Searcher

by T J Alexander

  The very thought of approaching these people whom she knows only by name makes her body feel awkward and angular. Perhaps she should have tried speaking to Raphael DaSilva first. He at least might have been able to provide introductions, and tell her what to expect. But it’s too late for that now, and having come this far, it would seem craven to return home without attempting to find a starting point to her quest. She knocks, somehow expecting to be greeted by a solemn-faced man with a skull cap and white beard, but again she is taken by surprise. After a long wait, and just as she lifts her hand to knock again, there is a flurry of soft steps inside, and a tall, well-built young woman with her face framed by curling chestnut hair appears in the doorway. She is wearing a plain but elegant grey-striped muslin dress and a matching shawl, and her green eyes are frank and inquisitive.

  ‘I would like to speak to the Rabbi Meldola,’ says Adah.

  The young woman stares at her for a moment, and then turns back towards the interior of the house and calls out some words in a foreign language.

  For a moment, Adah wonders whether the people in this house understand English, but then the young woman opens the door a little wider, and says, in the perfectly modulated tones of the London gentry, ‘Please do step in off the street, Mrs …’

  ‘Flint,’ says Adah.

  ‘Mrs Flint. I am sorry if our household appears to be in some disarray. Our housemaid was taken ill this morning, but my mother will be able to assist you.’

  The mother, who appears from the dim recesses of the tiled hallway, is almost an exact older replica of the daughter. The strong face is more severe and already lined with the marks of age; but her expression is equally open and quizzical. She exchanges a few words with her daughter in a lilting language that Adah does not understand, and then speaks to Adah in musical but heavily accented English.

  ‘You wish to see my husband, the Haham? What is your business with him?’

  ‘I am the Searcher of the Liberty of Norton Folgate. A young child was found dead in our Liberty, and I am trying to find out who she was. She was …’ Adah hesitates. She was going to say ‘dark-skinned’, but suddenly feels full of doubts. It was Jonah Hall who had suggested foreign connections, and encouraged Adah to ask the Rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue whether any of the families in his congregation have lost a child. But looking at this green-eyed, chestnut-haired young woman and her mother, the logic seems very tenuous. The people who worship at this synagogue are clearly not all dark haired or dark skinned, and the child’s colouring was not even obviously foreign. She might just as well have been a dark-haired English or Welsh child. This is a fool’s errand: a desperate attempt to find some thread to follow, however tenuous.

  ‘We thought the child might be Spanish,’ Adah concludes lamely.

  The two women observe her in silence for a moment, then the mother says, ‘My husband the Haham is very busy. Perhaps he has no time to see you. But I ask.’

  They leave her standing in the hallway. While she waits, her eyes adjust to the dim interior, and she picks out a line of sombre family portraits along one wall, and, at the entrance to the black and white tiled corridor beyond, a beautiful brass candelabra: a miniature version of the ones she had glimpsed inside the synagogue.

  It is the daughter who returns as last, and says, with grave courtesy, ‘My father apologizes for the fact that he is very busy and can spare little time, but he will see you for a few minutes. Please step this way.’

  Adah follows her down the corridor and into a large room whose windows are filled with dim green light from a garden bordered by dark yew hedges. Every wall is lined with rows of books – velum covers in countless shades of beige and brown, olive green and faded red. The man who rises to greet her from his seat at the big desk by the window is middle-aged and round-shouldered, and has a rather lugubrious long face with skin sagging in wrinkled folds beneath his eyes. He wears not a skull cap but a yellowish, old fashioned peruke. His desk is covered with stacks of papers, perilously piled one on the other. On a small table in the centre of the room stands a quill and ink-well and a dish with a peeled, half eaten orange. Adah wonders whether this confusion is another sign of the maid’s indisposition, or whether the study always looks like this.

  ‘Mrs Flint, what can I do for you?’

  The Haham’s voice is soft, and the expression in his eyes is at once searching and strangely mournful.

  Adah explains her quest – the dead child in the waste ground beyond Blossom Street, the lack of name or identification, the dark hair, the feeling that this was perhaps a child of foreign parents. Meanwhile, her eyes roam the bookshelves. She sees titles in gold embossed characters that she cannot read, and others in Latin, which she cannot understand, but her gaze is caught by a book in a row on the shelf nearest to her, whose title contains, in particularly vivid golden letters, the words: Animal Spirits. The meaning is enigmatic, but the words are alluring.

  The Haham is slowly shaking his head. His English is accented, but his voice has, when he speaks, the same intonation as his daughter’s.

  ‘I am sorry, Mrs Flint. This is a sad story, but alas, I cannot help you. I know of no lost child from our congregation. We are a small community here, and a very close one. I would surely know if any child was missing, but I have heard of no such thing.’

  There seems nothing more to say.

  Muttering thanks and feeling foolish, Adah is about to turn and leave when the Haham continues pensively, ‘Perhaps you might have better luck in Shadwell or Wapping. There are people of all nationalities there, and you might be surprised to learn how often women and even children come into the docks from all parts of the world on those ships. I heard tell a year or two ago of a Siamese child brought in on an East Indiaman who was found wandering lost in Billingsgate market. But you should send one of your officers of the watch to make inquiries there,’ he adds, ‘the docks are no place for a lady like yourself.’

  How little he knows about me, thinks Adah. But the Haham’s gaze is penetrating. Perhaps it is the expression in his eyes, or perhaps it the title of that strange book on animal spirits which prompts her, almost without thinking, to blurt out, ‘Rabbi Meldola, may I ask you something?’

  He nods silently.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

  The Haham is quiet for a while, observing her as though looking for the answer to some unspoken question. His ink-stained fingers toy with a corner of his slightly faded blue waistcoat.

  At last he says, ‘You have had some strange experience. Connected with this dead child?’

  She nods.

  ‘Mrs Flint,’ says the Haham. ‘You are a Christian, are you not? You should ask your own pastor these things. He is the person who will be able to help you.’

  Adah thinks of the Reverend Henderick at St Leonard’s, with his stern and disapproving frown as he reluctantly baptized her two youngest, after roundly scolding her for leaving them in peril of hell-fire for so long. She has already been marked out as a sinner; whatever would Reverend Henderick think if she were to tell him she had started seeing ghosts?

  ‘As for my own thoughts,’ continues the Haham, speaking as much to himself as to her, ‘in our faith we do indeed believe that troubled spirits may walk the world in the dark of night, and that we mortals are wise to be aware of their presence, and to take steps to guard against their influences. But I also think that our mortal minds may seem to play tricks on us, and yet those tricks have their own meaning. It is for us to discover that meaning.’

  He smiles at her, and Adah notices that, even though his lips smile, his tawny eyes remain profoundly sad.

  The Child’s Story

  April 1817

  WHEN SPRING CAME, SHE was allowed out to play in the garden. There was a long pebble path which ran between two rows of dark trees, ending at a green wooden door in the garden wall. The pebbles were endlessly fascinating – smooth and round, some bluish and veined like water, others white, others dust
y faded rose.

  The child sat on the path and picked up the pebbles one by one. She rolled them in her hand. They were hard and yet soft, and held the warmth of spring. The sky above was very high, and streaked with thin wisps of cloud. A bird floated across her field of vision, a speck of darkness on the rim of heaven. Sometimes she imagined that there was another child sitting beside her – a child with no name who was just the same size as herself. She smiled at the imaginary child and held out pebbles towards her, and then snatched them back again to add to her own pile.

  The woman she called Sully stood beside her, wearing heavy, black laced boots. The hem of her shiny black gown was stained with rusty brown marks.

  Sully bent down to her level and picked up a pebble with her fat red fingers.

  ‘One pebble,’ she said, setting it carefully on the line of bricks that marked the edge of the path.

  Then she picked up another, a grey-blue one. ‘Two pebbles,’ said Sully, coaxingly.

  ‘Three pebbles.’ Sully added another yellowish pebble to the line.

  The child liked this game. She picked up her own pebble, rolled it between her fingers, and then slowly and deliberately added it to the row.

  ‘Good girl!’ said Sully. ‘Four pebbles.’

  The wooden gate at the end of the path was closed, but if it were open, the child would have been able to look out and see the whole world. Far below, beyond the woods rose two stone towers, and beyond the towers again flowed the long lazy curve of the river. The river was a living stone, grey but veined with faint lines of white.

  ‘Pebble,’ said the child slowly. She could taste the round sound of the word, like a pebble in her mouth.

  ‘Good girl! Good girl! See, you can say it! Five pebbles!’ cried Sully, excited.

  Now the child started to pick them up, faster and faster, adding to the row.

  ‘Pebble,’ said the child. ‘Pebble. Pebble. Pebble.’

  She could have continued forever, but Sully suddenly seized her arm.

  ‘Enough!’ said Sully. Her mood had changed, like the sun going behind a bank of cloud. She pulled the child roughly to her feet and propelled her towards the house. Down the path. Across the yard where grass sprouted between the uneven bricks. In through the kitchen door to the smell of soup bubbling on the huge black hob. Up the back stairs, arm aching from the grip of Sully’s hand. She was dumped on the nursery floor while Sully fetched a ewer of water and a flannel, and hastily scrubbed her face and hands and the back of her neck with freezing sloppy water.

  ‘Time to see Mamma. You want to see Mamma, don’t you?’ said Sully.

  In Mamma’s sitting room there was a sweet smell of woodsmoke. A fire was burning in the hearth. Its amber light glowed behind the bars of the grate, and spilled patterns like flames onto the carpeted floor. The floor was soft and covered in squares of red with darker red flowers and curling leaves at the centre. Mamma sat on her rocking chair by the fire, next to a table whose feet had claws like a bird’s talons. She reached out her long thin hands and drew the child into the folds of her satin skirt, which smelled of woodsmoke and tea and lavender.

  ‘Cara, cara!’ said Mamma.

  The book was lying on her lap. The child could see its familiar fraying green cover. She leant in close, peering at the picture on the page. She loved this picture: mysterious, terrifying. It showed a huge creature with pointed ears and uplifted snout staring at a diminutive man with a beard and a crown on his head. While Mamma read from the book, the child sat at her feet, tracing the flowers on the carpet with one finger. The words were music, flowing endlessly and soothingly with rhythm and cadence but without meaning.

  ‘Dovete adunque sapere, donne mie care,’ read Mamma, ‘che Galeotto fu re di’Anglia, uomo non men ricco di beni della fortuna che di quelle dell’animo; ed aveva per moglie la figliola di Matthias re di Ungheria …’

  The fire crackled softly in the hearth. The wind rattled the window panes. The pile of the carpet was soft beneath the child’s finger. When she looked at the dark red flowers one way they were flowers, but if she looked another way they were strange beasts, with the deepest red spot in the centre a half-open eye. The little golden clock on the mantle-shelf chimed the quarter hour.

  When the flow of music stopped, Mamma bent forward and stroked the child’s hair with her soft hand.

  Sully, who was sitting nearby with her black boots blotting out the flowers on the carpet beneath her chair, said, ‘Say goodnight to Mamma, dear. Goodnight, Mamma!’

  But the girl was looking at Mamma’s feet, white and gold next to Sully’s hard black boots. Mamma wore white cotton stockings and apricot coloured satin slippers fastened by buckles decorated with tiny round green stones. The child cautiously reached out to touch one of the stones.

  ‘Say “goodnight, Mamma,”’ repeated Sully, bending down so that her sourish breath puffed against the child’s face.

  The child still stared at the stones on Mamma’s slipper buckles.

  ‘Pebble,’ said the child, ‘pebble.’

  Adah’s Story

  January 1822

  From the Courthouse to the Green Dragon

  THE DAY SHE HAS been dreading has arrived. Adah takes off her apron, and pauses for a moment in front of the blotched green looking glass which still hangs on the bedroom wall, smoothing her hair. A strange, distorted face gazes back at her from the depths of the mirror. The looking glass is one of the things that will have to be left behind.

  Young Will, as usual, has left the house first thing in the morning after wolfing down a lump of bread and a tankard of ale. Whenever she asks where he is going, he always says ‘work’, but he rarely seems to bring home any money. Adah knows she should take him aside and talk to him seriously, but can think of nothing to say. Her husband’s death has built a wall of silence between her and her eldest child.

  Nine-year-old Richard has been doing his best to help Adah and Annie move crates of clothes and crockery down the stairs and along the slippery cobbled road to their poky new home in Blossom Street, but has to stop repeatedly to cough and catch his breath. The boxes and bags seem unending. Adah did not know they had so many possessions until it was time to move them: the cauldron and the wooden spoons, the candlesticks and the chamber pots, even the half-full coal scuttle and a bucket of soda ash, too precious to leave behind. There is so much to remember. In the confusion of the move, she almost forgot about the strange white button which she found in the grass where the child’s body had been lying. It was only by luck that she spotted it on the window ledge where she had left it, and carried it carefully over to their new house, where it sits now amongst the confusion of salt cellars, vases, cotton reels, candle ends and sealing wax on the corner table in the dark little bedroom that she will have to share with her four daughters.

  Now, with most of the moving done, Richard is sitting in the back room, coughing quietly into a handkerchief. Caro and Amelia are rolling around happily on the patched green rug in front of the kitchen fire, while Sally runs about in wild excitement, managing to get under everybody’s feet.

  Pausing to watch her for a moment, Adah notices how Sally’s hair, which looked almost fair when she was a baby, is rapidly darkening as she grows. Her head, shiny like a dark horse-chestnut, is starting to stand out amongst the other children’s straw coloured mops.

  Mr Cansdell the assayer and three other trustees arrive in a body: an invading army. Mr Cansdell is a stout man with a fob watch and a mottled red blob for a nose. With his leather-bound book and quill in one hand and an inkwell in the other, he reminds Adah of the hanging judge she saw on her visit to the Old Bailey to watch William give evidence in the trial of that poor mad John Stafford. I should not dislike this man, thinks Adah.

  Mr Cansdell reaches out a soft white hand and tries unsuccessfully to pat Sally’s head as she whirls past, imagining that she is a huntsman riding his horse after the hounds. The surveyor turns to Adah with an unctuous knowing smile and asks, ‘And
she is one of your little ones too? What lovely dark locks!’

  Adah tries to pay attention as the trustees tramp though the half-empty house, sucking their lips and tut-tutting over cracks in the plaster walls, while their boots leave muddy footprints all over the floors that she and Annie assiduously mopped all day yesterday. But her mind is elsewhere.

  Wherever she looks, small objects catch like hooks in her memory, dragging out images from its depth.

  When they move the heavy wooden sea-chest from the big bedroom, she finds behind it, half jammed under the wainscot, a yellow, broken-toothed ivory comb, and has a sudden recollection of William’s long-dead mother Elizabeth wringing her hands in distress as she hunted high and low for that comb. The day after Christmas, it was. How many years ago? Fifteen, twenty?

  Seeing that room stripped of most of its furniture, Adah sees herself, for some reason, as she was the first day she arrived in the courthouse, a new bride, awkward and uncertain in this building which at that time seemed so huge and dark and cold compared with the warm earthy chaos of her father’s cottage in Fulham. It is strange to remember. Now these rooms are home, filled with the familiar smells of a multitude of memories, sweet and alluring and bitter.