Arthur & George

on his return to the gaol, an innocent man now publicly labelled guilty. But perhaps the terrifying change was only in his own mind. The officers’ manner remained the same for a simple and dispiriting reason: from the start they had presumed him guilty, and the jury’s decision had merely confirmed that presumption.
    The next morning, as a favour, he was brought a newspaper, so that he might see, one final time, his life turned into headlines, his story no longer divergent but now consolidated into legal fact, his character no longer of his own authorship but delineated by others.
    SEVEN YEARS PENAL SERVITUDE.

    WYRLEY CATTLE-KILLER SENTENCED.

    PRISONER UNMOVED
    Dully, yet automatically, George looked over the rest of the page. The story of Miss Hickman the lady doctor appeared also to have reached its end, subsiding into silence and mystery. George noted that Buffalo Bill, after a London season and a provincial tour lasting 294 days, had concluded his programme at Burton-on-Trent before returning to the United States. And as important to the
Gazette
as the sentencing of the Wyrley ‘cattle-killer’ was the story right next to it:

YORKSHIRE RAILWAY SMASH
    Two trains wrecked in a tunnel
    One killed, 23 injured
    BIRMINGHAM MAN’S THRILLING EXPERIENCE
    He was held at Stafford for another twelve days, during which time his parents were allowed daily visits. He found this more painful than if he had been hustled into a van and driven to the most distant part of the kingdom. In this long farewelling each of them behaved as if George’s current predicament was some bureaucratic error soon to be remedied by an appeal to the appropriate official. The Vicar had received many letters of support and was already talking enthusiastically of a public campaign. To George this zeal seemed to border on hysteria, and its origins to lie in guilt. George did not feel his situation to be temporary, and his father’s plans did not bring him any comfort. They seemed more an expression of religious belief than anything else.
    After twelve days George was transferred to Lewes. Here he received a new uniform of coarse biscuit-coloured linen. There were two broad vertical stripes up the front and back, and thick, clumsily printed arrows. They gave him ill-fitting knickerbockers, black stockings and boots. A prison officer explained that he was a star man, and therefore would begin his sentence with three months’ separate – it might be longer, it wouldn’t be shorter. Separate meant solitary confinement. That was what all star men began with. George misunderstood at first: he thought he was being called a star man because his case had attracted notoriety; perhaps the perpetrators of especially heinous crimes were deliberately kept apart from other prisoners, who might vent their anger on a horse-mutilator. But no: a star man was simply the term for a first offender. If you come back, he was told, you will be classed as an intermediary; and if your returns are frequent, as an ordinary or a professional. George said he had no intention of coming back.
    He was taken before the Governor, an old military man who surprised him by staring at the name before him and asking politely how it was to be pronounced.
    ‘
Ay
dlji, sir.’
    ‘Ay-dl-ji,’ repeated the Governor. ‘Not that you’ll be much except a number here.’
    ‘No, sir.’
    ‘Church of England, it says.’
    ‘Yes. My father is a Vicar.’
    ‘Indeed. Your mother …’ The Governor did not seem to know how to ask the question.
    ‘My mother is Scottish.’
    ‘Ah.’
    ‘My father is a Parsee by birth.’
    ‘Now I’m with you. I was in Bombay in the Eighties. Fine city. You know it well, Ay-dl-ji?’
    ‘I’m afraid I’ve never left England, sir. Though I have been to Wales.’
    ‘Wales,’ said the Governor musingly. ‘You’re one up on me then. Solicitor, it says.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘We’ve rather a slump in solicitors at the moment.’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘Solicitors – we’ve a slump in ’em at the moment. Normally we have one or two. One year we had more than half a dozen, I recall. But we got rid of our last solicitor a few months ago. Not that you’d have been able to talk to him much. You’ll find the rules here are strict, and fully enforced, Mr Ay-dl-ji.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘Still, we’ve got a couple of stockbrokers with us, and a banker as well. I tell people, if you want to see a true cross-section of society, you should visit