The Lost Orphan Read online

  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.”

  “Number 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 color 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 sound 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.”

  I swallowed. “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 governor 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 toward 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 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, the sky like a large velvet drape, covering everything in silence. The moon was pale, illuminating the few remaining carriages of the wealthy guests who’d watched us give up our children. Sated with the evening’s entertainment, they were now home to bed.

  “You’ll be wanting something to eat, Bessie,” Abe said as we walked slowly toward 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.”

  I watched him trudge beside 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 color 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 in London’s fish market. He sold it by the basket to costermongers and bumerees, 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, 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 realized 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 openmouthed 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 toward 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 i
t was warm, with a low fire burning in a grate, and 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 a hundred or more 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 down 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-story 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.

  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 anymore—of her thick, dark hair and milky skin. I didn’t miss her much, because it had been so long ago. 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, tipping 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 groaning in bed, smelling of vomit.

  Ned flopped on 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 liked being at the top of the house: it was quiet and private, far from the shrieks of the children who played below. 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 pregnant with Clara, the smell of everything on the market made me heave. Perhaps now it wouldn’t.

  Once I’d finished and set the pail by the door to take down, 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 half-wit.”

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

  Ned fixed him with a superior look. “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.”

  “’Cause you was birthing a baby!”

  “Didn’t care about that then, though, did you? Where were 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 contributed 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 d
oor 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 Fleet Prison on our right and going south through Bell Savage Yard to the thoroughfare of Ludgate Hill, before turning east toward 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 coffeehouses with news from the water. The traffic thickened toward 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 a heavy cloud—Abe and I knew the way with our eyes shut.

  We passed the Butchers’ Hall and moved down toward 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.