Free The Memory of Scent by Lisa Burkitt

so much simpler. I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise you to hear that thieves often assure me they haven’t robbed and murderers that they haven’t killed.’
    He stands, in a much more laboured way than Madame and not in an unkindly way, takes my elbow directing me too to stand. ‘There are just a few things that need to be cleared up. You’ll appreciate that.’
    Hugging my bag, I am steered out of the room and towards the front door. Many of the girls who were at the fête are standing like primly arranged ornaments on the buffed stairs, with the pink-cheeked lady and Madame Gouloumes like two mismatched bookends standing at the bottom. I can just about hear one of the girls whispering behind her hand to her friend on the step in front of her, ‘We could all have been murdered.’
    * * *
    If that observer in the park could describe me now, she would see someone in a state of absolute shock and terror. She would have watched as I stood in the dock, pleading my innocence while I was being referred to repeatedly as a ‘wretched creature’. She would have listened as someone, I’m not sure who, spoke on my behalf using terms like ‘delicate damsel’ and an ‘inherent piety’ and she would have witnessed a gruff, whiskered gendarme calibrate my distress with somehow being directly responsible for it and she would have heard it concluded that I was indeed, some kind of deviant from which the world needed to be made safe. All this has been recorded for I watched intrigued, as reporters condensed the proceedings and my upset for the leisurely fireside reading of others.
    All I can see here through this high grilled window are two cell-cars clattering out of the cobbled courtyard on their way to the Justice Palace with more prisoners. It looks almost elegant. One of the covered cars being drawn bytwo black horses, and the other by two white horses. The two drivers up front have blankets across their knees and if I make my eyes squint I can imagine that these women are being taken to a ball.
    * * *
    This place is a noisy clanking hell. From the very first day that I passed through the arched front entrance, it has been as if I was clamped in armour of fear, rigid and cold against my skin. With that first tentative walk down that long corridor, an ocean of noise swept over me. The corridor seemed to narrow as I got closer to the dormitory where I would be staying. My first glimpse of the room was of a dimly lit space with a dozen or more beds looming like shadowy humped-back beasts. Wherever there was a hint of brightness, it was caged in grilled mesh. My eyes are slowly adjusting, but my bed is not the sanctuary that I crave from the chaos. I used to love that sensation of sinking deep under the covers when the night turned inky, but here I lay down my fearful throbbing head and pray for dawn. My fingernails tear at my skin each night as the bedbugs and lice gorge on my compliance.
    If I was one of those reporters in the court, I would make a note of each class of humanity thrown here together, from the streetwalkers to the petty thieves to the murderers. I would easily describe them all as ‘wretched creatures’ and I so completely out of place. Several of these women have killed their husbands or lovers in what are dismissed as ‘passionate accidents’. ‘Passionate accidents?’ I would make a note of that. I feel no safer here in my sheath of womanhood than I did with that brute of a painter. Each night, on this pathetically thin mattress, I try to close my mind to the night-time activities of the other women around me. Though I attempt tomake myself as small as possible, more than once I have felt a hand reach in under my covers and snake across my breasts. My first instinct was to scream, but it only seemed to cause amusement. I did not know that other women would do such a thing. My pleading to be moved to another cell was greeted by the nuns as if they were deaf and me an unstable mute.
    The brief walk across