“I owe ye a bed and blankets,” he said to the prisoners with a great deal more good humor than he had displayed in Bristol. “ ’Twere your efforts got us out of the muck half a dozen times. And as for you, Tom, ye deserve a quart of ale—’tis good here, the landlord makes his own brew.”
He and Tom the bailiff disappeared, leaving Richard and Willy inside the wagon wondering what happened now. Then Tom the bailiff came to unlock the chains binding them to the hoops, cudgel at the ready, and conducted them to a stone barn wherein lay straw. He found a beam with several iron staples in it close to the floor, and locked them to that. After which he vanished.
“I am so hungry!” whimpered Willy.
“Ye may pray, Willy, but do not cry.”
The barn smelled clean and the straw was dry, a better nest than any which had come Richard’s way for three months, he thought, burrowing around. In the midst of this, the landlord and a hefty yokel walked in, the landlord bearing a tray upon which reposed two tankards, bread, butter, and two big bowls of steaming soup. The yokel went to an empty stall and reappeared with horse blankets.
“John says ye helped the wagon considerable,” said Mine Host, putting down his tray where they could reach it and then stepping backward quickly. “Have ye money to pay more than the penny each the bailiff will for ye? Otherwise I am out of pocket and must charge John’s firm, since he says ye’ve earned laborer’s wages.”
“How much?” Richard asked.
“Threepence each, including the quarts of ale.”
Richard produced a sixpence from his waistcoat pocket.
Three pence got them bread and small beer at dawn, then it was back into the wagon for a second day of eight miles, broken by much digging, pushing and heaving. A blissful night’s rest amid straw and blankets combined with the nourishing hot food had worked wonders for Richard’s frame, ache though it did from his exertions. Even Willy was more cheerful, put more heart into the work. It had ceased to snow and snapped colder, though never cold enough to freeze the ground; eight miles in one day were as many as they could go, a progress which perfectly satisfied John the wagoneer—and probably enabled him to put up each night at his regular stop.
Thus Richard expected to be deposited at Gloucester Gaol on the evening of the fifth day. The wagon, however, ceased to roll when it reached the Harvest Moon on Gloucester’s outskirts.
“I am not of a mind to put ye into that foul place in the dark,” John the wagoneer explained. “Ye have paid your way like gentlemen, and I feel sorry for ye, very. This will be your last night of decent rest and decent food for only God can say how long. ’Tis hard to think of ye as felons, so good luck, both of ye.”
At dawn the next day the wagon crossed the Severn River on the drawbridge and entered the town of Gloucester through its west gate. In many ways it was still medieval, had retained most of its walls, ditches, drawbridges and cloisters, half-timbered houses. His view of the town was limited to what he could see through the uncovered back of the wagon, but that was sufficient to tell him that Gloucester was a minnow to Bristol’s whale.
The wagon drew up to a gate in a heavy, ancient wall; Richard and Willy were unloaded and conducted, together with Tom the bailiff, into a large open space which seemed given over to the cultivation of plants only spring would name. In front of them was Gloucester Castle, which was also Gloucester Gaol. A place of frowning stone turrets, towers and barred windows, yet more of a ruin than a fortress last defended in the time of Oliver Cromwell. They did not enter it, but went instead to a fairly large stone house set against the outer wall and ditch surrounding the castle. Here lived the head gaoler.
The real reason they had been escorted from Bristol, Richard decided here, lay more in the fact that the Bristol Newgate wanted its irons back than cared about escaping prisoners. They were divested of every piece of iron they wore, Tom the bailiff gathering them to himself like a woman her new baby. As soon as all were accounted and signed for, he strolled off with his cargo in a sack to catch the cheap coach home. Leaving Richard and Willy to be put into fresh sets of the familiar locked fetters with a two-foot length of chain between. This deed done, a gaoler—they never saw the head gaoler himself—hustled them, carrying their precious boxes, to the castle.
What little of it was still habitable was such a crush of prisoners that sitting down with the legs stretched out was quite impossible. If these wretches sat, it was with knees drawn up beneath their chins. The chamber was exactly twelve feet square and contained around thirty men and ten women. The gaoler who had escorted them bawled an incomprehensible order and everybody who had managed to find enough space to sit got to their feet. They then filed outside, Richard and a weeping Willy in their midst, still carrying their boxes, and came to a halt in a freezing yard where twenty more men and women already stood.
It was Sunday, and the complement of Gloucester Gaol were to receive God’s message from the Reverend Mr. Evans, a gentleman so old that his reedy voice drifted into the winds eddying around the roughly rectangular space and rendered his words of repentance, hope and piety—if such they were—unintelligible. Luckily he considered that a ten-minute service and another twenty minutes spent sermonizing constituted adequate labor for the £40 per annum he was paid as prison chaplain, especially because he also had to do this on Wednesdays and Fridays.
After, they were herded back to the felons’ common-room, far smaller than that for debtors, of whom there were only half as many.
“It ain’t as bad as this Monday to Saturday,” said a voice as Richard put his box down by shoving someone else out of the way, and sat on it. “What a lovely man ye are!”
She squatted at his feet, elbowing those on either side of her roughly, a thin and stringy creature of about thirty years, clad in much-mended but reasonably clean clothes—black skirt, red petticoat, red blouse, black jerkin and an oddly cheeky black hat which sat with its wide brim to one side and bore a goose feather dyed scarlet.
“Is there no chapel where the parson can make his sermon heard?” Richard asked with a slight smile; there was something very likable about her, and talking to her meant he did not have to listen to Weeping Willy.
“Oh, aye, but it ain’t big enough for all of us. We are real full at the moment—need a decent dose of gaol fever to cut the numbers back. Name is Lizzie Lock.” And she thrust out a hand.
He shook it. “Richard Morgan. This is Willy Insell, who is the bane of my life as well as my shadow.”
“How de do, Willy?”
Willy’s answer was a fresh spate of tears.
“He is a water fountain,” said Richard tiredly, “and one day I am going to strangle him.” He gazed about. “Why are there women in with the men?”
“No separate gaol, Richard my love. No separate gaol for the debtors either, which is why we got a mention in John Howard’s report on England’s Bridewells about five year ago. And that is why we are abuilding of a new gaol. And that is why we ain’t so crowded Monday to Saturday, when the men are abuilding,” she said, rattling it off.
He picked one fact out of this. “Who is John Howard?”
“Fellow wrote this report on the Bridewells, I already told ye that,” said Lizzie Lock. “Do not ask me more for I do not know no more. Would not know that except it set Gloucester by the ears—the Bishop and his grand College and the beadles. So they got a Act of Parliament to build a new gaol. Supposed to be finished in another three years, but I will not be here to see it.”
“Expecting to be released?” asked Richard, whose smile was growing. He liked her, though he was not attracted to her in the slightest; just that her beady black eyes had not given up on life.
