"Get away, you filthy orphan! Go back to where ye came or I'll call the Sergeant on ye!" the haughty tavern woman screeched after boxing the poor, raggedy orphans' ears and beating the child's fragile body with her long-handled broom. With an arrogant slam of the thick wooden door, she hastily began sweeping up her "dirtied" floors, muttering endlessly under her breath how stupid children were littering the streets of fine business locations like her own.
The child meanwhile, lay sprawled in agonizing pain on the thick grey-stoned doorstep of the tavern. She slowly rose to her knees, holding her hand to her reopened gash across her upper forehead. Blood seeped through the tiny crevices between her soiled fingers. As she rested on her knees to assess the damage of her most recent beating, her dizziness consumed her coherent mind. She collapsed onto her back, and once again felt the frigid London fog squelched beneath the stone doorstep and her exposed back weave its way under her tattered dress.
"Why can't anyone give me a chance?" she wheezed, the creaking remants of typhoid slicing through her once beautiful voice. After scrambling to her feet, she opened her clenched fist, embedded with tiny pebbles after her rough fall. A dusty two-pence was safely cradled in the center of her small hand. In her clouded mind, she decided to go scrouge at the baker's for some dry, burnt bread. Hopefully the baker was in a good mood.
At the warmly-lit building, the baker's shoppe was filled with clambering people, chiding each other and demanding their orders. Rhea decided not to bother him, and scuttled back home to her tiny abode in the slums of London.
Shivering under a fabric and wooden stick lean-to, Rhea tried to cover her arms with garbage and debris coated with runoff from the nearby tenement to keep body heat in, but to no avail. Suddenly, loud moans filled the dank alleyway. Rhea silently thought, There's Sarah again. I knew she'd be here. Who's the guy this time?
A series of loud thumps and thwacks followed, and Rhea groaned. Seriously? Again? When Sarah began screaming, "Faster, faster!", Rhea decided it was time for bed. She didn't want to hear any of this. She shrunk back into the tongues of London fog and fought her way to sleep.
The next morning, Rhea awoke strangely warm, but then discovered a large sewer rat had decided to make camp on top of her sleeping form. With a great shove, the beast received a sudden awakening and scuttled off to the unknown depths of the drain nearby. After rifling through the newly filled dumpster, Rhea pulled out half of a ripped green dress. Well, this will have to do, she thought sadly.
She pulled it over her head after ripping off the top of her last finding, now so soiled after years of use. After plunging her hair into algae-filled sewer water, tearing off a strip of old newspaper, and tying her brown scraggly mop away from her face, she set out on a quest for work.
