Rose was sore.
That was the abiding thought as she lay in the dark in the narrow iron bed, shifting restlessly, unable to sleep, her cheeks still a little wet from her earlier weeping. All she was aware of was the relentless burning heat of her bottom, peppered with red welts and stripes, bruises and marks.
Outside, a night bird called. It was quiet here in the depths of the forest, where Lord Fawcett’s Institute for Delinquent and Debauched Young Women was situated. The cool night air drifted through the open window but Rose’s bottom was a ball of heat that would take more than the tendrils of a March mist to cool. She felt the room closing in on her, like a cell.
Up until tonight, she had shared a dormitory with two other inmates, Tessie Stevens and Nancy Ingram but tonight, she had been separated to a solitary room. Tomorrow, they would all be returned via wagon to the railway station and from thence to their various abodes but Rose was different and a closed carriage would collect her at dawn. Unlike some of the other girls, Rose had a place to go as her employer, Mr Anscombe, had told the magistrates court that he would take Rose back into his household when she had served her sentence. But once she had been given her final punishment, he had insisted that she be separated from the other inmates. “She will be infected by their ways” he’d insisted to the Chairman of the Bench.
Rose, already devastated with horror at her conviction for theft and whoring, had remained silent. The magistrates hadn’t wanted to hear how she came to steal the maids uniform provided for her by Mr Anscombe, her protests that as he had burnt her workhouse dress, she could hardly have run away naked. Nor did they understand that her one experience of the Cyprian trade was due to hunger and desperation to earn sixpence to pay for a room in a cheap lodging house rather than risk the streets for a second night. Nobody had listened at the court. And at the Reformatory, branded a whore and a cheap one at that, Rose had had to endure unwelcome attention from some of the Masters. And now, her sentence was over, her conviction expunged but come the morning, she would be returned to Mr Anscombe’s house. Her stomach whirled with the thought.
She tried to sleep, lying on her stomach to remove the pressure from her tender rear. Even the blanket covering her seemed to hurt. But sleep was hard to come by. Her memory was constantly assailed by snatches of memory from the weekend….
