Torn pages from Ripper Street

by writerfan2013

Drabbles from the lives of people in and around the cases of H Division. Unconnected. Chapter One - Passage to New York: Evelyn Foley. A girl and a ticket to a new life, but can it ever be new when the old tugs at her so?

I sail, and the white foam drags behind me. I sail, and steam trails like bare fingers sliding down a wedding gown which never saw the altar, gathering up the sky, hauling it and hoisting it so that I can move forward. The packet steams on, and I am part of the packet, a parcel, a bit of baggage, piled up against the rail with all the rest, waiting for a glimpse of land.

Bertrand. He was a liar and yet he told me truth. He was dishonest and deceitful and yet he serves the law. In another life I could have loved him always. His uncertain face and his gentle eyes could have guaranteed him a pardon, many pardons, for I'm as sure a fool for men as my mother was. In another life I would have forgiven him, but my life has been too full of the wrong ever to allow one man a right.

My own father is now proven another liar. Allowing another to take his place, to claim me as his own. That man, yer another deceiver, and in and in until the water strikes the hull in a metallic clanging which can never be quieted as I strive for sleep in my billet with four other girls, all of us jumbled together as the ship rolls and heaves, and none of us knowing up from down, or when this terrible journey will cease. We wake and shriek and despair together when the floor plunges away and the ceiling grips any loose thing which has flown up from our terrified hands.

I was born wrong, have never known anything but to be at crosswise with the law, with my neighbours and my own countrymen. Not Irish, not English, not a Londoner, not a daughter, not a wife.

I am no true thing and I am nobody, and my sparse moments of life have been clutched at in the arms of a man I trusted wrongly, mistakenly, in deception, and I ought not to be surprised at that.

I am lucky there is not to be a child, and to know quickly that I have escaped that condemnation, though I would have deserved it. Any child would have fallen immediately into wrong, been born wrong, lived wrong, like me.

This packet takes me away from wrong, yet all the time its engine turns around and around, every spin a cry of Ever! and Again!

Some on board are sick with the sea or the farewell to home. Some are joyful. Some are desperate. But most have hope.

I have only this cold iron rail, and the struggling sea, and the thick white knots of steam tying me to London, and the water ever dragging behind, and down, and back towards wrong.