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chapel. Impulsively, several of the men still in line started forward.
    â€œStand fast,” the guard barked. Number 351 had already bent to pick it up, and when he rose, their eyes met, his questioning.
    As he replaced the Bible on the stack, she handed him the one she was holding. “Bless you,” she said.
    When each man had received his Bible, the guards climbed down from the stools. “Form up!” came the command, and the men fell into a single line. “Forward!” The group marched away in a shuffling lockstep.
    â€œThank you, Miss Lucas,” the chaplain said, taking Charlotte’s black-gloved hand. “I know the men are grateful for the interruption in the monotony of their days, if nothing else. You’re going directly back to London? You’ll see Commander Sloan on your return?”
    â€œYes,” Charlotte lied. “I shall see him this evening. Do you have a message for him?”
    â€œPlease give him my best wishes and tell him that I am thankful for the Army’s continuing generosity.”
    â€œI shall indeed,” Charlotte said. “God bless your efforts on behalf of these poor souls, Chaplain.”
    â€œAnd yours,” the chaplain replied piously. “You and your colleagues are to be deeply commended for bringing salvation to the lost. Without your prayers and continuing efforts, these men would be damned indeed.”
    Charlotte thought about these words as she stood on the platform in front of the Princetown railway depot a half hour later, waiting for the train that would carry her south to Yelverton and the hotel room she had rented for yet another night.
    Salvation to the lost.
    She hoped with all her heart that the chaplain was right.

CHAPTER FIVE

    I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
    Â 
    And thus we rust Life’s iron chain,
Degraded and alone :
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God’s eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone.
    Â 
    â€œBallad of Reading Gaol”
Oscar Wilde
    â€œD on’t dally, Three fifty-one.” The guard behind him gave him a hard shove. “Leave that Bible in yer cell an’ step back out here. ‘Nough shirkin’. Time ye wuz back in the bog fields.”
    His face set, his mouth a thin line, Prisoner 351 did as he was ordered, then returned to Exercise Yard A with the rest of the men who had been briefly released from their afternoon’s labor to receive the Bibles. They formed a column and marched to the North Wall Gate, where the doors opened and they could see the moors stretching away to the far horizon, vast and rolling as the ocean. Since the work party was a small one, it was attended by only two mounted warders, each carrying a loaded carbine. The column made to the right and descended the slope of Cemetery Hill, where were buried the hapless prisoners of war who had met their deaths in Dartmoor almost a century before.
    Prisoner 351 kept his eyes forward, but his thoughts were bleak. If the Crown had its way, he would lie in just such a burial ground one day, under the cold, peaty sod of the moor and its filmy blanket of blowing mist. And from now until then, he would labor without ceasing in the windswept bog fields and the brutal granite quarry and sleep like the dead in the cold granite coffin of his cell, while around him men wept and cursed all through the night. He thought as he often did of the lines from Oscar Wilde’s ballad, written while the poet was himself a prisoner. “Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard. Some do it with a bitter look...”
    The warder nearest him caught his eye and motioned with his carbine. “Step it up there, Three Fifty-one. Ye’re laggin’.” But the rough voice was not unkind,