Among the Fallen

by Virginia Frances Schwartz

  “We never should have let you go from the theater that day.” She sighs.

  “You had no choice,” I assure her. “I had to pay Pa’s debt. You couldn’t have stopped them.”

  She stares at me darkly. “When we looked for you last Christmas at your aunt’s, Luther stood there, curses spitting from his mouth. Soon as I saw him, I got the shivers. It was then I guessed.”

  “Well, I’m freeing myself of that man—wait till I tell you how! You won’t believe my plan! And look how we found one another at last.”

  I remember the two of us playing in the theater. Her daring. Her hands across the gangplank, grabbing me to safety over the abyss. It’s Emma’s hands I need now. I grab them tightly in my own and tell her what needs to be done.

  Before she leaves, she makes a promise.

  “Yes!” Her eyes light up. “I’ll do my part. You do yours. Together, we’ll take our revenge!”

  “What a great thump we will make!” I shout.

  We bend over, belly-laughing, as if not even a day had passed since we were young girls together.

  * * *

  “Come down, Orpha!”

  “Time to get fitted for your traveling dress!”

  I ignore the shouts. Upstairs, I shut the door to our room and prop a chair against the doorknob. Quiet! These girls are never quiet.

  I may seem to be quite ordinary, just a girl sitting in a chair staring out the window. But I am not ordinary. A scene is forming inside and I will myself to be still and listen to it speak. Set my mind loose from my body so I am free to watch as images rise. I do nothing, nothing but hold still, until the story unravels. Then I rush to write it down without speaking or even thinking. If I don’t do this at once, it’s gone, like a flame in the wind.

  The words from the old draft have been copied into the journal along with bits and pieces of my own story. Beneath my hands it speaks, cutting and raw. The voices are clear as Westminster bells clanging in the rookery, tolling their names one by one: Rose, Edwina, Hester, E25, “the suicide,” A11, Ivy, Luther, and a girl named Orpha whose story is revealed. Haunting Tothill’s corridors, and each and every lane of London’s rookeries, rises a high wail: the voices of all the innocent babies born only to suffer and die.

  Listen!

  This moment roars with a thousand words and stories dancing in my head. Intoxicating!

  Now I know why Mr. Dickens got so lost when he wrote, forgetting who he was and where he was.

  * * *

  The leather journal is filled now. Miss Jane will carry it to Miss Coutts’s home in Piccadilly.

  “It’s the quickest way,” she explains. “And the safest. She promises to return it to you within two weeks. Just in time for your voyage. Along with her offer, she says.”

  By the window in our room, Ivy and I burst free with shouts and cheers as we watch Miss Jane below step into a waiting carriage with my manuscript in her bag. Our feet are stomping too, shaking the dresser and threatening the mirror hanging above it. In Ivy’s round brown eyes, I finally see reflected the girl I once was.

  I am not that girl on the cot, she who wept beside a dead father; or the one forever stuck on the gangplank. I am no longer living in those places. Those were just the things that happened to me.

  * * *

  For the first time in a month, I step down into the parlor for supper at the table and breathe the place in. It seems I’ve been away for years, it looks so fresh.

  Why hadn’t I noticed it before: the waxed wooden floors; the shimmering emerald moiré curtains sewn by Alice; and the polished surfaces of the oak furniture? We girls have scrubbed this house spotless. All crimes have been bleached away. Urania is fit for virgins such as us.

  Mrs. Marchmont pats my shoulder. “Well done, Orpha! We knew you could do it.”

  Alice is waiting for me, patting the seat beside her. I plop right down.

  Martha grins. “Welcome back to earth! You been gone such a long time up in your room, thought you were kept a prisoner.”

  She jumps up and twirls for me in a lilac dress that once was Sesina’s.

  Kate’s cheeks are pinked now and fuller. At our meal, she’s already learned to take extra from Alice’s plate as I used to.

  “They say you can write. Can you teach me how?” she begs.

  “Of course. Right after this, I’ll show you how to make your letters.”

  These girls are my sunlit walls. Never again can thoughts of Luther sneak into these coal-warmed rooms with their robin’s-egg-blue paint. It’s too holy a refuge for him. We girls have fairy-ringed this home with all kinds of bloody spells.

  APRIL 1858

  ·• TWENTY •·

  The sun is piercing, the wind gale-strong and tugging at my bonnet ties, pushing me back from the railing, away from London. My bombazine dress blows too, vivid and voluminous in its skirts, its plum-and-lavender piping sharp against the dull weathered timber of the Victoria. In my small leather bag, purchased with Urania’s wages, are tucked my engraved journal, a new quill, and ink, along with my gifts. Beside me, Ivy in her vivid yellow dress, her face rosy, shouts and waves furiously to Miss Coutts and Mrs. Marchmont, who stand on the shore, waving back.

  Between England and me are water and wind.

  Water widening by the second.

  Wind lifting the sails away from this land to elsewhere.

  I turn toward the direction of the rookery, where Emma has been sneaking through the dead of night in the company of her husband and her father, flinging my published story, wrapped in green paper, all throughout the rookery, letting it fly like paper birds. The Girl from Tothill unravels for all to see. At every tavern. By every corner. In every shop. Stacks on every street cart. In front of dwellings where readers live. The residents all delighted come this bright morning at the luck of awakening to a brand-new pamphlet landing on their doorsteps. Free!

  All around the rookery they will stop to read, their eyes widening to hear about the girl Orpha whom a man called Mr. A. Grace tells of.

  A man has revealed how fragile a girl is in our rookery, living right here among us.

  And all those other lost girls who did so little wrong, who only needed a mother. Why, they are treasures, aren’t they?

  Doesn’t the author look the gentleman? Here’s his picture. Dressed as fine as Dickens. Read his outrage!

  And the young girl too, the one named Orpha. Isn’t she from that acting family over on Old Pye Street? She has written a letter straight to her abuser. Listen!

  To Luther,

  I was your twelve-year-old orphaned niece.

  You betrayed me.

  You were supposed to be my uncle, protector, and guardian.

  Instead, you raped me. Not once. But over and over again.

  I lived in fear of you and your knife.

  It should have been you, Luther, damned to prison, instead of me.

  Now let the world know and condemn you as I do.

  For I am free of you now and forever.

  I live; I prosper; I survive.

  Miss Orpha Wood

  How readers will whisper the story to their neighbors who cannot read, tell the housebound, shout to the hard of hearing, visit house after house with the news, gossip in the taverns, and point out the words to anyone passing by. And then head out and gather together with that pamphlet squeezed in their hands toward Luther’s dark and shuttered door on Great St. Anne’s Lane. They will stop boldly there to knock and stare and shout names. There will be crowds of them. And he will hide with my aunt in the dampest, farthest corner and shrink from their sight.

  All around the rookery, girls will hasten to their houses as soon as dark falls, their families looking out the window for them to come safely home. And in the fine homes of Piccadilly, and of government officials, doctors, bishops, and clergymen, friends of M
iss Coutts, the well-to-do, will sink into their chairs, gasping. For they will finally understand what can happen to an unprotected girl.

  * * *

  In five months, we will land in Tasmania. I have already decided that I can write there, for I am told I will have a room of my own after the day’s duties are done. Ivy has fussed about that. She will room at the inn with ten other serving girls. But she will have her Jack, who will come and go from the gold mines to visit her. Even when she marries, I won’t be alone. If she marries. Every sailor aboard this ship has his eye on her.

  Besides, you are never alone when you write and entertain your characters as if they breathed in the room right beside you.

  When Mr. Dickens showed his first writing to the world, he did so with a pseudonym: Boz. It served him like a charm. Now I have one too: Mr. A. Grace! In this society, a gentleman’s name opens doors.

  Forever Mr. Dickens will remain part of me.

  Father. Teacher. Mentor. He played all those roles.

  This is what he taught me: When words fill your mind, you forget your own self; you become a higher self. A conduit. Full of something called grace. Like my own father, he planted words, tiny seeds that grew, until the words became him and he was the book. And then he fed them to me.

  All you must do then is set them free.

  MR. A. GRACE

  ·• AUTHOR’S NOTE •·

  I first encountered Dickens when I was a girl living in a semirural strand of Ontario’s fruit belt. He reached across the century and the ocean with satire, quirky characters, and sharp stabs at social injustice. His portrayals of unforgettable Victorian characters so awakened me to the presence of universal archetypes that I began to notice them all around me. I fell in love with Dickens’s voice and his conjuring of worlds, both external and internal, and dreamed of becoming a writer.

  Years later, I met him again in Charles Dickens at 200, a bicentennial exhibit of his life and work at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, amid a collection of his quills, the draft of a very worked-over A Christmas Carol, portraits of that famous face, and samples of his self-taught shorthand. His letters to Angela Burdett-Coutts brought me to a full stop: tongue-in-cheek stories of Urania’s girls; ideas about decorating the home; a plea for vivid color in the girls’ dresses; apt nicknames for them; and, of course, their antics, such as breaking into Urania’s supply of beer and entertaining policemen in the middle of the night.

  Dickens hoped for a magical transformation of his “virgin charges,” his damaged girls. So who were these girls and where did they come from? Who succeeded and why did they do so? On my way to the New York Public Library years later to search for answers to those questions, I suddenly had an impression of an imaginary girl sitting opposite me on the train. Tiny, thin, with straight blond hair so thick it seemed like a horse’s mane, she slid in like a shadow and accompanied me to the library. At that moment, I knew I would write this novel. When the main character shows up, so does his or her voice, setting the emotional tone needed to write. Later I would read how Dickens floundered, ungrounded, when entering a book, taking notes and long walks like his “benders” until his main character arrived and wouldn’t stop talking.

  Urania operated from 1847 to 1862. While no official record was ever located of all the girls who entered the home, usually twelve at a time, it is estimated that a hundred of Urania’s girls emigrated overseas (Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women, by Jenny Hartley). Dickens’s Case Book was not found either; it’s speculated that it was burned with letters and other papers spanning twenty years in a bonfire Dickens set in 1860. Of this event, Dickens wrote: “They sent up a smoke like the Genie when he got out of the casket on the seashore.” Most characters in this book are composites of actual girls who lived at the home. Orpha is my own creation. While I used some of the actual names of the girls, only the stories of Rhena Pollard and Alice Matthews are true. Alice died aboard ship when she finally emigrated, a common occurrence of the time because of epidemics. She took a bad turn after the equator, giving thanks to Miss Coutts. “Death held no terrors for her,” wrote a passenger present at her bedside.

  I am indebted to the Queens Library and the New York Public Library for providing a wide range of research materials on Dickens. For the invaluable assistance received at the Sherman Fairchild Reading Room at the Morgan Library & Museum, I am deeply grateful. The multivolumed book by Dickens’s chosen biographer and personal friend, John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, was the perfect start, along with the work of Peter Ackroyd, whose Dickens and books about London created a vivid background, as did Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Becoming Dickens. Dickens hid the truth about Ellen (Nelly) Ternan in his own lifetime, and Forster shielded him. In Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, that secret was explored. Jane Smiley’s Charles Dickens: A Life examines his writerly life, as does Dickens’s Working Notes for his Novels, edited by Harry Stone. The books that so immersed me in the era and street life that I could smell and taste 1850s London were Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor and Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Victorian, the latter providing fun details on grooming, dress, and lifestyle. Finally, in Dickens’s own novels and letters (Letters of Charles Dickens to the Baroness Burdett-Coutts), I encountered the author himself. The writing of David Copperfield spanned the Urania years, and the novel is viewed as semiautobiographical; in it Dickens revealed the trials of his own early life through David, just as the girls had confessed to him.

  Dickens abandoned Urania suddenly and without notice after a committee meeting in April 1858. While I tried to keep to his busy timeline, I have taken liberties with some of the dates to serve the story’s plot. Any mistake or manipulation of that timeline is my own. Some of Dickens’s comments and conversations in this novel are based on actual excerpts from his voluminous letters.

  Miss Coutts, the wealthiest woman in Europe of her time, devoted so much of her fortune to charity that she was named Queen of the Poor. Her many projects included assistance for impoverished weavers to establish their trade in the colonies; free vocational training for the uneducated; training for prostitutes in needlework and cooking; redevelopment of slum areas like Bethnal Green that housed the poor; campaigns against cruelty to animals; protection for street vendors such as flower girls and fruit sellers; and medical support and food for cholera victims, to name only a few. I have kept Dr. Brown on at Urania, since he was an invaluable advisor and close friend to Miss Coutts for years. He died in 1855.

  Laudanum, “black drops,” an opium derivative, was in common use in the Victorian period, a kind of everyday aspirin. It was viewed as a remedy for all kinds of ills from menopause to insomnia and nervousness. Not known to be addictive at the time, it was so readily available without a prescription that it led to the first opiate epidemic in Europe. Many fell victim to it: Catherine Dickens, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and the poets Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. By 1916, it became a controlled substance in England; it was finally banned in 1920.

  Of interest to those eager to explore more about the suppression of women are novels such as Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and The Handmaid’s Tale, and Sarah Waters’s Affinity. In film, Albert Nobbs and The Invisible Woman both explore women’s plight in the Victorian era.

  I hope that the spunk exhibited by Urania’s girls in surviving and coming of age in a difficult era, one of haves and have-nots, thrives in today’s world, a parallel universe—one of historic worldwide homelessness, poverty, and displacement, and one of dominance by the one percent. May every girl know the blessings of a mentor and the promise of second chances. May she say yes to both!

  Finally, in my own life, I am grateful for the presence of mentors and the grace of second chances that opened doors, lanes, and pathways around me. This circle includes my editor, Mary Cash, for her amazing sensitivity and
belief in Orpha’s story, and my agent, Fiona Kenshole, who saw its potential from the earliest drafts. To my first reader always and forever, Neil Schwartz, and my intuitive circle of writers—Denise Dailey, Leslie Sharpe, Eva Hill, and Raphael Sason. For all their support, I feel blessed.

  Virginia Frances Schwartz

  ·• A GLOSSARY OF •· VICTORIAN SLANG

  Slang was the common speech among Victorian working and criminal classes. As Dickens roamed London’s streets on his famous walks, he became fascinated by this colorful dialect. So did Chesterson, Coldbaths’s governor, who called it “flash language.” Dickens incorporated many slang words, derivatives of Old English, into his novels. By writing slang down for the first time in a novel, Charles Dickens caused it to reach a wider audience and helped transform slang words into acceptable and commonly used words.

  *Words and phrases marked with an asterisk were found in the Oxford English Dictionary.

  *abuzz: buzzing with excessive gossip or activity

  arse: British spelling of ass

  bah humbug!: a dismissal of something commonly liked; an expression made famous by Dickens’s character Ebenezer Scrooge

  bang-up: very fine

  *batty: crazy

  batty-fang: to smash up

  *blast: a word used to express annoyance

  *bosom friend: best friend

  bricky: brave

  *butter fingers: careless

  chiv: to cut or stab

  chum: friend

  church bell: a talkative woman

  coiner: a coin counterfeiter

  collie shangles: a quarrel

  *comfoozled: exhausted

  *dandy: a man unduly devoted to style and dress

  *devil-may-care: reckless and careless