“It’s just…a…memory of a friend. One as kind as you.”
“That is what I hope to be for you too, Orpha: a friend; a confidante. Tell me about her.”
She reaches across, tipping the open bottle into my palms, spilling its flowery scent.
“I thought Ivy would be my true friend, just like my childhood friend, Emma. But I’m not certain I’ll ever see either of them again. Ivy hasn’t answered my letter at Tothill. Perhaps I’m to blame. For I never answered Emma’s letter either.”
“Your friend Emma has written you?”
“Yes. At Tothill.”
The letter, folded and refolded so many times, is falling apart now. It’s harder and harder to read her words: Tell me the truth and I will come.
“Perhaps, when you are ready, you will write to Emma. It takes time to heal from prison life. And all that came before. You must first let go of all your hardship, receive our guidance, and rebuild your life. That’s why you are here.”
“I’ve begged Ivy to come to Urania. She has no plans. Nowhere to go. No family. And with what’s she learned from her Jack—”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
My benefactor jots in a slim notebook after hearing more of the story about my friends: one at Tothill and the other in the rookery.
“Mr. Dickens says you founded Urania after reading his novels.”
“It bothered me to read of girls so abused. The evidence was right in front of me. Girls roamed the streets of Piccadilly, sitting on my front steps, between customers. Girls of twelve, painted bright as parrots, all starving. It seemed someone must help them.”
Our eyes meet above our teacups. A knowing look passes between us.
“I hope you know that I…I am not one of those girls walking the streets. Circumstances led me to fall.”
She sits back to sip her tea, blushing. “I already knew that about you, Miss Wood. You don’t have to tell me.”
* * *
The girls are all chattering excitedly after Miss Coutts leaves, lined up at the window, watching her step into a waiting carriage.
Leah sighs. “Her dress is so soft, it floats as she walks!”
“Must be silk,” says Hannah. “Bet it’s from Paris!”
Alice whispers, “Such a gauzy silk. So delicate. Could have been spun by spiders!”
“She’s loaded with money, that one.” Fanny laughs. “And she spends it on us, imagine that! To run this house and send us to far-off places.”
“I heard she lives in a mansion with a lady companion like a queen!” Hannah exclaims.
“She’s not married,” Jemima says. “Not tied down to any man.”
Sesina pipes up. “That’s why she can pay for Urania. If she was married, a man wouldn’t let her. He’d want her money for himself.”
She’s more than all they say. Today, I saw a depth in the lady beyond the beauty of her dress. Today, I felt her heart reach out to mine.
* * *
It’s the middle of the month. The committee meeting is assembling. The men are arriving. The matron passes me on her way to them.
“All morning, you’ve been pacing back and forth in the hallway. What are you worried about, Orpha?”
I protest. “It’s ever so easy with you and Miss Coutts. You are both used to being with us girls. But I can’t tell those men anything.”
“You’re too quiet, my girl, always thinking. But you must learn to speak your mind too.”
I take a deep breath and the troubles tumble out: Ivy, with nowhere to go; that stench following Rose wherever she walked.
“Have you any news of them?” I beg her.
“They may have been discussed in private, I don’t really know. There’s only one way to find out—ask!”
I shake my head.
“Then I will,” she insists.
I can’t speak up. She never lived as I did, back slammed to the wall, waiting for the chance to run.
* * *
Now I stand before them, boots freshly blackened. Governor Chesterson frowns, folding his arms across his belly. His glance shifts to the other men, then drills me down.
I edge my feet closer to where Mr. Dickens is sitting.
“Miss Wood is concerned about her friend Ivy at Tothill,” the matron begins. “Has she applied yet to Urania?”
Mr. Dickens strokes his beard. “Yes, she has. Though she has more interest in godforsaken Tasmania than in Urania, yet she seems promising. Orpha is attached to her, I see. Friendship is essential for our girls to succeed in life.”
“When will you know, sir?” The words pop out of me without thinking. “She’s due to be released come summer and I—”
“Urania needs to have a free bed first,” the big-voiced governor interrupts. “As of now, there is none. And we make our selections according to who is neediest and most promising. We have a long list of suitable girls.”
Dr. Brown shoots him a glance.
“And Rose?” the matron continues. “Also at Tothill?”
Mr. Dickens clears his throat and does not look straight at me.
It’s as if all the air in the room got sucked away.
Mr. Dickens’s eyes darken as he turns to me. “We are working to release her early so she can go home to her mother very soon. Her phossy jaw is fatal, I’m sorry to say.”
“Whatever has happened to the girl?” Reverend Illingworth asks.
“She worked in a matchstick factory breathing phosphorus fumes far too many years. The vapors ate away the flesh of her jaw and all its bones. Soon she won’t be able to swallow food at all. Yet she sings hymns, they tell me, and her crime was so minimal, she would have been ideal for the Home.”
Murmurs circle the room. Tears bathe my face. I beg leave to go, one hand to the wall to guide myself out, the other over my mouth. I dare not ask about Edwina after that.
* * *
They think I am doing nothing except sitting on the garden bench for the free hour after dinner. Images flow: Rose holding her jaw, alone in her damp cell. She was cast off like an old garment the factory decided was of no use, once she sickened. Yet, even in her pain, she sang about something called grace. It’s what lifts someone up when they fall flat. Like wind to a stalled ship. Lines of Rose’s hymn echo down Tothill’s hallway and enter my cell:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound….
’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far
And grace will lead me home!
I know what Mr. Dickens does when the fever of words and images overtakes him. I have seen him in such a frenzy many a time. He stabs the words down with his quill at once, listening so carefully that he turns blind, deaf, and dumb to the world around him.
Does it help the pain to lift, I wonder, if you write it down and set it apart from the rest of you?
* * *
Come home at once! the note delivered by the messenger instructs Leah a few days later. Miss Jane accompanies her to the omnibus, returning that evening, alone.
“We arrived just in time.” Miss Jane wipes tears away. “Leah said her goodbyes before her mother passed.”
“We’ll let Mr. Dickens know,” the matron tells her. “Leah will need time to attend to her mother’s burial.”
There is a hush at Urania all that day as if we walk in Leah’s footsteps. Who wept for my mother besides me? Her death ended with my father and uncle drinking themselves into a stupor at my aunt’s, me waiting at the window all that night like a lit candle, searching for Ma.
I remember Emma shadowing me after I lost my own mother, afraid to leave me alone. I have not forgotten. But she must think I have forgotten her by now. Later that afternoon, I pry the letter out of hiding, hold it tight to my heart, and let her read what is written there. I could never tell it face-to-face.
The decision is final.
She can’t know the truth. Ever!
The letter shreds when tucked into the slats again.
* * *
Tonight, beneath the bright gaslight illuminating his face, Mr. Dickens eyes me expectantly.
“Have you spoken to Edwina about Urania, sir?”
Mr. Dickens takes a deep breath. “She is most eager to come. But I decided not to see her once I read her medical report.”
“The limp, sir? If she lived in comfort here, with a soft bed—”
Mr. Dickens shakes his head. “She has a venereal disease, so advanced, it cannot be cured.”
I rise from my chair. “She’s not that kind of girl!”
“Edwina never realized she had syphilis until her episodes of pain at Tothill. Likely she had it all her life, born to a mother who carried the disease. The governor is allowing mercury and laudanum until her release.”
Edwina shook her head when asked about her mother: “She left home when I was young. Back to the streets to work, my aunt said, where they knew her.”
“If…Edwina came to Urania, I’d care for her!”
“There is no future for her here. Or anywhere. Her disease will likely kill her within a few years. Miss Coutts only accepts girls who will go on to lead productive lives in the colonies.”
I plop down in my seat, cheeks burning. If he refuses to interview Edwina, why should he see a real criminal like Ivy? She’s already applied, he said. Yet she never wrote to me. Whatever could have happened to her since? Both she and Edwina are waiting in their cells to hear from him, but no answer comes. Come summer, Ivy will be released to the streets. We all know what happens to girls like that.
DICKENS’S CASE BOOK: NUMBER 98
Fire burns in this girl now. She is utterly other than she was at Tothill.
It is helping her to confess in bits and to speak of the wretched. Tothill’s girls have all been sorely used just as she has. She cries for them, but never for herself. Ophelia looms over her own past like a Crimean guard.
She does not live here altogether but inhabits Subterranean places where she feels safe. Such a haven is deeply entrenched in Imagination. That realm can be either a cure or a curse. Don’t I know it too?
Perhaps we plucked her just in time. She was about to Evaporate.
CD
Perfumed red peonies picked from Urania’s garden greet Leah when she returns, her mother buried in a pauper’s grave. Her eyes expand when she sees them. She’s thinner and paler but stands straighter than she ever did.
“I am ready to leave England now.” She turns to the window. “The sooner the better. This country has only brought me sorrow.”
* * *
One night near the month’s end, Mr. Dickens works until late. When he finally steps into the front parlor, Hannah serves him tea. He flops down with a groan into a chair and observes us over the rim of his teacup.
Fanny knits her shawl furiously, eyes never leaving the stitches. Her fingers flit so fast, nobody can catch the moves.
Mr. Dickens gasps. “Wherever did you learn to spar like that with those needles, Fanny? Did you spear fish for a living, perhaps? If you keep up that kind of race, you shall finish before bedtime!”
“Well, sir, I’m dropping all my problems down into my knitting. Each one with a name: Edward, the soldier who betrayed me; Morgan, my first customer; Jed, my pimp. Trapping them in this wool like bugs in a spider’s web. Leave them danglin’ as they did me.”
Bobbles dot her dark green shawl, little round bumps with clumps of stitches piled together, all with men’s names.
“What a curious idea!” Mr. Dickens strokes his beard. “To imprint those names into your knitting as a…a sort of record, would you say?”
“As revenge, sir. Hang ’em all!”
Mr. Dickens drops his head back and lets loose a belly laugh. Immediately, like claps in response to a performance, he is joined by rounds of our giggles. Every time we look at him, a proper gentleman wiping tears from his eyes, we are so shocked, we start laughing again. Fanny hoots the loudest of all. Even Leah is forced to laugh. Afterward, having drained two more cups of tea, he pushes himself up with a sigh to take the long walk home in the rain.
“No fly this evening, Mrs. Marchmont!” He raises his palms flat.
His hand fumbles in his pocket. A notebook drops out, which he picks up, jotting something into it before hurrying out.
The matron shakes her head. “He’s off on one of his ‘benders’ again. That’s what he calls those night walks of his. The signs are there: staring all about like an animal in a cage; his hair every which way; not looking at you.”
In her corner, Miss Jane sighs. “He says he wanders London’s streets long past midnight trying to stamp down his restlessness. The man’s a genius, but I worry for his sanity.”
“His safety too,” the matron adds.
* * *
He did it again tonight. When an idea comes, he jots it down. Like Fanny, gathering revenge into her stitches. Are his words his own wounds he can reveal no other way? All that night, I lie unsleeping, with great shivers of wonder.
Is it possible for a fallen girl like me to leap out of her old life into the shelter of words?
DICKENS’S CASE BOOK
I’ve walked the whole night, scheming about Urania. These girls are Calculating: Fanny’s nimble fingers seeking revenge; Sesina’s eyes darting out the window. Such Restlessness is a signal. Currents run through them all, wild and unpredictable, hurts unimaginable, never forgiven.
Can Urania ever tame them? Surely the presence of hearth and family should calm them. Yet it has not done so for me for some years now. Everything Wars inside me, threatening to burn itself out.
Urania’s girls need to have the comfort of Home, the very thing they never had, so elusive, it threatens to slip through my own hands this very moment.
CD
JUNE 1857
·• TEN •·
“Something got you into Tothill, Orpha,” Fanny teases one evening in the parlor. “Let me guess: trouble!”
“Bet it was a man!” Jemima calls over, eyes on her knitting.
“It’s always a man, ain’t it? I heard you had a baby too.”
The sucking in of breath fills the room. All heads turn my way. Alice’s mouth falls open. They weren’t supposed to know. My glance lands smack on Sesina, who leans back in her chair, smirking.
Leah stutters. “We—we’re…not…allowed to know one another’s stories. Mr. Dickens says we must keep them private.”
“Dickens gets our stories for free, don’t he?” Jemima spits her words like gravel. “And what does he do with them?”
Hannah glares at her. “It’s his job to know them.”
“But he don’t tell us his!” Sesina whines.
“His what?” demands Hannah.
Sesina bangs her hand on the table. “His own secrets!
He grabs ours like a child demanding a lollipop. Don’t you wonder what he’s doing with ’em?”
“I told Dickens about my sorrows,” snaps Hannah. “My heart is lighter for it.”
Alice’s voice trails across the parlor. “What is it about that man that makes you want to tell him everything?”
“Well, I told my stories to Leah.” Sesina lifts her chin like a weapon. “And she’s told me hers. That’s enough for me.”
Leah suddenly stands up, her face flushing.
“You pried them out of me, and Orpha too! You know exactly how to steal our secrets!”
Leah rushes upstairs. Sesina stalks a few steps behind her.
All eyes now look my way. Jemima turns her head expectantly.
So they think they know all about me. Just because of a baby that was never mine. It was always his. But Mr. Dickens has shared something with me that the others won’t ever know. His true iden
tity is my secret.
I face Jemima. “Mr. Dickens has troubles, same as us. But he carries on, in spite of them. And so do I. My past is my business. I’d never share it with the likes of you.”
Jemima argues. “He don’t have the problems you and me do—money, men, a decent living, a home. He’s got what he wants.”
“Who would want to spend their evenings with the lot of us”—Fanny shrugs—“instead of dancing and drinking? It’s unnatural.”
Jemima sneers. “Sesina says he must be paid plenty to come here. Just look at his silk ties and those fancy outfits of his. What a dandy!”
I get up and walk away from them, passing the bookcases. Even from far off, I can pick out his novels sitting quietly upon those upper shelves without anyone knowing: Bleak House. David Copperfield. Hard Times.
Girls like us turn into his characters. We live in his imagination.
We are the stars of Urania, his unnamed muses.
* * *
Mr. Dickens never speaks of his wife, though they say he has ten children, one starting school and the oldest in university. It’s as if his family lives in a foreign country. He abandons them when he visits us, a few hours away by foot. All the while, his mind is so burdened by stories, they never let him be. He’s in a race to tell the world everything.
Mr. Dickens studies us girls all the time, I catch him at it. He’s copying us. That’s why the characters in his novels fly into a reader’s mind and cling there like ghosts. They once were somebody real; they once were alive like us.
My boots suddenly stop in the middle of pacing the parlor. Deep inside, ideas are breeding. By the time I slip inside the shed and aim my quill, words march across the page like black ants. A word written down brings Pa a step closer. Just like Ivy, bits and pieces of my father appear from far off. Writing is a way of remembering, of calling people back from the dark.
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