a setting where it seemed out of place but where it took hold in its purest form.
As the crowd pressed against her, Elizabeth seized the moment to introduce herself and her friend Anna: “I am Mrs. Fry and this is Miss Buxton.” Even among the condemned, etiquette demanded certain polite customs. Fry spoke plainly in the Quaker style, addressing royalty and prisoners alike as “thee” and “thou,” well-mannered references that would have sounded quite strange to her Newgate audience. It was unlikely that