The Foundling Read online

  I watched him trudge before me, and noticed the defeated slope of his shoulders, and how stiffly he moved. The hair that spilled from under his cap had turned from the colour of rust to iron. He squinted at the quays now, and the younger boys had to point out the boats from Leigh that brought the shrimp from among the hundreds swarming on the water. For thirty years my father had sold shrimp from a shed on London’s fish market. He sold it by the basket to costermongers and bummarees, to hawkers and fishmongers, alongside two hundred other shrimp sellers, from five in the morning to three in the afternoon, six days a week. Each morning I took a basket to the boiling house at the end of Oyster Row and hawked it from my head in the streets. We did not sell cod; we did not sell mackerel, herring, whiting, pilchards, sprats. We did not sell roach, plaice, smelt, flounders, salmon, shad, eels, gudgeon, dace. We sold shrimp, hundreds of them, thousands, every day, by the double. There were plenty more fish that were nicer to look at, nicer to sell: silver salmon, rosy crabs, pearly turbot. But our living was made, our rent paid, from the ugliest of all, looking as they did like unborn creatures ripped from the belly of a giant insect, with unseeing black eyes and curled little legs. We sold them, but we did not eat them. Too many times I’d smelled them spoiled, and scraped the little spidery legs from my hat, the eyes clumped together like spawn. How I wished my father had been a Leadenhall market man instead of a Billingsgate one, and I a strawberry seller, smelling like a summer meadow, with juice and not brine running down my arms.

  We’d almost reached the tall gates, and a cat mewed nearby. My insides were empty and aching, and I could think only of a pie, and my bed. I could not think of my baby, and whether or not she had woken to find no comfort. If I did that, I would fall to my knees. The cat wailed again, and did not stop.

  ‘It’s a baby,’ I realised aloud in surprise. But where? The grounds were dark, and the sound came from somewhere to our right. There was nobody else around – I turned to see two women leaving the building behind us, and ahead the gates were closed, manned by a stone porter’s lodge with a glowing window.

  Abe had stopped, looking with me into the darkness. ‘It’s a baby,’ I repeated, as the noise started up again. Before all this, before I grew Clara and gave birth to her, I’d never noticed infants crying in the street or wailing in our building. But now, each little mew was as impossible to ignore as if someone was calling my own name. I left the path to go along the dark wall that hemmed the hospital grounds.

  ‘Bess, where you going?’

  In a few strides I saw it: a small bundle left on the grass, pressed against the damp brick, as though for shelter. It was swaddled as Clara had been, only a tiny, ancient face visible, with dark skin and fine black wisps of hair at its temples. I remembered the mulatto woman. This was surely her child, and she must have picked a black ball. I gathered the baby in my arms and shushed it gently. My milk had not yet come, but my breasts were sore, and I wondered if the child was hungry, and if I should feed it. I could hand the baby to the porter at the lodge, but would he take it? Abe looked open-mouthed at the bundle in my arms.

  ‘What shall I do?’

  ‘It ain’t your trouble, Bessie.’

  A noise came from the other side of the wall: people running and shouting, a horse neighing. Outside the city everything was darker and louder, as though we were in some strange land at the very edge of the world. I had never been to the countryside before, had never even left London. The baby was settled in my arms now, its tiny features creasing into a sleepy frown. Abe and I went to the gate. In the road beyond, people were gathering, and men were running with lanterns towards a coach-and-four, and trying to calm the sweating, bucking horses that had worked one another into a panic. Several white, shocked faces were looking down at the ground, and I slipped through the gate to move closer, still holding the baby. Two feet poked out from beneath the shafts. I saw a muddied skirt, and elegant brown hands. There was a low, guttural moaning, like an injured animal. Her fingers moved, and instinctively I turned to shield the baby from the sight.

  ‘She came from nowhere,’ the coachman was saying. ‘We was only going slow and she jumped out.’

  I turned and walked the short distance to the porter’s lodge, which was unlocked and abandoned; he was likely at the scene. Inside it was warm, with a low fire burning in a grate, and a candle flickering at a small table set with an abandoned supper. Finding a spare buff coat on a peg, I wrapped the child and left it on the chair, hoping the porter would understand whose it was, and take pity.

  In the distance, several windows in the Foundling were yellow, but most were black. Inside, perhaps in their beds, were hundreds of children. Did they know their parents were outside, thinking of them? Did they hope they would come, or were they happy in their uniforms, with their hot meals, their lessons and instruments? Could you miss somebody you didn’t know? My own daughter was inside, her fingers closing around thin air. My heart was wrapped in paper. I had known her hours, and all my life. The midwife had handed her to me, slick and bloodied, only this morning, but the Earth had turned full circle, and things would never be the same.

  CHAPTER 2

  If I wasn’t woken by the sound of my brother pissing into a pail, it was because he hadn’t come home. The next morning Ned’s bed was empty, and I leaned over to see he was not lying on the floorboards next to it, which he sometimes did when he’d fallen out in a tangle of sheets. The bed was made, the floor bare. I rolled back, wincing. I felt bruised on the inside; filleted, I’d be purple and blue. Next door, I could hear Abe’s footsteps creaking on the bare boards. The windowpanes were still black, and would be for hours.

  My breasts had leaked in the night, and my nightgown was wet, as though my body was crying. The midwife had warned me this would happen, and said it would stop soon. My breasts had always been the first thing people noticed about me, often the only thing. She’d told me to bind them with rags so the milk wouldn’t come through my clothes, but all that had was a clear, watery liquid. The pump in the court felt a long way away when I was this sore, but it was up to me to fetch the water. I sighed and reached for the slop pail, and from the other room heard Ned clatter in through the front door. Our rooms at No. 3, Black and White Court were on the top floor of a three-storey building, overlooking the murky depths of the paved court below. It was here I’d been born, and where I’d lived all my eighteen years. I learned to crawl and then walk on the sloping floor, tucked as we were under the eaves, which creaked and sighed like an old ship. There was no one above us, only birds roosting in the roof and shitting on the chimneys and church spires that jabbed into the sky. I liked being at the top of the house: it was quiet and private, far from the shrieks of the children who played below. Our mother had lived here with us, too, for the first eight years of my life, before she left us. I cried when Abe opened the window to let out her spirit; I wanted it to stay, and ran over to watch it fly up to Heaven. I didn’t believe in all that now. They took her body away and Abe sold her things, keeping only her nightgown for me to sleep with, which I did until it didn’t smell of her any more – of her thick dark hair and milky skin. I didn’t miss her, because it had been so long. I expected to need her less the older I got, but when my belly grew and the pushing began, it was her hand I wanted to hold. I’d been envious of the girls with mothers last night, who’d worn their love on their faces.

  Ned came stumbling into the bedroom we shared, crashing open the door and tripping over the slop pail I’d left on the floor, upending my piss all over the floorboards.

  ‘You clumpish fool!’ I cried. ‘Bit of warning next time.’

  ‘Shit.’ He stooped to pick it up from where it had rolled. In the two rooms Ned, Abe and I called home, there wasn’t a straight line anywhere – the roof slanted and the floorboards tilted. He didn’t stumble as he set it back on the floor. He wasn’t too soaked with booze, then, merely dampened. I wouldn’t return from the market with sore feet and an aching neck to find him pale and groa
ning in bed, smelling of vomit.

  He flopped onto the bed and began pulling off his jacket. My brother was three years older than me, with pearly skin, red hair and enough freckles for the two of us. He spent what little money he earned as a crossing sweeper in gambling kens and gin houses.

  ‘You going to work today?’ I asked, knowing the answer.

  ‘Are you?’ he said. ‘You only had a baby yesterday. The old man ain’t making you go on the strap, is he?’

  ‘Are you in jest? Think I’d be tucked up in bed with a pot of tea?’

  I went into the other room to find that Abe had mercifully fetched the water while I was asleep, and was warming it in the kettle. The main room was sparsely furnished but homely, with Abe’s narrow cot against one wall and Mother’s rocking chair before the fire. Opposite that was another chair and a couple of stools, and all our pots and plates piled up on shelves by the small window. As a girl I’d stuck pictures to the walls, reproductions of bonny farm girls and buildings we knew: St Paul’s, and the Tower of London. We had no frames, and time had made them curl and fade. I soaked a rag and scrubbed the floorboards in my room, wincing at the smell but not made sick by it. When I’d been growing Clara, at first the smell of everything on the market had made me heave.

  Once I’d finished and set the pail by the door to take downstairs, Abe passed me a cup of small beer and I took a seat opposite him, still in my nightgown. The events of yesterday went unspoken between us. I knew we would talk of it one day, but for a long time it would lie like a frost between us.

  ‘They took the baby then, Bess?’ Ned’s voice came from the bedroom.

  ‘No, I put it under the bed.’

  He was silent, but after a while said: ‘And you ain’t gonna tell us whose it is?’

  I glanced at Abe, who stared into his cup, then drained it in one.

  I began to pin my hair up. ‘She’s mine,’ I said.

  Ned appeared in the doorframe in his shirtsleeves. ‘I know she’s yours, you halfwit.’

  ‘Oi,’ Abe said to Ned. ‘Why you getting undressed? Ain’t you going to work?’

  Ned glared at him. ‘I’m starting later,’ he said.

  ‘The nags ain’t shitting this morning, then?’

  ‘Yes, but I need somewhere to shove my broom. Know of anywhere?’

  ‘I’ll get dressed,’ I announced.

  ‘You’re making her work after yesterday?’ Ned went on. ‘Are you her father or her master?’

  ‘She ain’t afraid of work, unlike some as live under this roof.’

  ‘You’re a fucking slave driver. Let the girl lie in for a week.’

  ‘Ned, shut your arse and give your face a chance,’ I said.

  I washed our cups in the water over the fire and set them on the shelf, then brushed past Ned to get dressed, taking a candle with me. Ned swore and kicked the bed frame, sitting down on it with his back to me. I knew we’d come home later to find him gone.

  ‘Go to sleep, will you? Stop ragging him,’ I said, standing briefly naked, pulling on my shift and wincing.

  ‘Listen to yourself – you should be lying in.’

  ‘I can’t. I didn’t work yesterday.’

  ‘Cos you was birthing a baby!’

  ‘Didn’t care about that then, though, did you? Where was you?’

  ‘As if I want to be around to see that.’

  ‘Right, well, shut your bone box. Rent day tomorrow.’ I could not keep the scorn from my voice. ‘You got your share, or are me and Abe gonna pay it again? It would be nice if you paid rent, once in a while. This ain’t an inn.’

  I blew out the candle and set it down on the dresser. Abe had buttoned up his old coat and was waiting for me at the door.

  Ned’s voice came through from the bedroom, hard and spiteful. ‘And you ain’t the Virgin Mary. Don’t be pious with me, you little whore.’

  Abe’s mouth was set in a grim line, and his light eyes met mine. Without a word, he passed me my cap and motioned me into the cold, bare corridor that always smelled of piss and last night’s gin, and the door swung shut behind us.

  To the river, then. Each morning, by the time the clock face hanging off St Martin’s reached half past four, Abe and I had already left Black and White Court, keeping the high walls of the Fleet Prison on our right and going south through Bell Savage Yard to the thoroughfare of Ludgate Hill, before turning east towards the milky dome of St Paul’s. The road was wide and lively even at that time, and we’d pass crossing sweepers and delivery carts and sleep-soaked wives queuing outside bakeries with their bread for the ovens, and messengers bouncing between the river and the coffee houses with news from the water. The traffic thickened towards the bridge, and the masts in the wharves bobbed and drifted beyond the sheds crowding the river’s edge. Men making for the quays and piers yawned, still half-dreaming of their beds and the warm women they’d left there. Even though it was black as pitch – here and there oil lamps burned above some doorways, but in the November fog they were like pale little suns behind heavy cloud – Abe and I knew the way with our eyes shut.

  We passed the Butchers’ Hall and moved down towards the river, which lay low and glittering before us, already choked with hundreds of vessels bringing fish, tea, silk, spices and sugar to the various wharves. The going was steep this way, and not easy in the dark. When the clock struck five a few minutes after we arrived, the porters would begin shoring in, moving baskets of fish from the boats in the hithe to the stalls. From six, the city’s fishmongers and costermongers and innkeepers and fish fryers and servants would descend with barrows and baskets to haggle over the price of three dozen smelt or a bushel of oysters or a great fat sturgeon, moving up in price as the sellers came down, meeting somewhere in the middle. The sun would rise, weak and watery, so the cries of the merchants – ‘Cod, alive, alive-oh!’ and ‘Had-had-had-haddock,’ and ‘Getcher smelt, flounder, shad, gudgeon, dace,’ with a low and deep emphasis on the last word – were no longer disembodied, but belonged to the red-cheeked merchants and their wives. Each cry was as distinctive as the next, and I knew without looking who had called it. There was a kind of magnificence to Billingsgate, to the morning sun on the creaking masts in the hithe, the iron-necked porters with four, five, six baskets piled on their heads, sliding through the crowds. By seven o’clock the ground was a churning mass of mud, studded all over with fish scales like glittering coins. The stalls themselves were a jumble of wooden shacks with leaning roofs that dripped icy water down your neck in winter. Willow baskets lay bursting with stacks of silver sole and crawling crabs, and handcarts groaned with shining shoals. There was Oyster Street in the wharf, called for its row of boats parked nose to tail, piled high with grey, sandy shells. Or if it was eels you were after, you had to get a waterman to take you out to one of the Dutch fishing boats on the Thames, where curious-looking men with fur hats and jewelled rings balanced over great tureens of the serpent-like creatures, writhing and stirring in their murky broth. Blindfold me and I would know a plaice from a pilchard, a Norfolk mackerel from a Sussex one. Sometimes the fishermen caught a shark or a porpoise and strung it up for all to see; once a high-humoured porter put a dress on one and called it a mermaid. Then there were the Billingsgate wives, themselves porpoises in petticoats, with their fat red hands and prow-like bosoms pushing through the crowds, shrieking like gulls. They carried flasks of brandy to nip in the cold months, and wore gold hoops at their ears. I decided from an early age I would not become one of them, would not marry a Billingsgate boy for all the shrimp in Leigh.

  Vincent the porter brought our first three baskets piled with grey shrimp, and Abe and I tipped them into ours. We had to work quickly, as the other shrimp sellers would be doing the same. After we’d unloaded, I took a basket to the boiling house, where it would be cooked by a ham-armed Kentish woman named Martha while I went to fetch my hat from the storehouse. Martha was uncommunicative but not unfriendly; we’d wordlessly agreed a long time ago the hour was too early
for chatter, and when the shrimp was the same colour as her red face, Martha would pile it onto my hat, clattering and steaming. I was used to the weight by now; it was the hot water that hurt, running as it did down my neck and scalding me, but that was nothing compared to Martha’s raw pink hands that were stripped of all feeling.

  ‘All right, Pidge?’ Tommy, one of the pox-scarred porters, paused on his delivery of Thames smelt. ‘Might I see you in the Darkhouse later on?’

  ‘Not tonight, Tommy.’ It was our daily ritual. I told him the same every time, and he replied in kind. Sometimes I wondered for how long I’d be obliged to take part in this performance, and would feel relieved if I missed him on his deliveries. He called me Pidge on account of my large chest. One afternoon a long time ago, Tommy had caught me on his way back from the Darkhouse, the roughest public house on the north bank, and pushed me against one of the sheds, pawing at my breasts as he pumped himself with one hand, trying to get me to touch him before shuddering gratefully onto my skirts.

  ‘How about we find a dark house of our own, then, Pidge?’

  ‘Not today, Tommy.’

  He winked, and went on his way to Francis Costa’s stall. I began the climb from the river to the city. London was waking up properly, washed with a low tide of clerks and businessmen on their way to their counting houses and coffee houses. Often their wives or servants made their breakfast – smoked mackerel or eggs or porridge in china bowls. And I could count on one hand the sailors and mariners who’d bought from me, sick to their stomachs as they were of seafood. No, I was looking for the mousetrap makers, the blacking boys and plasterers having a tobacco break, the lavender sellers and street sweepers pausing to stretch their backs. Knife grinders, wig sellers, market gardeners on their way back to the country having sold their wares. Harried mothers who’d buy a handful to share between their screaming kids; drunks who had not yet been to bed. Once I’d emptied my hat, which could take one hour or three, I’d go back to Billingsgate and do it again. Summer was the worst, when the city stank, and I with it. In those months, by midday most of our stock was only good for the cats. Winter was terrible, but at least it kept fresh until sunset, when the market closed.