So she sits, when she’s too tired to fight any more. Sits with her back to the door and the rough wooden floorboards snagging the skin on the backs of her legs. Her throat is burning, her skull wrapped around with tight bands of tension and pain. She tries to think of George, of the way she feels when she is with him. The life he seems to breathe; the soul of her, drawn patiently from the hard kernel inside by his smile and the touch and the taste of him. She tries to think of her mother – her mother as she was, before the consumption; or Tess on the first afternoon they sneaked out to a public meeting, with her delight painting her face like a rainbow. But the thoughts won’t stay to comfort her. George slips away into silhouette, into shadow, as if distant in her memory. She is left with his outline only, as if he sat with the sun always behind him, and her eyes could not cope with the light. Sickness and death take her mother; gaol, and now the workhouse, take Tess. Cat is back in her cell, with chill, clammy walls and the stink of piss and shit from the pail in the corner; with lice scurrying over her scalp, driving her wild with itching. They were in the bedding. In the ticking of the mattress, the seams and stitching of the meagre blankets. She did not think to check – had never before been anywhere where lice lay in wait like that; waxy grey speckles to swarm the unwary. The stone walls were damp; thick mildew crawled up them, shading the mortar black.
The working-class girls had none of the soft treatment of their middle- and upper-class comrades. No privileges, no luxuries. They were not allowed to write letters, or wear their own clothes. They were allowed out of the cell block for one hour a day, to shuffle around a cramped cobbled yard. Cat and Tess walked together, huddled close, their fingers meshed. Cat tried to make Tess laugh by sharing gossip and making up wild stories about the wardresses, and the other prisoners, and the vast feasts of cake they would eat upon their release. One wardress was the most feared by all the women. She was built like a snake, thin and wiry. All sinew and bone; no hint of a curve to soften her hips or bust. Her face was hard. She had dark hair which she pinned back severely; cold blue eyes; a cruel, lipless mouth turned up at the corners in an expression that had nothing to do with good humour; and a sharp, pointed nose. Cat dubbed her The Crow for this reason, and made up mocking rhymes about her in the long hours she was alone, to sing to Tess as they walked around the yard. Tess didn’t laugh, but she managed to smile. Her eyes were always full of tears, swollen and pink.
The wardresses slapped them for insubordination – a charge that encompassed walking too slowly, or too fast, coughing too much, or swearing, blaspheming, whistling, singing, talking back. By the second morning of her three-month sentence, Cat, who had never been struck in her life before, had a split lip, and a wobbly tooth behind it. Word passed around quickly that they had to go on strike against this treatment. This was what they did – suffragettes. They ought to have been classed as political prisoners, not common criminals. They ought to have been in better accommodation, with better food and treatment, and the privileges due to them. They were told all this by the WSPU before they were sentenced. Cat knew it as she passed through the massive stone gates of Holloway, crenellated like a fairy-tale castle, but with no happy endings inside. They had to demand these things, and they had to refuse to eat until they got them or were allowed to go free. Cat didn’t mind the closed-in space. Not at first. It did not bother her, the first night that the door was locked. She hadn’t known then what it meant. She had not tested the boundaries of her new world, and found out how close they were, how much they could hurt.
The first day without food was a blessing. The bread was always hard and stale, the soup little more than the water in which the wardresses had cooked their vegetables. Thin and bad-smelling. Cat was used to the good food of Broughton Street, and before that the home cooking of her mother. She could hardly touch this stuff without retching. Her stomach soon felt hot, and knotted itself in protest, but she was more than able to ignore it. The food she did not eat was left to go foul. The wardresses slapped her for her rebellion; The Crow twisted her arm up behind her back and yanked her around her cell by her hair. She bore it all, because they couldn’t force her to eat. They couldn’t win. Five days this went on, and by the sixth she couldn’t get up from the mattress. The cells all around her were quiet too, since all the suffragettes were housed together, and she lay still and listened to that silence. It was a companionable silence, and spoke of their shared weakness – the listlessness of their bodies, the strength and determination of their minds. The silence didn’t last beyond the end of the sixth day. New sounds came to fill it.