The Quiet Wing had one rule that anybody remembered, and it was that nobody wrote on its walls. Mireille broke it on the third week, with a stub of charcoal she had taken from the warder’s brazier-tray when he set it down to unlock her door.
She had not planned to steal it. She had only been standing near the brazier with her hands held out to the thin heat, and the warder had been called away down the gallery by a shout from the women’s end, and the charcoal had been lying on the tray beside the coals, black and dry and very useful-looking. She had picked it up without thinking. Then she had put it in the pocket of her grey dress, which the Wing had given her in place of her own clothes, and she had walked back to her cell with her hands folded and her heart beating very hard against the stays.
She did not write at once. She sat on the stone bench for a whole morning with the charcoal in her lap and looked at the wall above the cot.
It was a plain grey wall, scraped smooth by the damp and the hands of other prisoners, with a row of old marks at the height of a sitting woman’s eye where somebody had tried to count the days and had given up after forty. It had no names on it. The Wing did not allow names. It only allowed numbers, and the…
