“A child’s dress could fit her!” Alice mumbles upon seeing her, cutting one of our old dresses down.
Mrs. Marchmont pulls Ivy and me aside. “Kate’s come from an asylum, where she’s been resting after a stay at Tothill. Be kind to her. She needs to build her strength.”
“I swallowed essential oil of almonds this last time,” Kate admits when we girls are alone with her. “Found me passed out on a park bench and sent me to prison for harming myself, after a hospital stay.”
“Why would you ever do that?” Ivy asks. “That could kill you!”
“I had no one left who cared. I didn’t matter to anyone. Mr. Dickens heard of me and got me to an asylum. Then here.”
Ivy and I exchange a dark look. Without a word, we seat her between us at dinner, heaping her plate full. Kate won’t have Mr. Dickens to guide her now. Mr. Chesterson comes to interview her instead. He’s a solid wall. Mr. Dickens was sky.
* * *
Day after day passes and I can’t sit still long. I jump up and run outside in my free time to pace the whole yard, between the sleeping garden beds, around and around the chicken shed.
Who said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts”? Shakespeare! For me, this world is a labyrinth. And I am lost without an exit.
The next day, it’s the same: up and down the stairs, always in motion; determined to start writing that afternoon; unable to sit down. Mr. Dickens told me he would “go down a railroad,” walk a dozen miles, or roam the midnight streets when such a mood was upon him.
Yet he went on to write all those books.
How’s it done?
I wove my first stories like a spider spinning its web. Without thinking. Only knowing and listening.
Now I remember Mr. Dickens saying he wrote of himself as if watching another character. At Tothill, the pain was so numbing, the cell they bound me inside so stifling, I did think of myself as another person. Otherwise, I might not have endured.
I’ve done it before in my own way.
When will the words throb again, beating like drums, vibrating like lutes, announcing their arrival? They must make me come to them.
* * *
It’s the evening the girls are officially told that Mr. Dickens has gone for good. Martha hasn’t even met him. Yet she hisses in my ears, “We got to act like virgins and that Dickens does what he wants! That’s a man for you!”
Leah has just finished sewing the last stitch on her traveling suit, holding it high for us to admire. She drops it to the floor with a gasp.
“He left?” shouts Kate. “And never said goodbye?”
Alice shakes her head and sighs. “He won’t see me emigrate now. And that’s what he said he hoped for.”
As the girls leave, Mrs. Marchmont asks me to stay behind.
“You will go on without him, Orpha. As I did when my own husband died. For a time, everything died with him. Bit by bit, as I grew into widowhood, I found the strength I never knew I had.”
“I still need his help,” I tell her, head down.
Her hand rests heavily on my shoulder.
“Many a girl leaves Urania and I worry about her as if she were my own daughter. Some leave without maturing—Jemima, Sesina. But you have blossomed here. Wherever you go, you will do well.
“Orpha,” she continues. “You will be very busy sewing your traveling suit and finishing a new summer shawl for Tasmania. And you are also working on a project for Miss Coutts. Is that not so?”
“Yes, she suggested…if I can…that I should write what made me fall. A story of how a man can ruin a girl.”
“Then you must do it without fail. You don’t have much time left with us. I can release you from kitchen duties and Saturday cleaning. We have new recruits here who will do it instead. Will this give you the time you need for your project?”
For answer, I stand and curtsy quite low as if she were a queen and I her subject, given a royal gift. She smiles at that.
* * *
The nightmare returns. I am flying through the London night, dark passages wherever I turn. Creeping along a gangplank above the stage, eyes straight ahead on Emma at her perch across the open air. She reaches her hands to me across the great abyss below that is the stage. Crawling…balancing…then suddenly, my nightgown is yanked and there’s a pressing weight pinning me down in my cot. One hand presses my lips shut and the other is ripping my bare legs apart.
I awaken the whole house with my screaming.
* * *
Early the next morning Miss Jane pulls me aside, into the back parlor, to ask about it.
“I dreamed about…my past. It haunts me still.”
“Perhaps it’s time to let what happened go somewhere it can’t harm you anymore.”
“Where? It’s part of me. It’s my story!”
“When I was younger, I was overwhelmed, much as you are now. Behind me was a sad story: the story of my limp, what set me apart. If I had dwelt on that story, I wouldn’t be here with you right now. I had to let it go. And become someone new. As you must too.”
She studies my face, my hands clenching and unclenching, even my dress put on that day all crooked and wrinkled. She smooths my collar flat and straightens my hem.
Then she says, “Do what you know you must do in your own heart. What you crave to do. What you deeply desire. Be who you were meant to be and more! Even if you are afraid!”
“Tell me it’s possible!” I cry.
“More than possible, Orpha. I have done so myself. And so has many a girl who has passed through Urania. Hannah, Leah, and Ivy are doing so. You will too.”
* * *
Fanny hugs everyone early one morning, dancing out the door. She didn’t stop chattering a single moment all this week, preparing for the journey. Now she boards the carriage outside, waving wildly to us.
Leah clings to me in the front yard. “My story is safe with you now. I will never forget that. No one in Australia will ever know it. Unless I choose to tell it. And I won’t. It’s between us.”
With that, she rushes into the carriage and is pulled away. Without their bright voices and laughter, their skirts swinging through the rooms, Urania echoes.
You only notice the emptiness when someone’s gone for good.
* * *
Ivy finds me lying on my bed in the early evening instead of joining the other girls in the parlor.
“You’ve stopped writing. All you do is doodle and dream. And you’re not helping get ready for our journey. My new suit needs hemming and my shawl will never get done if you don’t finish crocheting the edges. Stop looking out the window for Dickens to come back!”
“What good does it do to write? Emma hasn’t answered. I’ve lost her too, just like Mr. Dickens and Pa.”
“Finish your story!” Ivy shouts at me. “Just tell it and get it out. That man deserves to be condemned for what he did to you!”
“Luther is dangerous, Ivy. You don’t know what he’s like. He could find me yet.”
* * *
Miss Coutts calls for me after her interview with Ivy. As Ivy leaves the parlor, she dangles a blue-glass-beaded purse from her arm, a going-away gift from our benefactor. Ivy is glowing.
She squeezes my hand. “She’s got a plan for you. Do as she asks.”
Miss Coutts looks up from her notes. “I wish to speak to you about something I want you to do.”
We sit face-to-face just as Mr. Dickens and I used to do.
“I believe there must now be a reckoning. A telling. From someone as wronged as you have been, imprisoned by another’s crime. There has never been a girl like you before. One who observes closely and knows how to aim her words with fire and precision.”
She leans forward and places her slende
r hand on mine. Her eyes and lips soften and she is the Miss Coutts I know.
“You have a month and a half before you sail. And sail you must or you will never escape the fear of that man finding you. Before you go, leave this tale behind you forever. Write your own story, Orpha. Do it for yourself and all the other girls just like you—unprotected girls who suffer abuse. And if you do so, I will publish it for all of London to read.”
This knocks the breath out of me.
“I have tried…but so far, it escapes me. It’s too hard to do.”
“Just because something is difficult does not mean it’s impossible. You have been writing. Your manuscript is stunning so far. You have had an apprenticeship with the greatest writer of our time. That means you are ready to write of yourself and what pushed you into Tothill.”
“Do you really mean to publish it?”
“Yes. I have the means to do so. I’d go straight to the same press Mr. Dickens uses, so it will look professional. It cannot have your name printed on the pamphlet, of course. That would be too risky.”
“If I write the truth, shouldn’t I use my own name?”
Slowly she shakes her head. “I wish it could be done. But not in our times. There are ways around it, though. When Charlotte Brontë was ready to publish and was told that ‘literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life,’ she did what other women do. Found a pen name. A pseudonym. As George Sand did. And our Mr. Dickens too.”
“If I…write it, am I free to decide what to do with it?”
“Of course. It’s your story, after all. But this city needs to hear it. For once it has been told, London will be shocked to hear what can happen to innocent girls. Many will be moved to save them. I’d like to distribute copies to top members of Parliament and society, influential men. And their wives too, who won’t ever stop nagging until their husbands do something. You shall have the rest of the pamphlets. Do you agree?”
She must see my ear-to-ear smile. She claps her hands together in triumph.
“You will succeed, dear Orpha. I know it. Your own words will do more good to help girls at risk than any charity I donate to.”
* * *
I run to Ivy at once to tell her.
But she speaks first. “Once it’s published, you’ll be gone from this country, Orpha. That man won’t be able to touch you. She said you needed a false name. Pick one. And get down to work!”
My mouth drops open. She already knows what Miss Coutts proposed.
“You must want this so much, you’ll never stop until you’ve done it,” Ivy says. “I’ve been trying to teach you that.”
There’s a look I never saw on her face before: sharp and cunning, her eyes cutting. I wonder what she has been saying to Miss Coutts.
“Once I have my mind set, I go after what I want. Jack taught me that. ‘If you can’t get in by the front door,’ he always said, ‘you’ll have to sneak in through the back door!’ You’re my closest chum. I’d do anything for you. But I can’t write. And I can’t take up the lady’s offer. That you must do on your own. And you will! I’ll help you too, do some of your work to free your time.”
She takes my hands and spins me around in circles, making me dizzy, her voice breathless.
“Look how it’s turned out, Orpha! Jack would…never…ever have done good in London. You knew that, didn’t you? But he has no choice now. It’s all been arranged. The three of us will be a family, like I wished for. It’ll make up for the ones we lost.”
Her head tips back as she heaves big gulps of laughter from her belly.
Suddenly, she’s the girl she must have been once, well before Tothill, long before Jack. I lean way back, letting her arms take my weight, and twirl with her, my bosom friend, to someplace light and free I have not been in many years: girlhood!
Miss Coutts has promised me!
* * *
The words need conjuring. They are drumming. They are piping. But they can’t push past…
Never did I feel that I was good enough.
At nine, wishing to call Pa back from the drink.
At thirteen, unable to fend Luther off.
At seventeen, yearning for Mr. Dickens to see me emigrate.
Mr. Dickens abandons me. Just as they all did.
For a man’s treasures: a young woman; gin; pleasures all his own. Without a thought for the unfinished girl left behind.
Just like Luther! Just like Pa!
One betrayed my body. One betrayed my heart. All betrayed my soul.
I am fallen because of a man. And that story is hidden within cobwebs and dust and silence.
Where is that girl Orpha, hidden behind her costume and disguise? The child who could play and sing, the one who play-acted in the dark, pretending to be anyone she wished to be. The one who flung herself to unknown places.
And then my whole chest opens wide. She’s right here! Mr. Dickens carries me in the Case Book. Wherever he goes, my story goes with him. But that story is not his! It’s mine! I want it back! “Society will never accept writing from a fallen girl. That would be scandalous!” he told me. “One needs a name, family, money. And a husband too.”
I will do this without him. Without any of his requirements. And I shall claim better: a circle of women, my own story, and a new name.
* * *
That night I stay awake and reread my manuscript. It sweeps me back into Tothill upon the wave of words.
When I put it down, my whole body trembles. I’ve almost done it! The skeleton is there: the setting; the atmosphere; the girls I knew. What’s missing is myself and the time before Tothill; Pa and the workhouse; owned body and soul by Uncle Luther; the brothel; the hard fall in the street; and the hospital.
“Later,” Mr. Dickens advised. “Later, you can build a story on the skeleton of those few jottings.”
I know what it is now. It was always Orpha’s story. But it’s bigger than just mine. It’s the story of every fallen girl everywhere.
Before dawn, I write alone, fiercely scratching my quill inside the creamy pages of the journal as if the paper were oakum to pierce. I tell of my childhood. It churns like butter. Then I dip dark black ink and scrape new lines onto the margins of the old draft about spiraling down toward Tothill, then the isolation of that prison.
Ivy delivers meals to my desk. Not a word do I say aloud to her.
My quill leaks and sparks, opens wide the wounds of those nights. Between the pages, my blue baby falls to the ground. Luther’s grunts and the sloshing of gin down his throat fill this very room. Then the stink of sewer and river-deep mud drifts past my nose.
He’s come! Conjured. Here!
I don’t flinch. Or step back. Or hesitate. This time, there’s a weapon in my hands: the truth etched in dark black ink, words for the telling.
Words can chiv too. They can name; they can carve out the wound, and slice the abuser wide open.
“Be bricky, Orpha!” Ivy calls over to me later from the dark side of our room as I write through the night in the moonlight by the window.
I tell Luther all.
MARCH 1858
·• NINETEEN •·
“There’s someone here to see you!” Miss Jane, her face flushed, rushes into the yard to find me. “Name of Mrs. Clark, Mrs. Emma Clark. Says she received a letter from you and…”
My feet run before I hear the rest.
Emma’s dress likely was once blue but is sun-faded now, rimmed with street dirt all along the hem. Above it, her face is dazzling bright, curls falling out of her bonnet just as I remember.
“Well now, shall I curtsy to your ladyship?” Her glance sweeps over me as she grins.
With that, I run toward her and we hug for a long while, each of us shedding tears. When I step away, my hand touches a head below my knee.
“Who’s this?”
&n
bsp; A child hides behind Emma, clinging to her skirts.
“This is my little girl, almost two. We call her Orpha. I am married to a good man, Henry, on his way up. He’s clerk to a lawyer. Pa loves him as much as we do.”
The girl peeks out at me, her curls matching her mother’s. Then she disappears, giggling.
“Well, little Orpha,” says Emma. “Aren’t you going to give it to her?”
The child peeks out again and hands me a package wrapped in twine.
“Go ahead, open it.”
Sequins spill out of the package like stars in a sky of twilight. My mother’s dress!
“Happy eighteenth birthday, dear Orpha! I’ve waited all these years to give you this present, hoping you’d come back. Pa and I saved it for you.”
I press the dress against me. The theater is embedded in it: old wood, musty curtains, and my mother’s voice commanding lutes and drums.
All I can do is hug her again. “I have…so much to tell you, Emma.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything. Someone wronged you. Grievously. I felt it like a knife to my heart when I heard about Tothill. Finally got up the courage to go there. And they said you were gone. Wouldn’t tell me where. Not until the letters did I know how to find you.”
“Letters?”
“First Miss Coutts, telling me you were safe and that you would write once you were healed. Then yours came.”
I do tell her everything then, pulling her into a chair next to me with the child on her lap, sucking her thumb and soon falling asleep. I feel like Robinson Crusoe, lost at sea all these years, finally returning home to her.
Among the Fallen Page 19