She had given them the name of her solicitor, and her sister’s husband, who was a viscount, though her sister and her husband were currently on holiday in Italy.
No one had yet come for her.
This seemed impossible. Unreal. Nearly the whole of her life someone had always known precisely where she was at any given time.
Her brother and father were currently in America, in New York, visiting. She was meant to travel to New York in a week in the company of a couple she knew from her childhood parish, Mr. and Mrs. Harper. She ought to be finishing up packing right at this moment.
It seemed nothing in her life, and yet everything in her life, had prepared her for being abandoned in a prison. She was three people at once in this moment: the one who was comprised of pure terror; the one floating over her body with a sense of unreality; and the diplomat, who, despiteherself, remained curious, kind, respectful, and sparkling, adroitly managing the circumstances without anyone quite realizing that this was precisely what she was doing.
“Ye mun ’ave a lot of time on yer ’ands if ye can waste it on words like misunnerstannin’.” Bunty spat on the floor, as if the word was an insect she’d accidentally ingested.
“Oh, no, she’s right busy,” Agnes defended stoutly. “Getting blood out of clothes and the like.”
Bunty’s eyes traveled Alexandra speculatively from head to toe.
“I’ll just ’ave them shoes off yer, will I?” she decided to say threateningly, at last.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Alexandra replied pleasantly but firmly. She tucked her satin-slippered feet beneath her skirt.
Would she fight for her slippers if she needed to? She decided she would. She was fit enough. What she lacked in size she could perhaps make up for in stamina. Even if Bunty’s biceps looked like little cannonballs tucked under her sleeves.
Agnes had shared with her that a previous cellmate had managed to hide in her skirts the leg of a broken stool, which she’d patiently, surreptitiously sharpened to a lethal point over a period of weeks. She’d used it to attack the warden. But Alexandra didn’t have weeks to fashion a weapon.
How had her life come to this? How had her life narrowed to a single point? At least prison wasdefinitive. For the past five years, she’d lived in a sort of in-between world, a sort of pampered purgatory,admittedly of her own making. She had recently taken steps to break away from it: she was meant to begin a journey to New York to visit her brother in about a week’s time, traveling from Liverpool on a Black Ball packet. She had no real desire to spend six weeks at sea. But she needed a change, and she wanted to be with people who loved her, to be reminded that she was a person who could be loved.
And while Bunty stared at her with her flat, dark eyes, Alexandra’s overtaxed senses, pitched like a small prey animal’s for new dangers, sensed almost at once that something had disturbed the usual rhythms of the prison.
Along the block of cells, a hush was creeping toward them. A bit like a slow, oily tide.
The volume of the ceaseless human sounds was tapering, gradually, into murmurs.
And then into silence.
The notion that something—or someone—existed who could actually put the fear of God into this desperate place ramped Alexandra’s ambient terror. Her heart, which had not beat at a normal pace from the moment she’d arrived, punched the walls of her chest.
Presently it was so quiet through the whole prison ward that she could hear, for the first time, both the jingle of the warden’s keys and the echo of his footfall.
It was accompanied by another footfall.
This one was heavier than the warden’s and quite obviously boot-heeled.
Twice she detected the slightest of hesitationsin one of those steps. It was almost, but not quite, a limp.
Suspicion clubbed her.
It must be. Oh, dear God. But how?
Surely not?
For a maniacal instant the gallows seemed preferable.
Because she knew of only one other person who could cause such a hush. One other person with that hesitant gait.
Salvation and damnation in the flesh.
In other words: her husband.
She hadn’t seen him in five years.
