Mary waited for the first of the women to wake up. It was Ann Gower, who couldn't remember when she hadn't been on the streets. She was probably still in her thirties but the effects of gin and her brutal life had left her looking twenty years older. Two of her front teeth were missing and matted brown hair hung over her eyes, which she was now in the process of knuckling in an attempt to clear her head of the gin she'd swallowed the previous night.
'Water, where's water?' she mumbled, as she stumbled over to the bars of the bird cage. Grabbing them she shouted, 'Bring the fuckin' water!' The shrill sound of her own raised voice caused her to hold her head and groan in agony.
'Ere,' Mary said, 'Over 'ere, love.'
Ann Gower turned slowly and looked at Mary through bloodshot eyes. 'You? Little Miss 'Orner what sits in a corner?'
Mary laughed, surprised at the woman's wit considering the state of her health.
'Wotcha fuckin' laughin' at?' the other woman snarled.
Mary, still with a smile on her face, dipped the ladle into the bucket and held it up towards Ann Gower. 'Drink.'
Ann Gower's hands were shaking as she took the large wooden spoon. She brought it unsteadily up to her lips and managed to spill a good portion of it down the front of her dirty pinny and upon the floor. The remainder she drank, slurping greedily. 'More!' she demanded, handing the ladle back to Mary.
'Sorry, love, that be it, there ain't no more.' Mary calmly put the ladle back into the bucket and stood up with one hand behind her back.
'Who says?' Ann Gower advanced menacingly towards Mary.
'I says,' Mary said, keeping her voice calm. 'That be your lot, Ann Gower.'
'I spilled 'arf of it!' Ann shouted.
'That be your problem, love. Next time be more careful.' Mary's voice remained steady and betrayed none of the fear she felt in the pit of her stomach. She was ready when Ann Gower lashed out at her and her hand came swiftly from behind her back, the two brass hooks at the end of her fingers cutting a double streak of crimson straight across the line of Ann Gower's jaw.
'Jesus!' she gasped, clutching at her face in surprise. 'The fuckin' bitch cut me!'
'Don't fuck with me, Ann Gower,' Mary said defiantly.
Ann Gower took one of her hands from her cheek and saw that it was covered with blood. 'Jesus! I'm bleedin'!'
'Next time it be your eyes.'
'I only wanted some water, wotcha do that for?' Ann Gower whined.
Mary forced a grin. 'Teach you some manners, darlin'.'
Mary was only five feet and two inches and carried no lard and Ann Gower was half as heavy again and at least three inches taller. But the larger woman, her head pulsating, and her cheek burning from the savage cut to her cheek, knew the ways of the street and realised she must make her move now or be beaten. The look in Mary's clear, cold green eyes told her that she had met a formidable opponent.
'You takin' charge, then?' Ann Gower said in a much mollified voice, one hand still clutched on her bleeding face.
'Somethin' like that,' Mary said.
Ann Gower smiled, the gaps in her teeth showing as she appeared to accept. 'Can I 'ave some water then?' she said, looking directly at Mary.
'No!'
Mary's eyes held the other woman's gaze and Ann Gower took two involuntary steps backwards. The fight was over, Mary had won. She had shown she was strong enough, hard enough to win the other woman's respect, or whatever passed for respect among the dispossessed.
Mary had also proved to herself that she had not forgotten the harsh lessons of the street and now indicated the sleeping women in the cell with a jerk of her chin. 'Wake them lot up, will you, tell 'em there's water, show 'em your face, tell 'em there's more where that come from if any should want it.'
Though Mary now controlled the cell she did not try to convert it to better ways. The women became drunk at any opportunity they could get their hands on a quart of gin and the nocturnal couplings continued. But the bullying stopped, the water was equally shared among all, and the cell was cleaned.
She was challenged on several occasions by older women, emboldened by a pint of gin in their bellies. But they stood little chance against her ferocious claws, and soon the rumour grew in Newgate Gaol of Mother Mary Merciless, who sat like a vulture in a corner of the whore cage cleaned of shit and dirt. It was said that she possessed the blackened talons of a great bird of prey and, if one should venture near, great slabs of flesh would be torn off in a single terrible swipe to feed her need for fresh blood and live human flesh.
A report which appeared in the Newgate Calendar, itself treated with gross exaggeration, was turned into a scurrilous and wholly lurid pamphlet sold in the streets and at fairs and in the Vauxhall Gardens and which was entitled: 'Mother Mary Merciless, the flesh eating demon of Newgate Gaol!' It sold ten thousand copies at the full price of a penny ha'penny.
Though her infamous name did nothing but good for her reputation, increasingly Mary came to impress her cell mates with her tongue, sharp eyes and the agility of her mind. They marvelled at the rapidity with which she worked the beads and boasted to the other inmates that she could do any calculation which might come into their minds. The number of days Methuselah had lived, and then the hours and minutes. Or if an ounce of dried peas should contain one hundred peas, how many peas would there be in a two-hundred-pound sack? Though they had no hope of verifying the answers, it was the speed of Mary's fingers as they flew across the wire slides to push the blurring beads this way and that which confounded and fascinated them. With such skill, they reasoned, the answers she gave must be correct. Furthermore, if any should have any unseemly ideas, hands so cruelly tortured which could move so fast were a reminder to them all that the dreaded claws could strike before they had a chance to blink.
They became like small children, enchanted and silent when Mary read to them by the light of the candle from Gulliver's Travels. For the much-worn volume, which, in the end, cost her so dear, like her precious abacus had seldom left her side.
Mary also read to them from the Bible. But they were stories of conquests and the persecution of the Israelites and the wonders of the land of Canaan. She did not read to them of Christ's love and salvation, sharing with them the lack of enthusiasm for this particular God of love, and much preferring the one of wrath who practised revenge and waged war in the hurly-burly of the Old Testament.
Mary took to writing petitions for prisoners and preparing their pleas to be read in court, for few could afford the fees of even the most down-at-heel lawyer or screever. She would write letters to the authorities about husbands and the welfare of children of inmates carted off to orphanages. Or she would write to loved ones, this latter in particular for the Irish, who placed great store in the mystical properties of the written word. While they, and those who received their letters, could neither read nor write, the priest in their parish could, and so the entire parish would know of their love and tenderness. They fervently believed that writing a letter was a divine affair which would bestow good fortune and protection upon those they loved who still lived in the sad and broken places they had fled from in Ireland. A letter of love, they most fervently believed, had the spiritual substance to prevent these same loved ones from suffering the sad fate to befall its sender.
Mary would always begin an Irish letter with the same words, for it was this single opening sentence which inevitably brought those on whose behalf she wrote to swoon with the ecstasy of its poetry.