The Reassembled

Chapter I: The Silt and the Bone

The tide on the riverbank was at its lowest ebb, exposing a slick apron of gray silt and Victorian debris. Bracing against the raw morning wind, Clara Davis knelt in the mud, her trowel scraping carefully along the edge of a collapsed nineteenth-century embankment and her jeans soaked through to her skin. Though the sun was shining, she couldn’t help but shiver in the coolness of the morning.

Among the washed-out brickwork and coal slag, something smooth and stark white caught the pale morning light. Clara cleared away a clod of wet clay, revealing a cluster of broken porcelain fragments: a severed torso, two tiny legs, and several headless bodies. They were bits and pieces of “frozen Charlottes” the doll of choice for the downtrodden children of the Victorian age.

Clara picked up one of the intact torsos, wiping the silt from its face. It was the classic ‘penny doll’ from the mid-1800s, a solid, single-mold figure manufactured without jointed arms or movable parts. Its tiny arms were molded stiffly flat against its sides, giving the pale porcelain figure its corpse-like rigidity. In the Victorian era, these cheap figures could be bought for a copper coin, and decades later they remained standard finds buried in riverbanks, outhouse pits, and old privy heaps.