The Foundling Read online

  Left, right, left, right; each day I walked to my own pattern, calling: ‘Fresh shrimp, straight off the boat, tuppence a third for you, sir, for you, madam.’ It was difficult to compete with church bells and carriage wheels and the general din of a winter morning. I moved up Fish Street, past the pale column of the Monument, and into the city, stopping to rub my hands together at the corner of Throgmorton Street and kicking a dog from sniffing at my skirts, but only for a moment, because to stop was to freeze and feel the weight of my hat. And that was when I saw the bone shops.

  There were four or five of them, supplying bones for all of London’s waists. Symbols sat over their doorways: a wooden whale, an anchor and sun, a pineapple. Wicker baskets stacked with skeletons stood outside. The bone made its way downriver from the warehouses at Rotherhithe, selected by merchants, cut slender as a blade of grass and wrapped in linen, silk or leather, or whittled by a scrimshander into horns and handles. Into hearts. I put an instinctive hand to my stomach; my stays had sat in a drawer for months now, and it would be a while until I could wear them again. If anyone had seen my globe of a belly at Billingsgate, they’d never mentioned it, just as they wouldn’t now as it slowly disappeared. Even Vincent and Tommy said nothing. Soon it would be flat again, and I’d forget how big it had been. I’d never forget, though, how it felt to be a home to someone.

  ‘Are you gawking or hawking?’

  A woman who couldn’t have had more than three teeth in her head had stopped before me. I felt around for the little pewter tankard, filled it and tossed the contents into her grubby hands. She threw the lot into her rotten mouth, and fished in her pocket for another coin.

  ‘I’ll take an ’andful for me son as well. He’s an apprentice at a milliner’s. He’ll be hungry by now, he will, so I shall take this to him at his place of work.’

  I unloaded another tankard into her palm. ‘I shall look forward to buying a hat from him one day,’ I said.

  ‘Got a little one at home, have you?’ She indicated my swollen stomach pushing through my cloak.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied.

  ‘A little cherub, is it? Or a darling angel?’

  ‘A girl. Clara. She’s with her father, before he goes to work.’

  ‘Lovely. You look after yourself,’ said the woman, and she limped away into the crowd, clutching her shrimp.

  I turned to face the morning once more. ‘Fresh shrimp,’ I called, as the sun climbed slowly, finally, into the sky. ‘Straight off the boat.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Six years later

  January, 1754

  Keziah had delivered on her promise. She came through the door with a sack in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, and a smile that reached from ear to ear. I cleared a pile of washing from Abe’s chair, dusted the low stool we used as a table free of crumbs, and poured the beer into two chipped mugs, handing one to my friend and taking the seat opposite her.

  ‘Let’s see what you got.’

  I exclaimed in delight as she began pulling bundles of frocking out – clouds of linen striped red and blue and white, frothing petticoats, linsey blankets, flannel jackets, drawers, stockings . . .

  ‘Oh, Keziah!’ was all I could say.

  My friend, who sold secondhand clothes and frippery on Rag Fair to the east of the city, had been saving things for Clara for months, taking them home and mending them, storing them away in a trunk for the day I could collect her. I had saved and saved for six years, and at last I’d added the final shilling to the wooden domino box I kept under my mattress. With two pounds saved, I finally had half a year’s wages to pay for Clara’s care at the Foundling, without which they might not release her. Sometimes, if sleep did not come, I would take it out and rattle it to settle my thoughts. I pulled the box now from its hiding place and shook it, and Keziah grinned and clashed her mug with mine as we cackled like wenches.

  I settled on the floor to rummage through her loot, made giddy with it. The sun slanted in through the high windows, which were open to let in the fresh air, and the sounds of the court drifted in. A Saturday afternoon, it was one of those blindingly bright winter days, and I’d finished work an hour earlier and come straight home with three currant buns – one for me and Abe to share, one for Keziah, and one for Clara.

  ‘I love them, all of them,’ I said.

  ‘I washed them for you,’ Keziah said, beginning to fold them. ‘Where shall I put them?’

  I held up a particularly smart red jacket, slightly faded with wear but otherwise in good condition. I wondered if my daughter would have hair like mine – dark brown, with a hint of red. If she did, it would look splendid against the scarlet linen, and I smiled, picturing a dark, solemn little girl in her red coat.

  ‘I’ve got caps as well – indoor, outdoor . . .’ Keziah said. ‘Almost made me want a girl, it did, collecting all this.’ She had left her two boys, Moses and Jonas, at home as she usually did, not liking them being out on the streets. It wasn’t through fear of losing them to a life of crime and vice. Keziah was a blackamoor, as was her husband William. Though the Gibbonses were born free, owned by no one and able to work within the limited trades available to them, young black boys went missing every day in London. At eight and six, Moses and Jonas could at any moment be plucked from the street like two ripe plums, spirited to the mansions of Soho and Leicester Fields, gilded with turbans and made into pets. So Keziah said, anyway. I had never known it happen, but she was very cautious, so bright and beautiful were they, and so desirable to many. It meant that, until they were a little older and Keziah could be certain they had their wits about them, they were mainly confined to the Gibbonses’ two rooms on the ground floor of a boarding house in Houndsditch, in the East End of London, and cared for most days by a Jewish widow who lived on the first floor. Her husband William was a violinist, who had learnt to play in the house of his mother’s master. He made a living by performing with a modest arrangement of musicians in the very households that would cage his sons like songbirds.

  I met Keziah one cold morning five years ago when I was looking for new shoes, going through a pair every six months as I did in my line of work, and we’d become fast friends. At twenty-six, she was two years older than me, and she had what I wanted most: a husband and two adoring children, who looked upon her as though she was a goddess and an angel both.

  I took the pile of clothes into the bedroom and knelt on the floor by the chest that held my own, and began folding them neatly away. Keziah sat on the end of my bed with her mug, kicking off her shoes and folding up her legs beside her.

  ‘She’ll sleep in here with you now Ned’s left home?’

  ‘Yes.’ I smoothed a maize-coloured skirt, printed with blue flowers, and patted it on top of the others.

  ‘Are you excited?’ I could hear that she was, how it burned inside her.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t sound certain.’

  ‘I am!’

  The bed creaked as she moved. ‘I wonder if you’ll know her to look at her. Being her mother . . . I wonder if you will pick her out from a room of girls.’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  There was a beat of silence. ‘Bess?’ she said. ‘Are you having doubts?’

  I closed the lid of the chest carefully – my mother’s chest, carved with roses. It was a cumbersome, old-fashioned thing, but I would never sell it. Her nightdress sat in the very bottom, musty with age. I remembered her wearing it when she warmed milk on the fire, and padded barefoot about our rooms, moving piles of laundry. She died in it, but she had lived in it, too, and when I was younger I used to drape it across my back like a cloak and wrap the sleeves around myself.

  ‘Bess?’

  In a small voice, I said: ‘What if she’s dead, Kiz?’

  ‘Oh, I’m certain she ain’t. They’re well cared for there, with doctors and medicine and all that. She has a better chance there than here.’

  I took a breath. ‘I suppose I’ll find out tomorrow. How much d
o I owe you for the clothes?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  I smiled at her. ‘Thank you.’

  She winked. ‘Pleasure’s all mine. Why don’t you go now, to the Foundling? You’re ready, ain’t you? You’ve been ready six years.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘What you waiting for? A carriage? A Tuesday? You got the money.’

  My stomach felt like one of the Dutchmen’s eel tanks, slithering and sliding. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘What does Abe say?’

  I took a swig of beer. ‘Well, he ain’t beside himself, but he’s promised to stick with the story: that she’s our apprentice, come to live with us and work with me hawking. She’s old enough, just about.’

  Keziah did not reply. I knew she thought six years old was too young to work, that she would keep her boys at home as long as she could. But she had a proper family, and I did not. Still, I would try to make the best of it. Tomorrow, after I’d collected her, I would take her to see the lions at the Tower of London, like Abe had done with us when we were children, when Mother was ill or tired. But I would not search the streets for a dead dog to feed to the lions as payment, as we had done – I would hand over a coin, and in the bright winter sunshine Clara would take my hand and tremble with fear and delight at the golden beasts. Perhaps she would dream about them at night, and I would smooth her hair and tell her not to be afraid. No, a dead dog would not do – that was not the type of mother I wished to be. ‘You’ll bring her by the rag market, won’t you?’ Keziah asked, draining her mug.

  I nodded, and brushed at my skirts. I hoped the odd feeling in my stomach was hope, not dread. But if it was, why did I feel like weeping? I imagined coming home to a chest full of clothes that would never be worn and a currant bun on the shelf that would never be eaten, and felt sick with anxiety.

  ‘Bess.’ Keziah came to meet me on the floor, kneeling on the rag rug. ‘She will be there, and you will be a mother again. You’ve been waiting for this for so long, and she’s out of danger now. She ain’t a baby no more. She’s ready to come home and work with you, and be loved by you. Everything she needs is here.’

  I felt my face fall. ‘I thought it was, Kiz. But what if it ain’t enough?’ I tried to see our two rooms as a child might for the first time: the slanted shelves stacked with dented tinware, the darned bedclothes, the sloping ceiling and patchy rugs. I should have bought her a toy, or a dolly – oh, why had I not bought her a dolly? – and set it on her pillow, ready for her homecoming.

  Keziah took my hands, and fixed her large brown eyes on mine. ‘Bess,’ she said. ‘It’s more than enough.’

  And now the day was here, and the clock was striking eight outside, and another hour had been wasted with fretting and tidying. Abe had been driven from the house by it, and said he was going to the docks to hear the newspapers read. I moved the currant buns, wrapped in cloth, to a higher shelf so the mice couldn’t reach them, swept my eyes around the room a final time and closed the door behind me, locking it with a trembling hand.

  ‘Fine morning it is, Bess.’ Nancy Benson was standing on the stairs. She took up the width of them, so I could not slip past without making conversation. Nancy’s rooms were not on our floor, though nowhere was off limits to her; she clambered up and down like an overweight mouse.

  ‘It is that, Nancy. Good day to you.’

  ‘Off to church, are you, in your best frock?’

  I stood three or four steps above her, and waited for her to move. She knew I did not go to church. ‘I’m out to collect our new apprentice.’

  Nancy’s eyebrows rose. ‘For Abraham’s stall, is it?’

  ‘No, for me. She’ll help me hawking.’

  ‘Will she now? A girl, eh? Well, I never. You don’t see many girl apprentices.’

  ‘You don’t see many boys selling food from their heads either.’ I moved to pass her on the stairs and she turned her wide back against the wall. The floorboards creaked as I passed. Nancy had lived in Black and White Court for ten years, and been a widow most of them. She made broom heads for a living, and her hands were red raw from it.

  ‘She’ll stay with you, then? The girl?’

  ‘Yes.’ I could rely on Nancy to sweep the news about the court, piling it in little corners and letting it settle. She knew I’d had a baby – it was impossible to hide as my stomach grew. She’d shivered with glee at the shame of it, and tried many times to trick me into telling her who the father was, but I’d been tight-lipped, taking pure pleasure in the frustration it gave her.

  ‘How’s your Ned?’

  I stopped at the foot of the stairs and held the knob of the banister that Ned would always knock off and send clattering down the hall. It was still loose, and I spun it around and around. ‘He’s well.’

  ‘And Catherine and the little ones?’

  ‘All well, thank you, Nancy.’

  ‘Lovely.’ Nancy was disappointed. She’d always held a candle for my brother, even though he treated her like a particularly dim mongrel. She’d been useful to him, before the gin laws arrived; when she’d realised his weakness, she’d opened a shop in her single room, distilling grain and selling it, and Ned was her most loyal and most credited customer. At one time, he was in her lodgings more than ours. I’d feel him sink into the bed next to mine and begin snoring, reeking of turpentine, and knew on the floor below Nancy would be tossing and sighing in hers. The way she looked at me, I had no doubt she’d asked Ned about Clara, knew she would have tried to draw the tale of my shame from his mouth like a silk kerchief from a pocket. The smell of her sulphuric jars was enough to make your eyes water, but nothing was too neat for Ned. Madam Geneva, he called it, which I hated, as though it was an exotic, fragrant thing. When he’d met Catherine, I thought his life might take a turn in the right direction. She was a butcher’s daughter from Smithfield, thin as a splint and sharp-tongued enough to whittle him into shape. But a family wasn’t the making of him. First their girl Mary came along, then two babies in-between that died, followed a few months ago by their boy Edmund. But becoming a father seemed to have taken something vital from Ned, as if by creating his children he’d lost part of himself, and was fading around the edges. He often disappeared for days; the longest had been two weeks. I’d been hopeful for him, once.

  ‘You seen him lately?’

  ‘Not lately.’

  I replaced the knob and smacked it in with the flat of my hand. ‘I must be going, Nancy.’

  ‘I’ll say a prayer at St Bride’s for the baby. Edmund.’ Her wide, flat face loomed above me.

  ‘Very kind of you.’

  ‘And his father, that the Lord may deliver him from his demons.’

  The demons that you conjured in a jar. We were silent for a second.

  ‘Very kind. Good day to you, Nancy.’

  Many times I’d approached the Foundling, but only got as far as the gates. The porter’s lodge was still there, its round window like an eye looking over the street. The flat grey sky pressed down on the sand-coloured stone, and the clock face in the chapel told me it was a quarter past nine. I stood for a moment on the dusty road, remembering that night: the darkness and the soreness between my legs. The muddied skirts beneath the carriage wheel, and the poor woman’s twitching fingers.

  The porter’s face appeared at the door. I stood up a little straighter, smoothed down my dress, hoped I looked respectable. ‘I am here to collect my child,’ I told him.

  He looked warily at me. ‘You got the collection fee?’

  My stomach flipped. ‘Yes,’ I said, more confidently than I felt. Surely half a year’s wage was enough; I hardly dared ask him, in case it was not and he refused to let me in. If it was not . . . it did not bear thinking about. Suddenly I imagined what it would be like to meet my daughter after all this time, with her thinking I’d come to get her, and being led back through a door, pleading and crying, and reaching for me. What if they wanted twenty pounds? I could not save that in a lifetime. A faraway ringing noise sta
rted in my left ear, and I began to feel giddy.

  ‘This way, miss. All the way to the end; go in on your left.’

  I thanked the porter, then walked stiffly through. The driveway was wide and empty, and in the distance I could hear singing. My legs were shaking. My daughter was inside these very grounds. Unless she is dead, came that little voice that lay buried like a worm in my mind.

  The lawns in front of the Foundling were occupied with little groups of boys sitting in rows, making ropes and nets. They wore a uniform of plain brown jackets with white shirts and red scarves tied at their necks, and they glanced briefly at me as I passed before going back to their work. They did not look as though they minded it, and talked easily with their legs crossed as their hands busied themselves. Among the white faces was a brown one, and I stopped and watched him for a moment, recalling the baby I’d taken from the grass and put in the porter’s house, wrapped in his coat. He looked a little like Moses Gibbons, with closely cropped hair and slim hands. He was around the same age as Clara would be. I wondered if he knew her. He felt me looking and stared at me with round, curious eyes. Perhaps every child wondered if a woman walking up the drive was his or her mother. I smiled at the boy, and he turned quickly back to his work.

  I hesitated outside the large black door that led into the wing on the left before pushing it open and stepping inside. There was that familiar smell: of furniture polish and cooked food. My stomach groaned, and my legs weakened again. I leaned back against the door, my ears ringing in the quiet. I could barely believe I was there, ready to collect my daughter after so long. But would she want to come? Was it not better for her that she stay here, where she surely had friends, and hot meals, and slept under a roof that did not leak? She would go into service soon, and might stay in a fine house, and have a kind mistress. But then I thought of the one or two girls I’d heard of from the neighbouring courts who had gone to work at the houses in the west of the city and were never heard of or spoken of again. Likely they’d been made mothers by their masters and turned out with no reference. At least that fate had not befallen me, though was I really so different?