“No gift, my dear,” said Mrs. Esther, “is so precious as gentle blood. Everything else may be won, but birth never.”
All day long there went on the same dreadful noise of shouting, crying, calling, bawling, rolling of carts, cracking of whips, and trampling of horses’ feet. In the evening I asked, when the sun went down, but the noise decreased not, if it was always thus.
“Always,” they replied. “There is no cessation, day or night. It is part,” said Mrs. Deborah, “of our punishment. We are condemned, child; for the sin of having a negligent trustee, we go in captivity, shame, and degradation all our lives.”
“Nay,” said her sister, “not degradation, sister. No one but herself can degrade a gentlewoman.”
Truly, the noise was terrible. When I read in the “Paradise Lost,” of fallen angels in their dark abode, I think of Fleet Market and the Fleet Rules. It began in the early morning with the rolling of the carts: all day long in the market there was a continual crying of the butchers: “Buy, buy, ladies—buy! Rally up, ladies—rally up!” There were quarrels unceasing and ever beginning, with fights, shouting and cursing: the fish-women quarrelled at their stalls; the poultry-wives quarrelled over their baskets; the porters quarrelled over their burdens; the carters over the right of way; the ragamuffin boys over stolen fruit. There was nothing pleasant, nothing quiet, nothing to refresh; nothing but noise, brawling, and contention. And if any signs of joy, these only drunken laughter from open tavern-doors.
Thus I began to live, being then a maid of sixteen years and seven months, in the Rules and Liberties of the Fleet Prison; surely as bad a place, outside Newgate Prison, as could be found for a girl brought up in innocence and virtue. For, let one consider the situation of the Rules. They include all those houses which lie between the ditch, or rather the market, on the west, and the Old Bailey on the east—fit boundaries for such a place, the filthy, turbid ditch and the criminal’s gaol—and Fleet Lane on the north to Ludgate Hill on the south. These streets are beyond and between the abodes of respectability and industry. On the east was the great and wealthy City with the merchants’ houses; on the west the streets and squares where the families of the country had their town residence; on the south, the river; on the north, the dark and gloomy streets of Clerkenwell, where thieves lay in hiding and the robbers of the road had their customary quarters. Why, Jonathan Wyld himself, the greatest of villains, lived hard by in Ship Court. Is there, anywhere, in any town, an acre more thickly covered with infamy, misery, starvation, and wretchedness?
If we walked abroad, we could not go north because of Clerkenwell, where no honest woman may trust herself: if we went south we had to walk the whole length of the market, past the marrying taverns, so that shame fell upon my heart to think how my uncle was one of those who thus disgraced his cloth: when we got to the end, we might walk over the Fleet Bridge, among the noisy sellers of quack medicines, pills, powders, hot furmety, pies, flounders, mackerel, and oysters; or on Ludgate Hill, where the touts of the Fleet parsons ran up and down, inviting couples to be married, and the Morocco men went about, book in hand, to sell their lottery shares. The most quiet way when we took the air was to cross Holborn Bridge, and so up the hill past St. Andrew’s Church, where, if the weather were fine, we might go as far as the gardens of Gray’s Inn, and there sit down among the trees and feel for a little the joy of silence.
Said Mrs. Deborah, one day, when we two had sat there, under the trees, for half an hour, listening to the cawing of the rooks—
“Child, the place”—meaning the Rules—“is the City of Destruction after Christian and Christiana, and the boys, and Mercy, were all gone away.”
We lived in one room, which was both kitchen and parlour. We had no servant; the Doctor’s provision kept us in simple plenty; we cleaned and dusted the place for ourselves; we cooked our dinners, and washed our dishes; we made our dresses; we did for ourselves all those things which are generally done by a servant. Mrs. Esther said that there was no shame in doing things which, if left undone, would cause a gentlewoman to lose her self-respect. ’Twas all, except the portrait of her father, that she had left of her former life, and to this she would cling as something dearer than life.