There once was a cobbler called Saunders who died for eleven days. At least, that was how his daughter remembered it.
In the year 1752 it was announced that the second of September would be followed by the fourteenth. The matter was merely one of wording, of course; time in its substance was not to undergo any change. Since this calendrical reform would bring the kingdom of Great Britain in line with its neighbours at last, what price a brief inconvenience, a touch of confusion? London newspapers printed witty verses about the 'Annihilation of Time,' but no one doubted the Government's weighty reasons. Nor did anyone think to explain them to persons of no importance, such as Cob Saunders.
He knew this much: injustice had been done. There were eleven days of chiselling shoe leather he’d never be paid for, eleven dinners snatched away before they reached his lips, eleven nights when he was going to be cheated out of the sweet relief of dropping down on his straw mattress.
On September the fourteenth—New Style, as they called it—Cob Saunders woke up with a hammering head and knew that eleven days of his life had been lost. Stolen, rather; cut out of his allotted span the way you might nick a wormhole out of an apple. He had no notion how those days had been done away with, or how he might fetch them back; his head was fit to split when he tried to figure it out. He was a man eleven days nearer to his death and there was nothing he could do.
But perhaps there was. When the Calendar Riots began—though Cob had no part in the starting of them—he joined in with all the breath he had, tossing his rage onto the general bonfire. The cry went up: Give us back our eleven days.
The Government was merciful; Cob Saunders wasn’t executed. He died of gaol fever.
Christmas came eleven days early, that year. The clamour of church bells pulled the air as taut as catgut, and the cobbler’s five-year-old daughter Mary knelt below the window, watching for snow that never fell.
Eleven years later Mary Saunders was back on her knees, herself in gaol.
Like father, like daughter.
The night room in Monmouth Gaol was twenty-two feet long and fifteen feet wide. She’d measured it by pacing, her first night. Four walls and no windows: here the men and women awaiting trial at the Spring Sessions lived like rats. Some were chained up after sunset, but not necessarily the murderers; there was no rhyme or reason to it that Mary could see. Anything, she learned, could happen in the darkness. Rapes, and only a hiss for breath; blows, and no sound but the slap of meat. There was no straw provided, so shit piled high in the corners; the air was as thick as earth. One morning an old Welshman was found face down, unmoving. But nothing could shock Mary Saunders any more; she wouldn’t let anything touch her now.
It had been worse back in September, when mosquitoes sang in the night heat and the guards didn’t bring any water. Once before dawn it had rained so hard that water leaked through the cracked ceiling, and the prisoners laughed like hoarse lunatics and licked the walls.
Now it was Christmastide, and in the gaol’s day room Mary Saunders sat on her feet like a carving, hour after hour. If she didn’t move, she wouldn’t feel. Her palms rested on the rough brown dress the gaolers had given her three months before; it felt like sacking, stiff with dust. Her eyes latched onto the barred square of window, followed the crows wheeling across the white frosty sky towards the Welsh border; her ears took account of their mockery.