Before entering her cell tonight, Ivy fills her lungs deep as if swallowing bad medicine. Hours ahead alone within stone walls when she just saw Jack. I want to catch her hand and let my touch linger on her skin as her lotion did on mine.
For Ivy, there’s just Jack. She won’t rest until she’s with him.
I’ll be out before her, in less than two months, if I toe the line. There’s nothing I want like she does. Only to survive. And not get trapped ever again. But where could that place be without her?
* * *
Between what’s real and what’s imagined, there can be too thin a line. Sometimes I hear Luther’s voice. Don’t deny it. I cover my ears but he shouts anyway:
“Don’t think of running. Or ever telling. Don’t I know every inch of this rookery? Not a corner to hide in. I’ll come for you. When I do, it’ll be with this”—he swivels the Valentin knife until it glints in the candlelight—“and afterward, no one will be able to stomach looking at your face!”
Ghosts fly in and out of my cell without my say and now a letter appears from someone I never met. In the oakum room, I glance at Ivy whenever I dare. She doesn’t turn her head lately; she was silent the night we all spoke of the letter and has been so since. Edwina and Rose won’t stop speaking of it, but not Ivy, who fills her head with Jack. She’s with him and not here. Another one haunted by a man. If she said she’d go, I would too. Her face on walks is often closed as if she is shutting everything out. She won’t even meet my gaze. It gets like this with all of us at times.
I sigh. Some days, the oakum draws you in. You let it. There’s a secret as you work it. I wonder if the others guess.
It’s this: you don’t need your mind to do it, just your body. Your hands can work without you. They will untwist, straighten, unwind, flatten, roll, and fray, over and over again. While you float and watch. When you finally come out of the spell, you are altogether different. What seemed a pressing weight before now seems like nothing. Pounds of strands caked together with thick black tar, a million barbs to prick your bare flesh, have taught me this.
It’s then I think of a time when I was “innocent and very different,” as the letter asked. Such a time I remember, when I was my father’s daughter and trusted all I met. There was Emma then, whose father owned the theater, much older than me, like a big sister. Her heart-shaped face always lit when she saw me. A playmate, loose and free as the curls spilling out of her bonnet. But on the day I returned from my mother’s burial, she did not skip to see me as she usually did. Instead, her arms wrapped around me and held me in a circle. It seemed an eternity. When she let go, she had become more than a friend and sister—a mother too.
The home is named Urania. I’ve finally remembered who Urania was: a Muse! One who inspires. One you call upon when there’s something yearned for. She was a long-ago Grecian goddess of stars and space, places where everything is possible and nothing is known. A poem about Urania once recited suddenly floods my mind:
She sang of night that clothed the infant world,
In strains as solemn as its dark profound—
How at the call of Jove the mist unfurled,
And o’er the swelling vault—the glowing sky,
The new-born stars hung out their lamps on high.
My mother’s dress floods my mind. So far away and long gone, nothing much else remains of her. It was my mother who once chanted this verse, dressed in a twilight gown with sequins like stars on it. It’s her voice I remember most. It was full of music. Sometimes it sounded like lutes and sometimes like drums. So splendid was her costume and that voice, she carried me away, up into the sky in that performance, as if she were Urania herself.
That very afternoon, after dinner, I ask for a quill and paper. Within the hour, Doyle brings them and stands over me, her neck stretched out long like a chicken’s and her mouth fallen open, as if she’s never seen writing before. All the girls pretend not to stare.
I wish to come, I tell the one who says he is a friend.
Hester watches with narrowed eyes.
* * *
The doctor’s hair is clipped at sharp angles, his skin scrubbed pink, and his nails trimmed. His white coat is spotlessly stiff. He takes his metal instruments out.
You remember the last time: in the hospital. Your body splayed on a cot, your wrists tied together. After they were done, my monthly bleeding never came anymore.
He motions me to an examining table. I must sit up in my thin gown, though I shiver.
“Any complaints about your health, E22?”
I shake my head. He sticks something into my mouth, then probes my jaw and neck with his long fingers, hunting for something. When he puts a cold metal circle to my chest, we both listen to my jumpy heart. The metal heads lower.
“Do you move your bowels regularly?”
I know to nod.
“Do you have your bleeding regularly each month?”
A quicker nod.
“Any pus? Or pain? Any unusual discharge down there?”
He’s reading my records. I jump off the table. Heat rushes to my face.
But he persists. “Show me your undergarments. Pull them down so I can see if they are soiled.”
His eyes scan my hips.
My bare feet walk a safe distance away. I unroll my undergarments and turn them inside out for him to see.
“If you will not let me examine your privates for disease, the examination is not complete, and I cannot recommend you for the Home. Only healthy candidates are accepted, girls clean inside and out.”
We watch one another. The air thins.
“Nurse!” he shouts.
A nurse runs in and guides me to the table. “Do as the doctor says. Lie down quiet. It won’t take long.”
My eyes dart back and forth between them. The doctor stands in the doorway, blocking my way. I lie down while my gown is lifted and the nurse spreads my legs. Hands pin me down. Fingers dig inside me. Slime drips down my leg.
This is the place only Luther touched.
The air thickens with my screams. Then suddenly it’s over and the doctor sits down to write something.
With a wave of his hand, I am dismissed.
There is a price to apply for the Home, and I have surely paid it.
* * *
That night I thrash in my hammock. Toss and kick the covers off. Images swirl. The hospital walls were a sickening green, covered with decades of grease and blood.
“Did you kill it?” the nurse demanded.
“Something was sliding as I ran. I didn’t know what it was.”
She sneered. “Did you do something to force it out?”
“Did you wrap the cord around its neck?” accused the doctor. “For that’s how it was found. And the baby blue.”
I wanted to cover my ears and not hear it.
They would not tell me whether it was a boy or girl and though I begged to see it, none would bring it for the shame of being an unmarried girl. Finally I was told the babe was in the morgue awaiting autopsy. Next morning, charges were shouted out by a constable and I was taken away to face the judge at the Old Bailey, then sentenced at once to Tothill. I never saw the poor creature. Or ever named it. It was not mine. It was his.
I must have slept. In the morning I awaken in the hammock with the taste of blood in my throat.
* * *
Foster, with me at her heels, descends down and down to the ground floor of the prison. Her back ramrod straight, lips pressed flat, her boots stomp ahead as if marching me down to Hell.
Sounds of the street echo upward: clomping of horses’ hooves, shouts of boys, wind screeching through crevices. From their posts on each and every landing, the male guards stare down. Cold eyes knowing everything there is to know about me, eyes that have pried greedily through my chart reading the defilements.
&
nbsp; I shouldn’t be going down to him.
Hester pressed against me in line yesterday, her warning still shivering down my back: “He’ll shove God down your throat like all the rest. You’ll be scrubbing floors on your knees reciting bloody Hail Marys till you’re thirty and near dead!”
My thin boots stall. Foster turns.
“Don’t tarry, E22!”
I made a mistake.
In a second, I could fly back up the two stories quicker than a shout. But Foster closes in on me, edging her face so near mine the black whiskers above her lips poke out like stiff quills.
“Best we don’t keep the gent waiting.” Her words spit out in a cloud of fried eel breath.
She squeezes my elbow between her icy fingers and walks me down the landing and then along a long hallway, leading me to a room with its door swung wide open.
“Sir? E22 is here.”
A smallish gentleman sits at a table, papers before him. Immediately his eyes fix on me as if eyeing oysters in a stall. The iron maiden knuckles my back. I inch forward and sit down where he points, in a chair facing him. Suddenly my breath catches in my throat. I try to breathe from deep in my belly as Pa taught me to do for stage fright but it tugs at my throat instead.
“Welcome, Miss Wood. I am Mr. Dickens. I’m here to interview you for admission to Urania, the Home a private benefactor, Miss Coutts, has established for girls who have…gone astray. Those who might welcome a second chance. Such help we offer certain girls. I was told that you yourself wrote the letter asking to meet with me. Is that correct?”
I nod, breath held. No one has said my last name since the day I left court to come directly here.
The man is crisp and finely dressed. A blur of something soft underneath his brown jacket. A vest as smooth as rabbit, the color of sapphire. Velvet!
“What was your schooling?”
He opens a thick black leather book and dips a quill in blue ink.
“Mostly my pa, sir, who taught me to read aloud and memorize. And then to write when he wasn’t so…I didn’t stay long at the ragged school they sent us to for free.”
“Which one were you sent to in your neighborhood?”
“Old Penny Square, sir.”
An image rises up between the two of us: a crowd of shouting boys, hands down my dress or in my pockets whenever the schoolmaster turned his back. Mr. Dickens grows still at my words. I swear he is seeing my very own thoughts.
“Then you are from Devil’s Acre, the Irish rookery, in the parish of Westminster.” He tilts his head as I nod.
The rookery. Hundreds crammed inside tiny crumbling houses. Families of ten stuffed inside a single room. Throngs pouring out into the streets in summer’s heat. Never quiet, except in the middle of the night, when Luther roamed.
“Does your family live there now? It’s so close by, you must have many visitors at Tothill.”
My breath catches in my throat. “He…my…pa is dead, sir.”
“I am sorry to hear it. And your mother?”
“They said too late you cannot drink of the Thames. Cholera swarmed in the water. Many died that year. My mother was one.”
“How old were you then? This must have been…forty-nine?”
“Yes, sir. I was nearly nine. Afterward, I only had Pa two more years. He never was the same.”
Sometimes Pa would stop in the middle of listening to a speech I had memorized and stare into the distance until I called him back into the room.
He lost his muse, his Urania, my mother. I know that now; I didn’t then.
“Is there no one else in the rookery to welcome you home?”
Not my aunt on Great St. Anne’s Lane. I can never go back there. My first home was the theater on Old Pye Street where I was born. Behind its stage lived Emma and her father. In a narrow hallway upstairs, Pa and I stayed until he died and they took me away.
Soon as my eyes opened each morning, Pa still snoring in a drunken daze, I ran down to Emma. I was by that girl’s side every hour back then. Always she shared breakfast and lessons in reading and writing when Pa could not. Between us, we sneaked the latest installment of stories sold in the street, reading them to one another and collapsing in giggles.
She wouldn’t want to know the kind of girl I have become.
I stare at Mr. Dickens without answering. The man watches everything and absorbs it as if the world is kindling and he a bonfire. Even Foster’s bone of a face peering in by the door where she stands guard, head turned, listening, he sees.
Suddenly, the gentleman leaps up from the desk. In three quick steps, he bounds to Foster, grabs her sleeve, and whispers in her ear. Foster disappears from the door. I am now alone and face-to-face with this man. He nods for me to continue.
Only my thoughts grow bold: One is alive who I wish dead. Another lives, the only one who cared—Emma. Most certainly dead I would be had I not been sent to Tothill. “Only one…perhaps. The others—”
“Where are they now?”
Emma’s letter is hidden between the bricks of my cell wall since Christmas, growing dark and wet with the damp.
“Nowhere to be found, sir.”
The fierce scratching of his quill surprises me. The man’s hand flies across the paper as if pursued. What he is saying about me in that black book, I dread to guess. That I am not suitable, I already know. Whatever made him think to come to a prison to find a good girl?
“Now I must ask you about your crimes. I am not here to condemn but to understand. What you say will not be reported to any prison authority, I assure you.”
Each word is a road. To conceal. To talk around. Or to tell. All the air suddenly leaves me so that I feel faint. I lean far back from him, toward the hard wall.
“Can you tell me why you were taken here?”
“I was found in the street, sir. And then…taken to hospital. After…the way I was found…they said I had committed a crime against society.”
“What was this crime?”
Mr. Dickens stops writing and lifts his eyes to mine.
“They branded me a fallen girl. They had the evidence.”
“Which was?”
“There on the street, sir…a baby spilled out of me. Too fast. Too early. Didn’t know it was coming. I must have fainted. When I woke, I was in hospital. Constables stood by the door ready to take me away once the bleeding slowed.”
Silence. Long minutes pass. Finally he reaches for a single paper upon the desk bearing an official stamp.
“According to your record,” he says while I grab the chair bottom hard, “the charges against you were these: infanticide. Prostitution. Robbery. Your aunt and uncle both disowned you for being with child.”
“Please sir, I am innocent of all those charges. But no one believed me.”
Mr. Dickens raises his eyebrows. “Witnesses had seen you through the windows of Silver Feathers, a brothel. A man’s wallet was missing. A baby died. And you refused to name the baby’s father.”
“What was done was done, sir. A man damned me. Many times I’ve wished him dead.”
“His name?”
I sit still as a rock. I can harden my whole body that way.
The quill scratches at breakneck speed, then stops. The gentleman stares at me for what seems like hours.
Finally Mr. Dickens sighs. “Do you have any questions of me?”
Questions boil up inside me like live eels in a pot. All slithering in circles and biting their own tails to get out. But I shake my head.
He tells me more of Urania, Home for lost girls. Rules are enforced there: punctuality, cleanliness, household chores such as cooking, cleaning and knitting, education, and prayer. The first few months, a girl is on probation. When the term is over, arrangement is made to transport her to a position in the colonies as a maid or possibly a governess. For it is
impossible to return to London society once so fallen.
But I lose most of it, for when he says there will be a library of many books and a garden too and that the Home sits in the countryside outside London, I almost stand to run right there. Pictures fill my mind: green fields; a soft bed; far away and safe from Luther. That man cast his shadow over the whole rookery. I shall always feel his chill lurking around every corner, a readiness to pounce, should I return there.
My hands squeeze into a solid block beneath the desk but I do not budge lest Mr. Dickens see how eager I am. If I could escape from here to there, I could be Orpha again. Even if I had to scrub all the floors.
“I will think on it, sir,” I promise him as I curtsy on my way out.
Mr. Dickens, you have dangled a sugarplum in my face. Shall I take your bait?
INTERVIEW NUMBER 1 WITH ORPHA WOOD (E22)
Another girl recommended by Governor Tracey. Her Red Star speaks for itself. Most inmates enter this prison multiple times, but not her. Not yet. At sixteen, she’s the most literate inmate I’ve encountered.
The girl is pale and so still she could have been Marble. Indeed she hardly breathes, her chest slight and birdlike. Her family has deserted her. But she shares no plans and does not think to ask questions about what we offer.
She winces when asked about her crimes, suggesting Contrition and great pain. Malnourished, Underweight, Secretive—although they all are to have survived the streets.
Most impressive is her Handwriting. It’s written in a tidy hand with no misspellings. Most girls I interview can neither read or write. So much time is taken teaching them at the Home.
There is more to her and I wish to know it.
CD
* * *
Out on the Devil’s Walk today, by the shelter of the wall, the Head Matron spits out orders as if training horses, heading us into the cutting wind.
“Left!” “About face! “To the right!” Then, “Stop! To the left!”
Among the Fallen Page 3