The Foundling

by Halls, Stacey

  And then, just like that, the opportunity presented itself. At bedtime, a little over three weeks after I had arrived, we had finished our game of cribbage and I’d put her in her nightgown. I sat beside her on the bed with a candle as she read me her favourite story, a pious tale from a children’s magazine about a spoilt little girl called Biddy Johnson. She’d read it to me once before, but I had been tired, barely listening as she recited the adventures of a young girl who ran away from her nurse and became lost in London. After accepting an orange from a stranger, spoiled, stupid Biddy was kidnapped by a gang of thieves, who took her to the countryside and tried to kill her. But she was saved at the last moment by the heroic Master Tommy Trusty, who spirited her back to London and returned her to her family. Charlotte did not know all the words and had to miss some parts out, and when she had finished she put the magazine on the coverlet and nestled closer to me. I had sat in deep thought, and she tugged my sleeve.

  ‘Do you like oranges, Eliza?’ she asked. ‘I think they are my favourite because Biddy Johnson has one.’

  I stared at the square of dark sky in the window, and hoped she could not feel my heart thudding. ‘I do,’ I said.

  ‘I like them with cream,’ she went on sleepily. ‘And when they are cut you can put them in your mouth and it looks as though you are smiling. Like this.’ She used her fingers to pull the corners of her lips into a grimace, and I smiled, and wondered if the moment should be now, or if there would be a better one.

  ‘Charlotte,’ I said, and it came out in a whisper. ‘Have you ever thought of running away?’

  Our faces were close, her breath sweet on my cheek. Her eyes were very dark, and shone with alarm. She shook her head ever so slightly, and I could smell the soap from her hair, which I’d washed the night before. Then she nodded gently, and plucked again at my sleeve, but would not meet my eye.

  ‘I have too,’ I whispered.

  ‘Please don’t go,’ she said in a small voice.

  I shifted on the narrow bed, and breathed in her warm, sleepy smell, and put an arm around her. ‘If I was to go, would you go with me? We could go together.’ I am your mother. How did you say it, if not in those words?

  She looked thoughtfully at me. ‘Like Biddy Johnson and Tommy Trusty?’

  ‘Just like them.’ My voice was so quiet now I could hardly hear it. ‘Charlotte, what if I were to tell you that . . .’ I got up from the bed and knelt on the floor to see her better. She lay against the headboard, her face turned towards mine, clean and white in her nightdress. She knew I had something very important to say, for her little face was serious, and dreadful, as though in some way she understood that what I was about to tell her would change her life.

  ‘Do you want to hear a story?’

  She nodded, and I took her hand in mine.

  ‘There was a little girl,’ I said, ‘who lived in a big house on the edge of London. There was a meadow at the end of her street, with cows in it, and at the other end was a square, with black railings and tall trees. She had everything she ever wanted: servants, silk dresses and ribbons in her hair. She had a tortoise, and a bird in a golden cage. She drank chocolate for breakfast and had marmalade every day. She lived like a princess, but she was lonely, and she never left the house. She sat at the window and watched people go by in the street. She wanted to be among them, and she dreamed that one day her real mother would come and rescue her.

  ‘One day, her mother told her she would have a nursemaid. And the woman who came to look after her had dark hair like her own, that went red in the sun, and she had brown eyes, same as hers. They ate every meal together, and played with the dolls in her room, and the little girl read to her, because the nursemaid, she couldn’t read herself. And one night, as they was tucked up in bed and the little girl was falling asleep, the nursemaid whispered to her: “I am your real mother, and I’ve come to take you away.” They made a plan to run away together, and then one night they tossed their things into a sack and left. And only the stars saw them, and the moon told the stars not to say a word.’

  The silence was deep and instant. She did not move, or breathe, her dark eyes fearful, her lips pursed in a question. I waited, and watched, resisting the urge to reach for her.

  ‘I am your mother,’ I whispered, finally. ‘I left you at a hospital when you was a baby, and Mrs Callard took you home to take care of you. For me. I was always coming back, you see? And now I’m here.’

  She blinked once, twice. A little frown had begun to knit itself across her forehead. ‘Is it true?’ she asked.

  I nodded. She needed something else, I realised; she’d had a story, and now she needed the truth. I climbed back on the bed and held her, and she let me, resting her head on my chest. My heart still banged furiously, and I whispered over the clamour of it.

  ‘When you was born,’ I said, ‘I wrapped you in a blanket and walked from my house with my pa – Abe, I call him, your grandpa – to the Foundling Hospital, where we go to church. They look after babies there, until their mothers can fetch them back. So when you was born, on the twenty-seventh day of November, I took you there, for them to look after you. And I left with you something that was very special, that your father gave me: a white heart, about this big.’ I drew it on her palm. ‘He’d cut it in half, with a crooked line like this, and he gave me one of the pieces, and kept the other for himself. And on it he carved the letter B with his penknife, for my name, Bess. I carved a C underneath, for your name, which was Clara, then.’

  She was like a baby owl, made of eyes. ‘Your name is Bess?’ she whispered.

  ‘It’s Elizabeth. But some Elizabeths are called Eliza, and some are called Bess, and some are Liz, or Lizzie, or Beth, or Betsy. There’s lots of names that come from Elizabeth. But you must call me Eliza here. Do you promise? I’m Eliza now.’

  She nodded, and I hugged her fiercely.

  ‘Is my papa the same papa?’ she asked, and I told her yes, he was, and that he’d love her if he knew her. She’d listened solemnly, and then said: ‘What happened next?’ I stroked her thick dark hair and told her how the hospital promised to keep her safe for her mama, until she was ready to be collected.

  ‘And now here I am,’ I said. The words fell between us, landing on the bed like stones. ‘I know you like stories, but that’s the truth.’

  She had gone to bed that night seemingly unchanged, though thoughtful, and a little while after I’d closed the curtains, when I lay wide awake in my bed, mulling over what I’d done, I heard her quiet voice from across the room.

  ‘Eliza,’ she whispered.

  ‘What is it?’

  To my surprise, she told me to stay where I was, and I was too shocked to do anything else as she climbed out of bed with quick, easy limbs and darted to the door. I lay there, listening for her feet, and not even a minute later she was back, closing the door and holding something behind her. She stepped towards me, and her face was shining with bright, uncomplicated triumph.

  ‘Where did you go?’ I whispered.

  ‘Mama’s bedroom.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘In the parlour.’

  She held her hand out, balled in a fist, and I put mine beneath hers, and something fell into it – hard, and small, and sharp. It was a flinty object, like a shard of china, and it took me a moment to realise what she’d given me. I could only stare at it, and then at her, and again at the crooked shape I held between finger and thumb. It was just as I remembered it – the looped B, and the crude C I’d made with a shelling knife at Billingsgate, when my belly was big.

  I said nothing, but felt, finally, as though I had been put together again.

  Charlotte returned the token before Mrs Callard missed it, but knowing it was in the house was like an itch, a craving. It sang to me from her room, as though my own bone had been cut out and hidden. That it was locked away made me want it all the more, and finally the time had come.

  I’d been surprised to see Mrs Callard glide i
nto the dining room, stiff and proud after the sequence of events a few days before. The house had been holding its breath with the mistress out of sorts, and her presence righted the balance again, though she simmered with fear and dignity, clearly afraid of how we saw her. When she sent me on a pointless errand to the kitchen, my opportunity arrived. I crept up the stairs and quietly made my way to her bedroom, which was mercifully unlocked. I had been inside it once before, when she had made me lock Charlotte in her room, but that day it was a different place altogether. Now her things lay all about in a mess, her bed unmade and drawers and chemises cast all over. A crystal decanter sat on her vanity with an inch of brandy inside, and scrunched paper and ink bottles littered every surface. It was a chamber of waste and indulgence: pear cores turned to mulch, and soap melted on a dish by a copper bath. The straight-backed, orderly Mrs Callard she presented to the world was privately a sloven.

  Charlotte had told me about the ebony box, and the key that unlocked it that she kept on her vanity. Briefly I wished I could sit at her looking glass and hold her pearls to my neck, but there was no time. I found the key in a velvet-lined caddy that smelled faintly of sponge biscuits and went to her bureau, taking out the ebony box painted with Japanese figures and opening it, my breath coming quick. I scrabbled through her keepsakes, feeling only a distant pang of guilt, looking for white among the gold and enamel. But first I found something else I had not been expecting: the tiny tin tag, with the numbers 627 stamped on it. I squeezed it in my hand, felt it real and hard in my palm, and that was when I saw the counterpart: the left-hand side of the heart, pale and shining, like a fragment of the moon. I traced the shape engraved on it with a finger and knew it to be a D from Charlotte’s books, the ones she was too old to read now, which lay untouched on the shelf: D for dog. D for diamond. D for Daniel. Mrs Callard had it. He had given it to her. Then something else in the box caught my eye: the glimpse of a face, looking into mine. I frowned and moved the trinkets around, and could not believe what I saw. As though I’d conjured him, an oval miniature of Daniel, the size of a small pebble. I took it out to look at him properly, and though I would recognise him anywhere, I realised I had not really known him at all; this was not how I remembered him, though the winning expression was there. He was younger here, wearing uniform, looking as freshly minted as a new coin. I could not help but smile, and for the first time felt his presence in the house he had lived in and died in. I thought back to the brightly lit doorway beside Russell’s coffee house, the way he’d looked at me across the street. Had I taken a left and not a right that day, walked on down the wide thoroughfare of Fenchurch Street and not turned left into Gracechurch Street, I would not have been standing here in a quiet bedroom in Bloomsbury, about to become a thief. The last seven years had led me to this moment. All the things I needed were in this house, and now I’d found them. I put both parts of the whalebone heart in my pocket with the tin tag and closed the box quietly, and went downstairs for more cream for the cabbage.

  ‘You ain’t scared of the dark, are you, girl?’ Lyle asked Charlotte. We were moving east through narrow streets somewhere around Gray’s Inn. Being so unused to strangers and walking outside, Charlotte had closed up like a mussel, and did not reply. I’d seen her eyeing Lyle’s unlit torch, which towered above his head. I hadn’t taken a link before, sticking only to the streets I knew after dark, when I had to go out at all. The night watchmen – Charlies, Lyle called them – would be about with their sticks and lanterns, calling out the hour and the state of the weather, plodding up and down like overfed cats, before retiring to their boxes for a game of cards and a nip of brandy. Lyle was avoiding the thoroughfares and using the streets and passages, living as he did in the darkness; his feet were his eyes and ears.

  ‘Who’s the cove, then?’ he had asked, on one of our moonlit meetings.

  I’d taken a swig of beer and passed him the bottle. ‘The mistress’s husband, but he’s dead now.’

  He let out a long, low whistle. ‘And how’d you meet him?’

  ‘Russell’s coffee house, near the Exchange. Do you know it?’

  ‘Not in the daytime I wouldn’t. What’s a giggler like you doing in a coffee house? They don’t let women in. Ah, was it one of them coffee houses? With the hand on the pot, keeping it nice and warm for the swells?’

  I knew he was teasing me and stuck him with my elbow. ‘Shut it, or I’ll find a place for your torch so dark it’ll never light again. No, he was coming out, and I was walking past.’

  ‘And that’s how you got poisoned, is it? Just walked past? That’s a new one.’

  ‘I didn’t know he was married. I didn’t know anything about him, other than his job. Still don’t, living in his house. There ain’t a picture of him, none of his things nowhere. It’s like he was never there.’

  ‘Did you try and find him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He might have helped you, if he’d known.’

  ‘I think we both know he would not.’

  The night had been cold, and I thought he would go back to work, but he said: ‘Do you know what I would have been, if I weren’t a moon curser?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I like growing things, you see. Which ain’t easy on the fourth floor, but on the sills we have rosemary and sage and thyme. I even tried tomatoes last summer, but they never turned red. I want my own garden outside the city. Lambeth, perhaps, or Chelsea. Somewhere green and spacious, where I can grow things for the markets: apples, cabbage, carrots, turnips. I’d love that, taking ’em in a cart to Covent Garden.’

  ‘I’ve never had a tomato. And I’ve never known any-one dream of working on the markets, neither,’ I said. ‘It’s early mornings and cold winters, outside all the time.’

  ‘Well, I’m late nights and cold winters, ain’t I? Same difference.’

  I shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t care if I never saw a shrimp again.’

  ‘I’d sooner smell of a tomato than a shrimp. Not that you do. You’re a bed of roses, you are.’

  But I knew that I was not, and though the Billingsgate smell had faded in place of the starch and lye of service, and we’d both escaped our lives for a short time to imagine ourselves a nursemaid and a market gardener, I was still a shrimp girl, and he a linkboy.

  The next time he came he brought out his hand from behind his back, and on it sat one of the bright, round fruits that had more colour in its flesh than the whole street, than the whole of London. I bit into it and wet, cold sweetness flooded my mouth. I do not know how he had found a tomato in London in winter, but that was Lyle: he brought light, and he brought tomatoes.

  ‘Stop.’ I put a hand on his arm, and we paused in a narrow street high with cramped buildings: warehouses or store rooms, shut up for the night.

  Lyle had lit his torch once we’d crossed the Holbourn thoroughfare, and it threw light in a shallow pool around us. I expected we were somewhere south of Clerkenwell, from the way we’d come. This was not the city I knew, the London of night; I had joined the shadow dwellers, the criminals. I peered into the darkness behind us, thicker than tar. Had I heard footsteps?

  ‘We ain’t stopping,’ he said, pulling us along. We came to the mouth of the alley onto a wider, quiet street with a few windows lit in the upper floors, distant but reassuring.

  ‘How’d you do, angel?’ I whispered.

  Charlotte was tired, her eyes dull. She was too big for me to carry but I wished I could.

  ‘We’ll be home soon,’ I told her. ‘And you’ll meet your grandpa, and I’ll put a nice warm brick in your bed, which is right beside mine. Then tomorrow morning we shall go and find a new house, just the two of us. How does that sound?’

  She was silent. A few minutes later Lyle’s torch showed the sign of the Drum and Monkey, and I looked for the spire of the church down the lane, and knew that we were only a few streets from Ludgate Hill. I told Lyle he could leave us.

  ‘I ain’t doing my job if I leave you,’ he replied
.

  ‘Oi!’ came a cry out of the darkness, sending me cold with fear. ‘Oi, you.’

  The slim frame of a man appeared. I gripped Charlotte’s hand so tight it might have snapped, and prepared to run.

  ‘Need a glim for a sedan going to Soho,’ the man said, his shoes echoing on the cobbles.

  ‘I got someone,’ Lyle said.

  ‘Oh, is that right?’ The man peered at us, his face solidifying before the flame. He was old, with baggy skin and a foul-looking wig. We passed by him, and I kept my head down, catching the sharp whiff of brandy.

  A merry fiddle was playing in the tavern at the end of the street – and inside people were whooping and stamping their feet. I had no idea what time it was. We crept in single file through Bell Savage Yard and onwards into Black and White Court. Lyle’s torch burned white, and we came to a stop at the mouth of our lodgings. All was quiet; a dog barked distantly, but the building looked to be asleep. I breathed out, a long, low sigh that I had not known I’d been holding. Lyle had a triumphant look, a smile curling the right side of his lips.

  ‘What do I owe you?’ I asked him.

  ‘How about a kiss?’

  The torch choked and spluttered. I drew Charlotte into its pool, and she stood, statue-like, her eyes serious. I leaned down and spoke into her ear. ‘Charlotte, what do we say to Lyle for bringing us home safe?’