The Foundling Page 4

  A short woman in an apron approached me. ‘May I be of assistance?’

  ‘I am here to collect my child.’

  There was more warmth in her small eyes than in the porter’s. ‘How lovely,’ she said with sincerity. ‘Let me take you through where someone will see you.’

  There were no children around, other than the disembodied singing; had I not seen the boys making the nets on the lawn, I might have wondered if there were any here at all. Children lived loudly, they sneezed and shouted and ran – at least, in the city they did. Only this morning I’d heard them shrieking, dragging a grisly bone around the courtyard for a dog. Perhaps the Foundling children were refined; perhaps they stepped elegantly and sat quietly, like little swells.

  I was shown to a small room off the corridor that smelled of cigar smoke. My heart was racing, and I was glad to sit down opposite a large, gleaming desk. The window behind it overlooked the fields stretching out of London. Clara would be used to the same view, with all the trees and sky. What would she think of our rooms, which looked out on chimneys and rooftops?

  I heard the door close behind me and a small, slight man in a neat wig edged around the desk to take a seat opposite. ‘Good morning, miss.’

  ‘And to you.’

  ‘My name is Mr Simmons; I am one of the clerks here. You have come to remove your child from the hospital?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and swallowed. ‘My name is Bess Bright. I am here for my daughter. I brought her in on the twenty-seventh day of November, six years ago.’

  He nodded once, showing the top of his wig. ‘Six years, you say? Then she should be here at the hospital, all being well. Now, did you leave a token?’

  All being well. ‘Yes,’ I faltered. ‘A piece of whalebone, it was, cut in the shape of a heart. Half a heart. The other part . . . well, her father had it. The piece I gave had two letters engraved in it: B and C.’

  ‘And you have the fee for the care and maintenance she has received?’

  ‘How much is it?’

  ‘Well, you say she was brought in November of . . .’

  ‘The year of our Lord 1747.’

  ‘So that makes it six years and . . .’

  ‘Almost two months to the day.’

  He nodded obligingly, drawing his quill and doing some sums. ‘That would make the sum total six pounds and, let me see—’

  ‘Six pounds?’ I’d raised my voice, silencing him. ‘I do not have six pounds.’

  He blinked, considering me. His quill trembled. ‘When you gave your daughter into the Foundling’s care, it should have been made clear that a reimbursement of one pound per year of accommodation was payable.’

  ‘I . . . I do not . . . I cannot . . . How does anyone get their child back?’ I thought of the ragged bag of coins in my pocket, made up of pennies and threepennies, that had grown heavier so slowly. I felt as though I was sinking very slowly into the ground.

  He scratched beneath his wig, setting it wriggling like a live animal.

  ‘I shall fetch your daughter’s papers, and we can speak on the terms of agreement once I’ve reviewed her case.’ He looked a little uneasy; his eyes were not unkind, but his mouth was glum, as though he was not used to delivering good news.

  I understood what he was leaving unsaid: Let us not get carried away with ourselves, for she might be dead. Many women must come here, only to be told their children had died. I tried to smile back at Mr Simmons, though my nerves were getting the better of me.

  ‘Before I do,’ he said, ‘may I ask if your circumstances have changed, Miss Bright?’

  ‘My circumstances?’

  ‘Indeed.’ He waited.

  ‘I am unmarried, if that is what you ask. And I have not changed my work since I brought her.’

  ‘You are not a burden on the parish? And keep a good home?’

  ‘As well as I can.’

  ‘With whom do you reside?’

  I was so unused to his language, it took every effort to scrape together my wits and understand him, and my head swam. Six pounds!

  ‘My father. My mother died when I was a child, so I know how it is to want for a mother.’

  The old man looked meaningfully at me. ‘And you could guarantee that the burden of her care would not fall to the parish until she reaches adulthood?’

  ‘I can guarantee it, though I must confess I do not understand. I’ve told you I don’t have six pounds. I have two, and it’s taken me all these years to save it.’

  Mr Simmons continued to look at me for a moment, pursing his thin lips. ‘Miss Bright, not very many children are claimed at the Foundling. Only about four a year, from four hundred. Which is why we do what we can when their parents do come back, within reason, you understand. Do you design to have the child work?’

  ‘Alongside me.’

  ‘In which profession?’

  ‘I’m an hawker. I sell shrimp from my father’s stall at Billingsgate. She wouldn’t leave my side.’

  Why had I not lied? All her lessons and learning would go to waste – her sewing skills, if she had started, would be as useful as a butter teapot. This was all going badly. I would not be allowed to take her home, not now.

  Dismay must have been written on my face, for Mr Simmons leaned in slightly and said: ‘While it’s not conventional, at the hospital we aim to reunite as many children with their families as possible. It is not our position to judge circumstances. So, as long as you are prepared to take responsibility for your daughter’s needs, we are prepared to sign her guardianship over to you, for whatever sum you have. To take her away you will sign a receipt for her care, and leave a name and address. It is a kind of contract, you understand. Now, if you could remind me of the day she was brought?’

  ‘The twenty-seventh day of November, 1747. And the token was half of a heart, made from whalebone.’

  He bowed, then left the room. Every part of my body was tense. I moved my neck, stiff from work, and rolled my shoulders, then got up and went to the window, looking out for something to distract me. Surely country people did not enjoy such views: it was like looking at a picture, for nothing moved. I rubbed my arms beneath my cloak, feeling cold. There was a noise in the corridor, and I heard children’s voices, and the sound of boots on stone floors. I went to the door and opened it a crack. A procession of girls was passing in pairs – eight or ten of them – in brown dresses and white caps. I peered into their faces, looking for my own. A few of them glanced at me, then away, absorbed in their chatter. And suddenly they were gone, closing a door behind them the corridor, ringing with their absence. I went back to my chair and lowered myself slowly into it. I had hoped when I saw her I would know her at once, that we would be connected by an invisible thread, fine and strong as a spiderweb. I thought of the ropes the boys were making outside, knotting and twisting with their small hands. A slick white rope had been attached to her after she came out, that I’d made inside me. It was grotesque, slick as an eel and milky as a pearl, with a slab of meat at the end of it, like a sheep’s lung. The midwife had thrown them both on the fire.

  Mr Simmons had been gone for a long time. He had said he was fetching her papers, but what if he came back with Clara? I was not expecting him to, and was not prepared. When the door began opening I clutched the sides of the chair, thinking I might pitch forwards. But Mr Simmons entered alone, with some documents in his hand, a blue ribbon trailing where he had unwrapped them. I remained where I was, for he did not sit down, and his face was puzzled. He took an eyeglass from his desk, set the sheaf down and examined the top item for a long moment.

  ‘You say your daughter was brought in on the twenty-seventh of November, 1747.’

  I nodded.

  ‘The token you left was a piece of scrimshaw. Half a heart, you say, with a B and a C engraved.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He frowned, and looked very hard at me. ‘You are Elizabeth Bright?’

  I stared at him.

  He pushed the bundle of p
apers to me across the desk. ‘Miss, have you seen these documents before?’

  ‘I can’t read.’ I plucked at the blue ribbon. Fear was rising in me, filling me like a rain bucket. ‘Are these hers? Is she dead?’ Elegant script curled meaninglessly over the heavy cream paper, but I saw the numbers six and two and seven, which to me was like reading her name.

  Mr Simmons looked at me for what felt like a full minute. Then he blinked, and pulled the papers back to his side of the desk. The ribbon lay splayed between us, and inexplicably all I could think was what a waste it was that something so fine should be shut up in a drawer.

  ‘Mr Simmons, I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Has she died?’

  The clerk shifted uneasily in his chair and put his eyeglass down carefully. ‘Child 627 was collected many years ago, by her mother.’

  There was complete silence, but for a pounding in my ears. I opened my mouth, then closed it and swallowed. ‘Her mother? I’m sorry, sir, I don’t understand. Are we talking about my daughter Clara?’

  He scratched at his wig, at a loss for words. ‘We do not record children’s names; they are baptised and given new ones. Privacy reasons, you see.’

  My head hurt, as though I was wearing my shrimp hat, piled with thoughts and riddles. ‘But this is the first time I’ve come to take her home. Child 627, are you sure?’

  Mr Simmons’s eyes shone with concern and alarm. ‘Might you be mistaken about the date on which you brought her?’

  ‘No, of course not. That’s her birthday, I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. Every year I light a candle for her. And 627 – they told me that was her number. I remember it as well as my own name.’ A clock was ticking somewhere in the room, and I felt as though I was watching the scene from above. My fingers were still gripping the sides of the chair, and I let go and sank down into it. My knuckles were white.

  ‘Might her father have—’ he began.

  ‘Her father’s dead.’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘So what you are telling me,’ I said slowly, ‘is someone has claimed Clara? My daughter?’

  The fear had gone, replaced by a dull kind of awareness that sat heavy on me and made me stupid. Something terrible, beyond my worst imaginings, had happened, but . . .

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘What was her name? The name of her mother?’

  Mr Simmons held the eyeglass to the paper. ‘It says here: Child 627 was collected on the twenty-eighth day of November, 1747, by her mother, Elizabeth Bright, of number three, Black and White Court, Ludgate Hill, London.’

  He held the paper towards me and showed me a signature by the words: a shaky, hasty X. The room tipped to one side, but oddly the glass paperweight, the candle and the papers sitting on it did not roll to the floor. I waited for it to stop moving, which it did, after half a minute or so. I reached out and touched the X, which marked the neat page like a burn.

  ‘That’s me,’ I whispered. ‘This can’t be happening.’ Then something made me look up suddenly. ‘But the twenty-eighth day of November. That’s . . . that was . . .’

  ‘The day after she was brought to the hospital. Miss Bright, I am afraid we have not had your daughter in our care for more than six years.’

  CHAPTER 4

  It had been a long time since I’d thought of Clara’s father. Even longer since I’d seen him. No more could I recall his face than my mother’s. Like hers, all that remained was an impression: a buff coat, the height of him, his light eyes – were they blue, or green? – and the way he grinned behind a cloud of pipe tobacco. He had given me his clay pipe – a small, smooth thing with his initials carved into the side. But it wasn’t a sentimental gesture – he’d passed it to me to hold for a moment, and I’d forgotten to give it back. No doubt he had several more at home – wealthy people did, and did not miss things so easily. I used to lie in bed tracing the D for Daniel, the C for Callard with a fingertip – I could not read, but I knew those letters – and when I could not find him, I threw it into the Thames. I regretted it when I found out he’d died. Now I had nothing of his: not his child or his pipe. People tossed all sorts into the river, including themselves. It was something I’d thought about too, briefly, when I found out he was gone and I was growing his child. But the river was the busiest street in London, and drowning would not be quick or private, with hundreds of boats choking the water from the Middlesex to Surrey banks, as far as the eye could see. Likely I’d be struck by a packet or severed by a prow. For an even briefer moment I had thought about the alternatives – jumping from a high window, or drowning myself from the inside with gin like the bloated creatures piled in alleys and doorways. None were particularly appealing. Besides, I had felt the growing life inside me, and knew I could not snuff two out at once. Perhaps death brought peace for people like Daniel Callard, where the sun dappled the quiet churchyard through leafy boughs, and flowers were left at their stones. But I knew how crowded the dry and shallow burial yards for those like me were. I’d smelled their rotting mass, and did not wish to join their unhappy slumber just yet.

  Once, when we were very small, Ned had told me that at night the dead climbed from beneath their thin blanket of soil and crawled the streets and courts, looking for children to take to their graves. They waited, he said, in alleys, and clung to the shadows. I had been too afraid to leave the house, attaching myself to Mother’s skirts and screaming for us to stay inside. When I told her why, Abe smacked Ned about the head, and a while later, when Mother died and Ned and I had been lying in our narrow beds, I’d asked him if she too would crawl the streets in the dark, looking for us. He pulled me close and told me no, and when I rolled away his face in the moonlight had frightened me – he looked very grown-up and sorrowful. Back then, our mother dying was the worst thing in the world, and we’d clung to one another night after night while Abe retreated into his own silent grief. How green we were.

  Walking back from the Foundling, my feet had brought me to Russell’s coffee house, somewhere I had not been able to bring myself to stand outside for a long time. Russell’s was set above a chandler’s shop and flanked by a large golden lion outside, its jaws locked mid-roar. I had never set foot inside because I was a woman, but if the day was a slow one, in the hours between breakfast and dinner I sometimes lingered in the streets by the Exchange with my brimming hat, waiting for men to spill out of the meeting houses onto the street, their teeth dark with coffee, their heads full of business and shipping news and other pursuits, and their bellies empty. Sometimes they’d take a handful of shrimp from me; sometimes they wanted a handful of something else. I saw what coffee did to their eyes – it made the pupils blacker, and larger, as though they were looking not at me but inside their own minds.

  I met Daniel in 1747, on a dark morning a month or so after Christmas. It had been very cold, and the doorway he had come from had looked very warm and bright and friendly, and my gaze had lingered on it and, I suppose, got lost in it. I realised he was staring at me, his own gaze soft as ash in the thin grey light. A slim piece of lead was tucked behind his ear.

  ‘Penny for them,’ he had said, and I’d come out of my reverie, closing my mouth and standing straighter.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘Penny for them,’ he said again, nodding at my hat, and I reached blindly for the little tankard, and began scooping.

  ‘Tuppence, actually, for a third pint, sir,’ I’d said, and he’d laughed and shaken his head.

  ‘No, for your thoughts.’

  I had looked so surprised he fell about laughing, and the air between us turned warmer. From him came the scent of coffee, and sawdust, and something else pleasant – was it wool? Or horsehair?

  After that first meeting I went back to the coffee house again and again, hovering around the golden doorway like a moth, greedy for the sight of him. Dusk came early, and in the middle of a grey afternoon, when snow had threatened from the sky all day and clouds had been a queasy yellow, I saw him among a sma
ll group of men in front of the chandler’s shop. They might have been arriving or leaving, but they were very splendid in their blue wool coats and hats, standing upright with outturned feet and easy smiles, for they had been warm, and would be warm again. I walked up the street and felt overcome, unable to speak or look at him, so I hid in a doorway, and after gathering myself, began back the way I’d come, making sure I met his eye. Our gazes caught like a tinderbox, and I was aflame. I’d never felt that way before – drunk from a look, giddy from a nod.

  ‘Shrimp girl,’ he’d said. ‘Where’s your hat?’

  I have no memory of what I’d mumbled – something stupid, not sparkling, because he made my head feel full of cotton. He put an arm around me, making me feel small and dainty. I’d hoped I did not smell of shrimp. We’d gone into a tavern – a low, smoky place by the hide market, and I’d had my first taste of wine. It was sweet and sticky, like melted fruit on a summer’s day, and had burned my throat. His companions had come with us – three or four officers and merchants, like him, who called him Cal, and I sat dumbly as they roused and rabbled, speaking loudly over one another and rolling their tobacco. Women were allowed in taverns, and several whores moved freely about, searching for customers. One or two sat with us for a time, joining in with the men and making me feel like a little girl, like a daughter. I learned small things about him: that he was a whalebone merchant, who spent a lot of time in Rotherhithe, down the river, and Throgmorton Street, where I knew the bone shops to be, and they spoke of a man named Smith, and another named Tallis. Meanwhile I drank another cup of wine straight down, and after a while, when the noise and the smoke were almost too much for me, he found my eye and gave a private smile, then asked if I wanted to go somewhere more quiet. I nodded, cotton-headed again, and we moved out to the street. It had been dark, then, and I didn’t know properly where we were, for the walls were so narrow, full of inky corners and buildings that buckled over the street, blocking the moonlight. I hardly remember what was said, except he asked me if I was cold. I said yes, and he gave me his coat – a fine, warm thing that reached my knees – and then he kissed me. He tasted of liquor and pipe tobacco. My back found a wall, and he moved his hands either side of my head, leaning into me. Before long they moved south, finding my body and then my skirts, and I moved him towards me and inside me. I had seen couples in the street before, young lovers and old lovers and men emptying themselves into whores. I had never thought I would become one of them, never thought a man – no, a merchant – would want to go with me in the dark. It was the wildest thing I’d done. I had not gone with a man before, though I’d come close once or twice with some of the bolder Billingsgate boys – Tommy not being one of them.