The Matron of the Gaol – Part 1: Admission

The heritage gaol had closed as a working prison a hundred and forty years ago, and now it hired its cells to film crews and, very occasionally, to couples with a very particular request. The booking form had asked for no explanation. The manager had left the keys on the admissions desk, with a note: Lights are on a timer. Please lock up at nine.

Winifred stood behind the high wooden desk and opened the great ledger. She was forty-nine, a senior probation officer, stern and spare, with iron-grey hair under a plain cap. Edmund was forty-one, a school bursar, soft-voiced and neat, who had told her one wet night that the thing he secretly longed for was to be received, assessed and told exactly where to sit.

"Name," said Winifred.

"Edmund Carr."

"Stand straight. Hands where I can see them."

Before the door had closed behind him, they had done the part that mattered. At the desk, in the flat light of an oil-style lamp, she had pushed a single sheet across. Regulations of the Gaol. His limits and hers, in her tidy copperplate: no marks, nothing painful, no real humiliation, nothing beyond the building, no one else. The word was Discharge. The cell door was fitted with a plain latch that opened from inside, and she had shown him how, twice. A bell-pull hung within reach of the bunk.

"Say the word."

"Discharge."

"If you say it, the Matron removes her cap. I am Winifred. We make tea in the old kitchen."

"I understand."

"And every hour, by the wall clock, I will ask if you wish to continue. You answer truthfully."

"Yes, Matron."

"Not yet." She put on a long grey dress with a white collar, a bunch of keys at the waist and a stiff white cap, and her voice dropped, low and flat and absolutely level. "Prisoner. Empty your pockets onto the desk."

He emptied them. A wallet, a pen, a handkerchief. She entered each item in the ledger with a long, slow scratch of the nib, and said nothing until she had finished.

"You will be addressed by number. Yours is forty-two. You will answer to it."

"Yes, Matron."

"You will keep silence unless spoken to. You will walk where I tell you. You will not look at me unless I order it." She held up the heavy iron key and let it swing. "Do you understand the regime?"

"Yes, Matron."

"Are you content, Forty-two?"

"Content, Matron."

"Good. Walk."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Lights Out.