The streets of
the London slums were never clean. Leastways, not in this slum. Not in Autumn.
Odius moss and lichen reached through cracks in the road and eagerly swallowed
the cobbles. Rain fell from the ever leaking sky, more grit and dirt than
actual water, and flooded the narrower alleyways with its filth. Debris
littered the streets, and the stench of sweat and rot permeated the air. The
sounds of the homeless coughing and begging for bread bounced off of the
buildings and filled the evening with a grotesque portrait of life on the
streets.
In this shabby
corner of England, one could only tell that night had fallen because the
monochrome grey sky turned slowly to black, and Liza Carlisle went around to
light the gas street lamps. The rain still fell, the poor still starved, the
streets still stank.
Liza Carlisle
was all of fifteen years old, four foot eleven, and eighty pounds. Certainly
small for her age, not much larger than the little wicks that she lit night
after night. Her thin rags, trying desperately hard to stand in for clothes,
hung limply on her tiny frame. Each week of lamp lighting gained her £2 to take
home to her parents. Her father worked as a servant in a rich man’s household,
and her mother was too sick to work. There were nine children to feed in the
family, and a servant’s wage wouldn’t buy enough food. So Liza worked.
Slowly, Liza made
her way through the poor streets and came to the wealthy areas around the
manors of lords and ladies. These buildings were magnificent! As she drew
closer to the first of the great houses, she could hear lively music, smell the
succulent roast goose that was cooking in the kitchen, see so many dazzling
colors of ladies’ dresses. A ball was in full swing. Carriages lumbered up the
drive to expel their cargo of chattering girls with long tresses and austere
men with too straight backs to the festivities. The glorious sight of such
grandeur always gave Liza a thrill. This was her favorite part of town.
Even the lamps
here were more beautiful. In the poor places, the lights resided in plain boxes
atop large, threatening iron poles. The glass of the boxes was always grimy and
covered in as much sweat as the people down below. But here, here in the glow
of parties and courts and glittering faces, here the lamps were beautiful. Some
of the lights rose like massive rosebuds from the pavement, twisting to unknowable
heights, to be reached only by her long lighting pole, and ending in petals of
gold as they were illuminated by the flame that Liza brought. Others didn’t
rise from the ground at all, but instead clung to the sides of the beautiful
homes. Interlacing vines of iron wove outward through each other to end in a
luminous bowl, flames cupped as though by the hands of an infant. On all of
these elegant lamps, the iron was clean, and the glass was crystal clear.
When Liza came
to these houses and these breathtaking lamps, sometimes she just stood and
stared. She couldn’t help herself; the beauty was too exquisite to pass by. Sometimes,
she would pause to listen to what the people were speaking about. She walked by
a pair of grooms standing next to a particularly sumptuous carriage.
-Did ya ‘ear what
the missus said? Cuttin’ our wages she said! ‘Ow can she do that? It’s in’uman,
it is!
Liza smiled
inadvertently to herself. Their “missus” had probably come upon hard times.
Last month, she may not have been able to afford the exotic jewelry with which
she wanted to impress the young man from the neighboring estate. It was likely
due to her husband’s awful drinking and gambling habits. She had never liked
her husband anyway; she’d only married him for his ten-thousand pounds a year.
And where had that gotten her? To a hard life of fewer jewels, that’s where! If
only that young man would notice her advances…
Shaking herself
back to reality, Liza continued on. She often found herself daydreaming,
fantasizing about a life that wasn’t her own. In her heart of hearts, she’d
always secretly wanted to be a writer. Someone like the Bronte sisters or
others she had heard of. Her father thought it was important for her to know
how to read; after all, one day she might get a prestigious position as a lady
in waiting. When she had spoken to her mother about it though, the sick woman
had shed a tear, expressing how disappointed she was that one of her children
could have turned out so empty headed and full of silly ideas that would only
get her starved sooner. So, Liza kept lighting her lamps.
She passed a
young couple that had snuck out of the ball for some time alone. The man
produced a flower from somewhere in his suit and tucked it behind his lady’s
ear. The girl giggled and spoke to him.
-You flatter me
Mr. Heavensbee! You should really stop all of your naughty advances on me! You
are engaged to another!
-Miss Mary Fawcett,
my fiancée does not interest me longer. She is a silly girl of no consequence.
And you are more beautiful than she! Who would not change a raven for a dove?
The reference
to Shakespeare seemed to catch her once more in his gaze. The engaged man
probably came to read his sonnets at her window, wooing her all the more with
every verse. He would bring her flowers each time he visited her too. She
probably had a whole collection of them at home, standing in dozens of water
filled vases. He was to marry another woman, but neither party would allow such
a petty thing to get in the way of their love…
Liza shook
herself out of her trance once more. It was a waste of time to dream up such
fantasies. She had lamps to light, and if she was too late, she would lose her
week’s wages. She refused to be responsible for the excessive hunger of her
eight little siblings.
She continued
to traipse through the streets, listening in on tiny snippets of conversations,
noticing how the richly decorated lamps of the wealthy streets turned to the
rigid and economical lamps of the industrious town. Here, factories belched out
smoke and oozed grease. The cobblestones were slippery from whatever poison of
chemicals leaked out of the workshops. Liza coughed and wheezed as the air
became thick with the powdery, black gasses that poured from the smokestacks.
The walls of the buildings were so blackened by this smoke that even the
persistent drizzle of rain couldn’t clear away the mire. There were
slaughterhouses here where great sheets of meat hung in rows and blood seeped
through the crack under the door. There were fabric mills where children worked
by day and immense machines stood sentinel by night. The streets here were
deserted. Those who worked in this part of town lived back in the slums. No one
wanted to be here much longer than they had to. Everything here was toxic; the
rain stung as it fell into Liza’s eyes, she could taste the metallic tang of
the bloody meat, she slipped in pools of slime where grease and blood floated
atop the water and gently swirled in sickening circles, the streets grew rank
as the sewers overflowed and pungent waste floated down tiny rivers of filth,
the empty windows and locked doors faded in and out of the smoke and sight as
ghostly testaments to how terrible it was to work and exist here. Only the
poorest of the poor, the bottom of the dung heap came here after work hours,
trying to forage through the dust to find something that might be worthy of
human ingestion.
As she splashed
through a puddle of who knows what, Liza heard a small cough and a whine. She
slowed and stopped to listen. The cough came again, followed by the sounds of
sobbing. Gripping her lighting pole tightly, she crept toward the sound. It was
so timid and tragic.
There, curled
up against a building, so stained with grunge that he was almost indistinguishable
from the wall behind him, was a boy. No more than eight or nine years old, he
shouldn’t have been alone in the dark this late at night. She herself would
have avoided it, and she was much older than this little thing. It could only
mean one thing; there was nobody in his life to care for him. He was an orphan.
An urchin of the streets, living off scraps.
As Liza inched
closer, the boy turned to look up at her. His glassy eyes were bloodshot, red
rimmed, and swollen. Tears had carved troughs through the dirt on his face, and
a spot of blood adorned the corner of his mouth. His whole body shook as he
pulled his torn scraps of clothing tighter. The poor wretch was shivering to
the ends of the straw colored hair that lay plastered to his sweaty forehead. He
coughed again, falling forward to his hands and knees and convulsing with the
force of his hacking. When he had finished, he collapsed to the ground, eyes
closed and little body shaking even harder than before. More blood spattered
the pavement next to him.
Liza gasped and
took a few steps back. The boy was afflicted with consumption.
She wanted to
go away, to run back home and leave this horribly wretched creature behind. She
was frightened of catching his disease; it killed almost every one of its
victims. In all of her walks through London, she had heard whispers and
terrifying stories of the slow and inexorable slide into the waiting arms of
death. Consumption was almost a sort of demon that stalked the poor and the
filthy, waiting for the opportune moment to strike. And this poor lad had felt
its icy fingers around his little life. She shook her head sadly and turned to
go.
-Miss…
Liza stopped
short. The single word plea was barely a whisper, just loud enough to carry
across the short space between her and the body lying on the street, and just
piteous enough to touch her soul. She turned back toward the boy and met his
glassy gaze. Tears welled in his eyes, nearly pouring down his cheeks again. He
was so forlorn.
Slowly,
painfully, the child tottered to his feet and stumbled toward her. She couldn’t
bring herself to pull away from him. He clutched at her hands, leaning heavily
on her for strength and peered back up at her. His brow was furrowed in agony,
and his little hands were hanging on to her so tightly.
-Please Miss,
a penny for a poor boy?
His voice was
so small and rough. It was like listening to sandpaper on a pitted board to
hear him speak. She couldn’t just ignore him and leave him to die alone.
He collapsed to
cough some more, spraying the street with red flecks. When the fit passed, he
lifted a shaky hand and wiped his mouth, tears leaking once more down his face,
and curled up where he lay. The pitiable thing was not long for this world. He
was in the final throes of that terrible consumption.
Liza stood
there for a moment, unsure what to do. She was poor herself, and was
responsible for feeding all of her siblings. At least she had siblings, and
parents, and a job. She felt not so bad off once she saw his awful state. The
poor boy must be so afraid. What would it be like to have not yet reached your
teenage years, and yet to be staring down that terrible figure of death, knowing
that in a matter of hours he would take your soul from this world? She gazed at
the boy, feeling sick. He was trying once more to lift himself off the cobbles,
to stand next to her. It was too much to bear.
In a moment,
she took her thin shawl from her own shoulders and wrapped the child in it. It
was amazing how much colder it was without that little rag. She set her
lighting pole down and picked up the boy. He was like fire, shivering and
crying in her arms. He didn’t even protest her ministrations, but buried his
face into Liza’s bosom. After a moment’s struggle, she managed to pick up her
pole once more, and then started up the street.
A while later,
after a short walk back toward the wealthy area of town, she came up to a
bakery. It was still open, despite the late hour. Warm light spilled through
the windows and illuminated the street around them. The smell of freshly baked
bread poured from the little building, and aroused the boy from where he had
been dozing. Liza gently lay him down on step into the bakery and dug in her
pocket. She pulled out a full pound and flicked it toward him.
-Eat well
little one.
Slowly, he
smiled, grasped the coin, and crawled into the warm, inviting room to buy some
bread. To buy his last meal.
Liza Carlisle,
lamp lighter, fifteen year old girl of the streets, turned her back on the boy.
She had a job to do. Dusk had nearly descended into total blackness and she
hadn’t much time left.
The lamps of
London must be lit.
