The Foundling Read online

  Contents

  Map

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  PART TWO

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  PART THREE

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Letter from the Author

  The Foundling Museum

  Turn over for Material for your Reading Group

  Reading Group Questions

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  BESS

  Late November, 1747

  CHAPTER 1

  All the babies were wrapped like presents ready to be given. Some of them were dressed finely – though their mothers were not – in tiny embroidered sleeves and thick shawls, for winter had arrived, and the night was biting. I’d bound Clara in an old blanket that had waited years to be darned, and now never would be. We stood clustered around the pillared entrance, thirty or so of us, like moths beneath the torches burning in their brackets, our hearts beating like papery wings. I hadn’t known that a hospital for abandoned babies would be a palace, with a hundred glowing windows and a turning place for carriages. Two long and splendid buildings were pinned either side of a courtyard that was connected in the middle by a chapel. At the north end of the west wing the door stood open, throwing light onto the stone. The gate felt a long way behind. Some of us would leave with our arms empty; some would carry our children out into the cold again. For this reason we could not look at one another, and kept our eyes on the ground.

  Clara was clutching my finger, which neatly slotted into her tiny palm as a lock does a key. I imagined her reaching for it later, her hand closing around thin air. I held her tighter. My father, who my brother Ned and I called Abe because Mother had, stood slightly behind me, his face in shadow. He had not held the baby. Earlier, the midwife – a wide woman from a neighbouring court, who was as cheap as she was discreet – had offered her to him as I lay beached on the bed, shimmering in pain, and he shook his head, as though she was a barrow woman proffering a peach.

  We were shown inside by a slim, bewigged man with reedy legs, and through an entrance hall unlike anywhere I’d been. Everywhere surfaces gleamed, from the walnut banister to the polished long-case clock. The only sound was our skirts rustling, and our shoes on the stone – a little herd of women swollen with milk, bearing their calves. It was a place for hushed, gentle voices, not hawkers’ ones like mine.

  Our little procession made its way up the claret carpet of the stairs, and into a high-ceilinged room. Only one skirt and bundled infant could pass through the doorframe at a time, so we lined up outside, like ladies at a ball. The woman in front of me had brown skin, and her black hair curled beneath her cap. Her baby was unsettled, making more noise than the others, and she bounced him with the unpractised air we all had. I wondered how many had their own mothers to show them how to swaddle, how to feed. I had thought about mine fifty times that day, more than I had in the past year. I used to feel her in the creak of the floorboards and the warmth of the bed, but not any more.

  The room we had entered was papered green, with elegant white plaster piped below the ceiling. There were no flames in the fireplace, but it was warm and brightly lit, with glowing lamps and pictures on the walls, framed in gold. A chandelier shivered at the centre. It was the finest room I had ever stood in, and it was crowded with people. I had thought we might be alone, perhaps with a fleet of nursemaids who carried off the babies that would stay, but a score of faces lined the walls – mostly women, who were certainly not nursemaids, fanning themselves and smiling curiously. They were very well-dressed and interesting to look at, and they were very interested in us. They might have climbed out of the paintings on the walls; their necks flashed with jewels, and their hooped skirts were bright as tulips. Their hair was pinned up high and cloudy with powder. There were half a dozen men scattered about too, silver-buckled and pot-bellied – not like Abe, with his drab coat like a bag of horse feed. The men appeared more stern, and many of them were eyeing the mulatto girl, as though she were for sale. They held little glasses in their gloved hands, and I realised for them this was a party.

  I was still bleeding. Clara had been born before daylight that morning, and every part of me felt torn. I had not been her mother a day, yet I knew her as well as myself: the smell of her, the little patter of her heart that had beaten inside me. Even before she was pulled from me, red and squealing, I’d known what she’d feel like and how heavy she would be in my arms. I hoped they would take her, and I hoped they wouldn’t. I thought of Abe’s lined face, his eyes on the floor, his calloused hands holding the door for me. He was the only father in the room. Most of the others were alone, but some had brought friends, sisters, mothers, who looked on miserably. Abe would not meet my eye, and had not spoken much on our slow, sad walk from Black and White Court where we lived in the city, but his being there was as good as a hand on my shoulder. When he had reached for his coat at home and said it was time for us to leave, I had almost cried with relief; I had not thought he would come with me.

  A hush fell over the room as a man standing before the huge fireplace began to speak. His voice was as rich and thick as the carpets. I stared at the chandelier as he told us how they drew the lottery: that a white ball admitted a child, a black one did not, and a red one meant we had to wait for an admitted child to fail the medical examination. It took all my energy to listen.

  ‘There are twenty white balls,’ the man was saying, ‘five red, and ten black.’

  I shifted Clara at my breast. The swells at the edges of the room were looking on us more boldly now, wondering which of us would be lucky, which of us might leave our babies on the street to die. Who among us was unmarried. Who was a whore. A nurse began moving about the room with a cloth bag for us to reach inside. By the time she came to me, my heart was stomping around my chest in boots, and I held her indifferent gaze as I shifted Clara to one arm and put a hand in the bag. The balls were smooth and cool as eggs, and I held one in my fist, trying to feel its colour. The nurse shook the bag impatiently and something told me to let the ball drop and take another, so I did.

  ‘Who are the people watching?’ I asked her.

  ‘They were invited,’ was her bored reply. I clutched another ball, let it go, and she shook the bag again.

  ‘What for?’ I asked in a low voice, aware of the many pairs of eyes on me. I thought of their sons and daughters in their grand houses in Belgravia and Mayfair, lying beneath warm blankets, brushed and washed and full of milk. Perhaps they would visit the nursery before going to bed tonight, grown sentimental at our plight, dropping a kiss on sleeping cheeks. One woman was staring hard, as though willing me a particular colour. She was large and held a fan in one hand, a little glass in the other. She wore a blue feather in her hair.

  ‘They’re benefactors,’ was all the nurse said, and feeling as though I couldn’t ask another question, and knowing I must choose a ball, I settled on another, weighing it in my palm. I drew it out, and the room fell silent.

  The ball was red. I would have to wait.

  The nurse moved to the next woman, while the rest watched her journey around the room, their jaws set in tight, anxious lines as they tried to work out what had been drawn, and what w
as left. We had been told at the gate that our babies must be two months old at most, and in good health. Many of them were sickly, starving things that their mothers had tried to nurse. Some were six months at least, swaddled so tightly to look smaller they cried out in discomfort. Clara was the smallest of them all, and the newest. Her eyes had been closed since we arrived. If these were her last moments with me, she would not know. All I wanted was to curl around her in bed like a cat and go to sleep, and come back the next month. I thought of Abe’s silent shame. Our rooms at Black and White Court were thick with it; it stained like coal smoke and rotted the beams. I thought of taking her to Billingsgate, sitting her on my father’s stall like a miniature figurehead on the bow of a ship. A mermaid, found at sea and put on display for all to see at Abraham Bright’s shrimp stall. Briefly I fancied taking her hawking with me, bundling her to my chest so my hands were free to scoop shrimp from my hat. I’d seen some hawkers with their babes strapped to their fronts, but what happened when they were no longer the size of a loaf? When they were fat little things with fists and feet and hungry, empty mouths?

  A woman began wailing, a black ball clenched in her fist. Her face and her child’s were the same unhappy masks of despair. ‘I cannot keep him,’ she cried. ‘You must take him, please.’ While the attendants calmed her and the rest of us looked away for her dignity, I yawned so widely I thought my face would crack. I’d not slept for more than an hour since two nights ago, when Clara began to come. This morning Ned sat with the baby before the fire so I could shut my eyes, but I was in so much pain I could not sleep. Now, every part of me ached still, and in the morning I had to work. I could not walk home tonight with Clara in my arms. It was not possible. But neither could I leave her on a doorstep for the rats. As a girl I’d seen a dead baby by a dung heap on the roadside, and had dreamed about it for months.

  The room was very bright, and I was very tired, and suddenly I was aware of being led to a little room off the side, and told to sit and wait. Abe followed and closed the door behind him, shutting out the sobs and the tinkle of sherry glasses. I wished for a cup of warm milk or some beer; I did not know how to stay awake.

  A nursemaid appeared from nowhere and removed Clara from my arms, but I had not been ready, and it was too soon, too sudden. She was telling me there was a space for her, because a lady had brought an infant of at least six months, which was far too old, and did she think they could not tell the difference between a babe of two months and one of six? I thought of the woman and her child, and wondered idly what would happen to them, then pushed away the thought. The nursemaid’s frilled cap disappeared through the door again, and I felt delirious, too light without Clara in my arms, as though a feather could knock me over.

  ‘She is not yet a day,’ I called after the nurse, but she had gone. I heard Abe shift behind me, and the floor creaked.

  A man was now sitting before me, writing on a ticket with a fat feather, and I forced my eyes open, and my ears too, because he was speaking. ‘The doctor is inspecting her for signs of ailment . . .’

  I unstuck my mouth. ‘She was born at quarter past four this morning.’

  ‘. . . If she shows signs of ill health she will be refused admission. She will be examined for venereal disease, scrofula, leprosy and infection.’

  I sat in dumb silence.

  ‘Do you wish to leave a token with the memorandum?’ The clerk finally looked at me, and his eyes were dark and solemn, at odds with his eyebrows, which sprouted from his head in a rather comic way.

  A token: yes. This I had prepared for, had heard how the babies were recorded with an identifier, left by the mother. I fished in my pocket and brought out mine, placing it on the polished desk between us. My brother Ned had told me of the Foundling – a hospital for unwanted babies, on the edge of the city. He knew a girl who’d left her child there, and cut a square from her dress to leave with it. ‘And if you leave nothing and go back?’ I asked him. ‘You might be given the wrong one?’ He’d smiled and said perhaps, but the idea had chilled me. I imagined a room piled high with tokens, and mine being thrown on a heap of them. The man took it between his finger and thumb, and examined it with a frown.

  ‘It’s a heart, made from whalebone. Well, half a heart. Her father had the other.’ I flushed furiously, my ears scarlet, aware of Abe still standing silently behind me. There was a chair next to mine but he had not taken it. Until now he’d known nothing of the token. The size of a crown, I had the right-hand side, smooth at one edge and jagged at the other. ‘B’ had been scored into it, and below it, more roughly, a ‘C’, for Bess and Clara.

  ‘What will you use it for?’ I asked.

  ‘A record will be made should you wish to reclaim her. Her number will go in the ledger as 627, with the date, and a description of the token.’ He dipped the feather in ink and began to write.

  ‘You will put that it’s half a heart, won’t you?’ I said, watching the words spill from his quill, but not understanding them. ‘In case there’s a whole one, and they get mixed up.’

  ‘I will put that it’s half a heart,’ he said, not unkindly.

  I still did not know where my baby was, or if I would see her again before I left. I was afraid to ask.

  ‘I will reclaim her, when she’s older,’ I announced, because saying it aloud made it true. Behind me Abe sniffed, and the floorboards creaked. We had not yet spoken about this, but I was certain. I straightened my skirt. Streaked with mud and rain, on washing day it was the milky pewter of an oyster’s shell, and for the rest of the month the dirty grey of a cobbled street.

  The nursemaid came to the doorway and nodded. Her arms were empty. ‘She’s fit for admission.’

  ‘Her name is Clara,’ I said, feeling overcome with relief.

  A few months before, when my belly was small, on one of the more genteel streets around St Paul’s where the townhouses stretched up to the sky and jostled for space with the printers and the booksellers, I’d seen an elegant woman dressed in a deep blue gown, glowing like a jewel. Her hair was golden and shiny, and one plump, pink arm held a little hand, belonging to a child with the same yellow curls. I watched as she tugged at her mother, and the woman stopped and bent down, not caring that her skirts were brushing the ground, and put her ear to the little girl’s lips. A smile broke out across her face. ‘Clara, you are funny,’ she had said, and took up her daughter’s hand again. They moved past me, and I rubbed my growing stomach, and decided if I had a girl I would name her Clara, because then, in a very small way, I would be like that woman.

  The man was unmoved. ‘She will be christened and renamed in due course.’

  So she would be Clara to me and no one else. Not even herself. I sat stiff-backed, clenching and unclenching my fists.

  ‘And how will you know who she is, if her name changes, when I come back?’

  ‘A leaden tag is attached to each child on arrival, bearing a number that refers to their identifying records.’

  ‘627. I’ll remember it.’

  He regarded me, and his eyebrows fell into stern furrows. ‘If your circumstances change and you do wish to claim your child, the fee for her care will be payable.’

  I swallowed. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The expenses the hospital incurred caring for her.’

  I nodded. I had no idea what sort of cost that might be, but did not feel as though I could ask. I waited. The nib scratched, and somewhere in the room a clock ticked patiently. The ink was the same colour as the night sky in the window behind him; the curtains had not been drawn. The quill danced like some strange, exotic creature. I remembered the large woman outside with the blue feather in her hair, and how she had stared.

  ‘The people in the room,’ I said. ‘Who are they?’

  Without looking up he replied: ‘The governors’ wives and acquaintances. Lottery night raises funds for the hospital.’

  ‘But do they need to watch the babies be given over?’ I asked. I knew my voice did not s
ound right here; it made him sigh.

  ‘The women are very moved by it. The more moved they are, the more donations are made.’ I watched him come to the end of the paper and sign it with a flourish. He sat back to let it dry.

  ‘What will happen to her, when I go?’

  ‘All new admissions are taken to live in the countryside, where they will be cared for by a wet nurse. They return to the city at around five years old, and live at the Foundling until they are ready to work.’

  ‘What do they work as?’

  ‘We prepare girls for service, and set them to knitting, spinning, mending – domestic pursuits that will make them attractive to employers. The boys work in the ropeyards making fishing nets and twine to ready them for naval life.’

  ‘Where will Clara be nursed? Which part of the countryside?’

  ‘That depends on where there is a place for her. She could be as near as Hackney or as far as Berkshire. We are not at liberty to reveal where she will be placed.’

  ‘Can I say goodbye?’

  The clerk folded the paper over the whalebone heart, but did not seal it. ‘Sentimentality is best avoided. Good evening to you, miss, and you, sir.’

  Abe moved towards me and helped me from my chair.

  The Foundling Hospital was on the very edge of London, where pleasant squares and tall houses gave way to open roads and fields that yawned blackly into the distance. It was only a mile or two from Black and White Court, where we lived in the shadow of the Fleet Prison, yet it may as well have been two hundred, with its farms and cows to the north, and wide streets and townhouses to the south. Coal smoke choked the courts and alleys I was used to, but here there were stars, and the sky was like a large velvet curtain, covering everything in silence. The pale moon illuminated the few remaining carriages of the wealthy guests who’d watched us give up our children. Sated by the evening’s entertainment, they were now home to bed.

  ‘You’ll be wanting something to eat, Bessie,’ Abe said, as we walked slowly towards the gate. It was the first time he’d spoken since we arrived. When I didn’t reply, he said: ‘Bill Farrow might have some meat pies left.’