The cell in which they lodged him was a seven-foot cube with an opaque leaded window the size of a handkerchief. Moonlight was vaguely discernible through the greasy grating. Mulvey sat on the floor and began to count the black bricks. By the time he got to a hundred ‘lights-out’ was called and what he had thought was the moonlight was briskly extinguished. He heard the slam of cell doors receding down his landing like the doors of a train preparing to leave a station. Something small with a tail scurried across his bare feet. It was quite a short time afterwards when the screaming started; he heard it echoing up from the landings below. Mulvey didn’t understand it; there was little point in screaming. It was only the next day that he learned what lay behind it. The prisoners had more to contend with than mere incarceration. The Governor of Newgate had progressive ideas.
The loneliness of the cell at night was something for which Mulvey had had time to prepare. Solitude was part of the condition of Connemara. What stunned him was that isolation was also enforced by day. Companionship was bad for men in prison, so went the Governor’s idealistic policy; the evil of the hardened would infect the merely misguided. Association of any kind was not allowed: not even with the guards or the Visiting Committee. Any human relationship was the enemy of reform, an act of unchristian cruelty to the already unfortunate prisoner and by extension to the civilisation he might hope one day to rejoin. When he was taken from his cell for his exercise or his work detail each inmate was clamped into a black leather hood before being allowed to enter the yard. The mask had minuscule slits through which you might see and an arrangement of pinpricks through which you might breathe and it was bolted around your neck with a padlock and choke-chain that would strangle you if you raised your arms above your head. More to the point, it made each man equally unrecognisable; absolutely identical to all his fellows, as they broke the stones or turned the treadmill and ceased to do evil and learned to do well.
It was put about by the more enthusiastically progressive of the guards that they, too, sometimes donned the masks; so you could never tell exactly who was working beside you, who was screaming and clawing at the air. Were his agonies real or a matter of performance? If you were being reformed, that wouldn’t matter. You would be aware that conversation was forbidden under pain of the scourge. If an inmate was heard by a warder to have spoken to another, he would receive fifty lashes of the bullwhip for every word he had said. If he was unreformed or unwise enough to do it again, he was put into solitary confinement for the remainder of his sentence. There were men in the windowless depths of Newgate who had not seen another life-form for fifteen years. Not a prisoner, nor a guard, nor even a rat: for their cells were so thick that nothing could penetrate them and in any case were kept in darkness every hour of every day. Even at chapel, isolation was maintained. Each inmate knelt in his own partitioned booth from which nothing was visible except the cross above the altar. But they were allowed to sing and to respond to the prayers; so attendance at chapel, though voluntary, was widespread.
Mulvey was regarded as an excellent prisoner. He gave no trouble and made no complaints and the only time he had to be punished – two hundred lashes for saying ‘I didn’t hear you’ – he had taken his scourging like a man. Alone in his cell he had wept that night, his back and buttocks flaming with pain, the base of his spine a nub of pure agony; but he discerned a small victory in what had happened. As soon as they opened his handcuffs and ordered him to rise, he had pulled on his britches and his sackcloth shirt and walked straight to the warder who had flailed the flesh off him and held out his hand in a gesture of thanks. He was so dazzled with pain that he could barely see his torturer. He could hardly even stand. But he made himself do it.
The warder, a Scottish sadist who had often raped insane prisoners, and had twice raped Mulvey and threatened to castrate him, had seemed astonished as he accepted his victim’s outstretched hand. Mulvey had put on a penitent face and given a series of small, humble nods. He knew the Governor and the Visiting Committee were watching from the gallery and he wanted to make an enduring impression. As he left the Correction Hall he passed directly beneath them, performing the sign of the cross as he did so. One of the visiting ladies was quietly weeping at the scene, as though the reformation she had just observed was somehow too much for her. Frederick Hall paused and bowed to the lady. As she sobbed and collapsed into the arms of the Governor, Mulvey knew he had won this battle. To allow yourself to be flogged without getting something in return was not just unmanly; it was stupid.
Never again was he whipped or punished. On the contrary, he began to be given small privileges. He noticed that the guards were opening his door before anyone else’s; leaving it ajar after lights-out was called. One night they failed to close it at all so he closed it himself as a warder was passing, making sure that the officer could see what he was doing. Learning that he could read, the Governor arranged for him to be given some books. A bible at first, then a Complete Works of Shakespeare. Prisoner Hall wrote to the Governor to express his thanks, being careful to say he was undeserving of such luxuries and to ask for nothing else. A week later more books arrived, along with a tilly-lamp by which he might read at night. By now he had learned something important about English authority. The less you asked for, the more you got.
He read the bible completely, then all of Shakespeare, then the fables of Aesop and the lives of the poets. Milton quickly became his favourite; he read all twelve volumes of Paradise Lost. The description of Hell in the opening book – where ‘hope never comes that comes to all’ – reminded him strongly of tormented Newgate. O how unlike the place from whence they fell. But the thunder of the language utterly thrilled him: the fiery march of the imperial rhythms. It became his secret amusement to baptise the warders with the weird names of Milton’s devils. Moloch and Belial, Asmadai and Baalim. The Governor he silently thought of as Mulciber, the architect of Pandemonium.
He grew fitter and stronger than he had ever been. The regime meant regular food and regular sleep, both enforced by the dread of punishment. (Prisoner Refused Supper: thirty lashes. Awake After Lights-Out: a week in solitary.) Tobacco, snuff and alcohol were forbidden, so his lungs grew cleaner and his thinking more clear. Work had hardened his muscles to rocklike bulges. By the end of Mulvey’s second year in Newgate he was able to lift his own body-weight in broken stones. Even the solitude rarely bothered him any more. ‘The mind is its own place,’ Milton contended, ‘and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell.’ If that wasn’t quite true, it was certainly worth the effort. Mulvey came to think of the door of his cell as keeping out the crazies rather than keeping him in.
In time he was moved to a larger cell, the window of which looked down over the Gate-House. At night he could see the guards chatting and joking with the small army of beggars who congregated outside, pleading to be given shelter for the night. It was widely known among the poor of London that the Newgate screws would sometimes let you in for a penny; permit you to sleep in an unoccupied cell.
It took him a while to reckon how he might turn the view to his advantage, but before too long the answer came to him. If you kept watch through the window early in the morning you could see prisoners being released at the end of their sentence. Their names were read aloud by the Sergeant-at-Arms in the gateway, and if you earwigged very carefully you might just make them out. Even if you didn’t, you could notice on your way to the yard which cells had been emptied that morning and were now in the process of being de-loused. If you put these facts together and waited for your moment you were in a situation of considerable power without danger.
No man in Newgate could inform on another and hope to live to the end of that week. But you could say what you liked about those who were no longer inside without any fear of retribution. Mulvey began a careful programme of reporting to the Governor, always snitching on a prisoner whom he knew had just been released. You couldn’t do it often or it would look too suspicious; but once in a while it could make you appear
zealous, particularly if you did it in tones of regret. ‘Inmate C34 talked last night, sir.’ ‘B92 proposed an indecency to me, sir.’ ‘F71 told me his name, sir. I’m concerned he might be interfering with my being reformed, sir.’ Mulvey’s co-operative attitude to authority was noted; it began to gain him rich returns.
He sensed the other prisoners turn against him. In the yard they stopped looking at him, or handing him tools. Mulvey didn’t care. If anything, he was glad. The more he was ostracised, the more the authorities regarded him as one of their successes. He was asked to attend before the Visiting Committee where he gave a powerful speech in favour of the separation system. Mouse-droppings began to appear in his gruel; a shard of glass secreted in a cake of soap sliced open his forearm. He thought of these tribulations as forms of promotion, rites of passage to a higher state. He started slashing his own skin whenever that was possible, reporting attacks on his person that had never happened. Every time he did it he was moved to a more comfortable cell, until finally he was moved to the Governor’s own house, where only the very richest of criminals were lodged and the cells had feather beds and wallpaper.
Half-way through the fortieth month of his sentence he was given a special duty as a reward for his progress. One prisoner was needed to tidy the lower yard at night, to grease the gears and clean the chain of the treadmill, to scrape the pigeon mess from the flagstones and bollards. Such a man, said the Governor, was a lucky man indeed, for he would be required to perform this important work alone and thus would be excused the wearing of his mask. He would also be permitted to speak to the warder-on-duty, but purely about matters of work. The official minutes of the meeting record that Prisoner Hall was seen to weep with gratitude. ‘God bless you, sir, for I don’t deserve it.’
The lower yard was bounded on three sides by the guardhouse and cellblocks. The fourth side was enclosed by a twenty-foot wall, mortared into the top of which was a barrier of rotating spikes; a cheval-de-frise in the English dictionary, ‘the death-horse’ in Newgate’s implacable vernacular. In the angle where the wall abutted on the guardhouse, about five feet below the iron-thorned summit, a small metal cistern was poorly secured; and in a tight space above it there were no spikes.
It seemed curious to Mulvey that such a space had been left unprotected. It was as though the cheval-de-frise had been made nine inches too narrow, or perhaps the wall had been built too wide. Respectfully he pointed out the oversight to one of the warders. Surely it was a temptation to the more ruthless of Newgate; to those unfortunates less reformed than Mulvey himself. The guard laughed quietly and looked up at the death-horse. The last wretch who had tried to escape had impaled himself so thoroughly that the only way to get him down was to cut away that section. He had died in such atrocious agony that nobody had attempted it again. His screams had been heard fully half a mile away.
The wall and its possibilities began to interest Mulvey.
As he worked, he would position himself in such a way that he could always see it; could note its cracks and small protrusions, the jags where the grout had fallen away. It became his habit to study that wall with the attentiveness of a detective scrutinising a forged banknote. Mentally he divided it into sixteen sections and he made it his task to memorise the details of each. With breadcrumbs and threads and flakes of loose plaster he sketched it out on the floor of his cell. A crumb was a stub-end of brick to which a hand might grasp; a thread was a tiny cleft where a toe could be inserted. With powderings of mortar he attempted to join them, to trace a climbable course from flagstones to cistern. But no matter how you plotted it, it couldn’t be done: not unless you were to sprout an extra hand.
He began to present for his duties earlier than was required of him, to stay in the yard as long as the warder would allow. Often as he worked he would think about his mother, an old saying she would come out with when times were hard at home. No mountain exists which may not be defeated. Jesus will show you the way across.
For two months he considered the problem of the wall, without realising that already he had the means of solving it in his hands. And then it occurred to him. Quietly; simply. Like the click of a key in a complicated lock.
It was a Sunday night in February of 1841. Most of the empire was at peace. Its Queen was celebrating the first anniversary of her marriage, for which instance of happy incest the Padre was conducting a service of thanksgiving. Almost every guilty soul in Newgate attended. The chapel was resounding with gratitude to God.
There is a fountain filled with blood,
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.
He waited, the thief, and he listened to the singing: the prisoners murdering the hymn. The duty guard that night was the flogging Scotsman. It was a blessing Prisoner Hall had truly not expected.
Moloch opened the gate with a key on a chain and Mulvey followed him into the yard. Dusk was falling; everything was golden. The windows of the cells were glimmering with fire. A blackbird was drinking from a puddle in the cobblestones and he cocked a head at the invaders as though he resented them.
The previous morning the treadmill had jammed, as Pius Mulvey knew it would. A nail dropped into its workings had seen to that. Carefully he opened the maple-wood panel that housed the cog-works and pulleys at the base. He unhooked the filthy drive-chain from the teeth of the gears. It was heavier than he had imagined. About twelve feet long.
‘What do you think you’re at?’
Mulvey looked up at his saggy-jowled abuser. An odd thought came into his mind. He wondered if the man might somehow know what was going to happen to him, if perhaps he had awoken early that morning with a vague premonition of pain and doom. Had he wondered, as he bade farewell to his wife, if this were the last time he would say goodbye to anyone? Had he felt as he walked into Newgate Gaol, as his hundreds of broken victims must have felt, and as Mulvey had felt on numberless occasions, that the sun was already going down on his life: that the moment had come for hope to be abandoned?
‘Sir, the Governor asked me to oil the chain, sir.’
With that single lie Mulvey’s escape was effected. His shadow had already broken free from his body and flapped away over the long-studied wall. Lying to a guard was punishable by two months in the basement, in a cell little bigger than a coffin. The one thing he knew was that he would never see that cell. He would go over the wall or they would unskiver his corpse from it. But he would not wake up in Newgate tomorrow.
‘Oil, you say?’
‘Sir, yes, sir. Has to be oiled, sir. Or it won’t work, sir.’
‘He didn’t say nothin about oiling to me.’
‘Sir – I won’t do it if you say so, sir. If you clear it with the Governor, sir. I don’t want to get into no trouble, sir. He seemed very adamant, sir.’
‘Adamant?’
‘Sir, yes, sir.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘Sir, it means keen, sir. That he wanted it done, sir.’
‘Sharp, aren’t you, Mulvey?’
‘Sir, I don’t know, sir. If you say so, sir.’
‘Sharp for the grovelling bastard of a diseased Irish bitch. What are you?’
‘Sir, a grovelling bastard, sir.’
‘What was your mother?’
‘Sir, a diseased Irish bitch, sir.’
‘Well stop lazing, you pimple of mange, if he’s so bloodied adamant. We all know you’re never done annointing his arse.’
Moloch walked away and looked up at the sky. Mulvey quickly slipped off his boots. The blackbird ascended with a flutter to a ledge. The men in the chapel were singing a new song.
O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
He picked up a rock and walked quietly up to the Scottish warder and struck him hard in the back of the skull. As he slumped to the
ground like a ripped sack of shit, Mulvey began beating him hard with the rock, pummelling him in the face until his cheekbones collapsed and his left eye burst open like a shattered egg. He tried to call out and Mulvey stepped on his neck, grinding his foot as though crushing a snake. He began to gurgle and whisper for mercy. It was tempting not to give it to him, to let him suffer before death, but Mulvey told himself that would be needlessly indecent. He sank to his hunkers, murmured an Act of Contrition in his dying rapist’s ear and bashed in what was left of his face with the rock.
He dipped a finger in his victim’s blood and scrawled two lines from Milton on a dusted flagstone.
To do aught good never will be our task,
But ever to do ill our sole delight.
He unbuckled the guard’s belt and took it off him; tied it in a loop through the end link of the drive-chain. Flung it with every splinter of his strength. It sailed heftily upwards, clunking on the wall. Fell back down with a nauseating clangour. The second throw sent the belted link drifting over the summit. Mulvey yanked on it. It began to slide. Stuck in the prongs of the cheval-de-frise.
He took a hard run, somehow clambered up as far as the end of the chain. Climbed its thick links, his naked toes clinging. Grabbed a tight hold on the stanchions of the death-horse. A breeze caught the spikes and spun them slowly. Immediately his hands were flittered with cuts, but he hung on, moving himself – swinging himself – around the upper walls of the yard, until he came to the leaking, corroded cistern. Planted his foot on the ashy rim. It gave a skreeking lurch as it took his weight. His arms were shaking. His hands felt like anvils. A lunge gained him the summit as the cistern crashed into the yard. He clambered over and dropped to the ground, his whole body sopping with blood and rusty water.