Thyla - Kate Gordon [45]
Mr Hopkins has entrusted me with keeping watch over Miss Geeves and her troubles, and I will report back on any subsequent developments. Mr Hopkins is, of course, always conscious of the Flash Mob and their influence on our young workers, and I will personally do everything in my power to prevent Miss Geeves from falling in with this unsavoury rabble.
Regards,
Isaac Livingston
You looked up at me, your forehead furrowed, and your eyes wide and fearful. I heard you swallow, loudly.
‘There’s more,’ I said, and my voice came out like a creaking floorboard.
You nodded. ‘I know, but Tessa, you don’t …’
I shrugged and looked down at my knees. How could I explain it to you properly?
I knew that the girl in the report was me.
She was the girl I had remembered when I was talking to Perrin – the girl with long, wavy, dark blonde hair, a serious face, a long cotton dress. She was me. I remembered seeing her reflected in the mirror. I remembered brushing and braiding that long hair. I remembered that serious face.
When I read the report, none of it seemed foreign or new. It was as though I was reading my own diary or journal. It was as though I knew everything that Mr Isaac Livingston was saying. As if it was a memory. And, as you read it again to me, I could see the memories.
I could see the Female Factory, with its high stone walls, peaked roofs and muddy courtyards. It was the building from my dream, and it was a building from my past. It wasn’t like the building you had pointed at as we drove to Cascade Falls. That building was a hollowed husk of what the Factory used to be.
I could see fat Mr Hopkins.
I could see Isaac Livingston, too. Well, almost. I could see his stocky silhouette, a quick flash of amber eyes.
I could hear his deep, gravelly voice.
I could see Mary Absolam, with her limp, sweaty brown hair and her always-dripping nose.
I could remember the ‘Flash Mob’ – an unruly group of women who refused to give up their criminal ways and incited fear in the less confident, more refined inmates. I was one of those inmates. I had an education. I had been taught to be a lady. I had arrived back at the factory in a pretty dress. They ridiculed me for this.
I remembered that my mother paid them off in rations, begging them to stay away from me.
That part wasn’t in Livingston’s report, but I remembered it anyway. I also remembered Livingston coming to me, the day after Sir Edward paid his visit – the day after Sir Edward did something to my mother that made her scream and rant and cry. Livingston told me that she had died from the ‘medicine’ they had given her to calm her, and from a lack of food.
She had given all of her rations to me and to the Flash Mob girls, and she was starving. It was a combination of starvation and the poisonous medicine – the ‘ipecacuanha’ – that killed her. Now I knew why that word sounded familiar when I’d heard it in Mr Beagle’s class.
That’s what my dream was about. It wasn’t just a dream. It was a memory. It was real.
I looked up at you and you nodded. ‘I know,’ you said, and I realised I didn’t have to explain anything. You could see it in my eyes. ‘Tess, you can understand that this seems … bizarre,’ you went on. ‘But it’s real to you, isn’t it? You believe it.’
‘I don’t just believe it,’ I said. ‘I remember it.’
‘Do you have … the scars? I mean, I know you have scars, but have they … changed?’
I pulled up my shirt and showed you my back. I heard you gasp. ‘But then, Tess, it says here in the book that …’
I nodded. ‘Read it to me,’ I said.
You cleared your throat and read again:
The following is a report from Female Factory guard, Isaac Livingston, on the convict Theresa Geeves, dated the fifth of February, 1851:
It is my unhappy duty to inform