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iron open. ‘I daresay Samson shan’t harm you ,’ she said. ‘You might just take a peep, if you are careful . . .’
    This room had iron louvres across its window and so was darker than the cells below, and instead of a hammock it had a hard wood bed. On this the woman—Jane Samson—was seated, her fingers plucking at a shallow basket that she had placed across her lap, that was heaped with coir. She had unpicked perhaps a quarter of the bundle; and there was another, larger, basket of the stuff beside the bed, for her to work on later. A bit of sun struggled through the bars across her window. Its beams were so clotted with brown fibre and with swirling particles of dust, she might, I thought, have been a character in a fairy-tale—a princess, humbled, set to work at some impossible labour at the bottom of a pond.
    She looked up once as I observed her, then blinked, and rubbed at her eyes where the coir-dust prickled them; and then I let the inspection close, and stepped away. I had begun to wonder, after all, whether she might not try to gesture to me, or call out.
    I had Miss Ridley take me away from that ward then, and we climbed to the third and highest floor there and met its matron. She proved to be a dark-eyed, kind-faced, earnest woman named Mrs Jelf. ‘Have you come to look at my poor charges?’ she said to me, when Miss Ridley took me to her. Her prisoners are mainly what are termed there Second Class, First Class and Star Class women: they are permitted to have their doors fixed open as they work, like the women on Wards A and B; but their work is easier, they sit knitting stockings or sewing shirts, and they are allowed scissors and needles and pins—this is considered, there, a great gesture of trust. Their cells, when I saw them, had the morning sun in them, and so were very bright and almost cheerful. Their occupants rose and curtseyed when we passed by them, and again seemed to study me very frankly. At last I realised that, just as I looked for the details of their hair and frocks and bonnets, so they looked for the particulars of mine. I suppose that even a gown in mourning colours is a novel one, at Millbank.
    Many of the prisoners on this ward are those long-servers about whom Miss Haxby had spoken so well. Mrs Jelf now also praised them, saying they were the quietest women in the gaol. Most, she said, would go on from there, before their time, to Fulham Prison, where the routines were a little lighter. ‘They are like lambs to us, aren’t they, Miss Ridley?’
    Miss Ridley agreed that they were not like some of the trash they kept on C and D.
    ‘They are not. We have one here—killed her husband, that was cruel to her—as nicely-bred a woman as you could ever hope to meet.’ The matron nodded into a cell, where a lean-faced prisoner sat patiently teasing at a tangled ball of yarn. ‘Why, we have had ladies here,’ she went on. ‘ Ladies , miss, quite like yourself.’
    I smiled to hear her say it, and we walked further. Then, from the mouth of a cell a little way along the line there came a thin cry: ‘Miss Ridley? Oh, is that Miss Ridley there?’ A woman was at her gate, her face pressed between the bars. ‘Oh, Miss Ridley mum, have you spoke in my behalf yet, before Miss Haxby?’
    We drew closer to her, and Miss Ridley stepped to the gate and struck it with her ring of keys, so that the iron rattled and the prisoner drew back. ‘Will you keep silence?’ said the matron. ‘Do you think I don’t have duties enough, do you think Miss Haxby don’t have business enough, that I must carry your tales to her?’
    ‘It is only, mum,’ said the woman, speaking very quickly and stumbling over the words, ‘only that you said you would speak. And when Miss Haxby came this morning she was kept half her time by Jarvis, and would not see me. And my brother has brought his evidence before the courts, and wants Miss Haxby’s word—’
    Miss Ridley struck the gate again, and again the