Searcher

by T J Alexander

  For a moment, she and Hetty Yandall stand side by side in silence, looking down at the child-sized impression in the grass.

  ‘How long do you think she’d been lying here?’

  ‘Most of the night, I’d say,’ replies the scavenger. ‘Her clothes were soaked through with the rain when I found her. And look, let me show you something else.’

  In a corner of the wasteland stand the ruined remains of a stable block. The roof is caved in in places, and blackened beams like the ribs of a dead animal stand exposed to the elements. But when Adah fights her way through the long grass to the building, she can see that the wooden stalls are still standing. In a couple of them are mounds of straw, mouldering but quite dry. After the sour odour of the muddy pathway, the straw smells warm and sweet.

  Adah steps cautiously into the stable. The floorboards beneath her feet sag and creak, threatening to give way at any moment. A broad shaft of hazy light slanting through the broken roof only serves to cast the recesses of the building into deeper shadow. Drops of rain glisten on a huge cobweb that hangs like a curtain from the central timber beam, dividing the visible stalls at the front of building from the impenetrable darkness beyond. A little way inside the entrance, she sees what the scavenger is pointing at. A mound of straw has been freshly disturbed, piled up into a heap and then pressed down into a makeshift bed. To a small lost child on a rainy night, this would have been an appealing spot, the straw warm and the fragments of remaining roof providing some shelter from the weather. The child would have slept here, and perhaps been startled by something, woken confused in the night or in the half-light of morning, stumbled out into the long grass, tripped and fallen …

  Adah bends down and prods carefully at the straw, hoping that there might be some trace of the child’s presence: a kerchief or a bundle of possessions that might give some clue to her identity. But there is nothing. Just a few scuffed muddy marks and the churned straw, seeming somehow to emit the last fading warmth of the child’s vanished life.

  A sharp rattling sound startles her. Deep in the darkest corner of the stables, something has stirred: a sound like a small pile of wooden poles being knocked awry.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Adah calls.

  There is silence; a silence so intense that, for a moment, she can sense some other living being in the recesses of the stable keeping absolutely, unnaturally still. She gets to her feet and moves very cautiously towards the darkened rear of the building. When she steps from light to dark, the blackness is total, and the floorboards beneath her feet sag more alarmingly than ever. Her own breathing sounds too loud, and she holds herself very still to see if she can hear the breath of another living creature, but the silence is as thick and heavy as the darkness itself. Very gingerly, she takes a step forward, and then another, and at that moment, her foot cracks right through a rotten board, badly scratching her ankle. She yelps with surprise and pain, and at the same instant, a scrawny tabby cat hurtles out of the interior darkness with a snarl and shoots past her into the wilderness outside the stable door. Laughing ruefully, Adah hobbles out of the ruined stable, rubbing her ankle.

  The scavenger pats her arm sympathetically. ‘Drat them stray cats,’ she says. ‘The bane of my life, they are.’

  Now that she looks more closely, Adah can clearly see the line of crushed grass leading from the stables to the spot where the child died. At one point, where the grass is thinnest, she can even make out the blurred and watery outline of a small footprint.

  ‘Well, at least it’s no mystery how that child died,’ she says.

  ‘You think not?’ replies Mrs Yandall warily. And then, after a short silence, ‘But that was an odd thing about her cloak.’

  ‘Her cloak?’

  The scavenger looks askance at Adah. ‘They didn’t mention the cloak to you? I told the officer of the watch all about it when I brought her body in.’

  ‘Nobody told me anything,’ replies Adah. Her heart tightens with anger. She has been made a fool of again.

  ‘The child wasn’t wearing her cloak when I found her, you see. That is, it wasn’t fastened round her. It was lying over her. As though someone had tried to cover her up.’

  ‘Cover her up how? You mean, hide her body?’

  ‘No,’ says Mrs Yandall thoughtfully, ‘not to hide her, because her head wasn’t covered. The cloak was just pulled up to her neck, as though someone had tried to keep her warm, to make her comfortable, like.’

  Baffled, Adah bends down again to touch the patch of crushed grass where the child died, running her hands down into its roots, and over the surface of stone beneath. Her fingers encounter nothing unexpected. But lying almost on the surface, just concealed by the edge of a drooping dock leaf – how did she not see this before? – there is something.

  Something about the size of a coin, slippery with rain and mud, but too white to be a coin. Not a coin, but a shining disc engraved with convoluted patterns. Very gingerly, she picks it up between her thumb and forefinger and holds it out in the light: gleaming, pearly white, its round surface polished smooth, but then etched with fine writhing lines. Adah can make out a curling tail, claws, a snarling mouth, an eye – a dragon, perhaps? She turns the disc over. The back is more roughly hewn and, sure enough, has a little nob with a hole for the needle and thread to pass though.

  Not a coin but a button. A single, ornate, exotic button.

  Darkness

  Adah lies on her back in the big bed in her room above the courthouse, staring into darkness. Since William died, she has spent many nighttime hours like this. The room is quiet, save for occasional snuffles from the little ones, Amelia and Caroline, curled together in a tangle of warm limbs in their shared wooden cot, and the soft fall of crumbling ashes in the hearth. The last glow from the embers of the fire has faded, though the thick odour of woodsmoke still fills the room. If she opens the shutters, a faint flicker of light will shine in from the gas lamp in the street below, but with the shutters tight closed and no candle burning in the room, she cannot see her hand in front of her face.

  The darkness above her is thick and furry, but Adah finds that if she stares at it for long enough, something strange happens. She starts to feel that she is no longer looking at the sooty ceiling of her bedroom, with its pattern of stains and cracks like the map of some unchartered continent, but is instead gazing out into the night sky, as though the roof has been lifted off the courthouse and she can see into the very depth of the murky London firmament, into the limits of the heavens themselves. In this unbounded night, the city shrinks to a mere pinprick, and Adah floats as though on a small bark adrift on limitless oceans of darkness. Beyond this city, beyond the globe, a vast black void stretches infinitely far until it comes to … what? Adah stares and stares into the darkness, but she never finds an answer.

  She has been sleeping fitfully ever since William’s death. Even now, when she falls into fretful slumber, she sometimes wakes, expecting to find his broad warm back pressed close to her body and, feeling only the cold and the emptiness, wonders where she is. Then the coldness and the emptiness and the sense of guilt catch hold of her heart, but with them comes something worse, something she cannot acknowledge to even herself: a sneaking sense of relief.

  With no William here, there will be no sudden clanging of the bell that links this bedroom to the watch-room below. No stumbling out into the cold at five in the morning, after a night interrupted by feeding babies, to answer the summons of the imperious bell by lighting the fire and heating water for William’s washing bowl and tea, while William himself struggles into the beadle’s uniform she has laid out for him, bad tempered as always at this hour in the morning: ‘My hat, woman! Where have you put my hat?’

  Now William is gone, she can lie in the big bed until the grey wash of dawn appears in thin lines through the cracks in the shutters, or until the little ones crawl, snotty nosed and tousled with sleep, under the covers to join her in the big bed.

  The snuffling in the cot
beside her turns into hiccupping sobs, the first sounds of little Caroline working towards a fit of howling that will wake Amelia and probably the rest of the children too. Wearily, Adah slides out from under her warm coverlet and lifts the youngest to her breast. Caro is too old for the breast, but suckling seems to soothe her, and now there is no William to scold her for indulging the child. After a few minutes of nuzzling, Caro’s warm downy head sinks quietly into her mother’s bosom, and Adah cautiously lifts the sleeping child back into her cot.

  But sleep seems further away than ever. So many months after William’s death, she had hoped that her nighttime awakenings were starting to subside. But the last two nights she has found herself lying awake thinking, not of her dead husband, but instead of the nameless dead child.

  When she closes her eyes, she sees again that small sallow face with the mark on the forehead. Sometimes she seems to see the child lying on her cloak on the pile of straw in that god-forsaken stable. Again and again she envisages the child rising from her makeshift straw bed, stumbling out into the darkness of the livery yard, running, tripping, falling, lying still … and then the shadow of another person – is it a man to a woman? – steps out of the stable to spread the small black cloak over the child’s motionless body.

  Why? Why not go in search of a doctor? Why not call the officer of the watch? Or, if this unseen other person is an evil-doer, a child-stealer, why not flee the scene? Why stop to cover up the child’s body in an odd gesture of gentleness? And where are the child’s parents? Is there, somewhere in this vast city, a woman lying awake in the darkness at this very moment praying for the safe return of the child she will never see again: the child whose small body was taken out of the watch house yesterday to a lonely pauper’s grave in a corner of Bunhill Fields? And what is the meaning of the curious button, which, carefully washed clean of mud, now lies on one corner of the window ledge?

  The darkness of the night seems to fill Adah’s mind. She can see no glimmer of light; she has not the slightest idea where to begin a search for the child’s name and family. And yet it is terrible to think of that child lying under a pile of earth, unmarked and unmourned, as though she had never existed at all.

  Her new role as Searcher, bestowed on her by the trustees of the Liberty in a moment of sympathy following William’s sudden death, requires Adah to examine the bodies of those who die in unexplained circumstances, and to decide when further investigation is needed. There is no training for this task, and she has received precious little advice from the local officers, who view her with a mixture of pity and irritation. But all those years of marriage to the Liberty’s Beadle have not been wasted. She remembers how meticulously William investigated every case, hunting down even minor miscreants with a single-mindedness that seemed almost chilling. Surely, if she could only imitate his logical patterns of thought, she would be able to make sense of this small tragedy, and at least give the dignity of a name to the dead child.

  The child is a stranger, not from the Liberty. That much seems sure. Her dark hair and sallow skin may or may not suggest foreign origins. Jonah Hall is convinced the girl was foreign, maybe Spanish or Portuguese, and Adah is half tempted to use her own special connection to the Portuguese community to make some quiet enquiries. But no, she pushes that thought aside as resolutely as she can. Raphael DaSilva has been only the shadow of a memory in her life for the past four years or more, and ought to remain a shadow. Better, surely, to approach total strangers in the search for information than to risk exposing the obscure undercurrents of emotion that even the thought of his name threatens to stir. Besides, Raphael is as much an outsider to his community and his own earnest mercantile family as he is to the close-knit world of the Norton Folgate worthies. She will have to look elsewhere for a starting point.

  Now that the fire has gone out, the damp winter cold is seeping into Adah’s bedroom from every side. The darkness is oppressive, and Adah feels the need for fresh air. She gropes her way along the bottom of the bed and treads carefully over the uneven wooden floor in the direction of the window. Her fingers touch the metallic chill of the bolt that holds the shutters closed. Very slowly and softly, so as not to wake the sleeping children, she prizes the bolt open and pulls the shutters back.

  The new gas lamp by the corner of White Lion Street seems not so much to light the space around it as to make the darkness come alive. Its flame flickers in the wind that sweeps down the empty street, and as it does so, the shadows move and dance, shooting out long tongues of darkness across the wet pavement and then retreating again. Apart from the shadows, and a fragment of some white stuff bowled by the wind along the street, everything is still. But then the flying clouds above part for a moment, and light from the full moon falls on the tall face of the silversmith’s house across the road, and something moves.

  A little patch of darkness separates itself from the other shadows, flits swiftly from one doorway to another, and then vanishes – something too small to be an adult human, too large to be a cat or dog. Adah stands very still at the window, wondering if she is imagining things, and waiting in vain for the dark shape to reappear.

  Then the scratching begins. It is a small but insistent sound, and it seems to be coming from the front door of the courthouse, almost immediately beneath her bedroom window. Something is tapping and scratching at the door, as though a small animal is trying to get into the house. Adah leans her head out of the window as far as she can and tries to look down at the street below, but from this angle, the doorway beneath is invisible. The sound stops, and she is about to close the window and go back to bed, when it starts again.

  Scratch, scratch, rattle. The sound of small nails against woodwork.

  Her mouth dry and her heart beating too fast, Adah creeps out of her bedroom and, feeling her way cautiously along the bannister, quietly descends the darkened staircase towards the front door. The polished wood of the old staircase is chilly and slippery beneath her feet. At the bend in the stairs, she passes the spot where William died and, as always, instinctively mutters a word of prayer under her breath.

  The hallway below is pitch dark but for a thin crack of light which comes from beneath the door of the watch-room on the far side of the hallway. I am not alone in this house, thinks Adah. I have no reason to be afraid. The officer of the night is on guard in the watch-room, always alert, always ready to apprehend any night prowlers who disturb the peace of the Liberty.

  It seems foolish to summon the officer simply because she has heard a strange noise, but something about this noise makes her heart feel tight and cold. There is a peculiar fear and urgency in that scratching.

  She walks across the dark hallway and opens the small interior door that leads to the watch-room, words of apology for the intrusion already on her lips. But the words remain unspoken. The watch-room is dimly lit by a fire in the hearth which has burnt low, and by a candle on the table whose gleaming molten wax overflows in sculpted rivulets from its battered pewter candleholder. At the far end of the room, Adah can just make out the shape of the little truckle bed where the body of the child lay until yesterday. At the near end, Jonah Hall lies slumped across a chair, the mountain of his belly rising and falling slightly beneath his officer’s uniform, fast asleep.

  Adah pauses on the threshold for a moment, uncertain whether to wake him, but then turns away and returns to the chill darkness of the hallway and listens intently. Moments pass. She recalls standing in the ruined stables near the spot where the child died, listening to a silent and unseen presence in its cobwebbed darkness. Now, in the dark of the courthouse, she feels that presence again.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch. Like small nails on the other side of the latched and bolted front door. A silence, and next, a sound like breathing, and a soft whimper. A terribly human sound.

  Adah stands frozen, waiting for the sound to come again. Then she forces her shaking hands to fumble with the big iron key, which slips in her unsteady grasp, and to pull the heavy front
door ajar. At once, a blast of wind flings the door open, almost knocking her off her feet. It takes her a moment to recover her balance and step out into the night, and by the time she looks down the street, there is only a distant dark shape, about the size and shape of a small child, vanishing like an eddy of the wind itself into the shadows of Bishopsgate.

  The cold damp air strikes Adah’s face. The winter chill scours the empty street. The moonlight disappears behind clouds.

  Everything is silent but for the voice of the wind and then, far away, ghostly and utterly un-consoling, the clear tones of the town cryer calling, ‘Five of the clock, and all’s well.’

  Standing in front of the synagogue later that morning, light-headed from lack of sleep, Adah still hears in her mind that sound of scratching nails and human breath, and the little whimper. She hears them still so clearly that she doubts her own senses. Did her troubled imagination conjure them up from the depths of last night’s half-waking dreams? But surely the dark hallway and the feel of the wind on her face were real?

  She has left Annie in charge of the other children, and another part of her mind is distracted by everyday anxieties – will little Caroline have another fit of screaming? Will Annie remember to light the fire under the washing copper?

  Adah has never ventured down this alleyway nor seen this building before, and it is completely, almost shockingly, different from her imaginings. She expected the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue to be something dark, rich and mysterious, full of deep reds and midnight blues and gold, with patterns as ornate and exotic as the dragon on that strange white button. Instead, she is confronted by a plain, four-square building of brownish brick which looks very much like the New Church in Bethnal Green where, in her childhood, pious Aunt Dorcas used to take her, muttering out of one corner of her sour-plum mouth if five-year-old Adah yawned or sneezed during the sermon.

  The windows of the synagogue are tall and arched, with square panes of plain glass that allow broad beams of sunlight to flood the space within. Inside, Adah can see a row of well-polished oak benches. The sight of them brings back the damp smell of plaster and brick dust from the Bethnal Green church of her childhood. It must be thirty-five years or more since she last inhaled that unmistakable smell, but now it suddenly assails her nostrils again. The only ornate or exotic things in the synagogue seem to be the great brass candelabras that hang from the ceiling, trapping gleams of light in their golden orbs. Adah wants to go closer and peer deeper into the interior, but she senses that such open displays of curiosity might give offence. Although there is no-one else in the street, somehow she feels as though she is observed. She turns away and walks briskly along the alleyway. The house she is looking for is just a few doorways down from the synagogue. Its dark blue door is adorned with a shining brass knocker in the shape of a lion’s head.