Searcher

by T J Alexander

  THE

  SEARCHER

  THE

  SEARCHER

  T. J. Alexander

  ROBERT HALE

  First published in 2018 by

  Robert Hale, an imprint of

  The Crowood Press Ltd,

  Ramsbury, Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.crowood.com

  This e-book first published in 2018

  © T.J. Alexander 2018

  All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of thistext may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 71982 685 6

  The right of T.J. Alexander to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  PART ONE

  LOST

  The Child’s Story

  October 1814

  IN THE BEGINNING, EACH sensation is cosmic, vast, all-encompassing. The warm sweet smell of milk from a leaking breast. The soft darkness within embracing arms, thrumming with a regular beat that seems like the beat of the world itself. Sounds still lack shape or name. Humming, wailing, clanking, clopping: without a net of words in which to catch these sensations, they all flow past, endlessly flowing into wind and sky and the ceaseless circling of light and darkness.

  If she had possessed words with which to catch her feelings, she might, later on, have remembered what it felt like to lie in the crook of her mother’s right arm, her toes occasionally tangling with the wriggling thing which lay in her mother’s left arm. She might have remembered the swaying sensation of being carried along in her mother’s embrace, on the day that changed her life and the lives of everyone around her. The motion was soothing, and she snuggled into the darkness, hearing the drone of voices above her head.

  Then, abruptly, the warm dark was ripped open by a gust of chill wind. Light and a chaos of shapes and sounds assailed her eyes and ears. The cloak which had covered her whipped back and was swept away by the wind. Panic rose through her throat towards the gaping circle of her mouth. But at that moment some tickling speck of dust entered her throat, and the sound that came out was not the impending scream of terror, but just a small sneeze.

  Now new arms reached out to her, and she was again enfolded and wrapped in an embrace which smelled completely unfamiliar: sharp and un-milky. She whimpered a little, but the regular rocking movement began again, and warmth flowed through her body, and she saw nothing but the drowsy red darkness behind her own eyelids.

  It was a change in the rocking movement that woke her: a sudden speed. No longer rocking, but jolting, jerking. She opened her mouth, and now the screams came freely. And from somewhere behind, she heard an echoing scream, growing fainter and fainter as the beat of feet accelerated.

  In those moments, the sensations were everything: her entire world. But she had no words to hold them. And so they flowed and floated away, leaving not a single trace of memory. They were caught up by the wind, and mixed into the dust and sand and scraps of straw, and amidst the detritus of wood shavings and chicken feathers, they blew away, high into the grimy autumn sky that hung over the Commercial Road, and then out over the great river beyond.

  Adah’s Story

  January 1822

  The Stranger

  THE LITTLE GIRL LIES on a small truckle bed in the watch-room of the Norton Folgate courthouse. She lies perfectly still on her back, hands folded across her chest. Strands of damp brown hair adhere to her forehead. The room is so dark that Adah Flint can barely see the child’s face.

  ‘Open the shutters, please,’ she says to Jonah Hall, who is standing impassively at the opposite end of the room, arms crossed above his expanding paunch.

  Even when the wooden shutters creak open, the light that falls through the glass is weak and dusty. Adah notices the shadows of cobweb in a corner of the window. The room looks more untidy than usual – the big table along one wall littered with lamps and candle-holders, quills and ink stands, and piled high with books of all sizes for recording the long litany of local crimes. The ropes for restraining uncooperative offenders are not neatly coiled as they should be, but sprawl in untidy heaps under the table. Adah remembers that she has not cleaned this room for two weeks, what with everything else….

  The girl, she can now see, is maybe seven or eight years old. How peaceful she looks, and how unnaturally clean. She has been covered with a rough linen nightshirt several sizes too large for her. Her clothes, still sodden from the rain, lie folded in a forlorn pile beside the bed. Adah picks them up one by one, holding them out towards the light as she examines them. A little black cloak, damp but strangely unstained. A frock that may once have been pink, but is now a blotchy white; a black stuff petticoat, frayed and muddy round the hem; a faded blue pinafore, also adorned with a patch of mud; a flannel undershirt, a little too small for its wearer, with yellowish marks around the armholes, but carefully mended in two places. Adah runs her fingertip over the neat stitches of the mending.

  This is no foundling or workhouse child. Someone cared for her; someone cares for her still.

  When Adah pushes the hair back from the child’s brow, she can see a discoloured patch on the left temple, which seems slightly indented, although the surface of the skin has not been broken. The room smells of soap and herbs and something sour. A clock ticks remorselessly on the wall, and a fly buzzes against the window pane. Outside in the street, a cart rumbles past and a woman’s voice gives a muffled curse. And then suddenly the bells of St. Leonard’s Church start to pour their cascade of pure sound into the morning air.

  Adah lifts the nightgown, and slowly and carefully looks at the girl’s thin legs. So thin, she could wrap a finger around the ankle. One knee is marked by a fading white scar. She examines the concave belly and slightly protruding lower ribs. Hungry, thinks Adah, but not starved. Apart from the mark on the child’s forehead, there are no signs of injury or violence.

  It is not death that is the mystery, but life. A day or two ago, a spark inhabited this small body. An entire world, a universe of sense and memories and dreams. With outstretched finger, Adah lightly touches the belly that will now never swell with child. There are worlds that will never come into being now, world after world vanished as completely as bubbles burst in air. Adah is so intent on the child’s lifeless body that she fails to notice Annie enter the room and take her place on a chair at the head of the bed. It is Jonah’s voice that alerts her.

  ‘What’s your daughter doing here?’ he barks.

  Annie glances neither at Jonah Hall nor at Adah. She has taken her paper and quill, and is swiftly, deftly, sketching lines in black ink. Adah watches her for a moment, with an odd ache in her heart. Annie’s face is calm, her mind and body focused on her task of capturing the image of the child’s face on paper. The light from the opened casement illuminates the soft line of Annie’s cheek and her downcast eye as she draws. Is it right that one so young should become so familiar with the sight of death? But Adah has never been able to protect her children from death. Not from the deaths of their brothers and sisters, nor from the sight of bodies brought to the ground floor of the courthouse where they grew up, nor from the sight of their own father’s body, stretched fully-clothed on the b
ig bed upstairs….

  ‘Mr Hall,’ Adah replies acerbically, ‘you used to treat me with greater respect when my husband was Beadle. William may be gone, but I’ll ask you to remember that I am now Searcher of this Liberty. It is my task to discover who this child was and what befell her. My daughter is helping me. How am I to fulfil my duties unless I have a likeness of her face?’

  ‘It’s probably a foreigner,’ says Hall dismissively. ‘A Portuguee as like as not. Or maybe a gypsy. They’re everywhere these days.’

  ‘It …’ notes Adah silently.

  Adah straightens the nightshirt, and with her right hand, which looks so large and red and hard beside the child’s delicate form, strokes the little girl’s head. The hair is surprisingly fine, like strands of wet silk.

  Annie’s sketch is done already. Adah always wonders at the speed with which her daughter draws portraits. The sketch on the paper is a fair impression of the child’s waxy face, though the mouth seems slightly awry. Annie glances up at her mother, who nods and, arm in arm, they leave the room in silence, with a brief gesture to Jonah Hall, standing as stolid as ever at his post.

  As always after examining a body, Adah finds herself closing the door of the room very softly, as though anxious not to disturb the sleep of the dead.

  Hetty Yandall, the Liberty’s scavenger, wears a rusty brown canvas cloak over her dress when she is working. Striding down White Lion Street on this winter’s day, her cloak billowing out in the wind, she looks for all the world like a Thames barge under full sail. The impression is somehow strengthened by her unusually large feet, encased in bulky brown work boots.

  The rain, which has been pouring down relentlessly for days, has lifted briefly, and a watery light pierces the clouds at the far end of the street, glittering on the ripples that blow across countless puddles in the uneven paving; but above the roofs and chimney pots, another mass of clouds is already gathering. Hetty Yandall’s figure, splashing heedlessly through the puddles, is silhouetted by the fleeting shafts of light. She seems vast, mythical, unstoppable. Adah stands on the steps of the courthouse, drawing her own thin black cloak around her shoulders as she watches this apparition approaching.

  ‘Ah, Mrs Flint,’ booms the scavenger as soon as she is within earshot. ‘A sad business, a sad business. And you, you are well, you and the children? You’re managing on your own?’

  It is an awkward greeting, and for a moment, Adah is unsure how to reply. She realizes that this is the first time she has exchanged more than a word or two with Mrs Yandall since William’s death, and recalls that her dead husband and the scavenger heartily loathed one another.

  ‘We’re doing well enough,’ she murmurs, ‘as well as can be expected.’

  But she senses, too, a note of rough kindness in Hetty Yandall’s voice.

  ‘That poor dead child,’ continues the scavenger, ‘just the age of my youngest, by the look of her. It gave me such a nasty turn to find her lying there, cold and wet and alone, first thing this morning. My innards fairly churned over, and they’ve not righted themselves yet. You’ll want to see the spot where I found the poor lamb. Come along.’

  And she turns abruptly on her heel and heads down Blossom Street, with Adah almost running behind to keep up with the scavenger’s energetic stride. Mrs Yandall is carrying her big hessian sack draped over one shoulder, though the sack is empty, and her greying red hair, so often wild and uncombed, has been tied in a knot under her bulging brown bonnet. A couple of small children pause in the midst of their game of hopscotch to watch nervously as she passes, and Adah remembers how William used to say to their own little ones, ‘Look at that sack. You know what she’s got in there? Bad children. Children who don’t do what they were told. Taking them to throw in the Thames, she is.’

  On the corner of Blossom Street, a little wizened man has set up a wooden crate on which he is carefully arranging a pathetic array of wares – a handful of potatoes and onions that seem almost as shrivelled as the man himself. Nearby, an old soldier in the ragged remains of a red jacket sits in a doorway with one hand stretched out to passers-by while the other sleeve hangs empty over a missing arm.

  How quickly things have changed since William’s death.

  Hetty Yandall seems to read Adah’s thoughts, for she glances back with a sardonic half-smile.

  ‘Your William would have had them off the street before they could give him the time of day,’ she observes, ‘but this new beadle Beavis is a puzzle. Speaks to me so soft and gentle that I can barely hear what he’s saying, and lets all sorts of riffraff set themselves up in the street to make mischief, but I’ve heard say that he has a devil of a temper when he’s crossed. Not that I’ve seen it myself, yet …’

  ‘He’s always been perfectly polite to me,’ responds Adah, a little stiffly.

  ‘Polite enough to turf you out of your own house and home so that he can be lord of courthouse,’ retorts the scavenger. ‘You should stand up to him, Mrs Flint. Your William and his father turned that house from a ruin into what it is today. And you’re Searcher now, aren’t you? You’ve got the right to live there, you and your children.’

  Adah falls silent. Unlike William, who always spoke scornfully of ‘that rag-and-bone woman’, she feels an uneasy admiration for Mrs Yandall. There is something powerful about the scavenger’s tall, broad-shouldered frame, her steady gaze and her refusal to bow and curtsey to her superiors. She manages her brood of children – is it nine or ten? – in the same forthright manner that she drives hard bargains with the Norton Folgate trustees and puts the officers of the watch in their place if they dare to cross her. Of a Mr Yandall, there is no sign. Some say he ran off to sea to escape his wife, or that he’s languishing somewhere in a debtors’ prison. Others say there never was a Mr Yandall, and that Hetty’s brood are the children of many fathers. None of which seems to worry Hetty Yandall in the least. She keeps the streets clean, and makes a handsome income from the treasures that turn up in her sweepings. As far as she is concerned, people may say what they like. Adah wishes she shared the scavenger’s self-sufficient confidence. But she doesn’t want this woman’s sympathy, and cringes to think that her affairs are talked about by strangers. The fact that Mrs Yandall’s words echo her own thoughts only makes matters worse.

  The cobbles of Blossom Street are slippery after the rain, and little rivulets of water the colour of ale run down either side of the road. Mrs Yandall is still holding forth about the new beadle, but her words are drowned out by the clatter of the shuttles from Loom Court, the cries of a sand man and the frantic barking of a pair of brindled mongrel dogs who are fighting over something that looks like a chewed slipper. As they pass the windows of the charity school, a chorus of girls’ voices mindlessly chanting a lesson adds another thread to the texture of sounds. Adah glances uneasily at the grimy brick walls of a small tenement on the left: the place into which she and her six children will somehow have to cram themselves in two weeks’ time, when they leave the courthouse forever. The very thought of the impending move fills her with a leaden sense of exhaustion and dread.

  Before they reach the Blossom Street almshouses, Hetty Yandall turns down Magpie Alley and stops by a battered fence, from which a wooden gate hangs precariously, half on and half off its hinges. Beyond, a muddy path leads between the backs of houses into the gardens and waste land between Blossom Street and Bishopsgate. It is a dank and unappealing corner. A heavy smell of rotting greenery hangs in the air as they squeeze their way through the broken gate but Hetty Yandall strides confidently ahead, thrusting through the overgrown privet that almost chokes the pathway.

  Beyond is a row of walled gardens, where Adah can glimpse the bare branches of fruit trees and the withered stems of beans still clinging to their bean poles. The place has a strange, stifling feel: an island of wildness penned in by the stern brown brick walls of the rows of houses on either side. After the clamour of Blossom Street, it is suddenly silent here. The only sounds are the liquid notes
of a song thrush perched on a dead tree branch, and the soft tap of the rain which is beginning to fall again.

  ‘It’s pure luck I came here first thing today,’ says Mrs Yandall. ‘I don’t come every day, nor even every week, to be honest. But I was passing and saw the gate off its hinges and thought, maybe someone’s been in here. You get tramps and tinkers and all sorts now and then, and who knows what mess they may leave behind. Thank God I came. To think that poor child might have been left lying there for days, weeks … horrible!’

  Where the gardens end, they come to an overgrown space which must once have been a livery yard, but is now a jungle of rank grasses and littered with empty barrels and broken cart wheels.

  ‘If I had my way I’d clear all that lot out,’ says Mrs Yandall, gesturing at the decaying mass of timber, ‘but they tell me it belongs to old Hodges that works for Mr Tillard, and I’m not to touch it.’ And then, more softly, ‘Here it is. Here’s the very place where I found her.’

  Adah can see at once how the grass is pressed down and crushed in one spot. She can almost trace the imprint of the small body that lay there. The ground beneath is soft and muddy, but when she bends and parts the tangle of damp grass, she glimpses something pale concealed amongst its stems. Cautiously, so as not to cut her fingers on the razor edges of the lush leaves of grass, she runs her hands through the hollow in the vegetation, and reaches down to feel among its earthy roots. Her hands touch stone; smooth, worn sandstone. A largish lump of weathered stone lies concealed by the riot of weeds that have reclaimed the abandoned yard. Perhaps an old mounting block. In her mind’s eye, she can see the scene all too clearly: the child, probably lost, running through the grass, and then slipping, or maybe catching her leg in some snare of weeds; falling forward, her head cracking against the rounded corner of the stone block. It would, at least, have been very quick, she thinks.