She was perhaps thirty,
perhaps five feet high, the shape of a black pudding, with stony, rather
than ugly, features, and cruel, cat-like eyes. I hated her handsomely till
she smiled at me.
She was, I suppose, my jailer's daughter, or servant, or something of the
sort. I never knew, and my ignorance does not matter. She brought me my
food, spake or spake not, according to the degree of vileness in her
prevailing humour, and went off, leaving me to my thoughts and my painful
shamblings round my prison-chamber.
My ignorance was limitless. I was a prisoner, and my prison was a room in
a sizable farm-house with thick stone walls. Where the house was I had no
idea other than that it could not be far from the place where I was taken,
which, again, could not be far from the town of Penrith. There was one
window in my cell, the sill of which was as high from the ground as my
chin when standing upright. But I never stood upright, being jammed into a
cross made of good, solid iron, foul with rust, and having bracelets at
the tips for my ankles and wrists. It kept me a foot short of my full
stretch.
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