Free The Journal of Dora Damage by Belinda Starling Page A

still fine green ribbon, which contrasted with the pale floral cambric. I married Peter in this dress; it was the only
     decent dress I had kept from Huggitty, as if I knew I would need to look proper again one day, and it had a matching bonnet
     that caught the worst of the drizzle. I had left a note, assuring Peter I would not be gone long, but I did not state my destination.
     With luck Lucinda might not even wake before I returned.
    I paid my ha’penny and scurried over Waterloo Bridge once more. It was still dark. I did not look over at Lambeth Marshes,
     but kept my eyes on my worn leather boots lined with The Illustrated London News , going in and out beneath my green hem. How hopeful the colour seemed, how fresh and spring-like. I was such the innocent.
    Occasionally I would glimpse the steamboats puffing underneath me, crowded with clerks on their way to Essex Street Pier,
     or Blackfriars Bridge Pier, or St Paul’s Wharf, or Old Shades Pier by London Bridge, where they would disgorge their sombre-suited
     cargo. The air was oily on my skin: the breath of London.
    The lamplighters were doing their rounds with their ladders, turning off the stopcocks at each lamp-post, and the pavements
     were already full of tradesmen, footmen, clerks, all wrapped up in thick cloaks. A few women were amongst them: maidservants
     in couples, wives tottering next to their tradesman husbands, the odd gentlewomen mantled and veiled to obscurity, with maids
     in tow. All were in pairs; I felt conspicuous on my own. I was stared at with impunity, especially by the men. Women are experts
     at the cross-gaze; why do men have to look directly? Was I overdressed in my finest, or not smart enough? Did I look like
     a lady’s maid who had done away with her lady, or a prostitute, even? For, unaccompanied, I became a public woman, a term
     I used to reserve for those whose coquettish walks, kiss-me-quick ringlets, and slightly-too-trim trimmings sought to be noticed,
     and paid for. Oh, for an escort on to whose arm I could cling, to allay my fellow street-goers’ curiosity and render me invisible.
    Straight up Wellington-street I went, with studied nonchalance and directness of purpose, past Somerset House on my right
     and Duchy Wharf down to my left, and all the way up to the top where the road was bisected by the Strand. Then I turned right,
     trembling but determined, and increasingly immune to the gaze of men. I was crossing paths with journalists and hacks from The Illustrated London News , which had its headquarters hereabouts, and doctors from King’s College, which I was just now passing. Through the shoppers
     I went, the gentlemen on fast business, the trolleys, crinolines, crossing-sweepers, hawkers, urchins, wheel-barrows, all
     weaving in and out of the irate, tedious crawl of carriages, cabs and buses. The noise was deafening: the iron-shod wooden
     wheels of the carriages rattling over the cobbles, the drivers of the omnibuses shouting their destinations, the thwarted
     haste of the red newspaper express, and at last I was anonymous, irrelevant, obliterated in the thickness of the crowds.
    Soon I reached the church of St Mary-le-Strand, which marked the junction with Holywell-street. The traffic was at a complete
     standstill here, for the Strand branched into two strandlets, one of which was the narrow, dark Elizabethan lane of Holywell-street
     and its tortuous mesh of alley-ways, where I was headed. I could not see above the suited backs of the crowds ahead of me,
     so I raised my eyes heavenwards, to the overhanging tenements, the lofty gables and deep bay windows, under which hung wooden
     shop signs and figures, including a large carved half-moon which betrayed the mercery past of the street. The old lath-and-plaster
     houses huddled and skulked just like the people below, deprived of light and air but rich in dirt and disease.
    At one junction with a fetid alley-way leading off into an unwelcoming labyrinth, I had to