The other matrons quicken to follow us. Doyle huffs and puffs as she marches beside us, expecting the lot of us to run at a quick pace. We do. She turns toward the Head Matron with a wide grin as if to proudly show off her charges doing her bidding. Harred casts a sour look our way.
Edwina shuffles. Her legs can’t quite keep her straight up. Between us, the rope slackens and I yank it hard to help her stand. She sniffs loudly and spits, cap tumbling to the ground. Her scalp is patchy and nearly bald. In the middle of the night, I awoke to matrons shushing someone’s cries. Could they have been hers?
At the turn, Hester slices a dark look my way. She won’t dare call out from the head of the rope but I guess the words she’d like to yell: “Don’t you go!”
“Did you meet the letter writer?” Ivy’s words fly in a wind toss of low notes.
Two tugs on the rope reach her hands with a yes.
On the next round, my back to the matrons, I dare throw my words.
“Won’t you see him too?”
Ivy shakes her head.
“You’ll be educated, Ivy! You won’t have to commit crimes!”
Ivy’s free hand slides over her heart: Jack! I say no more. If her mind weren’t so set on that man, we could be together in the Home. Instead of sneaking words on the rope-walk and shouts in the dark, risks that could condemn us both to the dark cell, we could tell one another everything there. Ivy wouldn’t ever return to Tothill then. She’d be with me.
FEBRUARY 1857
·• THREE •·
Along E corridor is the unlucky cell: E25. Matrons must think it so too, for it remains empty though new prisoners arrive weekly. It is shunned like the crossroads by Hobart Place where London’s suicides are buried but not resting at all.
“The suicide” was how we spoke of the last girl in that cell, who had tried to take her own life twice before she was sent here. No older than fourteen, murky-faced as the Thames, she was drawn into herself. In the yard, we yanked her along with us on the rope-walk, for she was a dead weight.
She was sent to the darks for refusing to come out of her cell to chapel. “God never saved me from him!” she shouted. No threats from the matrons could stop the howling. In the end, she was dragged to Bedlam, a hospital that houses the insane. She never returned from there. If you enter madness, there is no way out.
One thing can change your life forever. Never in the way anyone would wish. Now a gentleman offers to change everything. Mr. Dickens is very polished, the kind of man, rich and important, one might see attending the Theater Royal instead of the run-down theater where we performed. Or perhaps the man is only pretending to be so. Most of us pretend to be other than we are. Ivy surely did. My own father burrowed like a worm inside his characters, propped all evening long on a stool at the Black Horse, reciting drunken lines to an audience that was not there.
Best to stop thinking. Keep busy. Time seems to stand still but it is actually moving tho’ all of us feel it stalled. Think only on what’s left of the sentence. I count my time ahead in days now. Ivy looks backward at what was lost.
I bend down to the oakum. Having a task divides time so I don’t bear its crushing weight all at once. Time can melt into little bits that way. If I can pluck this pile of oakum, I tell myself, then I can go on.
* * *
“You two!” Foster shouts in the lineup, pointing to the slop buckets.
It’s mostly the bigger girls who carry the buckets down. Ivy and I lift a bucket in each hand as Foster trails us down the hallway. Backs pulled rigid. Lead-footed steps so the pails don’t tilt. Inside, in the frothy yellow urine, feces slide back and forth. As we head down the steps, Ivy presses her lips tight. I don’t hear her until we are halfway down the stairs. Giggles!
On the bottom floor, we head farther down, onto the steps leading to the basement, along a corridor and then to a doorway emitting a fetid stink.
“In there!” Foster halts. “No spilling!”
The matron doesn’t enter with us. Instead, she paces the hall outside.
Together, we edge across the cold room, where dampness seeps out of the walls as if the Thames itself surrounded us. Ahead is a huge open pipe that leads underground. It is smeared with feces and monthlies blood and ancient urine. I can hardly breathe for the odor.
“What luck!” Ivy laughs. “To be picked together. We can talk here! They don’t know we’re pals. Been watching you all this time and guessed you didn’t do any of it, did you? None of those crimes?”
I shake my head.
“You’re an innocent, as I once was as a child. Someone sure hammered the nails into you at that Old Bailey. When we get out of here, we’ve both got to steer clear of it.”
We lift our buckets and begin the slow pour but immediately lean back. Urine sloshes upward, barely missing our cheeks.
I turn my head. “But you’re going back to Jack. Whatever for?”
Ivy leans back, eyes on the door, as she pours. “I was nine years old when he found me. My grandma had died, the only one I had left. I was living on the streets. Chased by boys who stole my only shoes and beat me whenever they could. Jack pulled me away from them. Said he’d take care of me. I was starving. So I went with him. Into a gang of counterfeiters.”
“But why did you stay?” I gasp.
“He fed me. Taught me his trade. Not once did he push me to be his girl. I decided that later on myself. He was my first. And only.”
Boot stomps at the door.
“Hurry it up in there!” booms Foster, a handkerchief over her nose and mouth, before stepping back from the ammonia smell and disappearing.
“He got you in here!” I whisper right in her ear.
Ivy shakes her head. “I knew the risk. But I wasn’t afraid. Besides, we needed to eat. He’s my only family. I wouldn’t have survived without him. He taught me how to listen and look dumb to know all there is to know. Like how I heard of you from the matrons’ gossiping, your name and your crime. Didn’t believe them one bit.”
All the buckets are empty now. We step toward the door.
“Am I your family too?” I cry.
“You are like a sister to me. You saw into my soul as I saw into yours.”
Out in the hallway, just before Foster turns our way, Ivy lines up behind me, whispering into the bones of my back. “I’ll make him go clean. You’ll see. We’ll be together, all three of us. You’ll come live with—”
But we have entered silence once again. The only sounds are the metal pails swinging back and forth, back and forth, and the drumbeat of Foster’s heels right behind us.
* * *
They refuse to let us into the airing yards today. Gray skies day after day and now snow. It swirls through the yard in gusts and shakes the windowpanes. Carts from the prison library rattle past in the oakum room as matrons hand out books to those who want them. Most refuse. Not Ivy or me. Edwina studies the pictures only. Ivy’s fingers trace the lines and stop. Her lips silently try to form syllables. If only I could whisper the difficult words to her. But Doyle stands watching. I grab Robinson Crusoe, about a castaway on an island, a man who teaches himself how to survive alone. I need to find out how he does it. But there is never enough time to escape with him. Already the light is low and so dusky, the book’s print fades away. Drafts pry beneath the layers of my cloak. Hours to go before supper.
I study the Red Star girls around me, sisters all. Hester sneers at our armbands. She’s never had one. Matrons hint that the star earns us something upon discharge. I hope that means coins.
Six new girls arrive today, all crown debtors, plenty of them now that it is winter. Their sentence is under two weeks, their arms bannerless, their crimes minor. None could pay the small fine the court slammed them with, so they work the oakum to pay off their debt. Most are on the verge of laughing, glad to be fed and to wear shoes for a time. Th
e only thing they miss is the drink.
One has a blackened eye with purple streaking her face down to the chin. Her prison gown slants off her shoulder. Another has a swollen nose. Their work is sloppy and often handed back. Some yank with their front teeth to chew the tar away. All keep watch for the supper pots. They hold fire inside. Not like us in E corridor: pale indoor girls whose eyes have lost any light they once held.
One of the debtors has a cunning sneer and a blood-like unnatural color to her hair. She drills her gaze at Hester, who glares right back. This girl will be free soon. I force my bonnet down. But the image holds: her flushed face, tipped-up chin, that knowing smirk.
I must leave the room. It is unbearable. So I will myself away.
Somewhere an hourglass slowly shifts. I roam. Daring to drift back to Emma. Quickstepping up and down the stairs, playing hide-and-seek, belly-laughing, jumping across hidden passageways and gangplanks, feet flying in the air, my eyes landing on hers as she grabbed my hands back to safety over the abyss. What a great thump we made!
Let her remember me that way. May she never be certain that I am at Tothill. May she never be told.
Then, in an instant, the hourglass slams upside down and I cannot stop its sands from dropping. The other one sneaks in: Luther. The one who shows up when I least expect him to, when I am low and on my knees. He can slip through the barred windows like sewer slime. Sometimes my eyes catch the glint of his blade.
Matrons commend the ferocity with which I pick oakum.
“This one’s a real baby killer!” Doyle roars, watching my fingers viciously pluck the rope as if ripping feathers from dead chickens.
No one sees how the tar rips my palms, making them bleed, darkening the rope. When they cart the oakum off to repair the boats on the Thames, that blood will stain those filthy brown waters red.
You! It’s the skin you cannot shed. Ever!
* * *
Almost dark. Nearby, Ivy and Rose slip into their cells like ghosts. Suddenly a wave of stink floats past, nearly choking me. Now I can name that putrid smell: flesh rotting in an open grave. One never forgets a stench like that.
Foster slams the cell door shut behind my back. Alone, I wonder if that stench is me. Perhaps I am hemorrhaging again as I did for weeks when I first came here, after the childbirth. Not since then has there been any monthly. Quickly I lift my skirts and swipe a finger against the coarse prison underwear. It’s dry.
I think back to that time at Aunt Agatha’s house on Great St. Anne’s Lane where I lived for over a year after the workhouse. Something had happened to my body. Telltale signs I never guessed: swollen breasts, how cooking grease turned my stomach and that pressure, pulsing deep down. I had no say in its existence inside me.
When I look up, the walls lean inward. There is nowhere to go. Not now. Not ever. Even in a refuge, I will be found out.
I fling my fists at the hard stone, which does not budge, then slam my stomach flat into the wall. But it still does not move. Just like Luther. It’s him I want to push until I am no more and all that ever happened to me never did. Him! If I could sneak up behind him, catch him unaware, stab his own Valentin deep into him before I wrestle the blade out of his guts and slice open my own belly for not knowing what a man could do to a girl.
His lying testimony in court. “The girl’s trash. Everyone knew she was a ladybird at that Silver Feathers. More than once, she tried to stab me!”
Footsteps pound closer. I press my back against the cold wall, sipping my breath as the eyelet clicks open.
·• FOUR •·
Hard matron’s boots clunk to my cell door and stop. Just her boot slam tells me who it is. Foster stomps over the stone floor as if she’d like to flatten us all.
“Gent’s waiting downstairs. Move!”
Two visits in two weeks. The rule is broken. I bow my head in case the matron catches the questions in my eyes, the sweet delight.
Mr. Dickens calls me back.
The gentleman is not sitting quietly this time but pacing the length of the room, hands behind his back. He does not stop either while we stand and wait in the doorway. Not until Foster clears her throat thrice does he turn our way, looking at us sharply as if in a dream or perhaps a nightmare. He immediately motions me to my chair and nods for the matron to leave us. Foster retreats out of earshot down the long hallway, her eyes scraping my face like a knife’s edge.
Mr. Dickens sits at last, lifts his quill, and writes in a thick notebook this time, not in the dreadful black prison log. He takes no notice of me. From upside down, facing the desk, his jottings don’t seem like words at all but odd slashes and squiggles. His quill scratches the page as crisp as claws cutting through paper.
Then, like a fit, it’s over. He slips the notebook into a traveling bag. “Miss Wood, I’d like to determine how well you read. Can you read aloud to me from this?”
He slides a book across the table, careful to keep his fingertips only on the side nearest him. “Flip it open. Any page will do.”
“Sketches by Boz!” A little shout pops out of me. “A whole book?”
“You know it?”
“Yes, sir! In here is everyday London and Seven Dials too. Pa used to say that though the poor are the dregs of society, Boz loves us. ‘London will take notice!’ he swore. But it didn’t come as a book at all.”
“Then you read it in monthly installments?”
“Whenever we could. From hand to hand, we passed it around and shared its one-shilling price. Wrapped in green paper, it arrived like gold treasure. When Pa read it aloud, he taught me the trick of holding the words inside to remember them. I recited it back to him word for word.”
The book’s binding spreads wide open before me to a painting of “The Gin-Shop” in the rookery, at the bottom of Tottenham Road. I nearly stop breathing. No pictures were inside the installments. All I can do is stare at the barrels, their names boasting: “The real Knock-me-Down!” “The Cream of the Valley!” “The Out and Out!” This was the tavern and these the names, the promises of power. Yanking Pa out with his pockets empty every single night after my mother died, steering him back to our hallway room. Luther slipping in like a shadow, leaving taller, lit, sneering.
“Miss Wood?” The soft voice interrupts.
If only my hands had parted another page. If only I didn’t have to remember it all over again, what happened to Pa. For a time, he was true. That’s how I wish to remember him. Not in the gin shop. Not his spending every penny on drink and borrowing more. Not what came afterward.
I begin to read aloud through gritted teeth how in the slums, amid dirt and poverty, gin shops shine their brightest gaslights, while at home, most can barely afford candlelight. But, just around the block, Boz writes:
Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper: every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three…barbers and red-herring vendors in the front parlors, cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier on the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics…and a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one—filth everywhere.
My voice wavers.
“Tell it from inside,” I hear Pa coax his company of actors. “Let your pain bleed into Hamlet’s soliloquy. Become Hamlet and leave your own self behind.”
I slip inside the words like second skin, pronouncing the characters’ accents properly. Think ahead as Pa trained me, hearing his voice speak the lines. Sounds lift off the page: the clink of glasses being raised in toasts, drunks weeping, shouts and brawls spilling out into the streets. My mouth feels dry, parched like the toothless old men who crept in, pointing to a barrel as if it were an elixir to turn them young again.
Pa has come into the room! He could rant up there on the stage so no one in the whole rude crowd called out or even coughed.
At the chapter’
s end, I look up. The sun is gone from the window. Mr. Dickens is sitting quite still, a hand clasped over his beard and his jaw parted.
“You read as if speaking to an audience, Miss Wood. You don’t laugh at the sarcasm, yet it’s there in your voice. How difficult it must have been to be sent here.” He sweeps his arm around the room. “In this silence and killing isolation round the clock. How do you bear it?”
If I say too much, I will damn myself. But if I don’t tell him enough, he will lose interest.
“When my hands are busy with oakum, I don’t mind as much.”
“I hope you shall have better work when you are released, Miss Wood. Do you have any home to go to?”
I shake my head.
“How do you get along with the other inmates?”
“I’m afraid of them, sir. So I keep quiet. And think on my sins.”
“Have you any friends from the rookery?”
I shrug.
“Surely someone could visit you here? Yet the log shows no one came. Have you told any of your friends that you are here?”
I shake my head. No one must know. Not Emma ever.
His head tilts slightly. “Friends and family could help you survive this place. In hope of seeing them once again. Are you certain no one in the rookery could help you?”
He doesn’t know about the friendship of Ivy or the others—inmates whose names and crimes I know. Voices in the dark telling me: There are other girls like you who barely sinned, sisters all. We are among the fallen.
“At times, I am not alone, sir, though this place is most harsh.”
After a long pause, he speaks about the dead-end alleys that trap young girls: how once fallen, they must survive penniless in the streets without education, skills, or husbands, drifting into prostitution, then into prisons and asylums. My whole body feels naked.
Surely he means Hester and girls like her. Not Ivy or Rose or Edwina. We got the letters, after all. But Ivy will return to her smasher because she doesn’t know any other way. And they say when Rose lost her factory job, she begged in the streets. That’s what put her here in the first place—a second offense for begging, caught taking money from a man in the street, so they supposed the worst. Edwina’s a mystery, as old as Hester but resembling a sickly child. Whatever she did, I can’t guess.
Among the Fallen Page 4