The Foundling Read online

  After we were finished, I put my hands in the pockets of his coat, which I was still wearing, and drew out what was inside: the short clay pipe, with which the tobacco smell grew stronger; a few coins, which I put back hastily; and something odd-looking. I held it towards the stingy moonlight and saw it was two pieces of a heart, which fitted perfectly together.

  ‘This from your sweetheart?’ I asked him.

  ‘Don’t have one,’ he said, taking one of the pieces and leaving me with the other. ‘Something to remember me by.’ He smiled from the corner of his mouth, and reached for a penknife from inside the coat that I was still wearing, brushing my breast with his hand. He asked me what my name was, and when I told him, he carved something on it and handed it back to me, gesturing for his coat, which I took off, feeling the February chill rush in again.

  ‘It ain’t fair if you don’t tell me yours,’ I said shyly.

  ‘Callard.’

  ‘Your first name.’

  ‘Daniel. I’ll be seeing you, Bess Bright.’ And with that, he made for the light and noise spilling from the tavern doorway, while I stood shivering, feeling the wine slowly wear off and clutching his gift tightly. I was still holding the pipe in my other hand. I’d almost gone to take it to him, but could not face that bright, crowded room, and turned instead for the river, and home.

  I’d gone looking for him a few times after that. It had been a Wednesday when I saw him, and I went every Wednesday after that, floating up and down Gracechurch Street like a spook, waiting once for two hours in a doorway. But Daniel Callard had been swallowed up by London. Like the Thames tide, the city had a temperament, and it could give or take. When winter warmed to spring and I knew I’d have his child, I intensified my search and found the man I’d heard spoken of in snatches, Tallis. He was the owner of one of the Throgmorton Street bone shops, who looked like a bone himself, with paper skin that clung to sunken cheeks. He told me the merchant Daniel Callard had died the month before, very suddenly and unexpectedly. He was a fine merchant, and his funeral had been very well attended. He’d noticed my stomach then, and his expression darkened, and I’d staggered from the shop into the quiet street, and vomited in an alley.

  I stood looking now at the lion, then moved towards it and reached inside its gaping mouth, leaving my hand suspended between its jaws. I had wanted to take our daughter to the lions at the Tower, to show her how they roamed and padded. I thought of the currant bun at home, waiting on the shelf, and Abe, sitting in his chair, expecting us. ‘Where is she?’ he would say. Where is she? I thought of Daniel, sleeping in the soil. I’d paid a boy to find me the death announcement from April and read it aloud to me in the street. It was very short – one or two sentences – with the church for the funeral named: one I did not know, and had missed besides. I wished I had not thrown his pipe into the river; wished I could press my lips to it once more.

  On the eastern edge of the city, beyond the old wall, was the Rag Fair – a quarter of a mile of stalls selling clothes second-, third- and fourth-hand, even on a Sunday. It was busiest in the mornings, with people browsing after church, so when I arrived in the middle of the afternoon the crowd had thinned, while the bite of winter at people’s collars and fingers meant only a few idle souls drifted about – those without families, picking at frippery instead of a glistening roast bird. In the warmer months the tables were a riot of colour – blood reds and sky blues and foamy frills as far as the eye could see – but at this time of year people wanted warm coats, thick drawers and sturdy boots.

  Keziah’s stall was halfway down Rosemary Lane, and I saw her crouched over her jumble of ladies’ jackets and coats. She carried everything in her barrow from Houndsditch each morning, and was one of the few traders who took care of her stock, dabbing at stains with lye and mending holes and tears. A woman was examining her items, extracting sleeves here and there before discarding them. By the time I reached the stall she had ambled off, and Keziah sat down, rubbing her hands together and blowing on them.

  ‘You’ve no reason to be cold with all them coats,’ I said, trying to sound cheerful. My own wool cloak was one of Keziah’s, bought a few winters ago. If business was quiet and we were passing time, we’d make up stories about the people who’d owned them before. My cloak, we’d said, belonged to a beautiful woman who fell in love with a sailor and moved with him to the West Indies and sold her warm things because she wouldn’t need them in her new life.

  She made a face, and got up to embrace me. ‘Seems everyone’s got one this time of year. And those who haven’t are in the ground by now.’

  She saw my face then, and understanding flooded my friend’s features. She looked around, as though I might have been hiding Clara under my skirts. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She wasn’t there.’

  My friend’s face collapsed. ‘Oh, Bess. She died,’

  I shook my head. ‘No. She’s already been—’

  ‘Penny a dip!’ the wig seller behind me bellowed, making me jump. He repeated himself in Yiddish, then three more languages, and I moved around the table to speak more quietly.

  ‘She’s already been claimed.’

  Keziah blinked. ‘By who?’

  ‘This is the strangest part. By me.’

  She shook her head, and I wrapped my cloak tighter around myself. ‘The person who took her gave my name, and my address. I don’t understand, Kiz. My mind’s in a spin. I came straight here, I haven’t even told Abe. He’ll be . . . ’ My voice died in my throat, and I had to whisper. ‘Whoever took her did it the day after I left her there. All these years and she wasn’t never there, all this time.’

  ‘What? But who could it be? Daniel is . . .’

  ‘Dead, I know.’

  Keziah’s brown eyes grew even larger. ‘But what if he ain’t?’

  ‘He is. It was in the newssheets.’

  ‘You can’t read.’

  ‘I paid a boy to read it. He’s dead, Kiz.’

  ‘Penny a dip!’ cried the wig seller.

  ‘But why would someone take her? And in your name as well?’

  ‘What I don’t understand is how they know who I am in the first place – at the Foundling you don’t give your name, or your address, or nothing, to protect your identity. But whoever it was knows where I live, and who I am. How?’

  Keziah adjusted her bonnet, tucking her woolly black hair inside. ‘You’ve made me all nervous now.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And they wouldn’t tell you this to cover up that she’d died?’

  ‘I imagine plenty of babies that go there die. It’s not the Foundling’s fault – most of them come in half-dead. Besides, they send them out of London, like I said, to be nursed in the countryside.’

  ‘What if it is their fault? What if there was an accident, or—’

  ‘Kiz, why would they lie?’

  ‘What if they sold her?’

  ‘To who? Who would buy a day-old baby? Abandoned children are ten a penny – you can get one from anywhere: the gutter, the poor house . . . Half the families in this street would sell theirs if they could.’

  Keziah shuddered. At that moment, two small figures hurtled towards us, skipping and tripping over themselves. Moses, the eldest, leapt over a pile of boots in a basket, arriving in a heap at our skirts, and his younger brother Jonas copied, falling short and clipping the table leg, making it collapse and sending half of Keziah’s clean clothes to the ground.

  ‘Jonas, you filthy scrap! Look what you’ve done,’ she scolded, lifting him by one scrawny arm. ‘Why aren’t you at Mrs Abelmann’s? I pay her to watch you, not let you out to crawl like lice over my clothes.’

  She righted the table and I set about lifting and folding.

  ‘She let us take the bread to the oven,’ Jonas said, with pride.

  ‘Le-khem,’ said Moses. ‘That’s Yiddish for “bread”. And ta-nur is “oven”.’

  ‘And where is the bread?’

  ‘Being baked!’
/>   ‘You go and get that bread and take it straight back to Mrs Abelmann’s, you hear me? Do not speak to anyone, do not stop, and do not leave the house again, even if the King himself comes down Rag Fair on a sedan.’

  They scampered off past the boots and petticoats, and Keziah watched them until they disappeared down an alley behind a stall. In their merriment, I had forgotten my own troubles – children would do that for you. I brushed off a set of stays and placed them on top of the pile. ‘You are too protective,’ I told her.

  ‘There is no such thing.’

  We stood for a moment looking up and down the market. People were huddled against the icy wind with their hands and heads wrapped. Only those who had to be were out in this weather, but plenty had no choice. Dusk was falling already, and no one bought clothes when it was dark. Keziah’s finer things – flowered cotton and striped satin and coloured ribbons – hung on pegs from the cooper’s shop behind. These garments looked better in the half-light, when you could not see the hems stitched a different colour, or the sweat stains at the armpits that no amount of lye would get out.

  ‘What will you do now?’ she asked me, rubbing her hands together.

  I pulled on a length of violet ribbon. ‘I don’t know. I will go home alone, and Abe will ask where the child is, and Nancy Benson will, too, and I will look like a fool. I told Nancy we were getting an apprentice – I told everyone at Billingsgate. I don’t know how I’ll bear it.’

  Keziah was silent for a time, during which it seemed to get darker, so that when I looked at her again I could no longer make out the finer details of her face, the gentle wrinkles at the corners of her eyes.

  ‘Perhaps she has a better life than you can give her,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Yes,’ I said with a hollow laugh. ‘Perhaps a duchess has taken her in as her own, and teaches her to draw and play the pianoforte. No, Kiz. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t trust those men at the Foundling, with their wigs and quills. They look at you through their eyeglasses. We’re all the same to them, us and our children.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true. They can’t be playing you for a fool – you said yourself you didn’t leave your name when you took her there, so how would they know it? Did Daniel know where you lived, even?’

  ‘No, of course not. I only met him twice! I don’t know, Kiz. It’s like I’m feeling around in the dark.’

  I looked down Rosemary Lane towards Black and White Court, where I knew Abe would be sitting in his chair, thinking he was going to meet his granddaughter, and fretting about money. ‘How will we keep her?’ he’d asked more than once, and I reminded him we’d managed fine when we had three mouths to feed, before Ned left home, and would again. He would be listening for two sets of feet on the stairs, and getting three bowls down from the shelf for supper. The idea of telling him that I did not know where she was . . . it was careless. It was the opposite of what a mother should be. I could not bear the vastness of it all. Was she in London, or even England? Had she been put on a ship? At worst I had thought she might be dead, but knowing she could be anywhere instead of nowhere at all was a torture even more exquisite.

  ‘Help me pack up and come to ours for supper,’ said Keziah.

  I accepted gratefully, and helped her bundle all her clothes into sacks, which we piled into her barrow, laying the table and baskets on top. We walked north, along the wide thoroughfare of the Minories, where two drays could pass one another, and turned into the dingy passageways that led to Broad Court, where Keziah lived with her family. Flanked on both sides by synagogues, this pocket of London belonged to the displaced – blackamoors like the Gibbonses, Spaniards, Huguenots, Jews, Irish, Italians and lascars – all crowded into the little courts and boarding houses. The lodgings here were more respectable than the rookeries, where thieves and prostitutes laid their heads and three families slept on one floor, but a rung or two below Black and White Court, with its water pump and one or two rooms per family. Keziah’s two rooms were at street level, and when I visited I had to tap on her window, for her landlady – an irritable French woman with a hooked nose and beady eyes – spat forth an angry, rapid torrent if visitors knocked on the front door, and sometimes slammed it in their faces. It was dark by the time we arrived, but there was a gentle glow at the edges of the curtain, which meant her husband William was at home. We let ourselves in to find him threading a violin string at the large scrubbed table, while Jonas and Moses huddled on the bench reading the Bible aloud. Only one candle was lit, but William had not seemed to notice, so Keziah lit another stump, giving it to Jonas and telling him his brother would go blind if he tried to read such tiny words in the dark. I helped her prepare supper: bread, cold roast beef and beer, and we ate all together at the table, with William setting down his instrument on a chair, as though it was dining with us. The boys had a story about Mrs Abelmann’s canary, which had flown inside the chimney and refused to come down, and amid the chewing and chattering I forgot for a very short time, just a minute or two, what had happened that morning. It was only when I looked around at my friend’s simple room, with its russet-painted walls and clothes and baskets piled and on every surface, and the happy faces of their boys as they chattered, and the tired, loving way she and William looked at one another, that I remembered, and the shadows seemed to grow, and the little room seemed chillier. I must have looked sorrowful, for Jonas, the more bashful of the two, caught my eye, and I tried to smile for him.

  After supper Keziah told the boys to go to bed, which they did obediently, leaving the door ajar so she could hear they were asleep. We washed the supper things while William went dutifully back to his violin, and when we were finished and the plates and cups put away, Keziah took off her apron and we sat in the two comfortable chairs before the fire. I longed to put a cushion behind my head and close my eyes. I did not want to go back to Black and White Court without Clara and see her bed empty. ‘You should go back to the Foundling,’ Keziah said.

  ‘What for?’ I said. ‘They will only tell me what they already have. I swear they think me a liar. Or worse mad: what sort of mother forgets she’s taken her own child? They’ll send me to Bethlem.’

  As Keziah told William the events of the morning, which already felt a year ago, I watched the flames dancing, undeterred by the icy gusts that shuddered down the chimney. William listened, cleaning his violin with a rag and a small bottle of turpentine oil, and after a long pause, said: ‘The Foundling Hospital . . . I have played there.’

  I sat up. ‘You have?’

  He nodded, frowning hard in the dim light but not looking up. The care he showed that instrument was unlike anything I’d ever seen in a man. ‘A few months ago. September, I think. They had a service in the chapel. Did you know Handel composed a song for the hospital?’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Now he looked at me. ‘The composer. Handel’s Messiah?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘How does it begin . . . ? “Blessed are they that considereth the poor and needy—”’

  Keziah interrupted him. ‘If you ain’t talking about music, you’re talking about sermons, and we’re talking about neither.’

  William ignored her. ‘It’s a remarkable place. The children who are taken in are very lucky. Your daughter will be in safe hands.’

  ‘But she isn’t there, that’s the point.’

  ‘Listen, William!’

  The room went quiet, and the only sound was the crackle of the fire.

  ‘You know,’ I said after a while, ‘I could have married years ago, and had more children. I was waiting, I suppose, to get her back, so I could start a life with someone else. I wanted to be able to tell them the truth, because if I’d married without them knowing, what husband would have agreed to take her? And now I don’t suppose I’ll ever see her again. I’ve waited all this time for nothing. Soon I’ll only be good enough for the widowers.’

  ‘There’s still time,’ Keziah said. ‘You’re no old maid; you
’ve years in you yet. Ain’t that right, William?’

  He placed his violin under his chin, propped it on his left shoulder, and played a long, sorrowful, beautiful note. Then he played a popular wedding march, which made us smile.

  I knew I could tell Keziah anything, yet part of me wondered if deep down she’d thought I would never take my daughter back. That I would change my mind, meet a husband, have a fat bouncing baby, then another, and forget about my firstborn. That I would come to imagine Clara better off where she was, raised by nurses and servants, with laundered linen and plum pudding and a chapel in which to sing. Perhaps Keziah imagined she was safer away from the freezing sheds of Billingsgate and the damp walls of Black and White Court. But would she have left her sons to be raised like orphans, no matter how comfortably? I doubted it very much.