Her chin edges closer, touching mine. I twist away from her.
“Is that a yes?”
I nod.
“Good!” Sesina lets go, bounces off the bed, and shoos me away so she can make it up.
* * *
Prayers mark each morning and end each evening. Hester’s sneering voice reminds me, “He’ll shove God down your throat like all the rest!”
* * *
Mornings, for our first lesson, we recite the alphabet and then afterward copy it. Cards are passed around with paintings of objects. One of a “Kangaroo” in the colonies says they are “good-tempered.” Some Urania girls can read only a few words. While Hannah and Leah read books, Fanny stabs letters onto her slate, curses bubbling out of her mouth with each stroke: “Fuckers!”
Our instructor, Miss Macartney, stands behind me, hair smoothed into a bun, straight white teeth, and her dress seams falling perfectly. She looks over my shoulder. Her low voice strikes a pleased tone.
“Write what you wish, Orpha. You don’t need my lessons.”
The slate fills with words stretching into sentences:
Here the sky is everywhere peeking into the house. Anytime I am free, I can run out to the garden to see the sun reveal tight buds on the trees.
Words paint pictures the moment you write them down. Who am I writing to? The missing ones: Pa; Ivy; Emma.
From her chair beside me, Fanny gasps. “Are those real words?”
When I nod, she shakes her head. “I can’t do it nohow.”
“All the girls write letters home to Urania, I heard.” I set my hand upon hers to widen her B. “You will too.”
“Show me how,” she begs. “So’s I don’t look the idiot.”
Back and forth we go, from my slate to hers. My words and her wobbly letters, one at a time. Sometimes she stamps her foot when she makes a silly mistake. I almost laugh at the fuss she makes.
But then she leans close to whisper, “I never held a book before I came here. Or a quill. On my contract, I jotted an X, the one letter I learned at that bloody Magdalen Hospital. They never let me forget my past. To them, I was a sinner. So I refused to learn anything from them.”
Suddenly I remember the morning they brought me to Tothill. It will swallow me whole, I thought, I won’t ever find my way out.
I look into Fanny’s startled blue eyes. “Once you know your letters, they’ll be your friends.”
“I can’t do it, I tell you. It don’t make no sense.”
“But you do know some already. Like F and Y, letters of your very own name.” My hand over hers, I guide her fingers to write Fanny. She leans close to admire it.
The girl named Jemima tosses her head of thick black curls and scowls.
* * *
Time here is divided into little bits much like at Tothill. It is meant to tame girls like us.
This afternoon, we learn to knit a lace shawl from a pattern named Survival. The silky yellow yarn, soft as a cat’s belly, must be worked in an exact pattern or else is full of holes from dropped stitches and must be yanked out and begun again. Thirty times I’ve done it already.
In the corner, the assistant matron, Miss Macartney, knits too. Every so often, her eyes rest on each girl as if deciding something about us. She only speaks when she must. She doesn’t chatter like all the rest. Mrs. Marchmont leads the lesson. She lifts the yarn high above her head, turning it in the sunlight, as if it were a precious jewel, then holds it against Fanny’s dress to show how the yellow brightens the teal color. Fanny claps. The matron smiles at this. She demonstrates how to knit on one side of the shawl and purl on the other; to wrap yarn around the needle, making new stitches to form the lace; then to knit stitches together to decrease.
My yarn crisscrosses. Held to the light, it is full of holes like cheese chewed by mice. Jemima roars.
“Give it here!” she shouts, yanking out all my stitches.
She begins it again, showing me how to stab with the needle in front of the yarn for the knit side and behind for the purl side. “Move in and around, Orpha. One from the front. One from the backside.”
Jemima bites her lips, elbows Fanny, and both giggle, their cheeks flushing bright.
The matron is dead silent. Her assistant matron immediately stops knitting. They stare straight at Jemima and Fanny. Both girls drop their heads to their work. I am handed the needles again while Fanny guides my clumsy fingers. It takes long minutes, breath held, to finish one row without mistakes. Three perfect rows take up all the time before supper. But something amazing begins to happen to the yarn. Little bumps line up where I decreased. Nearby, tiny holes open to become lace.
“Take it slow. A stitch at a time.” Alice’s voice squeaks from across the room. “It ain’t a race.”
DICKENS’S CASE BOOK
What shall I say to Miss Coutts about keeping poor Alice on? The girl has surpassed the time we agreed to keep her. Any placement would welcome her but she is not yet fit. Reverend Illingworth will certainly back me up; he was the one who found her starving in his parish after her stay at Coldbath.
“A Pure girl,” he recommended her. “Never Corrupted.” And so she is. But Miss Coutts has the final say. It is her funds that keep our girls at Urania.
CD
Days pass. Three girls are chosen to accompany the matron on an outing to town. Mrs. Marchmont invites me, linking her arm in mine as she did the day we met. I shake my head and pull away. How can I be seen out in the world after Tothill? With a shout, Fanny springs up to join them instead.
When the girls return, they burst through the door laughing, cheeks reddened, mouths chewing caramel and bonbons. Whiffs of butter and chocolate and fresh air rush into the cottage with them. They fling their shawls off, spinning around. They seem to have visited another world.
* * *
We gather in the parlor evenings to knit and embroider our alphabet samplers until bedtime prayer. Alice is excused. She’s a fine needlewoman, as that was her trade, though she made little money. She leans forward, stroking the pages of the book on her lap, The Child’s Fairy Library. Such a spell she’s under. She hasn’t said a word for a full hour. Of all the girls, she’s the quietest as well as the palest.
Miss Macartney, who says I can call her Miss Jane, reads aloud to us from Herman Melville’s The Whale. It’s very somber. Almost like the Bible. Full of dread. Something terrible will happen, you can feel it. Yet Fanny yawns during the reading and Sesina rolls her eyes. When the hour is done, Miss Jane excuses herself to work on Urania’s accounts.
“I would never want to meet a man such as Captain Ahab,” jokes Leah. “Got his mind on such a silly thing—a whale named Moby-Dick that keeps swimming away!”
Sesina laughs. “Luckily, most men have their mind on other things.”
“Stop talking nonsense!” Jemima jerks her head my way. “We’d better teach this new girl the ropes. Wait till she finds out we’re checked here like schoolgirls.”
“Oh, you’re mad as hops ’cause you lost your marks this week but I still got mine,” boasts Sesina. “I know how to play the game.”
They begin explaining the system of earning marks for good behavior, and how every day we are judged on such things as Truthfulness.
“Imagine you telling no lies about yourself!” Sesina throws back her head and points. From across the room, Jemima glowers.
“Industry. Temper,” Hannah calls out like a song.
“Oh, Jemima, you are out!” screeches Fanny. “Again!”
“Propriety of Conduct. Conversation,” Sesina mocks.
“I never was good at those.” Pale Alice turns to me. “Sesina’s the one with the gift of gab. And Hannah too.”
“Temperance—that one is very hard on a girl.” Fanny frowns. Then she pinches her nose, making a high, squeaking voice to recite, “Or-
der! Punc-tu-al-i-ty! E-con-o-my! Clean-li-ness!”
“Not my cup of tea.” Jemima frowns as she knits. “That’s Hannah’s line, through and through.”
Leah smiles. “We get checks for doing well. And use them to buy things we want, like wool to knit mittens or Sesina’s tortoiseshell hair clip. We earn a wage too that gets banked until we emigrate.”
“But we can lose them fast! If we cuss, fight, or are cheeky to the matron, they’re gone”—Fanny snaps her fingers—“just like that!”
It’s then I remember that for the first months in Urania, I will be on trial. One wrong move and they could boot me out.
The click of Jemima’s needles draws my attention back.
“…Saturday evenings,” Hannah is saying, “the matron shows us her book where she’s tallied our marks. I keep my own book too to make sure I get what’s coming to me.”
“We all keep score, Hannah!” Jemima’s voice booms. “What else in bloody hell have we got to do here?”
Once a month, they tell me next, are committee meetings with the clergyman Reverend Illingworth, Dr. Brown, Mr. Dickens, our matron, and Mr. Chesterson, the governor of Coldbath Prison.
Jemima frowns. “They call us in one by one to ask how we are doing. They have already discussed us, for we had our ears flat to their door, listening. So why do they put us through such nonsense?”
Fanny clears her throat as if to spit. “My whole life I’ve been judged. Why, even those blasted matrons at Coldbath sneaked up to the eyelet just for a peep at me. Many a time, I was tempted to poke their eyes out. Or show them my bare arse. But if I did, I’d still be locked up in there right now, wouldn’t I?”
Giggles fill the parlor.
“Do what we all do when called in to them, Orpha.” Sesina winks. “Keep your hands behind your back and your eyes on your boots. They won’t know what the hell to think of you!”
* * *
It’s late. Metal sings against metal, a sound so familiar I once counted time by it. Keys! I tiptoe to the landing. Below, Mrs. Marchmont is walking across the dining room, her keys jingling like a Tothill matron as she turns the many locks of the back door.
Her low voice travels. “I’ve begun to worry about him, Jane. Ever since he confided in me that if he scaled the highest mountains in Switzerland, it would offer him no relief!”
“Mr. Dickens works much too hard,” Miss Jane answers. “He seems compelled. Lately, he looks as if he hasn’t slept at all!”
I tiptoe back to my room. It is pitch dark. Shivers sizzle up my spine remembering. Luther always knew the exact time to come: when I was sleeping. Up and down the crowded rookery, no one heard my cries through the fist jammed in my mouth.
Inside our room, Leah curls up fernlike on her side, her face wet with tears. Sesina lies on her back studying the ceiling, sucking her nails.
The night is sleepless.
·• SEVEN •·
Jemima corners me in the long hallway between the kitchen and front hall, blocking my way. Her look is pure Tothill: narrowed eyes and a sneer. If she were an alley cat, her rear end would be raised high.
“You come from Tea Garden, don’t ya? Tothill girls are all ladybirds. Do it for money. In the street. Or in the sewers. They’re all diseased. Priggin’ is much cleaner. I’ve lifted everything I ever needed. Got by without any man.”
My hands shoot out like a tigress’s claws, jagged nails nearing her upturned face. But she is quicker. Her hands grab hold of mine and twist my wrists hard. My boot smacks her shin. Footsteps bang, coming from the kitchen. Mrs. Marchmont slips into the space between us, her big bosom heaving.
“Oh, girls, it’s so good you are having a conversation. Friendship is what we like to encourage here. For now, though, Orpha has chores outside. Would you care to join her there, Jemima?”
Jemima gathers her skirts. “No, ma’am, I got dustin’ to do.”
“Well, then, this evening in the parlor, you can continue your little talk.” The matron straightens her back. “I’ll be sure to listen in.”
I walk away gulping breaths.
* * *
Zachariah finally joins me in the garden. He’d been too busy to teach me, he says. Now we head to the chicken coop, where it seems I will be in charge. My bet is no one else wants to do it. Jemima turned it down in a hurry. From inside the coop, the loud and insistent racket of clucking chickens greets me.
“They’ll settle down soon as you feed ’em. It’s that one you must look out for.” Zachariah points to a stringy black-and-white rooster with a bright red comb on his head. “Stay clear of him! A purebred Doring! Full of fire, he is. He’s Richard the Third and he hates girls. He’ll fly right up at you and tear your hair out.”
Richard squints at me sharply, shifting from claw to claw on his perch. The gardener shoos him out the door with the end of a broomstick. One by one, all the hens follow the rooster in a straight line. Hidden deep in the straw, I find eggs blue, white, speckled, and brown. Afterward, we scrape the roosts clean of manure and cover them in fresh straw.
“Overseas, you’ll have your own chickens to care for. Eggs and meat aplenty,” Zachariah says. “Maybe our matron will teach you the knack of wringing their necks for soup. She does it so quick—in a blink, they’re dead!”
I scatter slops on the ground and pour water. Some hens are beauties, like the hen whose feathers are freckled with specks of brown as if deliberately painted. Zachariah says she’s Cornish. A white hen flings dirt as she digs, shoving the others. Richard lands with a flurry of wings. I step back at once. There’s a chorus of tutting. Such squawking! It sounds rather like complaints and gossip about who got what to eat.
How like Urania’s girls they are! Fluffed up and chattering in the parlor. Suddenly, a sound pops out of my mouth. It shakes my belly and shoulders hard. Laughter, of all things!
So fitting they have put me in charge of the chickens.
* * *
After supper, the matron beckons Jemima away from our sewing circle with a stern look, like a flash of Tothill. There’s something steely about Mrs. Marchmont, although she has not been unkind. Not yet. My needle jabs my finger as I watch them talking. Jemima returns, eyeing me darkly, muttering low curses.
“Orpha?” Mrs. Marchmont calls me out next. She looks exactly as she did with Jemima, somber and unsmiling.
“Can you guess why I wish to speak with you now?”
“Yes, ma’am.” I curtsy. “It’s about Jemima.”
“It’s about you and Jemima. We don’t accept fighting of any sort at Urania. If you have a problem with another girl, you must come directly to me first. Is that clear?”
I nod.
“I want you to have a fine start here, Orpha. Since this is your first incident, I will not report it to Mr. Dickens. However, if you persist with this behavior, then I must also tell of this indiscretion. All marks will be lost.”
Perhaps I gasp. Tears make my eyes smart. Before I know it, the matron sets her hand on my shoulder. No one has done that since Emma.
“Stay away from Jemima. She’s a troubled girl. Let’s hope both of you will do well here.”
* * *
“Those were real pearls sewn into her hat. Ostrich feathers too!”
Afterward, as I slip into the parlor again, Sesina is describing upper-class ladies promenading the streets of London with hat boxes and packages carried by servants and footmen in tow. The center of attention, Sesina squawks loud and bright as a parrot while I cling to the walls like dust. Didn’t the others at Tothill warn me? Urania is not a refuge. One false move and they could kick me out—all because of Jemima. If I fail here, I’ll be out on the streets of the rookery: his prey.
Luther’s face has been flashing all day. An urge pokes me to look over my shoulder, in case he hears I am here. Those greasy lips that smothered mine before I knew what a man�
�s kiss was. My fists clench, threatening to smash something. All day, my feet have been itching to pace. Outside, where the light is fading, where the fence is high and the gate is locked tight, no one will find me. I must run him off. Will they let me just go outside on my own, without asking, without permission?
I slip out to pace the yard. No one follows. In a circular bed of herbs, I kneel, rubbing my fingers against newly coiled leaves of spearmint, bee balm and lemon balm, just like in our own kitchen garden of long ago, tended by Pa and then by me. The scent of lemon and sharp mint fills the air.
As I drop to the ground, a sound heaves from my belly in a high keening note, like the call of a soaring hawk.
All at once I’ve descended into the rookery with Luther.
He jabbed it flat and cold against my throat. Feel this knife? You bloody well won’t tell. That was the first time.
My fists pound the sodden ground and my feet kick up dirt. The times I shrank from his huge body and found no hiding place. All the while, the one that was Orpha—the child who could play and sing—died. The man who grabbed her stole my soul. There’s no one to tell me how to get it back. For I have never told, and never will, exactly what he did to me.
I roll onto my back. All around, the white rim of fence encircles the yard like strong arms. No one can get in here, I remind myself. Far above me shine the million dots of silvery stars. Through London’s smog, I rarely saw a single star.
This is what I imagined Urania would be: a home of space and stars. A refuge where I could be free to run outside just as I did when I was a child, playacting in the dark, pretending to be anyone I wished to be.
Among the Fallen Page 7