Chapter 3
That night, Kate managed to fall asleep despite the protestations of her belly and the stench of her surroundings. The guard at their door had taken some small pity on them and put some blankets through the bars to cover the women while they huddled together on the damp hay to sleep, and a stale, hard lump of bread was tossed in to them.
She knew that she dreamed every night, but her dreams were never of any real substance, just images mixed up and rearranged of things that happened before in her life or exaggerations of imaginings she might have upon seeing something odd or startling.
On this night, she thought she was dreaming for a long time before she realised she was awake. Once she did, she sat up in fright, listening. Her jostling woke some of the other women.
“Go back to sleep, darlin’,” one of them said, as though to a child.
“Listen,” Kate said, sitting up straighter still.
“What is it, Kitty?”
The women who were still asleep started to stir as the noise Kate had heard began to register in their own consciousnesses. There was a low howling that at first could have been mistaken for the wind, but when they listened, they knew it wasn’t. It was a woman screaming, though at a very low volume, and then it began to grow louder. All of the women were awake now, and they took stock to see if any of their number were missing—they were all still there. They could hear the guards moving around a little, and then the screaming grew even louder, until there was no denying what it was anymore. It was a woman screaming, and the sound was coming from somewhere up in the tower.
“Olocher is killing someone up there!” the women shouted at the guards.
“Be quiet!” one of them snapped back, but his attention was on the stairs, where he could hear the other guards calling out to one another and asking what was going on. His face was scared and white in the darkness.
“Olocher’s asleep in his bed,” someone called down, but the screaming was still going and getting louder.
And then a new noise began, not unlike the first but from outside this time, and the women looked through the bars. They could see pigs, many more than would be usual, and they were whining lowly, in the same way as the screaming from upstairs.
“It’s the banshee!” one of the women said, and no one troubled to correct her. They clutched closer together in natural defensiveness. Outside, the porcine chorus grew in intensity, and the guards looked out to see what was happening. The squeals from the wild animals grew frenzied, and an agitation began to run through them, as though they were in pain. The squealing grew to such a pitch that it was painful to listen to, and all the women and the guards had to cover their ears.
“What the fuck is going on here?” James Brick asked, bursting into the courtyard just above the steps to the dungeon. He was pulling on a coat over his nightclothes.
“We don’t know,” was the inept reply from one of the guards.
“What is this noise?” Brick shouted above the din.
“Pigs outside the gate.”
“Pigs?” Brick was clearly confused but also a little relieved.
“There’s another noise coming from up there, but the guards up there say Olocher is asleep in his bed, and they don’t know where the noise is coming from.”
Just then, there was a terrific thump at the wooden gates of the prison.
“Now what?” Brick said exasperatedly, the apprehension back in his face.
“Someone’s trying to get in!” a guard called out.
“Where are the soldiers?” Brick called out. There was another massive thump against the gates, and they creaked with the force of it.
“Keep your hair on in there,” a voice called from without the gates. It was one of the soldiers who was guarding from outside. “It’s these bleedin’ pigs bashing against the gate!” They could hear him trying to shoo the animals, and they heard the heavy, wet slap of the soldier’s baton on the back flesh of the pigs. “There’s a fuckin’ tonne of them out here,” he went on. The squealing was reaching a point where nothing else could be heard. More thumping came against the gates, but it was almost silent at this point, a visual throbbing of wood pulse in the lantern-fire-sparkled shadow play.
The noise was unbearable now, and though men were talking and shouting, no voice could be heard save that of the screaming pigs and the original scream of no fixed origin. Everyone had their ears covered, and no one knew what to do, so all stood rooted to where they were. Kate could feel the trembling of the women about her as some cried and others shook as if trying to rid themselves of the sounds in their heads or to wake themselves from what was clearly, to them at least, a terrible nightmare.
Then all the noises stopped, and there was silence. For ten seconds, not a soul moved. Kate looked out the window; she could see the army of pigs dispersing down different streets, some stopping and sniffing at the kerbsides for food but otherwise acting as the normal nuisance that they were.
“Check on Olocher,” the soldier from outside shouted in, but it was said with no immediacy.
“Do it,” Brick said, and the women’s guard left his post and ran up the stairs. Kate listened to his feet slapping on the stone steps and then heard the rattle of keys and his voice from the distance—“Get up there now”—and then she heard the heavy clanking of the lock and the door of the cell opening. There was silence for a moment.
Kate had a terrible feeling in her body at this silence. She was imagining the guard going to the bed where Thomas Olocher was sleeping and drawing back the blanket to find it stuffed with hay, and no sign of Olocher. She imagined him loose in the gaol and somehow being in this very room right now, waiting to kill them as they slept. She could almost hear his echoed breathing against the cold stone walls. Involuntarily, she darted glances around the room, and though there was none big enough to hide a man of any size, every black space multiplied the terror in her soul.
“He’s escaped” she heard herself say. The others looked at her in horror, and it was clear to her that they’d all had the same idea, though none was happy that it had been spoken aloud.
There was a commotion of running and talking from those up in the tower, and the women’s fears seemed to be correct. They huddled closer together and waited grimly for the news that he had escaped.
“You better come here, sir,” one of the guards called down.
“Why? What's going on?” Brick asked. (He was known not to like walking up those stairs if he could avoid it.)
“You better come see.” The voice came back down, leaning in tone towards something dreadful.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Brick said as he began to ascend the stairs.
“Wait!” one of the women called out. “We have no guard.”
Brick looked in at the women.
“You’ll be fine for a few minutes,” he said scornfully, and he continued on up. The women listened again for that dreaded word “escaped.” The gaoler seemed to take an age shuffling up those stairs, and there was no longer any commotion or noise anywhere else.
When he finally got to the top, the women could hear some speaking. Then the gaoler cried out, “What? How?” and the women confirmed their horrid beliefs.
“Oh God, what are we going to do?” one of them wailed.
“It’s ok, Betty,” Kate said, rubbing her arm. “Don’t forget, we’re still locked in here, and it’s as hard to get in as it is to get out.”
“Shhh, I can’t hear. What's going on?” the woman closest to the cell door said. They all listened again, and they could hear what seemed to be the voice of Brick muttering about something, but no one else was speaking. In a few moments, they heard the heavy boots of the soldiers as they came down the stairs. When the soldiers got to the bottom of the stairs, they stood at the gate and opened the hatch, and one of them said something to the soldier outside.
“What’s going on?” Betty called out to them. One of the soldiers looked into the cell and surveyed the women, proba
bly trying to see if he been a customer of any of them.
“You don’t have to worry your pretty little heads, darlins,” he said.
“Why is that?” Betty asked.
“Our old pal Olocher is dead.”
“Dead?” Kate asked, though there were no questions from the rest—they were just relieved to be out of mortal danger.
“Killed himself with a blade he must have smuggled in,” the soldier said, and he left them and went back to the other soldier in the yard.
At this point, the women knew there was going to be no sleep tonight. An officer from the army was first to arrive, followed closely by an army doctor and then some men who looked like they might be involved in the legal profession. There were comings and goings all night, and the gaoler was obviously under severe pressure to explain why this had been able to happen.
“Was he not searched when he got here?” the officer asked, incredulous.
“He came straight from the courthouse under armed guard. I was sure he would have been searched already,” Brick replied.
“What type of a prison are you running here, you idiot!” the officer shouted. Brick was displeased in the extreme, but he was too clever to answer back and make things worse for himself. Kate, however, had no shame about enjoying his squirms and embarrassment.
The same questions were asked throughout the night, and in all the furore about Olocher’s death, it was almost possible to forget about the wailing and the screeching of the pigs outside. Kate wondered if it had indeed been the banshee—the ancient foreteller of death—they’d heard. And then she wondered about the three knocks that also signalled death. Had that been how many times the pigs had barraged against the gates? She couldn’t be sure, but she thought so.
“That was the oddest thing with the pigs, wasn’t it?” she said to the others.
“I’ve never heard of or seen anything like it in me life!” Betty replied.
“What was it all about?” another of the women asked, but none among them had even a guess to make. It was baffling beyond description, especially since there were so many pigs about the streets in general, and everyone was used to their habits by now.