Among the Fallen

by Virginia Frances Schwartz

  “All of you will be doomed to Hell’s scorching fire if you don’t confess to God!” he shouts at us. “Down on your knees this moment to ask His forgiveness upon your heathen souls!”

  No one drops to her knees here. The others would slice her down with a glance if she did. To end, we sing a hymn. Today it is “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down,

  Darkness be over me, my rest a stone;

  Yet in my dreams I’d be

  Nearer, my God, to thee!

  Some of us scream, for this is the only chance we get to open our mouths. So clever, this, as it covers the other voices traveling from girl to girl between the cubicles. Harred’s glance cuts in all directions like a fox on a rabbit run. But there is such a din of voices no matron guesses whose mouth the words are spilling from. All mouths seem to be singing. Only we know, for we are inside the noise.

  When Ivy raps on the wooden wall between us, I lean my ear against it to listen. The hollow wood is like a magic flute. Through it, her voice echoes. Only since last month do I dare answer back, ever watchful of Harred.

  “Jack!” she cries. “He’s not showed these last six months.”

  “He’ll come!”

  “What if he’s found another?” she calls again.

  I could spit at that. She’s here because of him. And he is free to do what he likes. Just like Luther.

  I shout back with all my might. “What will you do about the letter?”

  No answer returns.

  If we could go to the Home, we’d be safe from the streets, away from both Jack and Luther. But she doesn’t see it the way I do. Of that, I am certain.

  I knock again. But Ivy is elsewhere.

  * * *

  Back to the oakum again until rope-walk. Children under ten years leave for the schoolroom. Those left behind don’t budge, just stare into space, and soon their small heads bob till nudged. Mothers who birthed here visit their own babies in the nursery, the one place they must hear laughter and the sound of their own voices. I imagine that room ringing bright as Westminster’s bells. As for the rest of us, we’ll be wrapped in oakum, lost for hours.

  * * *

  At last it is afternoon, three o’clock, the hour our heads drop.

  “Forward for your exercise!” shouts Doyle. “Off your arse, girls! Step lively now.”

  We head out to the airing yard in circles of girls joined hand to hand by ropes to keep us all moving at the same even pace. They believe the rope-walk keeps us fit. We call it Devil’s Circle.

  Today Governor Tracey himself joins Harred and the other matrons, leaning their heads together, whispering near the prison wall, out of the wind, Foster’s thin lips spilling foulness. They turn to stare boldly at our parade, pointing out Ivy.

  Let her be! She’s a Red Star girl. She’s done nothing wrong here. In a second, they could pull her out, away from me, with one of Foster’s lies. There’d be no way to protect her.

  Hester finally joins us today. She’s been in confinement in the darks, shut in the basement with the crank, a punishment tool that must be turned a certain number of rotations each day. She made the mistake of talking back to a matron.

  Hester’s the oldest girl here. She’s a nightwalker. They say she lures men down into underground tunnels. That’s how she makes money. Every matron knows her by name. She is here this time, she says, “ ’Cause the bribe I gave those constables wasn’t enough so’s they turned me in. The judge would hear none of that story. Fined me even more for being sassy enough to say so to the court. I couldn’t pay up. But I wasn’t lyin’ one bit!”

  These last five days, whenever we passed into the yard for our exercise, we could hear the crank squeaking round and round in regular rhythm. Whenever someone is punished, matrons are sure to lead us past the basement as warning of a life churning away.

  Hester slides quickly into line now. Twists of black hair poke out of her cap like live hornets and venom twists her thin lips trying to jump out. Most girls hang on her words. She has survived both here and on the streets. Way out in front, at the turn, she lifts her hand to shield her mouth and tosses words to the wind in a voice thrown from the back of her throat. I lean my whole body toward her.

  “Damn them! Five days in the dark of—”

  We must wait until the next turn to hear the rest. “—bread and water. Shoulder hurts awful and they—”

  Harred’s head turns. She sniffs the cold air. Her eyes bounce from girl to girl. Immediately, I tug hard on the rope. The human chain in front of me yanks upon their rope until Edwina, just behind Hester, pulls so hard Hester feels our warning throttle in her own hands. She slams her mouth flat.

  “That you I hear, E29?” the Head Matron shouts across the yard, pointing to Hester. “Miss the churning, do you? One more word and it’s back to the crank. Keep in step, all of you!”

  We push round and round until we are all sweaty and flushed, the way they like. They lecture that quick walks open the lungs wide and aid our stomachs to digest. “Can’t afford to dose you all with castor oil or bother the busy doctor,” we’ve been told.

  “Double quick!” Harred orders from the far wall.

  Usually, all she does is point a finger and we quicken our steps. She rarely moves from her post. Beside her, the tall pink-skinned governor nods approval.

  So we run in circles gasping until we hear, “Regular time!”

  Up ahead, Edwina’s right leg trails behind, slowing the whole line. You can tell where she is at once. She’s always sniffling. Gray she is, stick thin, with no breasts at all, and a flattened nose.

  “Get a move on there, E30!” Doyle shouts, heading closer.

  And Edwina does. She scoots her thin body ahead, out of Doyle’s reach.

  “Two and a half years gone,” Ivy whispers, brushing past as we go back inside the prison. “Seven months to go! I will never find myself again.”

  I catch the sign: her fingers trailing along the bricked wall. A signal between us: grief as hard as this stone. Don’t make me go back in there again, it says.

  This time, I take the chance. Pretending to stumble, I touch my hand to the small of Ivy’s back to steady myself, pressing my warmth into her. Doyle shouts too late. For I have already changed Ivy. Her chin lifts, not hiding her grin.

  Inside, girl after girl passes by, steering straight toward her pile of oakum like a ship toward land, sinking down upon her stool like a heavy anchor. A horrid odor fills the air in their wake: blood and rot. One of them must have her monthlies.

  * * *

  The letter waits on the floor of my cell after we return from supper. Out of the corner of my eye, I see letters in the other cells too: one in Ivy’s; one in Rose’s, Edwina’s, another in—there’s that stench along the corridor again. Perhaps a poisoned rat hides dead in the walls. The door bolts behind me. And I am alone with something I dare not touch. It seems so alive and fresh.

  But I do. Press its smooth surface to my face. It speaks to a girl called you. Immediately I draw to attention. Only to find it’s an anonymous letter by someone who signs, Your friend. The tone is sweet and full of promises. It invites us when our term is up to enter a Home and change our lives. And not to go the round of most inmates—those who step out prison gates only to reenter them like a revolving door and grow old behind bars, without family or friends.

  It ends with these words: “What you might have been, and what you are, oh think of it then, and consider what you might be yet!”

  How did this writer know that I was once an innocent girl…even promising…I would have been an actress, like my mother, tutored by my own father, who tuned my voice to vibrate as a violin string does. But there isn’t a house in the whole of London that would welcome me now.

  In fifty days, I will be released. There are only certain places a Tothill girl can
go. A girl’s shaved crop and blackened palms marked by the scars of oakum picking tell a story. No one will befriend such a girl or offer her a post. People will gossip about what she may have done.

  Pray Emma doesn’t know, my one bosom friend from the rookery. This winter, she sent an inquiry to Tothill about me. But I did not answer her. Just my appearance and list of my crimes would make her cry. Let her think I am not here at all.

  Soon I am spinning a path over the stone again. The thing to do is never stop. When my feet walk ahead, time runs away. There is no past or future then. Round and round I pace, though my stomach threatens to heave the grease from our dinner barley soup. It was supposed to be beef, but E37 cooks in the kitchen and let it be known on the rope-walk that rotting fly-ridden horsemeat was delivered yesterday.

  This letter is a trap. From a man, most likely. No one could write like that except one, sweetening his words like a peppermint humbug one would bait a child with. But we are knowing here. No man writes a letter to ones such as us unless he wants something.

  * * *

  That night, after the nine o’clock blast of gunfire, in pitch dark, we push our mouths flat to the eyelet as the matron’s bootsteps fade away at the end of her shift. There’s thirty minutes before the next matron shows.

  One voice, then others, echo in a chorus, “The letter! Did you get it?”

  We shush. Wait for one voice to penetrate the corridor. Then press an ear to the eyelet so one’s whole body becomes a listening vehicle. Edwina is a yeller. She calls out, wondering about the Home with the odd name: Urania. There’s a tumble of voices again.

  Hester taps us quiet. Her taps are the hardest. Likely her heel.

  “Fools!” Her voice slams. “It’s an asylum, not a refuge. More rules than here. Preachers and lashes. Hiding you away. Just like prison. Worse! Never let you out for air in case you sneak off!”

  Her words blast at the eyelet. We hold still.

  “I got nowhere else to go!” cries Edwina.

  “It’s a nunnery!” shouts a faraway voice. “I hear you must confess your crime and work every minute. If you don’t—”

  “You’ll be dragged to the punishment room!” screams another.

  Another yells, “It’ll be the cat-o’-nine-tails licking your back then!”

  “I was put in one at twelve!” Hester taps. “Bible reading all day long. Caned me if I complained about the hard work. So I ran away.”

  It sounds harsher than the workhouse where I was sent to pay Pa’s debt. How could it be any worse than here, where we see nobody? Hester always has a say. But she was not called down. No letter waited on her floor.

  ·• TWO •·

  I have a name but no one has ever said it aloud except Ivy. She called it across the dark corridor the night I arrived: “Orpha!” How odd to hear that name when all their charges still shouted in my ears, after they assigned me a number, confiscated my clothes, and swore I had no name anymore.

  Where had she heard it? And did she know the worst of the charges?

  Still she called my name aloud, risking punishment, brightening the dark. The whole of London had condemned me: constables, the doctor, nurses, the magistrate and the matrons. She did not.

  Next morning, stepping out of the cell beside mine, she stood between the stone prison and me like a shield. Tiny. Half starved. Yet she looked wiry, slippery as a fish, as if she could somehow slide between these walls. As if she could teach me how to breathe here. But it was her eyes that made me wish to know her: big as coat buttons, and deep brown, just like Pa’s. Those eyes darkened soon as she saw me, riveting to mine like she’d lost everything, wanting me to feel it too. I did. At once.

  Promises shivered in the air between us as if she had spoken them: You are not alone. We are here together. I have endured. You will too.

  Shadows already fall across the factory room when we come inside from exercise that afternoon. Oakum is heaped upon the floor by our stools. The tar’s fumes cut deeper now after we’ve filled our lungs with frosty air. We bow our heads, as if praying. In the stillness, my head droops. Drafts needle my back. The air clots with fibers from fraying ropes and then the coughing starts. Dry hacking. Throat clearing. My nails throb again, split below the nail beds. Tar clings stickily to whatever I touch. There’s no use scrubbing it.

  My thoughts become a flat line. I will myself away. Floating above the oakum room, fingers still plucking. Another me looks down. All I see are Tothill’s girls. Stalled before womanhood. Lips downturned. Eyes narrowed like cats cornered in alleyways. Backs raised. Tails, if they had them, curled beneath their bellies. Quick to hiss or curse.

  I have become one of them: fallen.

  When you are condemned for violence such as you believed you could never be part of, and all accusers point fingers at you, you look at yourself differently. The nurses’ eyes that landed on me in my hospital bed refused to look away. The testimony of witnesses in the street where the women invited me in. The judge without mercy. My father’s sister, Aunt Agatha, once a singer, and her husband, who both disowned me for being in that condition. She was the one who kicked me into the street, leaving me with no choice.

  “Streets lust for girls to be thrown to them like live bait,” Hester swears.

  Suddenly I am no longer myself but who they say I am: a criminal; a common tart not to be trusted. Guilty. All I remember is falling in the street that day and how that changed everything. I never guessed what could happen to a girl. Either before or after.

  Back and forth I toss that doomed time in my mind like a sizzling-hot chestnut. The year Luther owned me, body and soul. The accuser whose wallet was cleverly lifted. The day they caught me. If I did what they accuse me of—any of it—I have lost my own self.

  I awaken with a jerk to oakum piled on my lap and the stern eye of Harred. My fingers know to hop double-time.

  * * *

  After a supper of gruel and bread, heading upstairs in line to the dim cell on the north side of Tothill, I crave a peek outside at the quick fading light of a winter’s dusk. Even on the grayest day, the deepest blue can gather around the pink edges of sunset, making the sky blush with promise. I get a glimpse of it now as we enter the main hall to march upstairs. By the time we step into E wing, it’s become black night.

  There’s that stench in the air just now. It’s one of us in E wing.

  * * *

  On Sunday, there is no work after early chapel. No heat either. Hours alone in our cells.

  “Silence will do its work on the lot of you,” the chaplain lectures. “It will force you to face your sins alone and beg forgiveness.”

  Drafts blow through the seams in my thin boots, making my toes cramp. It helps to pace. It heats the core where your empty belly is. You can tramp down all you wish to forget. You can hold your mind still on what you like. I’ve waited long enough to do it.

  Urania, the anonymous letter writer called it, a fancy name making me think of stars. Why? Hester called it an asylum but the letter said it was a refuge. One of them is lying.

  There will be a family of girls there. I haven’t had a real home since I was eleven. That’s when Pa left. An orphaned girl doesn’t get a family one, two, three. What price will I have to pay for it?

  Ivy has a visitor today and is called down. Not once have I had one. Two visits a year, we are allowed. I bet it’s finally Jack, her smasher, that forger: the one who made up the soft banknotes she passed. The one the constables could not find to bring to court. He’s free. She’s not. Why does she still love him, then? He’s the reason she’s here so long. She couldn’t get enough of his money; can’t get enough of him, even now. I imagine her skirts rustling as she scurries along the stone floor to him like a mouse out of its hole.

  Later, to watch her walk to chapel with her head held high is to know for sure Jack’s come with all kinds of sweet promises. She wo
n’t speak of them, holding them in her mouth like a Communion host.

  On the other side of the cubicle, E41 bangs on the wood during hymns. “I hear they make slaves of you in those asylums. ’Cause you have sinned. All the Our Fathers in the world won’t save you from the birch cane!”

  After chapel, as Ivy files past, she catches the tip of my baby finger, leaving a trail of something warm and creamy. Inside my cell, I lift it to my nose. Lavender lotion! Light and floral, hinting of gardens and sunshine. Immediately, I press it into the ragged hangnail on my thumb.

  To think that Ivy hid this lotion in her palm and slipped it to me, straight from her lover’s hand into mine. Three feet of stone between us so we cannot rap or call one another. She thinks of me too.

  * * *

  It’s Sunday evening. The young weekend matron Ayre arrives. Her uniform is not crisp like the others. Her blouse loosens at her thin waist as if she’s hurried here. I don’t think she lives at Tothill. Bet she has a home. Bet she has a mother.

  If the week on our wing has been without incident, her first task is to leave all the eyelets open. Rose’s cell door is ajar, so we can hear her singing as we read and rest in our cells. The matrons believe it essential to bathe our blackened souls with Christian hymns.

  All along the E corridor, I imagine the other girls pressing their ears against cell doors as darkness falls too soon at the day’s end. For the voice of an angel trails through the empty hallways:

  When I from death shall wake,

  I may of endless light partake.

  Those singular notes vibrate in my chest until I become something other than I am. Can a girl fly invisible on wings and leave her own self behind? I do. For a time.

  * * *