Affinity by Sarah Waters

would Miss Haxby think of me if I did that? What would Miss Haxby think of her , for asking? The woman drew back a little, but still she kept on with it: it couldn’t harm Miss Haxby, for White to know that her friend Jane was thinking of her! She was sorry, she said, that she had asked me to spoil my book; but mightn’t I just pass a word on?—mightn’t I just do that?—mightn’t I just tell White that her friend Jane Jarvis was a-thinking of her, and wished that she might know it?
    I shook my head, and rapped at the bars of the gate for Mrs Jelf to come and free me. ‘You know you mustn’t ask,’ I said. ‘You know you must not; and I am very sorry that you have.’ At that, her sly look became sullen, and she turned away and hugged her arms about herself. ‘Damn you then!’ she said, quite plain—though not so plain that the matron could catch it, above the rasp of her prison boots upon the sanded passage-way.
    It was curious to know how little her curse moved me. I had blinked to hear her say it, but now I only gazed levelly at her; and she saw that, and looked sour. Then the matron came. ‘On with your sewing now,’ she said gently, as she released me from the cell and locked the gate. Jarvis hesitated, then drew her chair across the floor and took up her work. And then she looked, not sullen or sour but—as Dawes had—she looked only miserable, and ill.
    There were still the sounds of Mrs Bradley’s young ladies, working their way through the cells of Ward E; but I left that floor now, and went down to the First Class wards, and walked along them with their matron, Miss Manning. Gazing in at the women in their cells I found myself wondering, after all, which one of them it was that Jarvis was so eager to send word to. At last I said, very quietly, ‘Have you a prisoner named Emma White here, matron?’—and when Miss Manning said that she had, and should I like to visit her?, I shook my head, and hesitated, then said that it was only that another woman was keen for news of her, on Mrs Jelf’s ward. Her cousin, was it?—Jane Jarvis?
    Miss Manning gave a snort. ‘Her cousin, did she tell you? Why, she is no more cousin to Emma White than I am!’
    She said that White and Jarvis are notorious in the gaol as a pair of ‘pals’, and were ‘worse than any sweethearts’. She said I would find the women ‘palling up’ like that, they did it at every prison she ever worked at. It was the loneliness, she said, that made them do it. She herself had seen hard women there turn quite love-sick, because they had taken a fancy to some girl they had seen, and the girl had turned the shoulder on them, or had a pal already that she liked better. She laughed. ‘You must watch that no-one tries to make a pal of you , miss,’ she said. ‘There have been women here who have grown romantic over their matrons, and have had to be removed to other gaols for it. And the row they have raised, when they get taken, has been quite comical!’
    She laughed again, then led me a little further down the ward; and I followed, though uneasily—for I have heard them talk of ‘pals’ before, and have used the word myself, but it disturbed me to find that the term had that particular meaning and I hadn’t known it. Nor, somehow, do I care to think that I had almost played the medium, innocently, for Jarvis’ dark passion . . .
    Miss Manning brought me to a gate. ‘There’s White for you,’ she murmured, ‘that Jane Jarvis thinks so much of.’ I gazed into a cell to see a stout, yellow-faced girl, squinting at a row of crooked stitches in the canvas bag she had been set to sew. When she saw us watching her she rose and made a curtsey. Miss Manning said, ‘All right, White. Any news yet of your daughter?’—and then, to me: ‘White has a daughter miss, left in the care of an aunt. But we think the aunt a bad one—don’t we, White?—and are in fears she will let the little girl go the same way.’
    White said she