The Foundling

by Halls, Stacey

  ‘I have never been to a ball,’ Eliza said.

  I could imagine the parties typical of her kind: like servants let loose, with beer spilling on the floor, and maddening fiddles, and girls flashing their petticoats as they danced barefoot. Eliza began fishing in her skirt pocket, bringing out what appeared to be a coin. It was bronze, emblazed with a fiery sun and the year 1754, and she passed it across the table to me.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘A ticket,’ she said. ‘Doctor Mead bought us a year’s entry, in case we want to go back.’

  I looked at Charlotte. ‘And you have one of these?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well,’ I said, picking up my fork, and allowing a beat or two of silence, ‘you can forget that notion at once.’

  After dinner I went to sit at my writing desk, and an hour went by with only the words ‘Dear Doctor Mead’ atop the page. I put down the quill, then picked it up again, and tickled the feather along my wrist. I went to fetch my map, and found on it Bedford Row, and stared at it until the sky began to darken. I had never been to his house, never seen it, even. Had never sat in one of his chairs, or drunk from his china, or heard his clock chime the hour. I did not know the layout of his rooms, or how he moved about them. I willed him to knock at the door so that I could refuse him again.

  There was a scuffle at the parlour door.

  ‘Madam?’

  It was Eliza’s voice. I admitted her, and with her came Charlotte in her nightdress, her pretty plait falling down her back. She grinned, showing the gap in her smile, and held her palm out to me. On it was the missing tooth, tiny and white, like a shard of china. I took it from her and said thank you, and set it before me on the table.

  ‘Charlotte,’ Eliza said, ‘kiss your mother goodnight.’

  I held my cheek to her and said goodnight, and the two of them left, closing the door behind them. I lit a candle and took up my quill.

  Dear Doctor Mead,

  Thank you for the portrait, though I cannot accept it. I am unused to gestures of such grandiosity; the sum token of Daniel’s affection, in all the years we were together, was a heart made from whalebone, and only half of that. I would be a hypocrite to leave our friendship in dust, but I should be grateful if you would allow me to lick my wounds for another week or so. Then you may come in peace.

  Your friend (in marble),

  Alexandra Callard

  I left it on the hall table for the morning’s post, and took the candle up to bed.

  It was the wind that woke me, rattling at the sash. I turned over and tried to ignore it, but it persisted, and at some point I realised it was coming from inside the house. I sat up in alarm, frowning in the darkness. Floorboards creaked upstairs, and I opened my curtain to look at the yard, lit dimly in the moonlight. It was empty. I must have left my room at the same time as Agnes, for I found her coming down the stairs in her nightdress with a candle, her eyes wide behind the flame. The noise started up again, and at the same time we realised it was the door-knocker.

  ‘Who in heaven’s name is that at this time?’ she asked.

  Whoever it was would not stop pounding and pounding. I was equal parts curious and frightened, and hovered for a moment at the top of the stairs as Agnes went down, tidying her shawl about her shoulders. The sound became more urgent, and I heard Agnes muttering that it was likely a drunk swell come back from his club to the wrong house. I decided that the likelihood of somebody about to rob or murder us doing so by announcing themselves loudly at the front door was small, and intrigue got the better of me, so I followed her, hanging back in the dark hallway to let her answer it, thinking of what I could take hold of if we were attacked: the brass candleholders on the hall table? And there was a dagger locked somewhere in a drawer in Daniel’s study. But where was the key? I was entirely surprised to find that I did not need it, because standing on the doorstep in the moonlight was not a brandy- soaked neighbour, or even the night watchman with news of a crime, but Doctor Mead.

  He was utterly dishevelled, with the troubled look of a madman, and he pushed past us into the house.

  ‘Doctor Mead! What is the meaning of this?’

  ‘I got your letter,’ was all he shouted over his shoulder before barrelling up the hall, taking the stairs two at a time.

  Agnes exclaimed, closing the door behind her, and we stared at one another in mute horror. ‘What did you put in your letter, madam?’ she whispered in the darkness. ‘Is the child not well?’

  ‘What letter?’

  ‘The one you left on the table this evening.’

  I felt my forehead wrinkle in confusion. ‘Only that I could not accept the portrait. But how has he read it? And why would he come so suddenly?’

  ‘I had it delivered, madam; the post boy was walking past as I was drawing the drapes.’

  What was happening? The Scarlet Lady on the wall looked down upon us with her quiet eyes. Something was wrong. Fear soaked me all over. Clumsily I locked the front door, then groped my way through the velvet-dark to the staircase. Moonlight shone in from the fanlight above the door, revealing the first few stairs, and with Agnes and her light behind me, I climbed upwards, feeling as though they were made of sand, until I reached the first landing.

  ‘Doctor Mead?’ A moment later I heard his feet pummelling the stairs, and he appeared on the first floor.

  ‘Alexandra.’

  That he had said my first name made me go cold. He was taking me by the arm now, and leading me up to my bedroom – no, to Charlotte’s bedroom – and I felt once again as though I was in a strange dream, one that made no sense and perhaps never would. And then I saw.

  The curtains in Charlotte’s bedroom were open, and moonlight flooded in, casting its silvery glow on the beds, which were empty, and neatly made, with the pillows soft and plump. Care had been taken; urgency had not been at play. I stood numbly in the doorway, swaying slightly. I tried to understand what I was seeing, for my eyes were working, but my mind was not.

  Doctor Mead fled again, tearing around the house like a bloodhound, looking in every room, searching the parlour, the study, the kitchen. I heard him banging doors and thudding on the stairs, and felt a tiny gnawing inside my mind, a worm turning in an apple.

  Presently he was back, breathless, beside me, and I could not see his face. I could not see anything; we were in near total darkness, though Agnes’s candle burned on, trembling in the shadows.

  ‘It’s Eliza,’ he said.

  ‘Where is she?’

  He seemed more worried than he should be, at a servant fled in the night. If only I could see his face!

  ‘Where is Charlotte?’ I asked dumbly.

  He came to me then, and took my hands in his. Only then did I comprehend the terror in his eyes. ‘Charlotte,’ he said, and his voice was pleading. ‘Is she yours?’

  I had never felt shock like it. Then: a glimmer of revelation, like the first sliver of dawn.

  ‘Answer me!’ he pressed. ‘Is she yours?’

  I pulled my hands from his. ‘What is the meaning of this? Where is she? She must be in the house somewhere.’

  ‘Alexandra, you must answer me! Is Charlotte your—?’

  ‘Why are you asking me this?’ I screamed. My ears rang with distant bells, warning bells. A slow sort of horror began to drench me.

  ‘Eliza left a child at the Foundling Hospital six years ago. The token she left was half a heart, made of whalebone.’

  I began to shake.

  It’s not possible.

  Blindly, I pushed open the door to my room, which was lit by moonlight, and took out the little ebony box. The painted figures knew as well as I what would be missing, for they had seen it happen. Perhaps I had known since I saw the empty beds – no, before that – since Doctor Mead began pounding at the door. Perhaps before that, even; the tiniest part of me had known this day would come, and yet I was not prepared for it. Their wide, dark eyes, the reddish tint to their chestnut hair, their fr
eckles. The way they giggled behind doors like lovers, and danced like sisters. The night she had looked for Daniel’s picture with her secret flame. The way she’d blanch whenever I came in the room. The way she’d lit up when Charlotte did. Eliza. Bess. Elizabeth. The knowledge grew and bled like ink in water, like blood. I was water; she was blood.

  My hands fumbled in the box for the two halves of a white bone heart carved with lovers’ letters, for the little leaden tag on a string, bearing the number 627, but of course they were gone.

  ‘Kiss your mother goodnight,’ Eliza had said to Charlotte.

  Her mother had been here all along. And now the bitch had taken her.

  PART THREE

  BESS

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘You’re all right with me, girls, long as you stay close. I’ll light my torch just as soon as we’re south of Holbourn. Then we’re gonna criss-cross down so quick you’ll get dizzy. How’s about that?’

  We clung like shadows to Lyle, the linkboy I’d befriended in my time at Bloomsbury, who led the way through the black streets. I had one arm around Charlotte’s narrow shoulders; in the other I held the canvas bag I’d arrived with, packed differently now, with underclothes, a spare dress, stockings and shoes, and the things I’d taken from the larder – bread, a cold pork pie, a bottle of beer, two apples, and some gingerbread wrapped in paper.

  The night was cold, the streets empty. Not one to leave the house after dark, when London’s nocturnals came creeping from their holes and peril hummed down every alley, even here on these wide, fine streets my skin prickled with fear. Especially here – the few lonely shapes were likely to be valets fetching tobacco for their masters, or men coming home from their clubs, but there was something unsettling about the silence that made me eager for the bright open doorways and unquiet streets of Ludgate Hill. We would soon be there; Lyle was taking us, and with every step we drew closer, and further away from Devonshire Street. The only sound was our feet pitter-pattering in the road, and our breath in our throats. The windows watched us blackly, their dark glass like blank eyes.

  ‘You reckon she’s got you licked yet?’ Lyle asked, his voice bouncing into the road.

  I shushed him. ‘Not here,’ I hissed.

  I had known him only a few weeks, and yet here we were, putting our trust and our liberty in him. I’d met Lyle one night soon after I had arrived at Mrs Callard’s, when the strangeness of the house had pressed down on me in my bed and I’d had the overwhelming sensation of being buried alive. I’d taken the key from the jar in the scullery and gone to stand on the basement steps, just to feel the cold on my arms and the night air stirring my hair. Sitting on the top step, looking at the empty road, a voice had called out, ‘Need a glim?’, and Lyle had appeared brandishing his unlit torch like a sword. I’d jumped, and clapped a hand over my mouth, knowing a scream would wake the house, and the ones either side of it.

  ‘No,’ I’d hissed. ‘Now push off.’

  He ignored me. ‘Blower?’ He offered his pipe, and I shook my head, shivering. I wanted to go back in but knew that when I did the coffin would seal behind me for another day. He was dark – foreign-looking, with sallow skin and a heavy expression, but his accent was like mine. He wore a black cap, pulled low over his face, and a slim black coat that fitted him well. Everything about him was shadow-like, as though he had been created by the night, and could melt back into it at will.

  He’d leaned idly against the railing, and regarded me over his pipe. ‘I suppose you ain’t no Covent Garden nun waiting for a swell, from the way your nightgown’s poking out beneath your cloak.’ Blushing furiously, I’d wrapped it tighter around myself, and he threw his head back and laughed louder than he ought. ‘Besides, we’re a long way from Covent Garden. And that’s a rum ken,’ he nodded at the house, ‘but you don’t look like a miller, neither.’

  ‘I ain’t a thief.’

  ‘So my reckoning,’ he went on, ‘cos it’s dark, you see, and I can’t make you out proper, is that you’re a mop-squeezer, and you’re waiting for someone.’

  ‘I’m a nursemaid,’ I said hotly. ‘But you’re a man of too many words is what you are, and I wish you’d shab off.’

  ‘Who you waiting for, then? Fancy man, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Husband, then?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be here if I was married, would I?’

  ‘Then it’s my lucky evening.’

  And with that, he’d given me a wink, and gone striding off without looking back. I saw him again a few nights later, waiting for me across the street, leaning against the railings, and smiled despite myself. His name was Lyle Kozak. He never lit his torch when we were speaking, should searching eyes find him. He’d been a linkboy – a moon curser, he called himself, for work was hard to come by on a clear night – since he was ten or eleven. He was twenty-three now, and bringing home as much money as his father, a tailor. Lyle and his mother and father had come to London twenty years ago from Belgrade, and he lived in St Giles with them and his sisters and brothers. He was the eldest, and worked at night so he could look after the children in the day. He told me he only needed three or four hours’ sleep, and could kip on a washing line, what with having such a large family, and the chaos and noise that came with it. They spoke Serbian at home, and he had learned English in the streets, copying the accent and making it his own. What he liked best was Cockney, and he collected words and phrases like a magpie. He carried two pistols, both cheap, and likely to explode if he used them, but he’d never had to, because drawing them out was usually enough to make rogues turn on their heel (‘And if they’re no good for shooting, they’ll do for a crack on the custard,’ he added good-naturedly). All this I learned on our moonlit meetings. We’d sit on the steps, most often at number nine, whose tenants, Maria had told me, were on the Continent. We shared his pipe, and sometimes I’d bring us a bit of something to eat: a bottle of beer from the back of the pantry that afterwards I’d fill with water so Maria wouldn’t notice, or a breakfast muffin that I’d break in half.

  I told him about Alexandra Callard, and how she stroked the pictures of her dead parents but could not touch her daughter. I told him about Charlotte, how she loved animals and reading stories and eating oranges in cream. I told him about Ned coming to the back yard and asking for money, nearly costing me my job. One night we’d decided to walk around the square, having seen a light in one of the houses, and that was when I told him my plan to steal my daughter and bring her home.

  He told me I was dicked in the nob. And when he offered to help, I said yes.

  And then Mrs Callard had attacked us. The butterfly had turned into a beast. She’d the same look in her eye as the Smithfield cattle driven to the slaughterhouses; I’d seen the whites of her eyes. She was a dangerous woman, that was certain. What sort of mother could take a poker to beat her child? She was not safe, and neither were we in that tall prison, that dungeon above the ground with its sleeping dragon inside. Who knew when it would wake again? Charlotte, terrorised, trembling Charlotte – for though she would always be Clara to me, I had called her Charlotte for a month, and was used to it now – had left the mother she knew and returned to a monster. The poor thing had cried herself sick, and sobbed in my arms until she fell asleep, her quivering, damp little body clinging to mine. In the morning, I knew we had to leave; the hand had turned full circle, and our golden hour was up.

  The trouble was, life at Devonshire Street had grown comfortable. I’d grown comfortable: my figure was thicker from all the cream, my hair shinier from the soap. My hands were softer, the smell of brine gone. I’d grown used to the carpets beneath my feet, the overheated rooms, the groaning dining table. I was content in that little bedroom, where we lived and played and slept and sang. I could have stayed for ever, locking the door and swallowing the key. But there were things I still did not know: how Charlotte had been plucked from the Foundling and come to live in that house. How Mrs Callard had known of her existence,
but did not know me. Somebody did, though.

  I had been so anxious she would recognise me when I stepped into her home. The withdrawing room, she’d called it. The withdrawing house, more like. I had not known it was possible to live that way, choosing to shut out the world, never going out. Her food came to the street door, her money from a lawyer. Tea from China, brandy from France. She had no family that I’d seen, no friends calling of an afternoon. Yet she seemed . . . satisfied.

  Charlotte, however, was not. The day I met her, I sensed she wished for a different life. She knew French, and music, and could read words longer than my arm, but she did not know what it was to push a hoop down a street, or feed a horse an apple, or make a ball of snow. She had been shy, at first, and lived in her books, asking me if I had seen forests and rivers and boats. For a child of London not to have seen a boat! Sometimes I found myself paralysed with doubt that this soft, floury thing might hawk with me in the streets, a little basket of lemons at her arm. It seemed like something from one of her stories. More than once I’d resigned myself to staying her nursemaid until she grew older, so that we could live out our days in bliss and comfort on Mrs Callard’s purse. That way, when we left, Charlotte’s Bloomsbury voice and pretty face would get her a position as a lady’s maid. That was the best she could hope for, with me.

  But then the walls would close in on our striped prison, and she would grow irritable and teary, attaching herself to me in a way that made me sick to my heart, for this was no better than a gaol, no kinder than an asylum. It was enough to send you mad. I could not tell if Mrs Callard herself was mad to begin with, or if she’d made herself that way. She certainly seemed to occupy herself, with her letters and her newspapers. But what good was paper, with a world outside? Her only companion was Doctor Mead, who overlooked her strange ways, but I think she amused him.

  Poor Doctor Mead – how I had hoodwinked him. If there was space in my heart to regret pulling such a filthy trick, I’d feel it. But there was no room, because my heart was filled with my daughter. My daughter, who I had dreamed of these six years, and loved even more than I knew I could. My daughter, who I had made and who’d grown inside me, who walked around, pulling my soul everywhere she went. Her dark hair that twisted down her back, her warm hands, finding mine, the way she yawned when reading made her tired. The fact that she could read – I shouldn’t have been prouder if she flew. How could there be room for sorrow, or regret, or pity? I had never been in love before, until now. When she laughed, or showed me a drawing, or led me to a mouse hole in the kitchen – it almost choked me. ‘You are mine,’ I’d wanted to tell her from the very night I’d moved in. ‘I am your mother.’