Among the Fallen

by Virginia Frances Schwartz

  Every time I think of a future, a wall slams down. There’s nowhere to go!

  Mr. Dickens writes in the black log now. His quill circles slowly and halts before he huddles over in his chair to write once more. He is making judgment upon me for answers I refuse to give him.

  “Sir.” I lean forward. “I have a question.”

  Mr. Dickens does not raise his head from the log.

  “Whatever happened to Boz, sir? Pa said his name was once spoken on every street corner. Does he still write?”

  His quill immediately stops. “He is very much alive and writing still. You shall likely read his work again someday.”

  The gentleman actually smiles, his cheeks pinking. “It will soon be spring, Miss Wood, and you will be released from Tothill. Daffodils will be blooming by then. You must make plans.”

  “I wandered lonely as a cloud—” I quote, just as Pa taught me.

  “—that floats on high o’er vales and hills,” he finishes the line.

  “When all at once, I saw a crowd / A host of golden daffodils…”

  As I recite the rest of Wordsworth’s poem, the quill drops from Mr. Dickens’s hand. The gentleman twists his head to one side and his eyes do not leave mine.

  INTERVIEW NUMBER 2 WITH ORPHA WOOD

  The girl is careful with her words, measuring each and every one on a scale. She folds into herself before answering my questions, Plotting.

  Like most prisoners, she has become Invisible and doesn’t share much of herself. Who can blame her? Or did it happen long before Tothill? Give me a girl with fire. She will burn to get what she wants.

  Yet to watch Orpha read and recite is to see another being emerge: an Actress who flows, someone who was loved once.

  There’s Fire there somewhere. Can a girl like Orpha come alive again if given a second chance? Or is it already too late?

  CD

  ·• FIVE •·

  Rose disappears. The odor in the corridor vanishes with her. Ivy’s eyes greet me each morning with darkness deeper than the day before. Not one signal does she send in the silent oakum room. Even when I flip my hand in front of her, the sign to ask how she is doing, she doesn’t respond. The others won’t look my way either. Only the Red Star girls grant me a nod. Hester glares, her mouth in a flat line.

  Then down to work in the oakum factory. New faces appear. No one notices the crown debtors leaving. They just slip out one day. New faces immediately replace them as if there are lineups in the street waiting to fill Tothill.

  All that morning, a child’s howl fills the factory. It’s a sound that sinks my heart down to my stomach. A11, a small girl, just arrived, chants over and over, “Lemme go home, ma’am!” Tiny, with an upturned nose and dusting of freckles, she looks about eight. Snot crusts her lips. Such a girl has likely never spent an hour away from her family. Her band is yellow: she’ll stay three months. Her life is changed forever. She knows it too.

  On the way back to our cells after dinner, two matrons escort a new inmate into E25, the suicide’s cell. She grabs hold of her shaved head and shrieks as if on fire. Her eyes dart wildly but do not land on us. I’d guess her age as thirteen. Short and knock-kneed, she cringes as the matrons shove her into the cell. She is still begging them to let her free when they bolt the door in her face.

  All evening we wait on it. In full dark, it begins. Thumps. A body thrown at a door. More thumps. Fists pound against stone walls and then the screaming begins. It’s a smash-up.

  It sets off the rest of us like wild animals sniffing prey. One after another, inmates kick their cell doors and bang with bare fists, setting the metal eyelets chattering like teeth. Hester’s in the lead, no doubt, like a great she-wolf calling her pack in for the kill.

  Matrons’ boots beat down the hallways, slamming their sticks along walls and against cell doors, threatening to smack us. All inmates cease their clanging at once. Like rats, we scurry to the eyelets to listen.

  A door creaks open. “What’s this racket!” Foster demands. “What have you done to your uniform? And your hammock?”

  “Don’t leave me here all alone!” E25’s voice rises shrill and high. “I never meant to go on the lift and steal. I was starving!”

  “You’ll stay here or else there’s another place to send you!” Doyle shouts. “To the darks! If you don’t hush!”

  The girl pleads. High-pitched yells. Then sharp slaps. Her screams grow louder. No one comes to help. I step away and meet the solid wall at my back. My body drops to the floor, arms wrapped around my belly like ropes, inert as a bundle of oakum.

  Matrons’ boots march to each cell and stop. There is a matron at my very own cell door, slipping the eyelet open to peek at me crouched on the floor, where I have shrunk down, hands covering my head. Her breath sharpens as she clicks the eyelet shut. All night long, boots kick up and down the hall. Just when I think them gone for the night, they bang back.

  Then the yellow fog that plagues this city, bubbling and brewing from factories and furnaces and black rivers, rolls into my cell, stinking of coal and tar and excrement. Thick and clammy like his body. The smell of stagnant sewer water seeps in. A terrible face forms within the fog cloud, with leering lips and long fingers reaching out.

  He’s come.

  My body flattens and I cover my ears. I don’t know where the gasps are coming from, louder and shriller by the moment. The silvery Valentin shines, reflecting in his bottomless black eyes.

  I try to shove my fists through his slippery face. But I can’t get at him. Just when my fingers close around Luther’s muddy throat, he slips away. There’s a yank at my foot and he’s dragging me in circles. Something stiff is jammed against my leg, and I push it away, reeling in his grasp, upon the cold battling floor.

  His thick, wide hands pin me down. Bare hands that smashed rats’ heads, smearing their bloody brains against a ditch many a time, he told me so himself. And the weight of him, a hundred sacks of grain dropped on top of me so not a breath escapes my lungs. All my organs pulse, my stomach pumping up toward the tight cord of my mouth.

  And then his grimy fists slam down over my lips when they open wide to scream “Pa!” Who never came. Ever.

  No one hears me. I pound. No one comes. My palms are sore and swollen from blaming the stone floor.

  * * *

  It is very dark in the cell. I drift above, looking down at a girl, her cap askew, collar soaked with tears. She’s wearing a dull gray prison uniform. Surely she’s in costume, ready to perform the next scene.

  A girl who has lost all sense, matrons will write in their night journal.

  I lift myself from the floor and walk to the wash-basin to wash my face in the dark, find my bonnet and slip it on, then crawl into my hammock and force myself to shut my eyes. Try to rock myself to calmness and open a way for Pa. He’s a blanket to wrap myself with. I try not to think of those last years. How when Ma slipped away, he let go of me too.

  * * *

  In the morning, I awaken to gunfire and dress quickly, then stand at attention, waiting for inspection. Foster orders me onto the threshold of the cell, her sneer almost a smile. She strips my uniform of the Red Star and shoves it into her pocket with the other armbands. Then she snatches Robinson Crusoe out of my hands, but I tug it back until she yells for another matron. I let go then.

  “You’ll never set eyes on this book again!” she shouts.

  * * *

  There is no chapel today. Breakfast is delivered through the eyelet into my cell: half a ration of toke and a jug of cold water. Before the eyelet shuts, I peek out quickly. No comings and goings of the other girls. Only the matron’s boots bang back and forth. So all of us are being punished then. Ivy will be standing as I am, looking out toward the hallway and going nowhere. Pray she keeps quiet. Pray she doesn’t call out. She hates confinement more than I do. “The longer the
time, the heavier it weighs on you,” she once told me. “As if there is no future, only this Hell forever.” Let her bear it.

  By supper, the chamber pot attracts flies that circle and buzz. Piss turns the air acid. Out of the corner of my eye, a flash of something scurries in the far corner: rat’s tail or Luther. The walls lean in.

  The cell space shrinks just as it did when I first came here. That’s when I learned to pace: to prove to myself that the cell did not change. If I could measure it, if it was still six steps across and eight steps long, it calmed me. If I could walk it, my body seemed solid.

  I pace in circles, then suddenly stop, remembering my fit. Was it when I first came here, like the new girl, or was it just last night? It must have been last night too. No wonder I am punished. Of course there will be a report and all our names in E corridor will be listed. What will Mr. Dickens say? Her record is blemished; she is capable of losing control; no longer is she acceptable for the Home.

  “Better send her to Bedlam instead!” the matrons will hiss.

  * * *

  On the second morning, I pry loose the letter from between the bricks where it’s been hidden these two months.

  Dearest Orpha,

  I’ve searched for you all through the rookery. Pa finally found your aunt on Great St. Anne’s Lane. She was spitting mad to hear of you. Said you’d run off with all their money. Nasty woman!

  But now word has spread over Devil’s Acre. Is it true? Are you really at Tothill? I write this in hopes of finding you there, my heart broken if you are. Tell me the truth and I will come.

  Your friend,

  Emma

  How to untangle the many mazes of lies for her? They are labyrinths. I tuck the letter deeper into the brick.

  * * *

  On the third morning, they let us out. Lined up in the hallway, I blink at the high, open space. Sunlight brightens the walls and fresh, cool air rises up from the bottom floor like spring. All the girls are pale with flyaway hair and caps askew as if they had slept in a rats’ nest. Ivy stumbles out of her cell unsteady on her feet, cheeks drawn and shoulders hunched. Her flat lips puff out a silent O like a wail. Her palms bang together: I’d like to smash them! Hester sports a sly smile, like a cat who has cornered a mouse.

  E25 joins us at chapel, escorted by two matrons, one at each elbow. Both her arms are locked behind in cuffs, and leather belts bind her hands to her waist. One of her eyes is blackened and her face purpled with bruises.

  In the midst of the girls at chapel, I open my mouth wide. Listen! A wild animal, with fangs and claws and wings, howls how it fell asleep in a forest and awakened in a cage. It is not me.

  Ivy raps on the wooden wall between us.

  “Stop that! They’ll hear you!”

  “I can’t do this any longer.”

  “Neither can I. But you mustn’t let them see you like this.”

  I keep on wailing.

  “I said stop! You have less than a month left. They can add more time, you know.”

  I shut my mouth after that.

  That afternoon, Rose joins us in lineup to go outside. She was not punished, luckily, for she was in the infirmary and not with us. One side of her face is bandaged. Something bulges underneath, pushing the bindings out. Her eyes are puffy and red. That rotting odor follows behind her like a presence. I catch her wincing as she circles around in the rope-walk, heading into the stinging spring wind, bracing her left cheek tight to her shoulder.

  * * *

  Girls from E wing are handed motley piles of rope. Stiffened with clumps of pine tar like an old man’s arthritic limbs, only heavy tugging can tame it.

  From her high seat, Harred gloats, fixing me like a butterfly on a pin, writing notes in her black prison log. Sometimes she whispers to the other matrons, chin held high, tracking me with her stare. Or is it since Mr. Dickens’s visits that they’ve eyed me sideways? A soiled girl—their thoughts dart across the factory to poke me. Used property. A fine gentleman like him wasting his precious time on that one!

  My hands punch through the oakum. The others knew to be quiet when they heard the matrons come. But Luther did not penetrate their cells with fists of iron and the sharp point of his Valentin.

  From across the way, A11 weeps silently, her chest caved in. In these three days, she’s thinned. Likely she hasn’t eaten since being brought here.

  “Passed a bad halfpenny of her mum’s to buy bread and got caught red-handed.” Foster elbows Doyle, pointing to the girl. “They’re all trash.”

  “Give her one more day.” Doyle’s loud laughter sets her breasts bouncing. “She’ll come around and eat. They all do.”

  It’s good that Doyle is not near my boot. Tothill’s matrons live here under their own lock and key. Not mothers, not wives, but spinsters. Tothill changes them first into shadow, then into stone. The one difference between us is that we will leave here. They must hate us for that.

  Lint floats everywhere. I force my fingers to pick. To untwist rope into strands one by one. Wrap filaments around my forearm and grate them back and forth against my own flesh. At my feet, oakum climbs into a mountain.

  My eyes land on Rose and I wish they had not. Her new binding is blood-soaked and smeared with yellow pus. The whole side of her left jaw swells, twisting her head sideways. These last two Sundays, her singing has not filled the hallway, though I often hear her humming. That afternoon, my hands worm through oakum like blind eyes seeking a way out of the dark.

  But the darkness is everywhere.

  When they bolt me in that evening, I lean my head against the cold cell door. It’s been weeks since I heard from the gentleman. Did I imagine those conversations with Mr. Dickens? The matrons must have reported my sins to him. Better the door is locked right now, for I tremble what I would do to them, their throats flattening beneath my fists.

  * * *

  Early next morning, it takes me by surprise. Foster points to the buckets. Once again, Ivy and I tiptoe down to the basement carrying them, arms stiffened, legs trembling. I don’t dare look at her. If I see that grin of hers, I’ll be damned by my own giggles.

  But once inside that fetid room, I gulp. Just the two of us alone. So many words saved up to say to her. Now they jam in my throat, making it pulse.

  “If he doesn’t pick me, I’ve got nowhere to go!” I cry out. “I can’t go back to the rookery, Ivy!”

  “Hush!” Ivy swivels toward the door, eyes popping. “I already told you. You’re coming with me and Jack.”

  It falls out in a whisper. “But you don’t know everything about me. If only I could tell you.”

  “You mean…the baby?”

  I nod.

  “Something terrible happened to you. You don’t need to say it.”

  “But I…I want to—”

  The hard voice yells down the hallway.

  “What! You put those two together? Thick as thieves, they are. No telling what they’re up to.”

  Boot slams. Head Matron Harred stands in the doorway.

  “Don’t let the two of them work together again!” She points to us, Foster paling at her side. “Plenty you don’t know about E21.”

  * * *

  In the hallway before we enter our cells that evening, we find out what there is to know. Ivy is handed an official letter with a broken seal. Foster reads it aloud. The news echoes throughout the corridor like a newspaper headline shouted from the Times:

  “Jack arrested. Pocketful of forged banknotes written in his own handwriting. Transportation to Tasmania.”

  Ivy sways, then almost falls. “Jack!” she screams, running down the hallway as if he is standing there, so the matrons must chase after her. She’s raving as they shove her into her cell backward with their hands pressed flat over her face.

  My feet run. By the time I’m at her cell, she’s already
gone, swallowed in stone, her door slammed shut. They won’t let me speak to her through the eyelet, although I scream her name and beg and pound. Foster kicks my shins, shoving me back into my own cell as they did her.

  Three stone feet between us. Did she hear me call for her?

  * * *

  It’s deep in the afternoon and something has happened to time. It is standing still. No exercise today. It poured. Dry fingers grate against oakum. From the crown debt side, the redhead slices her glare right through me. Sweat breaks out on my neck. I force myself to look down at my hands. Then I look up at her again.

  Her lips twist, mocking. She will be out the door at month’s end when they let the new ones in.

  My feet push me up.

  “Back to your stool, E22!” Doyle hisses in my ear.

  Suddenly there is a whir behind me. Hester flies through the air past me. She claws and smacks the redheaded girl on her face.

  “Tart!” Hester screeches. “Stop staring at me like that!”

  The matrons descend like hawks upon the two furies and yank both down the aisle, coatless, out to the yard.

  “We’ll be seeing more of this one, mark my word,” snickers Doyle as she drags the redhead out.

  Within fifteen minutes, the cranks begin, after the howling stops.