“Yes,” Warden Barrow said, voice dripping with contempt.“I imagine there’s plenty to sort out over there with the police.”
“Yes.And the parish as well.”
“And the inmate who escaped, what of her?She isn’t in this batch, is she?”
“No, no,” the woman replied firmly.“We do not know where she is.”
“Just as well, I should think.Though she deserves her comeuppance for that ghastly attack.And the paper said an inmate was found dead, Sister?”
A pause.“Yes.But by her own hand, God rest her soul.”
“Mm.Well.Fortunately we have better security here for the staff than you have at St.Agnes’s.The fourth-floor staff quarters are secured for just this sort of reason.These girls are always better off in cells than running wild in dormitories.Give them an inch and they take a mile, every time.”Barrowtsked.“Now…get them lined up against that wall there and we’ll process them through my office.I was told there would be eighteen, is that right?”
“Correct.”
“Any of them due to give birth imminently?”
“Two or three, in the next month or so.I’m sorry, but may I ask what that odour is?”
The warden let out a dramatic sigh.“A lice outbreak.We have it under control.”
There was a clipping of heels and Emily stepped back from the door just as the warden appeared there.Their eyes met.
“What are you doing, Radcliffe?”Barrow snapped.“Get away from the door.Go sit until your hour is up.”She grasped the doorknob and yanked it shut with a snap.
“Oh, this tastes like summer, doesn’t it?”Emily said, popping one of the five local strawberries on her plate into her mouth and biting down, revelling in the explosion of tangy juice.The strawberries were the first fresh fruit—aside from bruised apples—that Emily had seen since her arrival at the Mercer.The girls on dinner prep duty had reported to anyone who would listen that the fruit had been delivered by the uncle of one of the inmates.He had a farm just outside the city, near Brampton.Emily was already dreaming of the autumn harvest she loved, the corn, squash, parsnips, and the pumpkin tarts her mother made every Thanksgiving.She would miss it this year, but she knew Bess would put up preserves and freeze the pies for Christmas.
As the weeks wore on, Emily felt a greater sense of accomplishment at the information she’d collected so far.The gasoline treatment, as horrendous as it had been, seemed to have had some effect on the lice infestation, though Emily’s scalp still burned in some places where she was sure the skin was permanently damaged.Once she was out, she would visit her family physician and have him take a look.But what she wouldn’t give now for a jar of Pond’s Cold Cream to soothe it.
Annie hesitated, a plump berry between her small fingers.“It does taste like summer,” she said, as half a sad smile pulled at her lips.“They’ve always been my favourite.There were loads of strawberry fields outside the town I grew up in.We had them in my backyard as a child, too.I’d eat them as soon as they ripened on the bush, before the rabbits got them.It used to drive my mother mad.She loved canning jellies, but she never canned a thing from that strawberry patch.”She chuckled.“She had to go to one of the market stalls on the edge of town.I’d help her in the kitchen,” she added.“It was my job to sit and watch the jars, make sure the lids all wentpopwhen the seals formed.And she’d let me lick the mixing spoon while I waited.”
Emily always sat with Annie Little now at breakfast, then Eliza, Lizzie, Peggy, and Gertrude at dinner and supper, when Annie sat with another psychiatric inmate who was hesitant about other company.Emily felt the matrons keeping a closer eye on her lately, surely wondering whyshe had chosen to befriend one of the Blues.But so far they’d said nothing.And Annie, it turned out, was a calm and interesting conversationalist now that Emily had gotten her talking.
“No one ever asks me questions,” she’d told Emily, “except medically related ones.I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone in years.Talking to you has made me feel a bit like myself again.Alive.”
She came from a small town, was married at twenty and moved to Toronto when her husband got a job at an architectural firm.He’d gone to Trinity College and always wanted to return to the city, so they did.Thinking Annie was settled, her parents had moved to Ottawa when her father was elected to the House of Commons in 1945.He’d been re-elected four times since.
“It sounds like you had a good relationship with your mother,” Emily ventured as she shovelled toast into her mouth.She didn’t want to hurt Annie, but couldn’t help asking the next obvious question.“Do they write?”
Annie fixed her with an expression that was both sad and wry.“No.My mother used to, but having a lunatic daughter isn’t good for my father’s professional reputation, now is it?If anyone found out, he’d be ruined.”
Emily ceased eating, then exhaled heavily, thinking how lucky she was to have the father she did.She pictured the mischievous smirk on William’s face the night she’d told him about this mission, and how he had fought to support her.She thought of how, as dusk had settled on their backyard and cigar smoke curled over his head like a question mark, he asked her how she was going to get this story.Not whether shecould; how shewould.He had an inherent belief in her abilities, and the thought nearly brought tears to her eyes right there in the dining hall.Oh, how she missed him.She’d sent one letter so far, in coded language, telling her parents she was all right.She would send another this week, but would need to leave out the lice infestation or it would never get delivered.
“Have they ever met your son?”Emily asked.
Annie inclined her head.“Mother has, yes.Not Father, I don’t think.”
Emily was becoming enraged by Annie’s continued incarceration, and was already determined to try to advocate for her release—somehow—atthe end of her own sentence, even before the article was published, if she could.Although, if the article had the impact Emily hoped for, it might be enough to at least trigger some sort of official investigation, which might then lead to Annie’s release regardless.Emily had tried and failed to imagine what it would be like to meet your fifteen-year-old child whom you hadn’t seen since birth.Equal parts terrifying and elating, surely.Annie didn’t talk about the future much, though, and Emily understood why.
Strawberries consumed, Emily shook some salt and pepper onto her scrambled egg now in a desperate attempt to coax some flavour out of it.
“It feels a bit different in here now, doesn’t it?”she said to Annie, raising her voice over the chatter.The dining hall was notably louder with the addition of the eighteen girls from the shuttered maternity home, who tended to cluster together at a couple of the large round tables.It must have come as quite a shock, Emily supposed, to find themselves in a prison, but word had spread as fast as the lice that the other maternity homes in the city were full.Theirs had shut, the sedulous rumour mill reported, because one of the residents had stabbed their headmistress and hanged herself in the foyer.Apparently the girls were all openly talking about it; one of them had even seen the body.However, with no access to a newspaper, there was no way for Emily to verify the story.Still, it seemed likely that it was all true, since the home had shut down suddenly, leaving the expectant girls with nowhere to go.Only the four nearest their due dates had been removed to the few vacancies available at the other maternity homes around the city.The rest were relegated to the Mercer.
Emily wondered why some girls pregnant out of wedlock were sent to more comfortable maternity homes to begin with, while others, like Vera, were consigned immediately to prison.Based on the scope of the Female Refuges Act, it might simply have been a matter of how angry and vengeful their parents had become at news of the pregnancy.Some families reported it to the police as an “incorrigible” offence, while others clamped down on it with a morality-driven vise as they shipped their girls off in secrecy, determined to smother the misdeed with a blanket of discretion.
“Yes,” Annie said now, eyes on the new inmates.“We’ve been this full before, but not for a while.I like it better when there’s more people, though.The Blues don’t stick out quite so much in the crowd.”She chewed her lower lip.“It used to bother me, seeing the expectant girls.But I had to get used to it if I wanted to be let out of the psych ward for mealtimes.”
Emily nodded sympathetically.“I imagine it’s incredibly difficult, Annie.I’m sorry.”
