Chapter 21 Emily
EMILY
Emily clutched the wet rag against her mouth and nose, eyes shut tight. The fumes from the gasoline were overwhelming, and she was terrified it would splash into her eyes and blind her.
“Just hold still,” the prison hairdresser, Maria, said.
“A few more minutes.” Emily could hear the disgust in her voice as she brushed more of the cold chemical onto Emily’s scalp and strands as though she were applying Miss Clairol.
It dripped down Emily’s neck into the towel tied around her shoulders as the hairdresser tugged at the hair around Emily’s right ear.
Maria was a fourth-generation Italian woman about Emily’s age, whose aspiring career in acting had spiralled into high-end prostitution.
Three months ago, she was caught with a politician of some importance—she refused to say who—at the Windsor Arms Hotel.
She was arrested and sent to the Mercer for a year. He didn’t even lose his job.
Maria had dark eyes, a rosebud mouth worthy of the screen and a sharp tongue that might very well have impeded her professional success.
“You’re lucky you only have to do this once,” she said darkly.
“I’ll be doing it a hundred and twenty bloody times.
” She herself hadn’t been infected yet, and wore a prophylactic plastic cap over her own spectacular head of dark locks.
“My sentence’ll be up by the time I finish murdering all these damn cooties.
And God help my sense of smell. Burned half to hell already, I’m sure. ”
The lice outbreak had spread through the Mercer faster than the fire at the turn of the century that destroyed most of the city’s core. The mites hopped from head to head over the course of two weeks, infesting nearly everyone except the prisoners currently in isolation cells in the basement.
I am certain those lonesome souls sequestered in the claustrophobic bowels of the damp basement had never before had cause to celebrate their punitive seclusion.
“All right, there you are.” Maria fixed a pink plastic shower cap onto Emily’s head with a grunt. “Go sit over there and watch the clock. It needs to sit for an hour, and then we’ll wash it out with water hot enough to cook a lobster.”
“Thanks,” Emily muttered, revolted. She stood and made her way over to the line of chairs against the wall as another inmate took her place in the salon chair.
She noted the time on the clock opposite: 1:16 p.m. At least this was getting her out of her domestics lesson and a decent chunk of her cleaning shift.
Three other women, including Eliza and Peggy, were seated already.
Eliza appeared to be napping, her shower-capped head resting on the wall behind her, and Peggy was crying silently, tears absorbing into the cloth she held over her nose.
Emily didn’t know the third woman, who was staring vacantly at the floor.
Emily ran her tongue over her teeth, swearing she could actually taste the gasoline fumes wafting from her head.
The windows were barred in the hair salon, but the matrons had thrown up the casements in an attempt to filter the air.
She held the cloth to her mouth again, repelled by the situation she found herself in, had put herself in for the sake of the story.
By God…the medical exam had been awful enough, the food a disgrace.
If she was also going to scorch her scalp and its resident vermin, she sure as hell was going to get this story and see her name in that goddamn byline.
That image was the talisman that kept her going, counting down the days to the end of her sentence and the beginning of her career.
“I’ve done this three times now,” Eliza said, not even opening her eyes. “Ev’ry time I been inside, there’s some sorta vermin. Nits. Bedbugs. Even had a rat in me cell once. In the winter. Burrowed into me mattress tryna keep warm.”
Maria scoffed, and Emily could only stare, incredulous. “And you still say this place is better than your home, Eliza?”
Eliza didn’t open her eyes, but nodded. “Yes ma’am.”
Emily sat beside Eliza, imagining, with no small measure of discomfort, the horrid realities of a home that rendered life at the Mercer preferable. Eliza appeared to doze off again, her head nodding, impervious to the fumes that choked her fellow inmates.
A little over twenty minutes later, a commotion in the hallway around Warden Barrow’s office next door caught Emily’s attention. The salon door was open onto the hall for ventilation, and she had a clear view from her seat.
A group of young women Emily didn’t recognize—many of them only teenagers—was clustered together, shuffling around awkwardly with suitcases.
Nearly every girl displayed a rounded, pregnant belly.
Emily stared, uncomprehending. Their expressions were fearful, and several of them spoke to one another, commenting on the fumes.
A voice Emily didn’t recognize called instructions to them to file down the corridor and wait.
She strained her ears, finally isolating the warden’s smooth voice in the clamour, just out of sight.
Glancing at Maria, who was busy now dousing another inmate’s scalp like an arsonist intent on burning the place to the ground, Emily stood and wandered closer to the door, taking several long strides under the pretence of stretching her stiff legs.
“They are spread out over the second and third floors, wherever we’ve found room for them,” Warden Barrow was saying.
“It was good luck that we aren’t currently at capacity.
Here’s the chart. Matron Smith and Matron White can assist the girls with finding their cells—rooms. Are you staying here to get them processed and settled, Sister? ”
“Well, yes, I think so,” a soft voice said. “But then we need to be getting back.”
“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.
” Barrow tsked. “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 went pop when the seals formed. And she’d let me lick the mixing spoon while I waited. ”