Spider Silk by A. Wendeberg

Author:A. Wendeberg [Wendeberg, Annelie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-370-95825-2
Publisher: A. Wendeberg

Graveyard

Olivia presented her papers to the officer who received her at the gates of Newgate prison. The man nodded and walked her through a lodge, then headed in the wrong direction.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, motioning the other way. ‘But I’m to visit Mr Gavriel Sévère.’

He spat on the walkway and muttered, ‘Prisoner had been moved.’

How efficient, she thought.

They turned into a yard and stopped at a thick iron gate. A turnkey admitted them, and they went deep into a maze of corridors guarded by armed men, gates, gratings, and more iron-banded doors. When they reached yet another ward, cold sweat began to trickle down Olivia’s spine.

The officer opened the door for her and said with a smile that didn’t touch his eyes, ‘The condemned ward.’

Olivia’s jaw felt as though it had come off its hinges. ‘Newgate has a capacity for nearly two hundred prisoners, and my husband was put in the condemned ward?’ Her voice sounded too shrill in her ears.

The officer merely shrugged. ‘Far as I know, he asked for it.’ Then he jerked his head, motioning her to step through.

She entered the damp corridor. Her ribcage grew tighter with every gulp of foul air she sucked into her lungs. Several oil lamps vomited unsteady light onto the flagstones, turning the slime inhabiting the cracks into a living, writhing thing. At the far end loomed a narrow staircase. Everyone knew it led to the Graveyard — a place of utter desolation where hanged murderers were buried beneath thick slabs of stone.

An armed guard stood in front of each of the twenty-four cells — mere holes in the walls, secured with gratings, locks, and iron bands. The pitiful homes of men whose only future lay in meeting their maker at the end of a rope.

‘For the coroner,’ the officer said to no one in particular, then stepped back through the door and shut it with a loud clank. The noise bounced off the walls.

Olivia knew hell. She’d lived it. But this — this was hell and bottomless despair, decay, and death all at once. She rolled her tongue around in her dry mouth, trying to swallow.

A guard asked for her papers, and she held them out to him. He read them twice, turning them over, and over again. And finally, he unlocked a cell.

Bracing herself, she entered. The door closed behind her — a sharp, unforgiving noise. Like a gunshot.

‘Welcome to my new lodgings, dear wife,’ Sévère said. ‘Please excuse that I remain seated.’

Her eyes adjusted to the gloom, but the rest of her body didn’t. Her breath came in short bursts, her knees clacked together. ‘Why… Why here?’

‘I needed better protection and this place certainly has it. Courtesy of the Chief Magistrate.’

Sévère sat awkwardly in a small hammock that was fastened to iron rings on both sides of the cell. The floor, the walls, all was wet and grimy.

‘It’s so cold,’ was all she managed to say.

‘Nothing we can do about that now. Tell me news about our case.’

She blinked, motioning at his canvas bed.

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