The Foundling

by Halls, Stacey

  ‘Only thing is, miss,’ he muttered, shuffling his feet, ‘as it’s me sister what took her, and I’d hate to see her in gaol . . . specially if it’s at my hand, you understand. As it’s me sister, I was hoping you’d let her go. In exchange for the little one.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, understanding. They had come up with the scheme together, then. All this time I’d fastened locks to my doors and windows, thinking I’d keep out the thieves that way. Instead I’d invited one to live with me in my home, and was now offering my money to another. ‘Very well,’ I said again. ‘You’ll take a man with you: Mr Bloor, at Chancery Lane. His office is at the sign of the falcon. Tell him to take a carriage.’

  He nodded, his mouth working all the time, as if he was chewing tobacco, and as soon as he was gone I shuddered, overwhelmed by a desire to open the windows and air the room.

  The carriage clock ticked faithfully on the mantelpiece in its mahogany case, and I watched the slim gold hand travel around and around as the light left the room. Doctor Mead did not come, nor did anybody else. On a table next to me was a pile of newspapers – in each of which I’d placed daily notices for Charlotte’s safe return – as well as the details of Benjamin Bloor, the private thief-taker Doctor Mead had found in the General Advertiser. There had been an engraving of him, wearing a cloth cap and holding a mace as he professed his services of investigation and reprimand. Doctor Mead had arranged it all: the commission, the fee. Mr Bloor had come to the house to take everything down, making large, looping notes in a leather-bound book. I’d been overwhelmed by the size of him; his hands were like small frying pans. His skin was smooth and tanned like leather, and he had small, piggish eyes that sat close to his misshapen nose. I had no likeness of Charlotte to give him: no miniature, not even a sketch. He’d advised we place our own advertisements in the newssheets, and Doctor Mead had taken care of that as well: twelve in total.

  ‘And the girl, Bess,’ Mr Bloor had said. ‘I assume you want her apprehended?’

  I had been silent for a minute. The carriage clock ticked, and Mr Bloor and Doctor Mead waited, watching me intently.

  ‘What would that entail?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I’d inform the magistrate, and when she’s found she’d be held in a cell until her trial.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then either she would be acquitted.’ There was an idleness to his tone that implied that would not be likely. ‘Or she would be charged. In which case: Newgate, most likely, if she’s sent to gaol. Or she might be transported to the colonies. Or hanged. Depends who’s got the gavel on the day.’ He smiled at this, as if he’d made a joke.

  I swallowed, and moved in my chair. ‘When you find her, bring her to me,’ I said. ‘Then I will decide.’

  The thief-taker had raised an eyebrow at that, and made a discreet note in his book. Doctor Mead had taken my hand, and squeezed it.

  And who had come forwards but Bess’s brother. I did not trust him an inch, and wasn’t certain he would return with the child. At a quarter after midnight I decided I had been proved right, and began to move up to bed, gathering the greatcoat around me and taking up my brandy glass. But before I set foot on the stairs, the door-knocker banged again through the house like a hammer. I froze with one hand on the banister. The servants were both asleep, and I had not told them what the man, Ned, had promised. Made bold by the liquor, I went downstairs myself, hearing the creak and murmur of Agnes two floors above. The hallway was pitch-black, and I shuffled in Daniel’s coat to the door, fumbling at the locks and opening it to find two people on the doorstep: the powerful presence of Mr Bloor, and struggling in his arms, weeping openly, a small boy. Behind them, a two-wheeled carriage was parked at the railings. I stared at them in confusion, and wondered how this smooth, idiotic man had mistaken this boy for Charlotte.

  Then Mr Bloor tugged the cap from the child’s head, and I saw a mass of dark hair, pinned in an elaborate plait, and the eyes, large and frightened.

  I fell to my knees, and reached for her. She shrank away from me, but was stuck fast in Mr Bloor’s strong grip, and protested loudly. We brought her inside just as Agnes appeared at the foot of the stairs with a candle and gave an almighty cry, and my legs gave out altogether.

  ‘Miss Charlotte,’ Agnes was braying, over and over, and it was Charlotte; she was here before us, flushed and dirty and coughing. Agnes was beside herself, sobbing and hugging the child, and Maria arrived a moment later, shrouded in a blanket, and their presence and the fretful noises they were making confirmed it: Charlotte was home, and the six long days and nights of hell were over.

  I’d been assisted to a chair, and sat helplessly, watching the two women murmur and paw at her, taking off her wet jacket and wiping her nose when she sneezed. Mr Bloor towered above this sentimental scene like a Pall Mall statue, while Charlotte wept and coughed and spluttered, and in a whirlwind of activity she was carried upstairs for a bath.

  ‘She will need close attention,’ he was saying. ‘I would advise you send for a doctor.’

  My foggy mind tried to make sense of his words. I could hear Charlotte crying upstairs, sobbing fit to burst, and the sound was unbearable, like a fiddle played wrong. Mr Bloor announced his departure, replacing his hat with black-gloved hands, and said he would call tomorrow. I did not move, was still clutching the sides of the hard-backed chair in the hall, rubbing the smooth wood with my thumbs.

  I’d had to tell Doctor Mead everything, of course. That Charlotte was not mine – Daniel’s, but not mine – and I had retrieved her, like Moses from the reeds, and raised her as my own. That dreadful night, when Bess took her – for now I knew who she was I could not think of her as Eliza – we’d sat in Charlotte’s room in the moonlight, me on her bed, him on Bess’s, and the whole sorry mess had come unspooled. He’d listened in silence as I told him of that winter night all those years ago, when Ambrosia came tearing into the house as I’d been readying for bed. I’d not been a widow long; Daniel had been dead seven months. The landscape of my life had been rubbed away and painted over anew, and I was only beginning to grow used to it.

  My sister had appeared in my bedroom in a gust of ribbons and skirts, bringing with her the briskness of a November night. Her cheeks were pink, and her eyes shining.

  ‘Daniel has a daughter,’ she’d said.

  I’d stood before her, barefoot in my nightgown, my hair falling down my back, failing to understand her. She’d said it again, and I asked if she was sure, and she said yes, yes, she was, and what did I want to do about it.

  ‘Do about it?’ I’d asked in surprise.

  ‘The child is at the Foundling Hospital, not half a mile from here. Will you make her stay there, in a nursery of sick children, until she is old enough to work as a maid?’

  ‘A maid?’ I’d said, as though that was the most shocking thing of all. I’d felt for the edge of the bed and sat on it, taking Daniel’s pillow onto my lap and listening in disbelief as Ambrosia told me how, months ago, in January or possibly February, she had gone to one of the more raucous taverns near the Exchange, where women were permitted, and where whores roamed the tables. She had gone with a friend and her husband, a sergeant, who brought a pack of soldiers in high spirits, and sitting there at their crowded table, among the smoke and the sawdust she’d spotted Daniel across the room. It was too noisy to call out to him and, besides, a moment later he got up to go, but he led by the hand a woman – a girl, really – who she had taken to be a whore. She took her drink and followed them, stopping at his table to ask who the pretty girl was. His companions had shrugged, and she’d stepped outside to find him, and turned a corner to see them moving together in the dark. She had gone back to her table and not told a soul about it. Then Daniel had died, and she’d forgotten it altogether, until that cold night later that year, when she was invited to the lottery at the Foundling Hospital to watch women leave their babies. She told me about the coloured balls and how the women drew them from a bag; a dreadful s
port, but it brought a tear to the eye, and the guests paid handsomely for it. But there, she went on, she had seen the same woman, dark-eyed and frightened, standing with her father, holding a baby in one arm and reaching with the other into the cloth bag. It had taken a few moments to place her, but when she had, she was certain it was the same girl. From behind her fan Ambrosia had watched her draw one and be shown into a side room, and ten minutes later she had emerged with empty arms and a shocked white face. The woman’s father had led her gravely from the grand room, where trays of punch circulated among the guests, and the tinkle of glasses and laughter drowned out the pleading from the new mothers, and the occasional cry of the babies. Ambrosia had closed her fan and marched into the side room and asked the clerk very sweetly the name of the dark-haired girl in the grey dress, and was told that the mothers’ names were not recorded. Then she had asked, even more sweetly, with a flutter of her fan, about the tokens she had heard of, and what sort of thing they left, and could he show her one, so that she could describe it to her friends outside? With his breath smelling of coffee and decay, the clerk explained how the unmarried mothers left parts of themselves, cutting their dresses to pieces and scratching their initials into coins to leave with their children, should they ever return. On the table by his elbow was an odd, jagged little D shape, which looked like a gambling token or a small brooch, and when she gestured towards it the eager clerk was more than happy to oblige, placing the strange object into her gloved hand. It turned out to be half a heart, made of whalebone, and scored with initials: B and C.

  I was glad to have been sitting then, because whatever doubt I had – that this girl was a whore, that it could have been any man’s child between Westminster and Whitechapel – evaporated as I brought out my little ebony box, and showed Ambrosia the polished ivory heart-half, and watched her face turn white to match it. I had known, of course, that Daniel took women; I asked him to, the third or fourth time he had come to me at night. It always made me rigid and afraid, and I would close up like an oyster shell, before finally, gratefully, sealing off that part of myself.

  That night, Ambrosia had gone after the dark-haired woman in the grey dress, who had come with her father. She followed them discreetly in her carriage to a crowded, festering part of the city, where tall houses gave way to leaking courts and dark alleys. She’d expected to arrive at a brothel and that be the end of it, but the driver pulled up on Ludgate Hill at the narrow entrance to a court, and she had asked him to wait as she slipped in behind them and followed them to a door that seemed to be ordinary lodgings. She’d waited until someone appeared, aware she might be robbed of her things at any moment, and asked them who the dark-haired girl was who lived with her father, and who had been in childbed. The neighbour had been surprised, but said it sounded like Bess Bright, who lived at number three, and confirmed the name of the court. And, no, she was not a whore – she worked as a shrimp girl. That was enough for Ambrosia to come straight to me at Devonshire Street.

  I listened to all of this in my nightgown, feeling as though my head was stuffed with wool as she told me she would arrange everything, and send one of her servants to claim the baby, telling her to give Bess’s name and address, so that if she did come back the child could never be traced. As well as claiming her being the charitable thing to do, Ambrosia said, a child would be company, and, besides, it was unlikely I’d have any of my own, with me a widow and my thirty-fourth birthday a fortnight before. She insisted that not only did I owe Daniel this, for taking me away from Aunt Cassandra’s miserable mansion, but that I could give the child a comfortable life. She made the whole affair sound like a stray dog had turned up at the kitchen door.

  By the time I finally climbed into bed that night, somehow I had agreed to be a mother, with a daughter arriving the next day. A polished wooden cradle belonging to Ambrosia arrived that morning, along with piles of snowy gowns and blankets and caps and sleeves, and printed cotton outfits for when the baby grew. I had to find space for them all, and sent the servants out in the midst of it, losing my temper when they asked where I wanted them to go. And before the afternoon was out, when the house was silent and lifeless, the door-knocker pounded once more and Ambrosia was on the steps with a soft, pink creature in her arms, like one of Maria’s flayed rabbits. When she handed her to me, I took her stiffly, looking at her eyelashes, fine as silk threads, and her tiny nose. She was the same size as a bag of flour, and I felt, then, the enormous weight of how my life had changed irrevocably, from order to chaos.

  ‘What shall I call her?’ I had asked in the dim hallway.

  ‘How about Marianne, for Mama?’

  I shook my head. It had not been a lucky name for her. I thought about the token her mother had left, the B for Bess, and C for . . .

  ‘Charlotte?’ I said.

  ‘Charlotte Callard.’ Ambrosia had beamed. ‘How splendid.’

  I think she thought Charlotte would be the making of me, or perhaps the undoing of the person I’d become. I would disappoint her on both counts.

  Doctor Mead had listened to my story in silence, his jaw tight and pulsing, his eyes never leaving my face. In all the years we’d known one another, he had been ignorant of so many things about me – my parents’ murders, Daniel’s infidelities, and the fact that I had not given him a child, but that he had given me one from beyond the grave.

  By the time I had finished, daylight was deepening over the rooftops on the houses beyond. He sat in silence, touching his lips, painted with concern in a most familiar way that I longed for even as I saw it, fearful I’d never know it again. When he did not speak, I could not bear it.

  ‘Am I despicable?’ I asked.

  His brow was furrowed. I’d hoped for an immediate reply, and did not get one.

  ‘No,’ he said, after a while.

  ‘Do you think me selfish?’

  Again he said no, but sighed very deeply, and took up a toy of Charlotte’s, a spinning top, which had lain discarded on the floor. I saw in his face a reckoning, a dawning understanding, of the lukewarm affection I’d always shown Charlotte, and why I did not take her on my knee like the mothers in the pictures. Finally he looked at me, and asked a question so simple I had not been expecting it.

  ‘Why did you not tell me?’

  I opened my mouth and closed it, and looked beyond him at the striped wallpaper.

  ‘I suppose,’ I said slowly, after a short silence, ‘I thought you might find me weak.’

  ‘Weak how?’

  ‘A failure, then. The purpose of women is to become wives, and the purpose of wives to become mothers. What woman would wish to raise a child who is not her own?’

  ‘But children are brought up by women who are not their mothers all over London, all over the country. Men remarry after their wives die; relatives take children in. Some women do it very well, others not so, but you and Charlotte are mother and daughter in every way but blood.’

  ‘Charlotte was illegitimate; Daniel and I were married. You must see why I did it this way: she could never know she was not mine. Ambrosia knew, of course, and the servants would have guessed because one day a baby arrived and I had not been expecting one. But if I’d told anybody else – not that I have many to tell – it might have got back to Charlotte.’

  ‘I understand why you did not tell her. But I feel now as though I’ve been deceived, not once but twice.’

  ‘Twice?’

  ‘By you and Eliza – Bess, whatever her name is. She told me her name was Bess, you know, in the beginning. Then she said it was false, and she’d invented it because of the shame. I believed her. I sympathised with her.’

  ‘Do not put me with her. She lied to you for her own gain; she played a devilish trick on both of us. More than that, she was deceitful, over and over, every day. How can you compare us?’

  His eyes were glassy with defeat. ‘I wish she had been honest, but of course she had to hoodwink me. Imagine if she had come to me and said you had her daughter!
I would have thought her crazed. At the very least I would have sent her away.’ He rubbed his knuckles against his mouth. ‘And now I feel wholly responsible for inviting her into your home and your life. But I do feel sympathy for her.’

  ‘How can you say that? She has stolen my child from me.’

  ‘She could say the same about you!’

  There was no mistaking the hardness in his voice. Immediately he apologised, and, I think, meant it, but it was too late – he had said it, and could not take it back. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘this is much more complex than charging her as a thief, for she is the child’s mother.’

  I glared at him. ‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

  ‘The courts will not prosecute a woman who has stolen her own daughter.’

  ‘Of course they will,’ I snapped. ‘I have raised her, fed and clothed her. I have taught her lessons and nursed her when she was sick. I have more of a claim to her. I am not the whore who abandoned her at some pox-ridden baby farm.’

  He winced at that.

  ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘beyond her word, there is no proof the child belongs to her.’

  He stared at me. ‘Will you deceive the magistrate, and call her the liar?’

  ‘I have not thought that far ahead.’

  ‘Well, think on it now, Alexandra, because the theft of a child is a serious claim! Would you see her hanged?’

  I sat silently, feeling he was testing me, watching me closely with a twitching anticipation. A shadow passed briefly over his face, and he nodded warily and stood.

  ‘I will ask the watchman if there is any news,’ he said, and went from the room without looking at me.

  There had been a coolness between us ever since, packed like a layer of ice over what was already a wholly nightmarish business, and through it all I could not decide which was the worse experience: grief or shame.