Chapter One
Three of them were thieves (a silver candlestick, a half dozen handkerchiefs, a wheel of cheese, respectively), another one
was a forger, and the fifth one had stabbed her husband in the leg. Alexandra was the only one wearing a gold shot-silk ball
gown, which was probably why the others had circled her like wolves around a lame deer when she'd been brought into the cell.
The matrons had taken her hairpins from her lest she decide to impale someone with them—this notion had never once occurred
to her in her life, but was apparently often taken at Newgate—and this left Alexandra with only one defense. She was going
to have to charm them.
She'd leaned forward and confided conspiratorially, to Agnes, the husband stabber, "I've a wonderful receipt for getting bloodstains
out of your clothes. Lemon juice and kerosene."
Two hours later they were all cozily clustered about her like guests at a dinner party. She had learned their first names, their alleged crimes, and three verses of "The Ballad of Colin Eversea," a bawdy song in which the word "cock" liberally featured. No doubt because so many things rhymed with it.
Alexandra's crime was the group favorite because they all thought she was making it up.
Because the light in the prison ranged from sludgy gray to sludgy pitch, it was difficult to know how many hours had passed
since she'd been brought in—perhaps twenty-four?—but she hadn't closed her eyes since she'd arrived. Her neck felt sticky;
her loosely knotted hair sat heavily on her nape. She was certain the entirety of her person was coated with an invisible
layer of filth, which hung in the atmosphere the way fog hung over London. All of her senses were excruciatingly heightened,
which was both necessary and a pity, as the smell was an unholy potpourri of human effluence, and the cacophony (sobs, curse
words, bitter arguments, shrieks, snores, farts) was ceaseless.
Straw had been strewn on the floor, as this was where they were meant to sleep. If it was good enough for cows, apparently
it was good enough for them. There wasn't enough room for mattresses.
She understood viscerally now why people spoke of "the fibers of their being." For the first time she was acutely aware of
hers, and they were all perilously stretched.
The warden—whose appearance was usually heralded by a jingle of keys and shouted invective and obscene suggestions from all the women locked in the cells—had just installed a new pris oner in their cell and departed. That made seven of them now crammed into the space.
"Bunty," she announced. This was apparently the new prisoner's name. "I clouted me employer in the head."
"Alexandra stole an entire carriage ," Agnes proudly informed the newcomer, essentially declaring her allegiance. "Horses and all. A carriage belonging to a duke ." She elbowed Alexa whimsically and winked.
Bunty assessed Alexandra through unimpressed, narrowed dark eyes.
"Cooorrrr, Alexandra, is it? Ain't ye a rascal , then." The words were flatly ironic. She flexed hands the size of pitchforks. "They'll 'ang ye for stealin' a carriage."
Everyone had, in fact, already pointed this out to Alexandra.
"Thankfully, I did not steal a carriage, so there will be no hanging," Alexandra replied lightly. Her mouth had gone sandy; her voice was hoarse.
"It was all a silly misunderstanding."
"Doesn't she talk pretty? Misunderstandin ' ," Agnes imitated loftily, and everyone laughed, including Alexandra, because she wasn't a fool.
"Never ye mind, lass. Ye've a wee skinny neck, and t'will snap like a twig when they yank the noose." Lizzy, the cheese thief,
gave Alexandra's thigh a reassuring pat. "Ye'll doubtless not feel a thing."
She was absurdly touched. She knew this was what passed for kindness here. "Thank you, Lizzy."
Lizzy normally stole handkerchiefs and watch fobs. She had given Alexandra a lot of advice on how to do both (men are easily distractible idiots; "when in doubt, show 'em yer teats" is what it boiled down to, she claimed) and even a pantomime demonstration. She'd stolen a wheel of cheese because she was pregnant and therefore always ravenous, and she'd gotten caught trying to smuggle it out of a shop under her dress.
How outlandishly studded with blessings Alexandra's life was. She supposed she'd always known that. When she was free from
here—surely she would be?—she would count them over and over, like a miser with his gold.
But now her head felt light as blown glass. So far she'd been given one lumpy beige meal in a bowl, because it was apparently
important to keep criminals alive until the court said they could go ahead and kill them. She was ashamed that she hadn't
been able to eat it. Nerves had obliterated hunger pangs, and revulsion had done the rest. She'd given her meal to Lizzy.
"Tell Bunty your story," Lizzy urged.
Alexandra obligingly turned to Bunty. "My dear friend, Lord Thackeray, who is my third cousin, was given permission to borrow
the carriage of the duke, with whom he is acquainted—"
"Ha! A duke! That there is my favorite part of the story!" Agnes gleefully interjected.
"—who is up in years and quite forgot that he'd loaned his carriage and alerted the authorities and they took us away. It's merely a mistake and I'm confident all will be resolved soon."
She had told this story three times. They loved it. They all thought it was a fairy tale.
Alexandra was half beginning to believe it was, too.
The "resolved soon" part of it, that was.
Because not one of the prison officials seemed to believe she was who she claimed to be. Then again, there were moments she
found it difficult to believe, too.
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, despite herself, 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 was definitive . 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 hesitations in 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.
Colonel Magnus Brightwall peered into the cage in which his wife was being held. His eyes seemed bright as windows in the
gloom.
He found her at once.
Alexandra's breathing had gone shallow. She was sorely tempted to duck, but she refused to allow her gaze to drop from his.
Damned if she would ever appear abject before him. Even as her heart pummeled away inside her.
She vividly recalled her very first sight of him almost five years ago, standing amid his luggage in the foyer of her family
home. In the blazing light of noon his shadow had fallen nearly entirely across the circular marble expanse, like a giant
compass needle.
He turned to the warden. "I assume she told you she was my wife."
By rights, one would expect such an imposing man's voice to boom like a cannon. But it was an elegant, smoky-edged bass. The first words he had ever said to her were A pleasure, Miss Bellamy , just after her father had introduced them.
Never had the word "pleasure" sounded so profound.
The warden's Adam's apple bobbed when he swallowed.
"It's... it's... just that so many of them claim to be your wife, Colonel Brightwall, we took it quite for granted she
was lying. They all lie. About everything."
"Coorrr, look at the size of 'im!" Agnes whispered gleefully. "Ye're just full of surprises, Alexandra. Brightwall the Beast hisself."
Alexandra stared at him. Her mind was static. She felt as though she'd never learned how to form words. Her heart was now
beating so hard the blood rang in her ears.
"Let her out." Brightwall's voice was calm.
The warden cleared his throat. "Colonel Brightwall. As a man all too familiar with bureaucracies, surely you understand we
have a formal process. I fear we cannot just allow an inmate to stroll out of the..."
His ability to speak apparently evaporated when Brightwall fixed upon him an expression of scathing amazement.
"The process is this, sir." He said it almost tenderly. It was the tone one might use to administer last rites. "You unlock the cell. I depart with my wife. Her name is forever struck from your rolls, thereby also eliminating the record of the appallingly grave error made in incarcerating her. Do you require further clarification?"
" Brrr . Has anyone else's nips gone hard?" Agnes murmured.
The warden shook himself out of the trance of Brightwall's icy gaze and pivoted. The keys frantically jingled in his now-trembling
hand. He stabbed at the keyhole and missed for a few torturous seconds.
Finally it fitted in.
The fateful clunk was heard as the cell door unlocked.
Everyone exhaled.
Alexandra surreptitiously pressed clammy palms against her skirt and stood from her spot on the floor. Black spots scudded
in front of her eyes and she nearly swayed. She took a last long, deep breath of fetid prison air, gathering courage for another
kind of ordeal. She knew she would never forget the smell.
The warden stepped aside so she could exit and then at once slammed the cell door and turned the key.
And for the first time in five years, she tipped her head back to take in the dizzying view that was her husband.
He'd always seemed to her hacked from granite in stark, almost brutal, lines: a jaw made of severe, hard angles, a bold nose, battlement cheekbones, legs like pillars, a shoulder span nearly twice the width of her. A few tiny pinprick scars were scat tered in the hollow of his cheeks. Another thin, white scar bisected a thick, dark eyebrow. He had survived both illness and combat.
When she'd first met him, she'd been unable to decide whether he was ugly or magnificent.
But even in the gloom of Newgate, he looked indestructible.
I do think we'll suit, Alexandra , he'd said gently, the day he'd proposed.
Two months after they'd met.
He had brushed his lips across her knuckles.
She was fairly certain he was seething now. It was difficult to tell. He excelled at cool inscrutability.
He'd been seething the last time she'd seen him, too. But then, she'd given him a good reason.
In her current dazed state, she could almost imagine he'd seethed nonstop for the nearly five years he'd been in Spain.
She turned to the warden. "Thank you," she told him. As though he'd been her host for the evening. Because she was well-bred,
and the social niceties were what knit the world together.
"Madam." The warden bowed ironically.
Brightwall did not extend his arm to her.
Ah. So he was seething.
She supposed she could hardly blame him, given the circumstances of their reunion.
But she was certain the warden would notice that sort of thing, and he would likely happily tell everyone of his acquaintance
who would listen that Brightwall refused to touch his estranged wife.
Her husband opted for a subtle, ironic "shall we?" gesture with his chin instead. Clearly the outside of a jail cell wasn't the place for the get-reacquainted chat.
She smoothed her palms down her skirts and rearranged her shoulders and took her place by his side.
Thusly, much the way she'd been installed into a cage by a man, another man retrieved her from it, as if she was a parakeet
with clipped wings.
Lack of sleep and the steady diet of terror and acute, constant alertness made her feel as separate from her body as a kite
aloft on a string. As though she did not belong to herself anymore.
"Fare thee well, Alexandra! I'll name me bairn for you!" Lizzy called after her.
She turned around. Suddenly, bizarrely, her heart ached at the sight of those eyes staring at her through bars.
She was reminded of something Magnus had once said to her on a sweet, breezy spring day, about heroes, scoundrels, and boors,
and how applying a label to someone could be a foolish tactical move. She hadn't realized then that he saw the whole of life
the way a chess master saw a chessboard.
And that included people.
And that included her.
"Oh, thank you, Lizzy," Alexandra called. "I'm honored. Godspeed and good luck, ladies." She paused a beat. "And Bunty."
Bunty spat again on the floor.
"Good luck to you ," Agnes called. "I think ye was safer in 'ere."