Another Twist in the Tale

by Catherine Bruton

  “I could still hear her calling!” said Sloane, her one eye awash with briny tears at the recollection. “Callin’ out to us, she was, till ’er little voice could be heard no more.”

  There was silence then for a moment. For Angel was the darling of the Sassy Sisters – a rare water lily bred in a muddy puddle, a child of singular sweetness of temper and kindness of spirit. She brought a sunshine into the dank and gloom of the printing press like a candle in the sanctuary of a holy shrine, and without her the whole place seemed dimmer and darker to all.

  It was Twill who finally voiced what all were thinking. “We have to rescue her,” she said. “She can’t go to that place – work in that evil cellar till her skin turns blue and she coughs till her lungs burst.”

  “They don’t put the girls in the cellar,” said the small boy called Nemo – the one they had rescued that evening, who had barely spoken till now. He was small and bow-legged and hungry-looking, the blue tinge lending his skin an almost ghostly look, as if starvation and ill-use had sent him halfway to his eternal home already.

  “What do you mean?”

  “They brings the girls to the Benevolent, but then the big lady comes and takes ’em away,” he said, looking up at them with frightened eyes (he wasn’t yet sure he trusted these girls, who had kidnapped him from the only home he could remember then assaulted him with a bath).

  “What? Which lady?”

  “Mother Earth, they call ’er,” stammered the tiny boy. “She takes care o’ the girls, tha’s wha’ Mr Barrabas says.”

  “She pays for ’em in gold too,” added the boy they had swiped from the gate a few days previously, a red-headed urchin known simply as Ginger. “Mr Barrabas, ’e reckons girls are worth as much as boys nowadays.”

  “Where does she take ’em?” demanded Dodger, stepping forward so quickly it made the boy flinch. “Wot does this Mother Earth do with the girls?”

  “To the in-sti-toot wot she said earlier.” Nemo jerked a thumb towards Fleet.

  “The Institute for the Edification and Betterment of Young Ladies of Ill Fortune,” mused Twill, for none of them had ever heard talk of this place before.

  “Tha’s the one!” said Ginger.

  “An’ when does she come? Mother Earth?” asked Dodger. “When does she come to the Benevolent?”

  “She always comes on hangin’ days!” said the boy called Nobby, who had been dragged feet first through a window by his rescuers and seemed to carry a look of one pulled through a hedge backwards ever since.

  “Hangin’ days?” Dodger turned to Twill in alarm. “You mean – when there’s a hanging at Newgate?”

  “Tha’s when she comes to collect the girls and take them away,” said Ginger the erstwhile gatekeeper.

  “But – isn’t there a hanging today?” said Twill, looking to Sloane and Fleet, who nodded in confirmation of her fears.

  Twill turned to Dodger, who met her glance with an answering nod. “Then we have no time to lose.”

  Chapter 25

  In which Twill turns Twist and encounters the blessings of Mother Earth

  “How are you goin’ to get in there?” Dodger asked.

  But Twill had already thought of that. Her brain moved faster even than her legs on occasions like this, as her mind darted through the alleyways and passages of the problem and alighted upon a solution several steps ahead of Dodger.

  “Pass me some scissors!” she demanded.

  “What are you doing?” asked Sloane.

  “Dodger – take off your clothes!” continued Twill.

  “Tha’s very presumptuous, ma’am,” said Dodger. “I wonder if we should be better acquainted first.”

  Twill did not dignify this with an answer. “I just need your breeches! Come on – hand them over.”

  Battersea produced a giant pair of scissors purloined from a dressmaker in Covent Garden. Twill took them and lifted them to her golden locks.

  “What you doin’?” asked Battersea, with a horrified expression on her squashed face that reflected the emotions of the entire company.

  “I need to get into the Benevolent Home for Unfortunate Boys. Which means I need to look like a boy in need of benevolence!” declared Twill, brandishing the scissors like a sword.

  The others continued to look at her with incomprehension.

  “I go dressed as a boy, knock on the gates – say I’ve been walking for miles, I’m half starved, in need of shelter and food. They’ll let me in, I’ll find Angel…”

  “And then?” said Chelsea.

  “Then I’ll think of something.”

  “It’s a crazy idea!” said Dodger.

  “Have you got a better one?” She held Dodger’s gaze and he glowered for a moment. “Exactly,” she declared.

  Neither did anyone else, so, somewhat reluctantly, the Sassy Sisters set about transforming Twill from girl to boy – borrowing bits of clothing from the former residents of the Brownlow Home, some from Dodger himself (a neckerchief – handed over most unwillingly – but not his breeches to which he held on firmly) and some from an old clothes seller round on Herbal Hill, which had been “borrowed” by Battersea.

  The final touch was to cut off Twill’s long sheath of corn-gold hair, which was plaited in a coil at the nape of her neck. As she unfurled it and lifted the scissors to cut, everyone in the printing press seemed to hold their breath.

  “Stop!” said Dodger.

  “What?”

  “You can’t. Your hair is…” Dodger was staring at her in a kind of confusion. His tongue seemed to tangle his words and his face wouldn’t arrange itself quite how he wished it to.

  “What?” demanded Twill again.

  “It’s so pretty,” said Sloane, speaking for all of them. “Seems a shame to slice it off.”

  “Can’t you just tuck it into your cap?” said Battersea.

  “Not if I’m going to do this properly,” said Twill, lifting the scissors again. “An’ we can sell it too – bring in a pretty penny!”

  “But…” This was Dodger again.

  “What?” demanded Twill for the third time.

  Dodger shrugged, and shook his head. “Nothing!”

  And so – to the mixed horror and fascination of the Sisterhood and the blue boys – Twill’s lovely locks fell one by one to the dank ground of Price’s Printing Press, and Sloane – who fancied herself in the hairdressing line of work – cut what remained into a neat pageboy style. Dodger had absented himself during this process, apparently to “make enquiries”, though nobody was sure into what.

  “There,” said Sloane, standing back to admire their handiwork.

  “We needs to dirty ’er up a bit,” said Tommy Tickle, who was perhaps the only member of the company who had enjoyed the spectacle. “She looks a little too fine to be an orphan.”

  “True enough,” said Chelsea, smearing a little soot over Twill’s face, in a way that reminded her of Baggage, and almost threatened to melt her resolve.

  But it was at this moment that Dodger returned from whatever business had taken him out of the printing press for the past parcel of time. He was hastily stuffing something into his pocket, and when he beheld Twill – now fully attired in her boys’ garb – he stopped dead and stared. His expression seemed to undergo several convolutions – from the confusion of earlier, to what seemed a momentary pang of grief, then to amazement, thence to a dawning look of sudden realisation, as if a fact that had been eluding him for some time now suddenly popped into his brain, and all was made clear.

  “Of course!” he declared. “I oughta ’ave known it right away.”

  “Known what?” said Twill, who was becoming a little impatient with Dodger’s strange and erratic moods today.

  “I knew there was summat – first moment I saw you,” he said, apparently ignoring her question and taking a step closer to survey her face with curiosity, as if he were seeing it for the first time. “Where did you say your Baggage found you again?”

 
“On a rubbish heap,” said Twill, who was beginning to think that Dodger might be coming down with some affliction; was he running a temperature?

  “Where?” he demanded.

  “Um – in a place called Mudfog, I think.”

  “And the year?” Dodger tipped his head to one side and continued to view her scientifically, like a strange exotic species or specimen in a museum.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Just answer the question, woman!”

  “It was the same year they opened the zoological gardens,” said Twill, now half convinced that Dodger was under the influence of intoxicating liquor – or perhaps the apothecary’s tincture. “That’s what Baggage always told me. When I was naughty she said she’d picked up a monkey escaped from the new zoo, not a baby at all!”

  “Course she did!” said Dodger, nodding his head, as if all his calculations were adding up in neat columns in his head. “Why, it all makes sense now!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  But the Artful shook his head. “Nuffin’ that needs concern us right now, but p’rhaps…”

  “Jack Dawkins, will you stop talking in riddles and let me go and rescue Angel,” said Twill, running out of patience. “Before it is too late!”

  Chapter 26

  In which Mr Fagin sees a ghost of children past and Mother Earth reveals herself

  The plan was simple enough. Twill stood before the grey walls of the Brownlow Benevolent Home for Unfortunate Boys and rang the giant bell. A few moments later, the giant iron gates were opened by a ragged-looking child – the replacement for Ginger the Gatekeeper – who looked at Twill in horrified bemusement when she begged to be allowed in, but was too scared to do anything other than usher her inside. As she heard the gates creaking to a close behind her, Twill glanced back at the square, where Dodger and a small team of Sassy Sisters were stationed at watch, and had to swallow down the desire to run back to them. Then she recalled Angel, trapped inside this awful place, and she knew there was no turning back.

  “Mr Barrabas is in the workshop,” said the urchin with a doleful stare. “I’ll take you to ’is office and you can wait for ’im there. ’E’s in charge, see!”

  So Twill was led through a long room that evidently served as a refectory, with long wooden tables lined with low benches, all covered in filth and grime as if they had not been cleaned for months. Around the room were tapestries depicting the good saviour surrounded by young children, which bore such slogans as “Suffer the little children to come unto me” and “Blessed are the meek”. But the place smelled of burned porridge and mould, and there was nothing blessed about it.

  Passing through this hall, Twill caught sight of an empty schoolroom, dusty and cobwebbed, which had clearly not been used in some time. Then the urchin opened a heavy door, bearing a sign declaring “No unauthorised entry”, and Twill was led down a set of slippery steps, leading down into the bowels of the building.

  She could smell the blacking as soon as she began to descend the steps.

  “They’s smelting a new batch today,” said the urchin, a small ship’s-biscuit of a waif, known simply as Boy Number Eight. “Always strongest when it’s new. Mr Barrabas says it’s good for the lungs.” As he made this statement, the urchin was wracked with a cough so long and deep, Twill feared it might burst his tiny frame.

  And as the sound of the furnace boomed ever closer, Twill felt the noxious vapours creeping into her own throat, ears and eyes. The young boy had led her to a waiting area outside the overseer’s office, from which one could view the factory floor below, and Twill could see the small blue boys scuttling like insects, stirring, pouring, sticking, shovelling – all in mechanical unison that seemed so unlike any child that Twill had come across, and so inhuman too, as if their young hearts had been taken out and replaced with cogs and wheels. They barely made a sound to compete with the clamour of the furnace and the bellows and the mechanical thrum of industry – no talk, no laughter, no childish chatter. And their eyes, when Twill fixed on them, seemed glazed – as if the blue of their skin had seeped into their souls, like the colour of sadness.

  Twill was so absorbed with this piteous sight that she did not notice that the door had opened and from the factory office had emerged the twisted figure of Mr Barrabas – as the world knew him, or old Fagin to you and me – who stood beholding her with a look of horror on his face.

  Now, the reader may recall that old Fagin – when he graced the pages of Master Twist’s story – was described as shrivelled, with a villainous and repulsive face obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. In these respects he was unchanged. He no longer wore the filthy old dressing gown, however, but was now attired in an inky black greatcoat, which might once have belonged to an undertaker, along with a large black moth-eaten hat that only half obscured his virulent red eyebrows. His face still held the stamps of villainy upon it – more deeply etched than before and ever so slightly tinged with blue around the eyes – and now, as Twill beheld it, it was contorted into an expression of such shock that it oddly recalled the expression on Dodger’s face a few hours since.

  “What … what … what are you doing here?” he muttered in a trembling voice. “H-h-have … you come for me at last?”

  “What?” asked Twill – with an odd sense of having had this same conversation with Dodger already.

  “Tush, tush, my dear! I have eluded justice, slipped the traps of the law – lived like a cat with nine lives … but have you come to claim me now and take me to my final reckoning?”

  “Final reckoning?”

  The old man continued to behold Twill with a horrible expression, as if she were a spirit come from below to unleash its horrors up on him. “Oh, I tremble to hear you say it, my dearest boy. You know I only ever meant the best for you – only the best, dearest boy!”

  Twill stared at Fagin in astonishment near equal to that with which he beheld her. His gnarled features were alive with the horror of one who has seen a ghost, as indeed old Fagin believed he had. For before him, shrouded in indigo vapours rising up from the new vat of blacking, stood a young boy so much the image of Oliver Twist that – for perhaps the first time in a life of blackest iniquity – it had stirred up feelings of terror and what even might have been remorse in Fagin’s thorny heart, had he been possessed of such an organ in his heartless chest.

  He took a step towards Twill, reaching out his crooked fingers. “Is this young Oliver that I see before me?”

  “Oliver?”

  “Come, let me clutch thee!” said the old man, moving with more agility than might have been expected in a man of his decrepitude, making a sudden dart towards Twill and snatching her hand. She cried out as the old man’s yellow fingers came into contact with hers, causing him to jump backwards.

  “Warm, I declare. Warm and alive. No ghost come back from the grave to take old Fa—old Barrabas to his fate.”

  “Ghost?”

  Mr Fagin’s expression seemed to have undergone several transformations in the space of less than a minute. Now a horrible grin spread across his face, and a new light began to glitter in his black old eyes.

  “Oh my dear – could it be?” His tone was milky now – solicitous and smooth. “Are you alive? And returned from the Indies so soon? Saved from the ravages of disease and safely restored to us? Praise be!”

  “I’m – I’m not Oliver,” said Twill uncertainly.

  “Not Oliver, you say?” The old man’s expression changed once again. He was regaining some of his composure but still fixed his eyes upon her, wary as a snake preparing to strike.

  “Um – no,” said Twill, recalling what she had come for – the plan to rescue little Angel – and determined not to be sidetracked by this Oliver business. “My name is Will. Will – um – Camberwell.”

  “Will?”

  “Short for – um – William!”

  “It is possible?” said Fagin, creeping towards her again, speaking in a manner that made Tw
ill feel distinctly ill at ease. “Such an extra-ord-inary likeness… Tush, tush, my dear! What did you say your name was again?”

  “Will Camberwell,” said Twill, concerned that things were not going exactly according to plan. “And I was hoping you might give me shelter for the night.” She tried to sound plaintive. “I’m ever so hungry.”

  “Of course you are, my dear!” said Mr Fagin, his eyes growing brighter still as he looked over the “boy”, his mind blossoming with possibilities.

  “You must stay here, dear heart, and we will look after you. We will be like family to you. Like the family you never had.” He seemed to twist each word as he spoke, tugging at the vowels and worrying the consonants in a most disconcerting manner. “Did you … have a family? Sisters and … brothers, perhaps? Any … brothers?”

  “No, sir,” said Twill.

  “How remarkable!” said Fagin, rubbing his gnarled, yellowy-blue palms together as if with eager anticipation. “Well, well, Mr Camberwell. I am so truly delighted to see you. Why don’t you come with me and we will make you most at home. We have another new arrival today and she must be fed and watered before her long journey too.”

  As he said this, Mr Fagin, or Mr Barrabas, or the devil himself – whatever you chose to call him – opened the door to his office and Twill caught sight of Angel, perched on a stool. The little girl looked up and saw her, and was about to cry out but Twill put a finger to her lips and shook her head. Angel looked confused but said nothing.

  Twill’s mind was moving rapidly, trying to formulate a plan – where was the sluice gate through which the goods were transported? Might she be able to smuggle herself and Angel out without anyone noticing? Could they break through the little window through which Nobby had been pulled? Or make a dash for the entrance like Ginger?

  But just then the giant iron doors opened, and all of Twill’s best-laid-plans and hopes were dashed, as she heard the words, “My Snow Diamond – fancy finding you here!”

  Chapter 27