Her name was temporarily Alice Smith. She chose it to sound respectable on the indentures they had given her. Six months after she was taken from Covent Garden, she ended up in a holding-house, or depot, in St Katharine's-by-the-Tower, moved there from St Giles-in-the-Fields as the day for shipment to Virginia or the Indies grew closer. The second civil war, with the navy revolt and blockades downstream in the Thames estuary, had delayed transportation and given her a respite, but towards the end of the year the young people were told their boat would come soon.
During her captivity — though it was never openly called that — she had come to regret her agreement to emigrate. She was by nature more suspicious than the other kidnapped young people. She kept her ears open. Soon, the situation began to worry her. She overheard a pair of desperate parents begging to have their stolen child returned. She noted how the staff spoke among themselves of their kidnapped charges' fates. Always ready to believe she had been lied to for the gain of others, Alice Smith began to fear that once she reached her destination she would find that the 'service' she had signed up for was not mild housework with respectable colonists but hard manual labour out of doors on plantations, in conditions close to slavery. Once she arrived overseas, it would be too late. She asked as many questions about conditions as she dared. When this was discouraged, she soon disbelieved all the glowing promises.
She stayed at the depot, because it was an easy life — so far. She had shelter and food. Even the meagre daily diet was better than she had been used to; her health and with it her inbuilt truculence began to revive. She kept alert for news of their ship, and was keyed up to abscond. When the matron and staff ran out to watch Rainborough's funeral procession, she decided to waste no more time. So she calmly filled an apron with whatever she could carry, then she slipped out of an unguarded door and made off.
St Katharine's was a forbidding area. It lay beyond the Tower, outside the city walls. Less than a hundred years before, this had been an empty quarter used only for drowning pirates on the foreshore; convicted pirates were by tradition chained to ramps until three tides had passed over them — a story that had been told to the spirited youngsters in the process of subduing them. Alice was not afraid of long-dead pirates — though she turned instinctively away from the river.
The main feature of this parish was a charitable foundation for the poor, the Royal Hospital or Free Chapel. Founded and supported by various queens of England, it had been a Catholic institution but was spared by Henry the Eighth during his dissolution of monastic orders, because it had belonged to his mother. The hospital was regarded with suspicion because, even when nominally Protestant, it was run by lay brethren and sisters. Like so many religious properties, it had attracted the poor and helpless until it became the centre of a rat's nest of lanes and mean streets, containing perhaps a thousand houses where stick-thin, dull-eyed paupers struggled against starvation and disease. As with all the liberties beyond London's walls, the area became a haven for illegal trades and the outsiders who practised them. The small, stinking cottages and dilapidated tenements housed a lawless English underclass and foreigners who were no better. The alleys had suggestive names: Dark Entry, Cat's Hole, Shovel Alley, Eagle and Child Alley, Axe Yard and Naked Boy Court. This grim district was a natural place to position the depot for stolen children: rough, unfriendly, secret and rarely visited by anyone respectable.
In some ways it was no worse an area than Southwark, across the river, where 'Eliza' and Jem Starling had holed up the previous year. There were just as many seamen on this side, with watermen of all types, especially the drunken, unemployed variety. Among the wrongdoers who had emerged like fleas at the funeral commotion were prostitutes looking for clients and vagabonds planning to pick pockets as the great procession of mourners wended up Wapping High Street. Astute ones had adorned their dishevelled coats with sea-green ribbons so they would blend in.
Alice' picked her way through the tangle of unpaved lanes and alleys, stepping over piles of litter and runnels of nightsoil, while keeping an eye out for people throwing slops from the teetering tenements above. Nobody seemed to observe her. The dark, filthy courtyards seemed deserted, though she knew better than to feel secure here. Any unguarded moment could have pitched her into worse trouble than she had left behind. She pulled in her skirts and scurried past East Smithfield, where some of the most degraded brothels in London huddled, although the neat lines of little houses had once been pleasant dwellings occupied by hardworking hatters and shoemakers. Now the clothes they once made, so worn they barely held together by threads, were sold second, third or fourth hand in Rosemary Lane. That was where the public executioner lived, the man who had lopped off the heads of Strafford and Laud, or so turnkeys were wont to tell the children at the depot. And he will come for you too, if you give us any trouble!' It was a fetid little street crammed with sour taverns and totters' stalls, where Alice' managed to sell for a penny what she had stolen from the depot. Before leaving the lane, she carried out a swift piece of stall-robbery and fled with a tattered hood that would help to disguise her.
She went west. So she entered the City, by chance reversing the processional route which Thomas Rainborough's cortege had taken earlier that day. The streets remained subdued. Unsure where to turn, she began a long walk that would bring her back towards the Strand and Covent Garden where she had worked her way in misery before. This time she turned off, reluctant to be spotted again by the man who had lured her. Instead, she slipped into the disreputable alleys around Giltspur Street, north of the Old Bailey.
She survived there for six months. Time had no meaning for her, days, weeks and months slipping by as once again she deteriorated. She heard they beheaded the King, but the tentative start of the Commonwealth meant little at gutter level. Then, since the life of the dirt poor stayed unchanged by the absence of monarchy, one day she walked into a house where a maid had left a door open; she stole a silver charger, which was a felony. When she tried to fence the plate, a thief-taker informed on her; she was brought, spitting protests, before a particularly dyspeptic magistrate. It was her first mistake, so she hoped to get off with a fine and a whipping. Transportation to the colonies was a possibility that made her smile grimly, since she had escaped it once when she was spirited. But her manner was so defiant, she was despatched to Newgate Prison under sentence to be hanged.
She knew what to do; she 'pleaded her belly'. Examined physically by a jury of matrons', to check her story, she was pronounced genuinely pregnant. She was as surprised as they were. This would save her life until she came to term; she had no idea how long that would be, having no sure way to tell which of the casual couplings with lawyers' clerks and muffin boys that she had engaged in when particularly desperate for money had resulted in a baby.
It was born. It died. Still in prison, she disposed of the evidence secretly and for a while longer pretended she was still pregnant, mocking up a convincing bump as she had done in her short career of highway robbery. So she clung on in Newgate, a desperate jail where every staple of life, even a place near the fire, had to be paid for either with money or some base favour to the jailors. Prisoners were denuded of an entry fee on first arriving, then fees for food, for bedding, for clothes, even a release fee if they were pardoned or transported. Also, the longer she stayed, the greater the risk she would catch fatal jail fever.