“Where are we?” Maisie asked. “Shouldn’t we try to follow them?”
“Don’t matter,” Maggie answered. “They’ll just be goin’ back to Soho when we want Lambeth. We can find our own way back. C’mon.” She set out as confidently as she could, without telling the others that in the past she’d always come to this part of London with her father or brother, and had let them lead the way. However, there were plenty of landmarks Maggie had been to and could surely find her way back from: Smithfield’s, St. Paul’s, the Guild-hall, Newgate Prison, Blackfriars Bridge. It was just a matter of finding one of them.
For example, ahead of them and across a green was a massive U-shaped building, three stories high and very long, with towered sections in the middle and at the corners where the wings began.
“What’s that?” Maisie said.
“Dunno,” Maggie answered. “Looks familiar. Let’s see it from the other side.”
They walked parallel to the railings that enclosed the green and then past one wing of the building. At the back a high, crumbling stone wall covered with ivy ran alongside, and another, even higher wall had been built closer to the building, clearly designed to keep people in.
“There be bars on the windows,” Jem announced, squinting up through the rain. “This a jail?”
Maggie peered at the windows high up in the walls. “Don’t think so. I know we’re not near Fleet, nor Newgate neither-I been there for hangings and it don’t look like this. There’s not this many criminals in London, not behind bars.”
“You’ve seen someone hanged?” Maisie cried. She looked so horrified that Maggie felt ashamed to confirm it.
“Just the once,” she said quickly. “That was enough.”
Maisie shuddered. “I couldn’t bear to see someone killed, no matter what they’ve done.”
Maggie made a garbled noise. Jem frowned. “You all right?”
Maggie swallowed hard, but before she could say anything, they heard a wail from one of the high barred windows. It began low in pitch and volume, then ascended the scale, growing louder and higher until it became a scream so forceful it must have torn its owner’s throat. The children froze. Maggie felt goose bumps sweep up and down her.
Maisie clutched Jem’s arm. “What’s that? Oh, what is’t, Jem?”
Jem shook his head. The sound stopped suddenly, then began again in its low range, to climb higher and higher. It reminded him of cats fighting.
“A lying-in hospital, maybe?” he suggested. “Like the one on Westminster Bridge Road. Sometimes you hear screams coming from it, when the women are having their babies.”
Maggie was frowning at the ivy-covered stone wall. Suddenly her face shifted with recognition and disgust. “Oh Lord,” she said, taking a step back. “Bedlam.”
“What’s-” Jem stopped. He was remembering an incident one day at Astley’s. One of the costume girls had seen John Astley smiling at Miss Hannah Smith and begun to cry so hard that she sent herself into a fit. Philip Astley had thrown water in her face and slapped her. “Pull yourself together, my dear, or it’s Bedlam for you!” he’d said before the other costume girls led her away. He’d turned to John Fox, tapped his temple, and winked.
Jem looked up at the windows again and saw a hand fluttering between the bars, as if trying to grasp at the rain. When the scream began the third time, he said, “Let’s go,” and turned on his heel to walk what felt like west to him, toward Soho and, eventually, Lambeth.
Maggie and Maisie followed. “That’s London Wall, you know,” Maggie said, gesturing at the stone wall to their right. “There’s bits of it all round. It’s the old wall to the city. That’s what made me recognize Bedlam. Pa brought me past here once.”
“Which way do we go, then?” Jem said. “You must know.”
“Course I do. This way.” Maggie turned left at random.
“Who…who stays at Bedlam?” Maisie faltered.
“Madmen.”
“Oh dear. Poor souls.” Maisie stopped suddenly. “Wait-look!” She pointed at a figure in a red skirt ahead of them. “There’s Rosie! Rosie!” she called.
“Maisie, we’re nowhere near St. Giles,” Maggie said. “She won’t be over here.”
“She might be! She said she works all over. She could’ve come here!” Maisie broke into a run.
“Don’t be an idiot!” Maggie called after her.
“Maisie, I don’t think-” Jem began.
Jem’s sister was not listening, but running faster, and when the girl turned suddenly into an alley, Maisie dived after her and disappeared.
“Damn!” Maggie ran, Jem matching her stride for stride.
When they reached the turning, both Maisie and the red skirt were gone. “Dammit!” Maggie muttered. “What a silly fool!”
They hurried down the alley, looking at each turning for Maisie. Down one they saw a flash of red in the doorway of a house. Now that they could see her face, it was clear that indeed the girl was not Rosie, or a whore either. She shut the door behind her, and Jem and Maggie were left alone among a few houses, a church, a copper shop, and a draper’s.
“Maisie must have kept going,” Maggie said. She ran back to the original alley, Jem at her heels, and continued along it, ducking into other alleys and lanes. At a dead end, they turned; at another they turned again, getting wound more and more tightly into the maze of streets. Jem said little, except to stop Maggie once and point out that they’d come in a circle. Maggie thought he must be furious with her for getting them so lost, but he seemed to show neither anger nor fear-just a grim determination.
Maggie tried not to think beyond finding Maisie. When for a moment she let her mind picture the three of them, lost in these tiny streets in an unknown part of a huge city, with no knowing how to get home, she began to feel so breathless with fear that she thought she would have to sit down. She had only ever felt this frightened once before, when she’d met the man in what would become Cut-Throat Lane.
As they ran along another alley, they passed a man who turned and leered at them. “What you runnin’ from, then?”
Maggie shrieked, and shied like a spooked horse, startling Jem and the man, who shrank back and disappeared into a passageway.
“Maggie, what is’t?” Jem grabbed his friend by the shoulders, but she threw him off with a shudder and turned away, her hand against the wall, trying to steady herself. Jem stood watching her and waiting. At last she took a deep, shaky breath and turned back to him, rain dripping from her crushed straw hat into her eyes. Jem searched her unhappy face and saw there a distant, haunted look that he had caught a few times before-sometimes when she didn’t know he saw it, others like now when she desperately tried to hide it. “What is’t?” he said again. “What happened to you?”
She shook her head; she would not say what it was.
“It be about that man in Cut-Throat Lane, don’t it?” Jem guessed. “You was always funny about that. You went funny back at Smithfield’s too.”
“It was Maisie what looked sick, not me,” Maggie retorted.
“You did too,” Jem insisted. “You looked sick because you saw so much blood back in Cut-Throat Lane. Maybe you even-” Jem paused. “You saw it happen, didn’t you? You saw him get killed.” He wanted to put his arm around her to comfort her, but knew she wouldn’t let him.