It seems to have once been a small parlour or study, but is littered with an astonishing jumble of objects: broken painting easels; mountains of books and papers heaped on the floor, with an old iron kettle balanced precariously on the top of the tallest pile; framed paintings stacked on end in one corner. Against the far wall stands an aged-looking divan upholstered in faded red and green brocade, with the straw stuffing poking out through a hole at one end. Stevens pulls a crumpled and paint-stained sheet from behind a stack of paintings, and spreads it over the divan, and Raphael gently lays the child’s supine form on top of the sheet, with a ragged velvet cushion under her head by way of a pillow.
‘But,’ exclaims Adah, catching her breath, ‘she surely can’t stay here! How can you take care of her?’
‘We’ll think of that later,’ says Raphael simply. ‘Stevens, we need warm water and a clean cloth. Oh yes, and fetch an old night shirt or the like from the linen cupboard. Never mind the size. Anything that we can use to cover her will do.’
Adah looks up at Stevens, expecting indignant remonstrations, but the old servant merely nods and shuffles away on his errand.
The child lies absolutely still on the divan, her dark lashes closed over her eyes, her mouth slightly open. She might be dead, but for the fractional rise and fall of her chest. In the lamplight, Adah can see that the child is dressed in the ragged remains of a frock and cloak. Her hair is long, dark, and so tangled that it looks like wool. Her hands and face are grimy, and the nails on her fingers have grown into curved claws. Her sunken, bony face is longer and thinner than her twin’s, but still bears an unmistakable resemblance to the face of the dead child who lay on the bed in the Norton Folgate watch house some six months earlier.
‘Molly,’ whispers Adah. ‘Molly Creamer. Where have you been all this time? What has happened to you?’
Once Stevens has brought the water and cloth and lit a fire in the hearth, Adah orders the two men out of room and takes over the task of tending to the child. She leaves the ragged, rank-smelling clothes in a pile on the floor, and wipes the child’s face and body as gently as she can, noticing how quickly the water in the enamel pail turns murky with grime. As she works, she speaks softly. ‘You poor dear. You poor lamb,’ she says.
The child is completely unresisting, and her eyes remain closed. Her ribs protrude, her stomach is sunken and her little feet are scratched and calloused. Adah moistens the dry, cracked lips with water, and then finds her way to the kitchen and fetches another cloth soaked in cold water to lay across the child’s feverish brow.
When the little girl has been washed and dressed in an old darned night-shirt many sizes too large for her, and covered with a frayed patchwork blanket, Adah leaves her lying on the divan and goes in search of Raphael, who is sitting before the fire in his study, deep in thought.
‘Why did I not guess this earlier?’ laments Adah. ‘She must have been there all along. Last winter, when I went with Hetty Yandall to the place where Rosie Creamer’s body was found, I thought I heard a noise of someone in the stables. And then again that very night, I thought I heard someone at the door of the courthouse, and when I opened the door I seemed to see the shape of a child in the dark street outside, but I felt I must have imagined it … I thought I was seeing ghosts … If only I had looked for her then! But how did this happen? Poor child. Poor child. Sleeping in that accursed stable all alone—’
‘Don’t reproach yourself, Adah,’ interrupts Raphael. ‘You are not to blame, though others are. The question is, what do we do now?’
‘We should call a doctor to attend to her. I should report the story to Mr Beavis and the officers, but …’
Raphael nods quietly. ‘But if we do, this will become an official matter, and the child will be taken to the foundling hospital or the poorhouse.’
‘And then,’ adds Adah bitterly, ‘as sure as night follows day, she’ll be dead within the fortnight.’
‘As for a doctor,’ says Raphael, ‘I think I know a man who will help us, and ask no questions.’
‘But she can’t stay here, Raphael. How can you and Stevens care for her? And I must go home to my children soon. I should be home with them already.’
‘Could your son William take care of the younger ones tonight?’ asks Raphael. ‘I can have Stevens make up a truckle bed for you here, so that you can stay with the child for this one night. In the morning, we’ll decide what to do next. Perhaps she will be a little better by then.’
‘Let me go back to Blossom Street and check my little ones first. If Will is there and all is well, I’ll be back here within the hour,’ replies Adah.
Her heart is heavy and her thoughts are in turmoil as she opens the front door of the Blossom Street house. She feels suddenly exhausted. Her head is starting to ache. The door creaks open, and she enters quietly, not wanting to wake the little ones if they are sleeping.
A figure is standing on the stairway that leads down to the entrance hall, one hand on the banister. A slightly built, female, unmistakable figure. Annie! With a cry of joy, Adah runs towards her daughter, arms opened wide.
‘You’re home! I wasn’t expecting you.’ But then a doubt strikes her, and she falters. ‘Father…?’ she says.
But Annie is smiling and shaking her head. ‘Never fear. He’s well. He’s on the mend,’ she responds, ‘but he’s a stubborn old man: up and about already, and insisting he can care for himself and work in the gardens again, though no doubt he’ll welcome another visit in a few weeks’ time. And that job at the big house came to nothing. They found another girl who had experience as a parlour maid already. I’m sorry, Ma. I meant to send a message before I came home, but there was no chance…’ But the rest of her words are silenced by the smothering embrace of Adah’s arms.
‘Oh Annie, Annie! How glad I am to have you back! The most extraordinary thing has happened. How are the children? Is Will home? Are Sally and Amelia asleep already, and little Caro?’
‘All’s well, Ma. I put the little ones to bed myself. Richard’s still awake. He seems better than when I last saw him, and Will’s asleep in a chair by the fire.’
‘Then come with me,’ says Adah, ‘and I’ll tell you the story as we go.’
They hurry together through the thickening fog, Annie listening intently as Adah tells her the story of her visits to Rosemary Lane and the Lambeth-Street office, and the discovery of the half-starved child in the abandoned stables behind Magpie Alley.
‘You may remember Mr DaSilva,’ says Adah, choosing her words carefully. ‘He was an acquaintance of your father’s, and is a nephew of old Mr Franco the overseer. He’s a good man, and has taken the child to sleep in his own house for tonight until we can find a way to care for her. I would have stayed there with her myself, for she’s too ill with fever to be left on her own. But I don’t like to leave our little ones in Will’s care. Would you stay with the child for tonight? She’ll need cooling cloths on her head to bring down the fever, and some thin gruel to drink as soon as she’s awake and able to take sustenance. God grant she does wake. Mr DaSilva’s manservant Stevens will help you. He’s a crusty old soul, but he means no harm. I’ll bring some garlic and honey in the morning, and Mr DaSilva has said that he will try to call a doctor tomorrow.’
When they reach the house in Spital Square, they find the child still lying on her back with her eyes closed and her mouth slightly open. She does not seem to have stirred since Adah left. Stevens has made up a small truckle bed before the fire.
Adah feels a sudden moment of awkwardness as Raphael enters the room and she introduces Annie to him, but the artist greets Annie with the same grave courtesy that she noticed when he first met Sally. Adah and Annie stand side by side for a moment next to the child’s makeshift bed, staring down at the fragile, feverish form. Annie bends and strokes the child’s bony claw-like hand. The open mouth emits a tiny sound like a sigh, then the child sinks back into silence again.
Adah kisses her daughter goodnight, a
nd slips quietly out of the room. That night, lying in the bed that she shares with Sally, while Amelia and Caro sleep in the cot on the other side of the room, Adah dreams that she is running through the dark, across a vast grassy wasteland. She is carrying Sally in her arms, but Sally is just a new-born baby. As she runs, Adah is terrified that she will trip and fall upon the baby that she is carrying, but a deathly unknown terror urges her on. At the far side of the wasteland, she sees an open door, with bright lamplight shining through it, and a figure standing silhouetted in the doorway, waiting for her. She runs in desperation towards the door, but just as she approaches it, the door slams in her face and she hears a voice – she cannot tell whether it is the voice of a man or a woman – booming in her ear, ‘That is my child!’
She starts awake. The bedroom door, which she had left open, has slammed shut in the wind that has picked up during the night. The fog has turned to ragged cloud and the moon is shining above the roof tops. In the cramped bedroom, her three young daughters sleep the deep sleep of childhood, their tousled hair spread like fronds of grass across their pillows.
Silence
In the morning, the child seems neither worse nor better. She lies as still as ever on the divan in Raphael DaSilva’s spare parlour, her breathing shallow and her forehead burning with fever. Annie has been awake much of the night, sponging the child’s head and moistening her lips with cooling water. Stevens has prepared some gruel, but until the child wakens, there is no way to feed her.
‘I tried to help him make it,’ says Annie with a rueful smile, ‘but it seems that the kitchen is his domain. He doesn’t like others intruding.’
Adah has brought an old nightdress of Annie’s, which she has been keeping until Sally grows big enough to wear it. She and Annie remove the ungainly nightshirt from the child’s emaciated body and dress her in this better fitting garment. Adah applies a couple of poultices of garlic and honey to the little girl’s legs. Then they fetch a pair of scissors from Raphael’s studio and manage to chop back the child’s grimy hair close to her head. All the while, the little girl lies unresisting on the divan, allowing her body to be moved softly this way and that, without a murmur and without opening her eyes. When they throw the cut hair into the embers in the fireplace, it hisses and shrivels, filling the room with a slightly acrid smell.
Adah sends Annie off home to rest for a while, and takes her turn sitting by the child’s bedside. The room is dimly lit by one small window, and by the faint glow from the fireplace. Beneath the linen nightdress, the child’s narrow chest slowly rises and falls – in and out, in and out. Adah feels her eyelids drooping in sleep, and then starts awake. In and out, in and out, the child breathes. The sight of her first-born daughter, Sarah Ann, comes back to her. She remembers sitting by Sarah Ann’s bedside, watching that infant’s small body fight its losing battle with the fever, willing her child to take one breath after another, until the moment when Sarah Ann softly breathed out, and Adah waited and waited for her to breathe in again, and no breath came …
But this child’s quiet breathing does not falter, and for a moment Adah sees the child’s lashes flicker as though she might open her eyes, though instead she just rolls over onto one side and continues sleeping.
If she lives, what will we do with her? By rights, we should contact the Creamer family, for she is their daughter. But where are they? And how will they react if they learn that she is still alive, after all that has happened? If she lives, what will she be able to tell us? She will not remember the kidnapping itself, for she was only an infant then. But surely she has not been wandering the streets alone for all these years. She must have been living with someone
– as like as not with her kidnapper, or someone connected to the crime. If she lives, what will she tell us about her abductors? And will she tell us how she came to be reunited with her twin, and how Rosie Creamer died?
The doctor comes in the early afternoon – a scraggy, weasel-faced man with thinning brown hair, who calls himself Doctor Smith.
‘She’s my niece,’ say Raphael imperturbably, showing the doctor into the room where the child lies sleeping. ‘Her parents are in Jamaica, and she was staying with a guardian, but she must have been unhappy there, for she ran away and has been wandering the streets these several weeks. Luckily we found her last night, and brought her back here, but as you can see, she seems half starved. We are very worried for the poor child.’
Adah marvels at the fluency with which he invents his story.
The doctor puts one hand on child’s forehead, and runs his fingers along her arms. He feels her pulse, taps her chest and listens to her breathing. He lifts her nightdress and presses her stomach, but the child does not stir. Then he extracts a notebook from his leather bag and scribbles a series of letters and Latin abbreviations which he hands to Adah.
‘Take this to the apothecary,’ he says. ‘She needs a tincture of Peruvian bark. Burwell’s in Threadneedle Street is the best place. Not too much, mind. Just four drops in half a cup of water, two or three times a day.’
He shakes his head slowly as he writes out his bill and hands it to Raphael.
‘There is very little I can do,’ he says. ‘She is very undernourished, and may have been drinking foul water. I’d apply the leeches if she weren’t so young and so weak, but I’m afraid to weaken her further. Send your maidservant to have the medicine made up, and have it ready to give to the child the moment she is able to swallow.’
Raphael opens his mouth to correct the doctor’s mistake, but then exchanges a glance with Adah and remains silent.
‘She is gravely ill,’ continues the doctor, still shaking his head discouragingly. ‘With care, if she is strong, she may recover, but you should prepare yourselves for the worst. The parents should certainly be notified as soon as possible. But by then, of course, it may be too late.’
Old Mr Burwell the apothecary peers through his half-moon spectacles at the doctor’s note, and then potters off into the back of his shop, muttering to himself all the while. Adah waits impatiently at the counter, running her palms over its worn and pitted surface. She surveys the great wooden medicine cases, which rise to the dark recesses of the vaulted ceiling. The shelves are lined with jars, bottles and vases of every conceivable size and shape. Tall ladders are propped in the corners to allow the apothecary’s assistant to reach the vessels on the uppermost shelves. To Adah’s right are rows upon rows of blue and white Dutch china jars, all neatly labelled with incomprehensible Latin words: crocus sativus, she reads on one; and echium vulgare on another. In front of her, behind the counter, are arrays of glass jars filled with coloured liquids and powders – amber, pale green, deep indigo blue. Strange roots and branches float within the liquids.
She listens to the rasping sound of the apothecary’s pestle as the old man grinds and pounds the Peruvian bark, and she thinks of the child lying on the divan in Spital Square, suspended between life and death. The process of mixing the tincture seems interminable. The apothecary shuffles along the shelves, perusing the labels on the bottles, picks one up, consults the doctor’s paper again, mumbling to himself as he returns the bottle to the shelf unopened, takes the neighbouring bottle instead, withdraws to the back of his shop to add a few drops of the liquid to his mixture, and then returns to the shelves to start the whole procedure over again.
But when, after more than an hour’s absence, Adah returns carrying the precious bottle of tincture, she is astonished to find the child sitting propped up on a pile of cushions, with her eyes half open, and Annie cautiously spooning driblets of gruel into her mouth.
‘She’s awake,’ says Annie wonderingly, ‘though she hasn’t spoken yet.’
Adah hastily mixes a few drops of the tincture to give to the child. When the liquid touches her tongue, the child grimaces a little, but she swallows the medicine without complaint. She turns her dark eyes towards Adah and Annie.
‘Molly,’ says Adah softly, ‘little Molly. You’re safe no
w. We’ll take care of you. Don’t be afraid.’
The child gives a small sigh, closes her eyes and falls asleep again.
The following day, she seems more alert. When Annie brings her a cup of warm milk, she grasps the cup in both hands, and gulps the liquid down so eagerly that Annie has to gently draw the cup away.
‘Steady. Take it slowly. Careful you don’t choke,’ she says.
‘How are you feeling, little Molly? Are you hungry?’ asks Adah.
The child gazes at her with opaque dark eyes.
‘They will have given her another name, the people she was with. She won’t answer to the name of Molly,’ says Annie. She takes the child’s hand in her own. ‘My name’s Annie,’ she says. ‘What’s your name? What do they call you?’
The child’s eyes are alert and questioning. Dark brown, one iris slightly flecked with grey. She remains completely silent.
‘Do you think she can hear us?’ asks Adah. ‘Perhaps she’s deaf.’
By way of answer, Annie walks to the iron kettle, balanced on the pile of books behind the head of the divan, and strikes it sharply with a metal spoon. The child starts, and turns her head towards the echoing sound.
‘She’s not deaf,’ say Annie. ‘But think of all the troubles she’s been through. And here she is, in a strange house, with strange faces around her. Let’s just make her body strong. Then no doubt she’ll start to speak again.’
Over the days that follow, the child slowly gains strength. The fever in her body subsides, and her forehead seems a little cooler. She allows Adah and Annie to feed and bathe her without complaint, and they are even able to ease her off the divan and, supporting her frail form on either side, guide her as far as the chipped china chamber pot which Stevens has placed in one corner of the room.
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