Dwynn Murphy was cold and alone. Fortunately her directions kept her to major thoroughfares where the risk of being waylaid were diminished even for the dismal hour in which she found herself out of doors and far from home. Still, she remained alert on her current journey westward across a city slowly disengaging from the merriment that consummates a Saturday’s work. She had much rather been passing through town an hour or two earlier when boisterous laughter and obscene lyrics would have still been flowing from tavern windows. Presently, all that poured out onto the streets were staggering silhouettes, rancorous disputes, and, well, obscene lyrics.
Dwynn was moving swiftly on frozen feet, sore from uneven pavement meeting thin soles, when she came to an abrupt halt on Leadenhall Street. Her pricked ears perceived a swelling wave of profanity and drunken banter rolling towards her from the shadow-fallen blocks ahead. When at last its origin was revealed by the faint glow of the street lamps, the girl felt a pang of anxiety that was either her heart fluttering through her chest or bile racing up her throat. Without a thought, she swiftly side-stepped into a narrow alley between a butcher’s shop and a bakery, fleeing to a nook that was both darkest and furthest from the street. Beside her were open waste containers from which wafted the mingled scents of each shops’ earlier enterprises – discarded, rotting flesh with a hint of flour and wheat. She wondered if she would ever eat another bite of bread without recalling the vile stench. She held her breath for long intervals, gasping silently now and again and always watching – watching and listening for the oncoming rabble.
At last a man appeared as he passed across the alley opening, walking backwards as he laughed and heckled the rest of the unseeable gaggle. Then two more crossed by, supporting each other with an arm flung over one another’s shoulders. They sang an incoherent tune and giggled to themselves, not so much as glancing down the alley where Dwynn stood motionless. She began to relax, ever so slightly.
“Perhaps it’s too dark to see me down here at all. And they seem to be too drunk to care about anything that doesn’t involve not tripping over themselves,” she thought to herself. The thought had hardly left her mind when the largest and rowdiest group of pedestrians at last came into view, and to her great disheartening, lingered at the mouth of the alley as they lit cigars.
“Still, I’d never seen anything like that in my whole life,” one deep-throated slob said above the rest.
“Greasy little shit.”
“Pompous ass.”
“I’ve got a mind to follow after him – that’s if I weren’t so damn crocked!”
“And if you hadn’t shit your pants, you little coward,” retorted the deep voice. “You would’ve kissed the bastard’s ass before you kicked it!”
The group chuckled, but their laughter was hampered by unspoken concerns and confounded expressions .
“Can you blame him?”
“No,” said the first voice after some pause. “He had the strength of ten men and the look of Satan himself. He seemed like a good chap too, at first; ’til he got set off. Never seen anything like that in my whole life,” he reiterated, trailing off at the end.
The men stared at the ground and kicked dirt under the street lamp for a minute until the hour was mentioned and the allure of bed arose in all their minds, drawing their heavy feet down the street again. Dwynn was momentarily relieved by their collective shift eastwards until, by the most evil stroke of luck, another voice rang out.
“Hold up, hold up, boys!” a man implored his disinterested compatriots.
“What the hell’s your problem now, Tripp?” one of the others cried.
“I do believe I’ve found myself somethin’ here,” Tripp said as he took an inquisitive peek into the alley. Dwynn stopped breathing altogether, stiffening up from head to toe. She started to sweat as she feverishly groped about for some instrument of defense. Blindly her hand searched – something soft, something oozing, at last something rigid. She grasped a chicken leg and held it above her ear like a dagger.
“What a pretty thing is this in a filthy alley!” called Tripp as he ventured a few feet into the brick chasm.
“What’ve you got you goddamn idiot?” another louse bellowed.
“Such a beautiful flower all alone in the city,” he wailed with drunken theatrics. He stepped once more towards the shivering girl. Dwynn wanted to scream at him to get away, to leave her alone or she’d kill him. But instead, she grit her teeth and brandished the weapon and waited to strike. “I wouldn’t be doin’ my civic duty if I didn’t take care of the poor thing,” Tripp added.
Just as Dwynn was about to rush her would-be attacker, he spun towards the wall, arched his back, and unbuttoned his pants. Then came the sound of running liquid as he proceeded to empty his bladder on the alley floor.
“Poor little dandelion growin’ up in these harsh conditions. All pretty and yellow, and lovely. Wouldn’t be right not to water the poor thing!” he said in a high-pitched voice, tip-toeing his way back to his mates with a gay and lively step.
“You’re a horse’s ass, Tripp,” was the refrain over the party’s laughter as it started off once more down Leadenhall.
Dwynn watched the last carouser pass by and stood perfectly still for what felt like an hour, scanning the air for any hint of a foul whisper. With each scrape of a boot or slam of a door she jumped, cursing herself for having gone so willingly on so dangerous a venture. Why did I ever agree to…
“Are you reading that book again?” Dwynn asked her sister Sophie. The latter lay on her stomach on the floor, gnawing on the remnants of the evening’s supper with a tattered, leather-bound book in front of her. She hummed a few bars of a tune in between chewing and swallowing. Dwynn had always admired the girl’s voice – perfectly pitched, a dulcet vibrato. When she sang, empty-mouthed of course, it felt as though the tiny house in squalor’s capital was transported to a green moor in the northern highlands, where there it sat alone, serene and undisturbed save by a light rain or a passing doe. Presently, Sophie choked on a bone. When she had recovered, she turned to her little sister.
“Don’t you just love it though, Dwynn? It’s so romantic!” Sophie responded with a pining sigh. “How Mr. Darcy finally reveals his feelings. And then Elizabeth realizes that he’s not a fiend at all, but the most generous man in the world! It always makes me cry.”
Dwynn sat at the table with her head in her left hand scratching out shapes and figures on a sheet of paper with her right. The etchings were nothing too remarkable – geometrical and always symmetrical, to the extent her hand allowed. She often scribbled such insignificant art when half-engaged in a dull conversation – or when distressed. Presently, she listened to her sister with an unapologetic look of apathy.
“How wonderful it would be to live in Pemberly. Or even Longbourn, for that matter,” continued the elder sister unaffected by the younger’s indifference.
“I’d settle for The Tower.”
“What has gotten into you, sister!” huffed Sophie. “How is it that such profound literature, such moving sentiments, have so little manifest affectation on your disposition?”
“That’s why!” Dwynn snapped.
“What do you mean?
“For one, you start babbling like a pretentious debutante,” said Dwynn setting aside her sketches. “Real people don’t talk like that. Real people don’t live like that. The whole story takes place in a fantastical bubble that about twenty people in the world have actually experienced. The whole story is as contrived as your phony accent.”
“What?!” Sophie exclaimed as she sat up. “Are you mad? Jane Austen is ridiculing the aristocratic nonsense that made women’s lives miserable. She was a pioneer. Just like Elizabeth Bennet, she refused to be relegated to an inferior social status by the fact that she was a woman, and poor. Elizabeth was principled!”
“Yes, the great Elizabeth!” Dwynn said mockingly as she stood up. She then began striding about her sister with the composure and pomp of an empress, embracing an invisible scepter and waving to an imaginary crowd. “The more I see of the world,” she decreed in a lofty tone, “the more I am dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters.” She stepped backwards to the chair, faltering in her steps until she dramatically flopped into the seat where she had begun her melodramatic performance. “It is unaccountable!” she said breathing heavily with a forearm across her brow. “In every view…unaccountable!”
Sophie rolled her eyes and conceded a dry applause. “That’s quite a soliloquy for somebody that doesn’t even like the book. How many times have you read it anyways?”
Dwynn ignored the question and continued with her initial train. “Look, Soph, Elizabeth Bennet hadn’t seen a day outside of her bubble and yet she completely wrote off even the most amiable, refined, and luxurious of societies! And Miss Bennet was by no means poor, herself, you know. I doubt she would have even condescend to look on this den of ours. She lived in a manor for God’s-sake. Which brings me to my real point. You say she’s principled. I say: why shouldn’t she be? She could afford to be! Women in our position can’t afford to be principled. You don’t think for a second that if a man, even half as charming as George Whickham, walked into this room that you wouldn’t run away with him in an instant?”
“Whickham was a dolt!” Sophie said indignantly. She was momentarily interrupted by a few stray crumbs on her bosom that caught her eye, which she brushed away to the floor before rejoining the debate. “He was a gambler and a scoundrel with a bit of polish.”
“You amaze me, Sophie.”
“How so?”
“You of all people should know better. I see the men that pass through this courtyard, and I’ve heard the filth that comes from their depraved mouths. I’ve seen you with black eyes and bloody noses. And yet you still have your heart set on the perfect man.”
“Not perfect,” Sohpie jabbed back. “Just decent, selfless, caring…handsome…” Sophie’s voice waxed reminiscent while her head lolled back as the defined features and demure smile of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy drifted across her mind’s eye.
“Stop that!” snapped the impatient observer. “There’s no such thing as a decent man, let alone a perfect one, so you can just put it out of your silly head.”
“What about father?” Sophie challenged without a trace of sarcasm.
The question caught the youngest daughter off guard. Dwynn was as well read and well spoken as a girl in her position could be, despite never having spent a day behind a school desk. Her father often happened across cheap or discarded books and would add them to the floor-strewn library at the back of his home. There, with his help, Dwynn had learned to read and to enunciate properly. (Thomas Murphy would have no daughter of his illiterate or communicating in the guttural vernacular of his closest neighbors.) She had devoured a water-stained copy of On the Origins of Species, procured from a stack of castaways behind the church a block away. She enjoyed Voltaire too, particularly La Henriade – a battered old copy, dog-eared and robbed of several pages. And though the intricate mathematical jargon and calculations were completely lost on the farmer’s daughter, Dwynn had a curious affinity for Newton’s Principia. The Murphy library was at a loss for the first two volumes, (a fact of which Dwynn consistently reminded her father), but over the third the girl had spent hours meditating upon, hoping to grasp at least a subtle understanding of the diagrams and explanations of heavenly motion. She found comfort and, perhaps more importantly, escape in the witty, cerebral, and substantive works of her favored authors, far more so than in the emotive and sensational literature amongst which her sister commonly dwelt. Thus, Dwynn grew up sharp and was often armed with a quip, quote, or barb for any occasion that warranted her acumen. Nevertheless, for all her keenness and cunning, the facts and circumstances that surrounded her father and his true nature had never settled to a point of absolute resolution. And so, the girl who had so routinely patronized and pounced upon her duller sister, presently sat slack-jawed, searching for a response to the loaded query.
“Isn’t father a decent man?” Sophie asked again, this time pointedly and with increased attitude awoken upon seeing her younger and too-often haughty sister at a rare lack for words.
Anxiety welled up in Dwynn’s chest as she considered her answer. She wanted to dismiss the question as foolishness, but she knew that her disregard would speak as loudly as anything she might actually say. The fact was the Murphy sisters never discussed their father. Perhaps it was the bizarre duality – providing father and blithe pimp – that cinched their lips and discouraged analysis. Just as likely was the overriding fear of the imposing frame and domineering presence of Mr. Murphy that forever kept the three sisters from broaching the topic. Worse for Dwynn, in this matter, was her hitherto absenteeism from the family business roll book. A critical take on her father would invite condemnation of her own reluctance from her working sister. On the other hand, a positive response condones what she knew to be the utter despicable treatment of her ill-fated older sisters.
“Well Soph,” she said at last, slowly and tentatively – choosing each word with great care. “I don’t believe that anybody could classify a man as ‘decent’ when he encourages his daughters to do what you do.” She initially felt rather proud of her response – in particular its vague, generalized tone, though she lamented some of the verbiage. Encouraged, she thought to herself, as if they had a choice.
“And what would you know of what I do?” Sophie’s swipe interrupted her sister’s thoughts and once again aroused roiling angst in Dwynn’s stomach.
Dwynn’s guilt rested her tongue and the room fell silent. Occasionally the the thick, uncomfortable quiet was disturbed by a sniffle from Sophie, who had turned back over on her stomach to read.
“I will,” Dwynn muttered humbly.
Sophie pushed herself up to her knees and gathered the many groupings of pages that comprised her most beloved book. She glanced only once at her sister, wiped her face with her hand, and hurried into the other room.
Dwynn did not follow after her.
The high walls of the alley forbade the wind from entering the narrow inlet. There Dwynn felt more at ease standing in the midst of decaying animal remains than she had since she had met the deviant messenger some three hours prior. The night’s excitement appeared to be waning, for it had been nearly twenty minutes since another passerby had graced the small stage at the end of her alley.
Dwynn looked up to the sky to see what might be observed. There was a brief period late on Saturday evenings when the brume of London’s industry would disperse from above, just before domestic chimneys began a lazy Sunday’s activity. At this moment of relative clearing Dwynn gazed at a waxing gibbous moon ducking intermittently behind black clouds of mercantile smog. She studied the luminescent orb, a refined Lady of the Heavens, and recalled Mr. Newton’s many graphs that depicted its celestial path about the earth. A twinge of pride tickled the back of her throat when it occurred to her that she was privy to a secret, hiding in plain view of the entire world, which few bothered to uncover. So great was the swell of ego that she forgot about where she was, forgot about the ever-present dangers about her. The fear that had paralyzed her moments ago melted away as the delight of her attention took control of her thoughts. She stepped out of the alley and into the street while envisioning unnamed stars and distant planets dancing in the nocturnal court of the heavenly queen.
The remainder of Dwynn Murphy’s cross-town venture passed by quite uneventfully. But even if Victoria herself had rolled across Leadenhall in a bare-knuckle brawl with a talking hound, the girl would have very well passed on obliviously. Deep contemplations strolled leisurely about her head – from the heavens to poetry, from the stately homes that she occasionally passed to the families that dwelt within. She analyzed and criticized without evidence to support her unspoken conclusions. She laughed aloud, as she was wont to do when silently musing. She laughed at the drunks whispering tiny nonsenses into their beards, as they peacefully passed out of consciousness, feet in a gutter and necks propped against a wall. She laughed at venerable, distinguished matriarchs in silken robes, bejeweled in extravagant boudoirs, relinquishing soiled chamber pots to stiff-lipped servants. Inevitably the events of the past day, week, and month floated to the forefront of her scrutiny. Her sisters. Her father. The bastard.
She halted abruptly at an intersection and looked to a street sign.
“Tottenham Court. Here we are. A right on Tottenham than a left onto Percy,” she read from her directions. She folded the paper again, neatly as usual, in fourths so that all the corners met precisely.
Dwynn’s journey had taken her westward with the setting moon as the lady raced on ahead to the western horizon. Her path traversed a diverse cross-section of the city – from the dregs of Mile End, through the marketplaces of Whitechapel, yet untouched by the encroaching, tainting hand of industrialization and gross overpopulation. Past well-tended gardens and parks she had walked; past stone monuments erected to England’s victorious generals and renowned politicians, each standing high above London’s streets, proud and stoic in their watch over disinterested citizens, ignorant of their guardians’ immortal diligence. Leaving behind the infamy of the East End, she had navigated the streets of the Old City, admiring from a distance, for only the second time in her life, the great dome of St. Paul’s. Thomas Murphy had once taken young Dwynn on a sightseeing tour of the city’s many points of interest and consequence. While the circumstances of that visit – summer sun, a father’s hand, and toffee – were certainly more agreeable then the present night’s conditions, she believed that her second visit – cold, alone, and hungry – would somehow be recorded in her memory as the more significant.
Presently, Dwynn found herself in a well-constructed, well-maintained neighborhood comprised of tall, many-windowed homes that appeared oddly uninhabited. Standing at the very center of Percy Street before the appointed house, the sole building to bear a lit window, she turned around to take in the panorama of the short, dead-end lane. The girl was perplexed with her natural reaction to the darkened street; for never could she have imagined that the mucky, strife-ridden bustling of Devonshire could offer more comfort than the quiet and subdued elegance of one of London’s finer corners. But the reflection of light from Tottenham’s street lamps on the glass panes, like glazed eyes, forbade any inquiries into the personal business of the grimacing homes and served to increase Dwynn’s feelings of unwelcome.
She unfolded the paper and read the next line of instruction, though the reading was strictly a formality to ease her compulsive mind. For, as she traveled and ruminated, she would cease her reflections to address the directions and memorize them word-for-word. And even then, when they had been committed to memory beyond a shadow of a doubt, she perused the note again and again by street lamp or moonlight. There was comfort in commanding what little information there was to be had on this strangest and most fearful of nights.
Go around to the back alley and enter through the rear door. It will be unlocked.
She did as directed.
The rubbish-strewn throughway behind the Percy Street houses was a setting to which Dwynn was more accustomed, though it was no more soothing to the nerves. Her heavenly fellow sojourner had finally disappeared for the evening, and she felt her courage slip away with it. All the evening there had shone a clean, friendly glow to accompany her, to gently reassure her that familiarity and continuity did indeed exist in the most alien of lands. But no more. The lonely, grey alley crept in on all sides and a gust of chill air burned her face. Quickly she turned to the door she had been avoiding for years, and entered.
She closed the door with a snap that fell dead in a tightly walled scullery. The girl leaned her back to the door and sighed. Realizing she still clasped the note, more firmly than ever, she unfolded it to peruse its contents for what could be no less than the twentieth time.
“Too dark,” she moaned. “It’s not like you don’t know it by heart, you idiot.” Then she folded it carefully for the last time that evening and placed it into a small pocket sewn into the side of her dress. It was then that Dwynn took on an air that people sometimes do when faced with impending danger and precarious circumstances beyond their control: she cast away her many worries and actually grew rather silly, all the while attending to the instructions carved into her memory.
Walk perfectly straight through the kitchen and into the foyer ahead. Raising her chin and extending her arms out on either side like a tightrope performer, she stepped lightly through the kitchen in a line straighter than an arrow. There was a creaking and a gust of wind from the floor. She stepped quickly, then, gayly, she leapt into the foyer, landing and pirouetting. She bowed to the crowd, accepting its rave applause with grace before arriving at the foot of the staircase.
Ascend the stairs by stepping on each consecutive step in this precise order or you shall receive no money what-so-ever: The right side of the step, next left, left, center, right, right, right, left, left, right, center, center, then left to the top. Almost comically, Dwynn stretched one hamstring, then the next, followed by a few toe touches and a couple deep draughts of musty air. Then, with a nod of mock determination and grit teeth, she exploded up the stairwell as if by the charge of the starter’s gun. She reached the top, in record time as she supposed, with the agility of a doe. For a moment she paused to gain her breath, but her respite was not long, for her resolve to complete her abhorrent mission now out-weighed both physical exhaustion from a night of adventure, and the temptation to retreat in fear of the thick shroud of darkness that presently lay over her.
Move left down the hallway until you can go no further. Enter the left door. Biting her lip, Dwynn acted as her memory commanded her. When at last she came to the end of the hallway, she observed light escaping from under two doors, one to her left and the other to her right. She knew what she was instructed to do, but by now her gay sense of bravado had reached its pinnacle, and the enticement of peaking behind the directions’ unmentioned door was swelling in her head and turning her ears red with a mischievous energy. But quickly her head was checked and her misguided desire was diminished by something those very same burning red ears had picked up. A murmur, a gnarl, or some other low rumble was emitted from a throat within the room that sent a tingling shiver through her body. She knew that tenor, in what capacity she could not recall then and there; but, from whomever it was uttered, Dwynn knew that she cared not to meet, or rather, meet again.
Wisely, Dwynn turned around and faced the opposite door, the door which concluded the list of instructions now tucked away in a pocket. She flattened her dress down with the palms of her hands and opened the door to her new life.
B David Larson 
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