‘Hers is the one on the right with the sheet on it,’ he said, and turned to leave, locking the gate and checking it with a rattle, so that her heart rattled with it against her ribs.
‘Well, hello, pretty girl,’ said a male voice from the shadows.
She didn’t look at him.
‘Margery?’ she whispered, walking up to the bars. There was a silence, then she saw the sheet pull back a few inches and Margery stared back from the other side. She was pale, her eyes shadowed. Behind her stood a narrow bunk with a lumpen, stained mattress, and a metal pot in the corner of the room. As Alice stood, something scuttled across the floor.
‘Are you … all right?’ She tried not to let her face reveal her shock.
‘I’m fine.’
‘I brought you some things. Thought you might like a change of clothes. I’ll bring you more tomorrow. Here.’ She began to pull the items from the bag, one by one, feeding them through the bars. ‘There’s a bar of soap, and a toothbrush, and I – well, I brought you my bottle of scent. I thought you might like to feel …’ She faltered. The idea seemed ridiculous now.
‘You got something for me there, pretty girl? I’m real lonesome over here.’
She turned her back, away from him. ‘Anyway.’ She lowered her voice. ‘There’s some cornbread and an apple in the leg of your drawers. I wasn’t sure whether they’d feed you. Everything is fine at home. I’ve fed Charley and the hens and you’re not to worry about anything. It will all be just as you like when you get home.’
‘Where’s Sven?’
‘He had to go to work. But he’s coming by later.’
‘He okay?’
‘He’s a little shaken up, actually. Everybody is.’
‘Hey! Hey, come over here! I wanna show you something!’
Alice leaned forward, so that her forehead touched the bars of the cell door. ‘He told us what happened. With the McCullough man.’
Margery closed her eyes for a minute. Her fingers looped around a bar and tightened briefly. ‘I never set out to hurt no one, Alice.’ Margery’s voice cracked.
‘Of course you didn’t. You did what anyone would have done.’ Alice was firm. ‘Anyone with half a brain. It’s called self-defence.’
‘Hey! Hey! Stop your yammering and come over here, girl. You got something for me, huh? Cos I got something for you.’
Alice turned, her face a fury, and placed her hands on her hips. ‘Oh, do shut up! I’m trying to talk to my friend! For goodness’ sake!’
There was a brief silence, and then, from the other cell, a whinny of laughter. ‘Yeah, do shut up! She’s tryin’ to talk to her friend!’
The two men immediately began arguing among themselves, their voices lifting as the air turned blue.
‘I can’t stay in here,’ Margery said quietly.
Alice was shaken by how Margery looked after only one night in this place, as if all the fight had seeped out of her. ‘Well, we’re going to work this out. You are not on your own, and we are not going to let anything happen to you.’
Margery looked at her with weary eyes. She set her mouth in a thin line, as if she were stopping herself from speaking.
Alice placed her fingers over Margery’s, trying to grip her hand. ‘It will all sort itself out. You just try to rest, and eat something, and I’ll be back tomorrow.’
It seemed to take Margery a minute to register what she was saying. She nodded, shifted her gaze to Alice, and then, with a hand on her belly, she moved back to the floor, where she slid slowly down the wall and sat down.
Alice rapped on the metal lock until she had the guard’s attention. He rose heavily from his chair and let her out, closing the gate and eyeing the sheet behind her, from which Margery’s shoulder was just visible.
‘Now,’ said Alice. ‘I will be back tomorrow. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to get a slip, but I’m sure there will be no objections to a woman providing basic hygiene and assistance to a mother in waiting. That’s just decency. And I may not have been here very long but I do know that Kentucky people are the most decent of people.’
The guard looked at her, as if unsure how to respond.
‘Anyway,’ she said, before he could think too hard about it. ‘I brought you a piece of cornbread to say thank you for being so … flexible. It’s a rotten situation, which will hopefully be sorted out very soon, and in the meantime I am much obliged for your kindness, Mr …?’
The guard blinked heavily. ‘Dulles.’
‘Officer Dulles. There you go.’
‘Deputy.’
‘Deputy Dulles. I do beg your pardon.’ She handed him the cornbread, wrapped in a napkin. ‘Oh,’ she said, as he opened it. ‘And I’ll want that napkin back. If you could just give it to me tomorrow when I bring the next lot, that would be lovely. Just fold it up. Thank you so much.’ Before he could respond, she turned and walked briskly out of the jailhouse.
Sven hired a lawyer from Louisville, selling his grandfather’s silver fob watch to raise the money. The man attempted to demand a more reasonable setting of the bail money, but was refused in the baldest of terms. The girl was a murderer, the answer came, from a known family of murderers, and the state would not be satisfied with knowing she was out and free to do the same again. Even when a small crowd gathered outside the sheriff’s office to protest, he was unbending, stating that they could shout all they liked, but it was his job to uphold the law and that was what he was going to do, and if it was their father who had been murdered while going about his lawful business, they might think again.
‘Well, the good news is,’ the lawyer said, as he climbed back into his car, ‘state of Kentucky hasn’t executed a woman since 1868. Let alone a pregnant one.’ This fact didn’t seem to make Sven feel much better.
‘What are we going to do now?’ he said, as he and Alice walked back from the jailhouse.
‘We keep going,’ said Alice. ‘We keep everything going as normal and wait for somebody to see sense.’
But six weeks passed, and nobody did see sense. Margery remained in the jailhouse even as various other miscreants came and went (and were, in some cases, returned). Attempts to transfer her to a women’s prison were rebuffed, and in truth Alice felt that if Margery had to stay locked up it was probably better for her to be where they could stop by and see her than to be somewhere in the city where nobody would know her and where she would be surrounded by the noise and fumes of a world completely alien to her.
So Alice rode to the jailhouse every day with a tin of still-warm cornbread (she had pulled the recipe from one of the library books and could now bake it without even looking) or pie or whatever else she had to hand, and had become something of a favourite with the guards. Now nobody ever mentioned slips but merely handed back the previous day’s napkin and motioned her through with barely a word. With Sven, they were a little stickier, because his size tended to make other men nervous. Along with food she would bring a change of undergarments, woollen sweaters, if needed, and a book, although the jail was so dark in the basement that there were only a few hours a day in which Margery could see to read. And nearly every evening when Alice finished up at the library she would head home to the cabin in the woods, sit at the table with Sven, and they would tell each other that this thing would be sorted out eventually, no doubt, and Margery would resemble herself once she was out in the fresh air again, and neither of them would believe a word the other was saying, until he left, and she would go to bed to lie awake staring at the ceiling until dawn.
That year, it was as if they had missed spring completely. One minute it was frozen, and then it was as if the rains had washed away a whole couple of months because Lee County slammed abruptly into a full-on heatwave. The monarch butterflies returned, the weeds rose on the verges, waist high under blossoming dogwoods, and Alice borrowed one of Margery’s wide-brimmed leather hats and wore a handkerchief around her neck to stop herself burning, and slapped at the biting creatures on her horse’s neck with the buckle of her reins.