“Really?” Conan Doyle blustered, although he had pored over Sketches by Boz many times and was well acquainted with the passages.
“Yes, very drab indeed. I hope your reports will be equally dark. For the world needs to know that Newgate Prison is the last place any man or woman should wish to visit.”
As if to punctuate the remark, Bland turned his head and stared pointedly at Wilde, who visibly paled. And then the warden leaned forward, bringing his face uncomfortably close to Conan Doyle’s — a headmaster about to scold a naughty pupil. “Those who enter Newgate leave broken men,” he said, lavishing the Scottish author with breath that smelled as if a lead spoon had dissolved in his corrosive mouth. “And some do not leave at all, but are buried beneath the stones of the Bird Cage Walk, where they will remain prisoners of Newgate until the Resurrection. Bodies of the executed are taken there straight from the scaffold. A floor slab is pried up and the carcass dropped into the pit below. Final absolution is provided by a splash of water and a bucket of quicklime — to speed the dissolution of the skeleton.”
Conan Doyle dared not breathe until the Warden finally drew his face away.
“Unfortunately, we have quite run out of room,” Bland continued. “Nowadays, executed prisoners must be taken from the prison to be inhumed in a potter’s field along with the indigent, the insane, and all the other useless detritus of society.”
Conan Doyle swallowed a grimace and molded his features into an expression he hoped resembled affability. “I come purely in the interest of research, so that I may provide my readers with an accurate description of the rigors of prison to… to… provide a somber lesson for those who might be tempted to stray—”
“So, you wish us to leave?” Wilde interrupted. “It seems we have been invited inside Newgate simply to have the door slammed in our faces by you, personally.”
But instead of taking affront at Wilde’s remark, the warden shook his head mildly. Apparently, his countenance had only the one dour expression. “Quite the opposite, gentlemen. My prison is open for your inspection.”
It soon became obvious that the guard escorting them had been drilled to provide an intimate tour of all of the very worst of Newgate’s privations. First they visited the men’s cellblock, a place gaggingly odiferous with the stink of unemptied slop buckets, alkaline sweat, and the tangible reek of lives wearing to the bone. Next, they trod a dark maze of corridors, passing along the way a shuffling prisoner being prodded along by a guard’s wooden truncheon. The prisoner cut a nightmarish figure in his gray uniform, a cloth disk bearing the number 19 sewn onto the breast — the only identity permitted inside the prison walls. He wore the requisite cap with its large visor that projected straight down to hide the prisoner’s face and allowed only a restricted view of his confines through a pair of eye slits.
They passed an open door to an exercise yard where men in striped prison uniforms trudged in aimless circles around a narrow quadrangle. Next they entered a dinful gallery where convicts trudged upon the giant wheels of wooden treadmills, while others labored at The Crank, a wooden box fitted with a handle that turned in a box filled with sand to provide a resistance. In all cases, the one and only goal of such punishments was futility: a cruel reminder to every captive of the state that their energies were squandered meaninglessly and produced nothing but sore muscles, racked bodies, and broken spirits.
“The poor wretches toil like Sisyphus,” Wilde muttered sotto voce. “I could not survive a day in such a place.”
The extremities they witnessed cowed Conan Doyle. He had always been a staunch supporter of law and order, but the diabolical ingenuity of the punishments seemed out of proportion to any crime, perhaps short of murder.
Finally, they stepped into the condemned cell, a gloomy but comparatively large space created by knocking two cells together. The wan morning light filtered in through two barred windows. At one side of the cell, a pair of guards lounged at a pine table, playing cards. The only other stick of furniture was a low cot covered by a thin cotton pallet and a worn woolen blanket. The Italian valet, unshaven and wretched in his prison uniform, slouched on the end of the cot where he stared at the rectangle of sky caged by the barred window. He was not alone. A handsome man in his early thirties, with a noble mien and head of ash blond hair that had enjoyed the benefit of curling papers, sat at his side, a black Gladstone bag nestled on the floor at his feet. He was busy unwinding the dressings on the condemned man’s arm. Conan Doyle surmised that the handsome man must be the prison doctor. He rose from the cot when Conan Doyle and Wilde entered and addressed them in a challenging voice. “Who are you? Might this man not be allowed to compose himself unmolested in his final hour of life? What are you, newspaper reporters?”
At the comment, Wilde sucked in an audible gasp and pressed a hand to his breastbone, pantomiming umbrage.
“I, sir, am Oscar Wilde, playwright and raconteur. My companion is the esteemed author Arthur Conan Doyle, and I can safely vouch that neither of us has ever been so insulted in our lives. Newspapermen, indeed! Do I look like a newspaperman? Do I dress like a newspaperman? Do I display the sunken posture of a man who spends his life on all fours, grubbing about in the unhappiness of human suffering?”
The prison doctor lowered his eyes. “I apologize. I am Doctor John Lamb, the only physician here in Newgate. It is my lot to attend to the poor souls walled up within this place. I do what little my meager skills permit to alleviate the suffering of the men and women here. Yes, even those who are condemned. For I believe that even the lowest in society deserve to sip from the cup of human dignity before the state strips away their soul.”
Conan Doyle stepped forward and gently took the Italian’s arm. The condemned man sat passive and silent — a man shaken from a dream only to awaken into a nightmare. The Scottish author inspected the physician’s work. A ten-inch incision, beautifully stitched, showed where the doctor had performed a miraculous repair of the arm.
“This is most artfully done, sir,” Conan Doyle observed. “The bone was shattered by a bullet, and yet he can raise and move his arm with little discomfort. I am a doctor myself and have stood in attendance at some of the best surgeons at my medical school in Edinburgh.” He carefully lowered the valet’s arm and reached out to shake the doctor’s hand. “I congratulate you, sir, and am curious to know how you performed this minor miracle.”
Doctor Lamb shook the proffered hand and acknowledged Conan Doyle’s praise with a nod and a modest smile that betrayed his satisfaction at the obvious pride he took in his work.
“As a prison doctor, the pecuniary advantages are scant,” he spoke in a cultured voice as mild as his demeanor. “My reward comes in the freedom to practice my technique. Including, what some would consider, experimental procedures.” He added somewhat ruefully, “I have an advantage over other doctors in that my patients do not complain much. And in the case of poor souls condemned to die, have not the means to do so. And so I am free to practice a form of healing whose orthodoxy might be questioned elsewhere. As you correctly noted, the bone was shattered into fragments. I straightened the ends using a bone saw and then held the ulna together using screws and metal straps.”
“Screws and metal straps?” Conan Doyle repeated. “I have never heard of such a thing! Surely, metal will corrode inside the body and cause infection?”
“Precisely why I used a special iron-free alloy that does not corrode. The strap is affixed to the bone with brass screws so that stabilizes the bone until it knits together naturally. In addition, I have concocted a salve that alleviates the swelling typical after surgery and promotes rapid healing. The incision was then sewn up in the usual manner.”