‘Go, go, live your godless life,’ he called down the stairs as I stormed out of the vicarage for the last time, my sister Jane watching silent and ashen-faced. ‘And when you’re alone and penniless, rotting in a debtors’ gaol, do not come begging to me.’
And now his prediction had come to pass. I cursed the memory, spat the bitterness away and walked out into the prison.
The Marshalsea is an old gaol – centuries old. Its buildings are a peculiar hodgepodge, some brick, some timber, set in a quadrangle around a cobbled yard close to an acre in size. There were perhaps two dozen prisoners outside that first morning, men and women, some walking up and down in a distracted fashion, others talking and smoking and laughing, as if they had chanced to meet in the street. I watched them quietly in the shadow of the Lodge, settling my nerves and waiting for the best moment to step into the arena.
The Lodge gate was the only way in and out of the prison, unless you were suicidal enough to try scaling the walls. To my left was a two-storeyed timber house with bright yellow curtains and a low wooden fence about the door – the governor’s house, I discovered later. A tree shaded the windows – the only one in the prison and a mangled, sickly thing at that. Beyond the governor’s lodgings this west side of the prison was given up to a high wall crowned with iron spikes, where men played rackets.
The north wall was much longer and began with a terrace of three rundown houses. These, I learned, were the prison wards, with twenty large rooms in all. Most cells were occupied by at least three men – often twice or even three times that. The best rooms were at the front on the first floor; they were larger, and looked out into the yard. I could see a few pale faces at the windows, men smoking and drinking or staring dejectedly into thin air.
At the end of these three terraced buildings was a tall, narrow house, kept in a much better state than its neighbours. The turnkeys’ lodgings took up all of the ground-floor rooms while the prison chapel lay on the floor above, with a large window facing the yard. What God made of the view below I couldn’t say.
At the end of this north row stood a handsome brick building, five storeys high and wider than all its neighbours put together. It seemed to look down its nose at the rest of the prison, like a duke forced to live cheek by jowl with his peasants. A small crowd sheltered beneath its long, colonnaded porch, watching a game of backgammon.
