Her voice has a Tothill edge to it: ice and knives.
Jemima throws her slate to the floor and stomps off. I am sure I hear the word fuck slam like an axe from her lips.
* * *
Hannah, our cook, is waiting for us in the kitchen. She is hefty, with a round belly, pink-skinned as a piglet.
The matron pats her shoulder. “Hannah will teach you how to make healthful food from practical recipes. In London, progressive women are following the advice of Mrs. Beeton. She publishes a column about cooking and running a household.”
“Beeton calls this beef and barley soup recipe we’re making today ‘Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes.’ ” Hannah grins. “Who wouldn’t want to make soup with such a holy name?”
Mrs. Marchmont nods. “Every Wednesday, after cooking for Urania, Hannah sets aside a pot for the poor. We feed many mouths and keep costs low with these recipes. That’s what Mrs. Beeton promotes.”
With one hand, the cook stirs; the other wipes the counter. Beneath each foot is a rag she swirls whenever she steps. The floor is polished to a sheen.
“Hannah’s secret is”—the matron smiles as she leaves us—“she cleans as she cooks and pays attention to everything she does.”
Hedgehog! That’s what Mr. Dickens called Hannah. It’s the perfect nickname. Instead of digging, she wipes. She’s not his pet, though. Alice is. He defended her being allowed to stay on.
The cook now sets supper china in piles, counting each pile twice.
“Suppose you’re wondering what I’m doing. It’s counting. I learned to count long before Clerkenwell. There I counted plenty. The strands of oakum I untwisted. Every speck of dust floating in the oakum room. Now, that’s an impossible task, I tell you!”
The cook does not take a breath. “I know I’m a church bell, my voice always ringing.” She frowns. “I’m always mumbling numbers too. Mrs. Marchmont says she’s seen it before. It somehow makes me feel safe to count. So I do it.”
She scans the kitchen floor, pleased with its shine.
I edge my words in quickly. “I daydream…when I can.”
Hannah nods her curly head. “At any moment, your life can change. So you must pin time flat. That’s why I count…So let’s start cooking our ‘Useful and Benevolent Beef and Barley Soup.’ Our only purpose is to eat it tonight. Take a look in this pot.”
“It’s just cold water. Nothing else!”
“That’s how you begin—with fresh cold water from the well. Now we’ll add these four pounds of beef trimmings with all the big bones and two pounds of barley. Then boil it until the beef falls apart. You get all the vitamins out of the meat that way.”
She lines up carrots next with turnips, onions, celery, herbs, and leeks all in straight rows, counting them twice.
“You need to chop these vegetables with a knife so sharp, it can split hairs.” Hannah grins.
Indeed, she demonstrates this, yanking a strand of her own hair and slicing straight through it. Over an hour later, when steam blows out of the pot, Hannah peeks in.
“Good! The beef is softening. Now dump those vegetables in and let them boil another hour. My soup recipe not only tastes good but is more nutritious too. I’m going to write Mrs. Beeton and tell her so.”
She points to The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine on the table, where she’s been reading recipes by Mrs. Beeton.
Whatever can’t be used in the soup pot is scooped into a pail: blackened potatoes, carrot peelings, yellowed herbs. This mess of slops is for my chickens.
Just as I’m headed out the back door, Hannah stops me.
“Want to know what happened to me? Dickens did. When I was eight, I saw my ma stabbed to death by my father. Dickens says such things stick to you forever. Told me to talk about it to set it free. But talking hasn’t done the job so far. So I count.”
It could have happened to me too.
He saw your eyes click to the door just as he stepped into the shadows where you hid, your feet already lifting to scoot away. At once, he drew the Valentin out of its sheath, testing its pointed tip and razor-sharp edges with his fingertip. “No matter where you poke it, it mars.”
I wanted to ask Hannah when I’d forget my past, but it wouldn’t have done any good. She hasn’t found a way either.
* * *
When they catch sight of me with the slop pail later that afternoon, the hens circle me. I squat down, flinging scraps around. After their meal, the freckled hen hops onto my lap, thinking it a nest. I’ve spied feathers like hers in fancy hats. Freckles, I name her, petting her smooth back.
Richard flies in screeching and slides to a landing with sharp claws to viciously shred a prized potato peel. The girls are so in awe of him; they hop back, clucking in low tones to peck at Richard’s leavings.
Tomorrow I shall sneak bread crumbs into my pockets just for the hens. Richard the Third won’t get a nibble. The chore holds my feet down to this soft earth, Urania.
* * *
On Saturday, the windows are flung wide open. Curtains are pulled down and soaked in barrels. All morning, Fanny and I whirl through the bottom floor spring-cleaning, pushing furniture away from the walls, sweeping behind. We don’t leave an inch untouched by our dust rags. Mr. Dickens is expected within days.
“The Chief Inspector will check each and every corner, mark my word,” Fanny warns. “There’ll be hell to pay should he find one tiny spider.”
Beating rugs with metal rods, we shout a hymn as loudly as the girls in Tothill’s chapel, our mouths wide, throats vibrating, chests heaving. Red-faced and giggling too.
Rock of ages, cleft for me.
Let me hide myself in thee!
Hannah calls us in to dinner. Soft bread dissolves in my mouth with a slice of kidney pie. Alice leaves half her portion of pie untouched. When she sees me staring at it, she nudges me to take it.
There’s dessert too: egg custard, slippery sweet, sliding down my throat with hints of cinnamon.
“Mmm!” I hum.
“Orpha in ecstasy!” Sesina pipes up to a round of laughter.
“I’ve never tasted such…flavor!” I squeeze my eyes tight, almost blurting out the truth: I never ate egg custard before.
Hannah applauds as Sesina and the girls laugh out loud.
I catch the girls’ fire with my words, echoes of their laughs, and before they are quieted, spin them into more giggles again, with my oohs and aahs.
“Please tell me, when do we eat custard again?” I beg them.
* * *
Mr. Dickens arrives today at the end of our spring-cleaning. My breath stops short whenever I think of what he will ask me next. I perch on a seesaw: Will he keep me on? Will he let me go? Up and down, back and forth I swing.
From the hallway, his voice now travels.
“Nothing on the chairs, Jemima. Tidy them at once. All knitting and books should be properly stored on the bottom shelves of the tables when not in use.” Then, sniffing, he adds, “It smells clean here! Well done, girls. It’s officially spring now.”
Mr. Dickens finds me in the parlor, dusting books. The task has taken me hours, as I stand totally still, reading titles from all the spines.
“I wonder, Miss Wood”—he swipes his fingers along the shelf of a bookcase, eyeing it for dust—“if you might read to the other girls in the parlor tonight?”
My mouth falls open.
“Think of it as a way to let the other girls get to know you. They will be amazed. Besides, when Miss Macartney reads, have you noticed how they all doze off?” He smiles slyly.
“That book, sir, The Whale, is deadly. There’s not one laugh in it. Boz’s Sketches is funnier. Perhaps that’s a better book to read to them?”
Mr. Dickens studies me. “You are free to read anything you like. But why that one? Indeed, why Boz?”
“It rings true, as if he walked London’s streets beside us with its hackney stands and pawnbrokers. He makes great fun of it all.”
Something happens in his eyes then: a glow.
As he leads me into the back parlor, I tell him more. “My pa said that in the rookery, Sketches was clutched like food. Nobody paid us any mind until Boz wrote of us. He made us cry, sir; he made us laugh.”
His face rounds as if holding something inside, ready to burst.
“You must like to read him too, sir. Have you ever met him?”
His head is bowed to the black book. He motions me to sit.
“However can Boz write so true?”
Mr. Dickens raises his hands in the air. “Mostly he paces, watching everyone and everything. Thinking. Listening. Falling into such a spell that he sees no one in the room, for he must jot ideas down fast before he forgets them.”
His words jump into the space between us. A rush like a thrill rises in my stomach. His hand scribbling before me at Tothill! Him pacing the floor unaware of the matron and me at the door!
“Have you guessed, Miss Wood?”
His eyes darken and land right on me as I gasp, “Boz!”
“I once was Boz, yes. I suppose I still am. It was a nickname I used when I first began to write. Until I had success. Then I wrote novels using my real name—the name you know me by now.”
I am up on my feet, voice rising. “You can’t be Boz!”
“Why not?”
“You are Mr. Dickens!”
“Charles Dickens, to be exact.”
Then he leans back in his chair and shuts his eyes. He recites a page from Boz’s Pickwick Papers, the muscles in his face jumping as he flits from character to character. It’s a performance. First it’s Mr. Pickwick talking and then Sam Weller. How could I forget these men, whose very speeches my pa performed for his own audience?
“Bah humbug! Let’s try another,” he says now. “ ‘Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.’ Do you know it?”
He cocks his head and recites more. I plop down in my chair like a heavy weight. I certainly do know those lines. It’s A Christmas Carol by Mr. Charles Dickens! I stare at him with my mouth open. Charles Dickens I’d heard of, of course. It’s a name known all around London. But how could this man be the Charles Dickens, the most famous writer in all of England? And he insists he is Boz too!
“Tell me who you really are, please, sir!”
“I am both: Boz and Charles Dickens. Writing is my livelihood.”
Then he turns his head away as if listening to something far off. He’s gone somewhere. I’ve seen it before. Right in front of me, he disappears. His lips mumble as if he’s having a conversation with someone invisible. Then, for long minutes, his pen scratches inside a notebook. When he finally looks up from its page, his eyes seem vast and earthy brown. I wonder where he’s been.
“What is it you are writing, sir?”
He smooths his tousled hair with his palms. “You must think me a madman. Words have been flashing and I can scarcely catch up with them. At home, in the fly on the way over here, and just now, they swoop down like gnats and won’t leave me be.”
“What’s it about, sir?”
“Hmm…” He leans forward to study me. “I’m writing like the devil to finish the last month’s serial of Little Dorrit. It’s about a needlewoman who might fall if she is not saved. Wherever I go, shopmen shout their bad advice about a happy ending! They’ve never forgiven me Nell’s death in The Old Curiosity Shop. I have to steer into alleyways to be rid of them!”
Mrs. Marchmont taps at the door to remind Mr. Dickens of his appointment with a workman soon.
“Let me know the instant he arrives.” He raises his voice.
Then he turns abruptly to me. “Miss Wood, I trust you will keep my identity secret from the other girls?”
I swallow hard and nod.
“Good. Then let’s continue with the interview. Since I have shared my secret name with you, it is only fair that you share your secrets with me. So let’s start where we left off, shall we…at the workhouse?”
Bitter, bitter as a mouthful of lemons shoved down my throat when he says that. The others all confessed. I am next. The thick maroon book is wide open. Case Book, he has named it. And that quill never leaves his fingers.
“How did you come to leave the workhouse?”
“Aunt Agatha fetched me, along with her husband, back to the rookery. I turned cartwheels all the way to their rooms on Great St. Anne’s Lane.”
“What happened then?”
“My aunt said I must work with her.”
“At what?”
“On the dust mounds by the Thames, sir. She was a feeder of dust and I was her sifter. Of bones and cinder. Of rags and charred coal bits. Of tin and oyster shells. Each piece weighed and sold to the street man for making soap, glue, soil, brick, and dye.”
“This is how your family made their living?”
“During that time, my uncle’s work became risky and my aunt went with him on the lookout. So she left me in the dust piles, sinking in dust and bones up to my chest. More than once, I had to be yanked out. The rot from bones brewing was awful. It could set you to coughing for weeks. Boys were quick to snatch from my pile. Those days, I went home to switchings.”
“How long did you do that work?”
“Over a year.”
“Was it such treatment that made you leave your family?”
I shake my head.
“Had you met someone?” he asks. “A boy from the theater, perhaps?”
I am mute. He sits and waits, a silent cat watching a mouse tiptoe out of its hole.
The words sneak out between the tight cords around my mouth. “I was…with child…and my aunt ordered me to leave at once.”
My first thought back then was to run to the only friend I had: Emma, whom I had not seen since Pa died. But my belly spoke too loudly. No one would want to know a girl like that. I thought Emma had forgotten me, anyway. Not until the letter did I realize she was looking for me.
In Mr. Dickens’s presence, my body turns to stone and I cannot budge it. It is used to doing that.
“Where did you go?” he demands. “You were only fourteen. Did you try to get help or ask your…lover for shelter?”
Ivy had a lover and Hester swore she had too many to count, having begun at twelve. It’s all Sesina speaks of. Fanny had a lineup of men but they were customers, not lovers, like the soldier she whispers about. I cannot tell Mr. Dickens whose arms I slept in then. And they will not tell either. For they were dead. Between the stones in the graveyard was a safer place to sleep than the streets. After that, I was lost for good.
DICKENS’S CASE BOOK: NUMBER 98
Orpha has lived in all kinds of Prisons. Forced into Prostitution, young and alone, she was preyed upon. She does not seem at all coarse. Silent and reserved, she measures each word and notices everything, a street soldier on guard.
She says nothing to defend herself. It’s almost as if she had nothing to do with becoming pregnant. Urania’s girls all admit if they are Virgins or not without batting an eye.
CD
Soon as Mr. Dickens has left, I rush straight to the parlor to examine the shelves until I find his true name: Charles Dickens. It dots the spines of books and monthly serials too. Two whole shelves of them! Ones by Boz too! I pull out the first one-shilling serial of Little Dorrit for myself. Then I pick a novel to read aloud, one by Charles Dickens.
As I turn to leave, I trip over something unseen and fly across the room, slamming into an oak desk. Behind me is a faint sound like skirts rustling. This is the day and hour Jemima dusts the parlor but she’s nowhere to be seen.
* * *
That evening, we gather in the parlor for needlework and literature. Miss
Jane settles into her chair gracefully, propping her foot on a stool. After she introduces me as tonight’s reader, Jemima mutters, “Isn’t she the princess now?”
Deliberately, I turn away from her to announce the new book, Oliver Twist.
“Who the hell is he?” asks Jemima, hissing hell.
Miss Jane interjects in the same even tone she always uses, smothering Jemima’s curse. “It’s sure to be a delightful story if Orpha chooses to read it to us.”
I begin. Needles click. Upon the mention of workhouse in the fourth line, one head rises. Next I read about the newborn Oliver, who struggles to breathe, the old drunken woman who is supposed to be helping, and finally the mother who asks to hold her baby before she dies. There I pause to look up.
All the girls’ eyes are upon me, even Jemima’s. Alice has dropped her needlepoint onto her lap and is wiping her eyes. She pulls so hard on her lungs, her chest squeaks. Sesina sits bolt upright, her mouth fallen open.
If only Ivy could be among us, her warm eyes signaling how she felt. All the ways she let me read her so that at any time, I could look at her and never feel alone.
“For God’s sake, Orpha!” Jemima shouts. “Don’t keep us all guessing. Read some more!”
I lower my eyes and read another chapter until it’s time for prayer. By then, the boy is in deep trouble. Mr. Dickens is right: the girls are amazed. And so am I. None of them have any idea who Charles Dickens really is.
* * *
Today, Mrs. Marchmont insists I walk out with the others. She hands me my shawl and hooks her arm firmly in mine so I cannot beg off. Outside, her hold on my arm does not budge. It’s the first time I am wearing my sky-blue dress. It spreads wide at the hips, swaying with each step, giving my flat body curves. I imagine crowds, hands over their mouths, gossiping: She’s no virgin!
On the road to market, we meet two women who nod and walk past without staring. The village has one store that sells everything you need. Our bags soon fill with buttons, yarn, muslin, thread, and bright ribbon. The matron treats us to sweets, which we chomp immediately. Licorice blackens my mouth with fumes of anise. On the way back, Fanny hops. Leah slips her hand into mine and pulls me along, the three of us skipping in time. We seem like sisters. No one would ever guess what we really are.
Among the Fallen Page 9
