As I continued along Lower Calthorpe Street, skirting the prison, I heard rapid footsteps behind me. Before I could turn, I was slammed forward, straight into the prison’s high wall.

“What you doing?” Bessie asked me fiercely, as the rough stone scraped my cheek and tore into my gloves. “Spying on me?”

I wrenched myself from Bessie’s hold and spun around, putting my back to the wall and my rigid basket between us. “My dear girl, I am only heading for the train.” I kept my voice steady, trying not to let on she’d badly frightened me. “There’s a station in Farringdon Road.” I pointed to the end of the next street.

“You’ve been at the Hospital, asking questions, poking your nose in. I heard you mention the police.”

She glared at me, backing off and holding her shawl closed with one hand. Her other hand was hidden in the shawl’s folds, and I wondered if she had a weapon in it.

“Mrs. Compton was telling me the police had been there about Nurse Betts,” I said. “She’s been killed.”

Bessie’s eyes flickered. “I know, and I’m right sorry, but it’s nothing to do with you.”

I glanced at the wall beside me. Behind it lay a prison that, if what I’d read was true, was filled with dreariness. The men were made to march on a treadmill that turned a great wheel all the day long, and to do so in utter silence.

“Your young man is here?” I asked. “Are you allowed to visit him?”

Bessie’s eyes filled with sudden and abject terror. She came at me, but in panic, not rage.

“You leave him be,” she shouted. “Never you mind about him. He’s nothing to do with you. Go on. Run for your train.”

The words tumbled out rapidly, becoming incoherent as she yelled them at me. She clearly wanted me away from there, and quickly.

As I opened my mouth to ask her why, a large boom! tore through the waning afternoon. A huge cloud of dust and rubble burst upward behind the wall, rising into the wind as Bessie and I gaped. The cloud spread as the bits and pieces of stone reached their apex and then began to pour down on us.

I grabbed Bessie and shoved her into the wall, positioning myself over her as bricks, pebbles, and pieces of mortar rained around us.

Before my eyes, a bottom portion of the prison wall collapsed in a morass of bricks and dust, leaving a hole about three feet in diameter. Behind the opening lay the bodies of men, both guards and convicts, who’d been felled by the explosion, and behind them were desperate-eyed prisoners who rushed at the newly formed exit.

Bessie shrieked as the top of the broken wall, too weak to remain in place, toppled forward, burying the prisoners unfortunate enough to have nearly reached freedom.

15