Searcher

by T J Alexander

  All the while, the child never speaks or makes a sound. She never cries, but she never smiles.

  Raphael, when he visits the sick room, tries speaking to her gently in a foreign tongue – Adah is unsure whether it is Spanish or Portuguese – for it has occurred to them that the child might have been stolen away by foreigners and brought up speaking another language. The child looks up with a puzzled expression as Raphael talks to her, but she makes absolutely no response.

  On the afternoon of the fourth day, Adah comes to sit with the child while Annie rests. As she approaches the door of the child’s sick room, she hears an unexpected sound: a human voice inside the room. A quiet humming. Very cautiously, she pushes open the door, and then pauses on the threshold, frozen motionless by astonishment. Stevens is seated beside the child’s bed, singing a lullaby in his cracked old voice as his gently spoons gruel into the child’s open mouth.

  ‘What are we to do with her?’ Adah asks Raphael, when the child has sunk into fitful sleep again, and Annie has gone home to rest for a while. ‘She surely can’t stay in your house forever.’

  They are seated in his study, with the last of the summer evening light slanting through the windows, and the pigeons cooing in the eaves of the house. The light illuminates Raphael’s face from one side, and Adah is suddenly aware how much he has aged since she first met him. The streak of white in his hair is becoming more pronounced, and the lines on his face tightening and hardening around the mouth and eyes.

  ‘I have been thinking about this,’ replies Raphael. ‘Of course, we should try to send word to the child’s family, but as long as their whereabouts are unknown, I think it best that she should be cared for here. And this relates to another matter that I have been thinking about of late. Stevens is growing old. He would never admit it, but the work about the house is becoming too much for him to manage on his own. If I were to employ a maid or housekeeper, this woman could help him with his tasks, and could also care for the child until we can find a permanent home for her.’

  ‘Have you discussed this with Stevens?’ asks Adah, raising her eyebrows. ‘It’s hard to imagine him accepting such an arrangement.’

  Raphael smiles. ‘I think you might be surprised, Adah,’ he says. ‘Of course Stevens will grumble and mutter and complain. But behind the sour looks, I suspect that he is happy at the presence of the child, and would even be grateful for the presence of a woman to help him with the housework. You know,’ he adds, ‘Stevens had a wife and child of his own once, long ago. They both died within days of each other, so I heard, of the smallpox. It must have been almost forty years ago, but I think not a day goes by when he does not grieve for them still.’

  Adah is silent for a moment, absorbing this information, and picturing again the briefly glimpsed apparition of the crabbed old servant at the child’s bedside, humming a lullaby that perhaps he had not sung for forty years.

  ‘Do you know a good woman for the task?’ she asks.

  ‘Adah, I was wondering…’ says Raphael, hesitantly, ‘I was wondering if your daughter Annie might be willing … She is very young, of course, but seems so mature for her years, and so very gentle with the child. Only with your approval, of course. She could live with you and come to us during the day.’ He pauses, and then adds, somewhat awkwardly, ‘Stevens and I would treat her with the greatest respect, you know.’

  Adah, completely taken by surprise, can only stammer, ‘I … I really don’t know. I’ll have to think. I need to talk to Annie about this.’ It would, of course, be a solution to some of their problems, but there are so many reasons why it might not be wise …

  ‘But there’s something else we must talk about, Raphael,’ she continues. ‘Someone else, I should say. Sarah Stone. What about Sarah Stone? We mustn’t forget her. We have living evidence in our hands that she was innocent. She was convicted of a crime she didn’t commit. Can you imagine? To bear a child, and then to have that child snatched from your arms by a stranger who claims that you are a child-stealer, and that your child is hers. And then for your infant to die within weeks of being taken from you. What more terrible thing could happen to a woman? It would be enough to drive anyone to madness. We must find Sarah Stone.’

  ‘But how? In heaven’s name …’ exclaims Raphael. He leans forward in his seat, his face suddenly quite flushed and, to her surprise, almost angry. ‘She was transported to the colonies years ago. How could we ever find her? And would it be wise even to look for her? This child I have sleeping in my house is not Sarah Stone’s child, Adah. We cannot give Sarah Stone back the child she lost. For all we know, she may have made a new life, and want to put the tragedies of the past behind her.’

  ‘Believe you me, Raphael,’ retorts Adah heatedly. ‘However much she may want to, she will not have put that past behind her. You tell me that not a day goes past without Stevens mourning his dead wife and child, and I believe you. But I will say to you with equal certainty: not a day goes by when Sarah Stone does not mourn for her lost child. True, we can’t give her back her child. But if we can do nothing else, at least we can lift the burden of a guilty verdict from her shoulders. At least we can tell her that there are people who believe her to be innocent – no,’ she corrects herself, ‘we can tell her that there are people who know her to be innocent.’

  ‘But how, and where, could we begin to look for her?’ asks Raphael.

  ‘You know, she may never have been transported at all. I remember William telling me that not half the people sentenced to transportation are ever sent to New South Wales or Van Dieman’s Land, or wherever it is they send them these days. More than half languish in the hulks or in Newgate or in that great new prison they’ve built by the banks of the Thames …’

  ‘Millbank,’ says Raphael.

  ‘Millbank, that’s it. And if Sarah Stone was not transported, but was held in Millbank or in Newgate or some other prison in England, she may well be a free woman again by now. Her sentence was seven years. And more than seven years have passed since the trial.’

  ‘But who would know which prison she was held in, let alone what happened to her afterwards? I fear it would be a fool’s errand, Adah. We are busy enough caring for the child, and trying to think about her future, without taking on other impossible tasks.’

  ‘It’s a matter of justice, Raphael. It’s a simple matter of justice.’

  Raphael sighs, and rises from his seat to walk over to the window.

  ‘I suppose there is one person who might know,’ he says at length.

  ‘Who?’ asks Adah eagerly.

  ‘If there’s anyone who knows the whereabouts of women prisoners,’ says Raphael, turning back towards her, his fingers toying with the fringe of the green velvet curtain, ‘it would surely be Mrs Fry.’

  ‘Mrs Fry?’ echoes Adah blankly.

  ‘Oh come now, Adah, surely you must know of her. The famous Mrs Elizabeth Fry, the lady prison reformer.’

  ‘Ah yes, of course I have heard of her.’ William, she recalls, always described Mrs Fry as ‘that meddling busybody’, more than once adding, ‘she should stay at home and look after her own family, instead of making trouble for others.’

  ‘But,’ she continues aloud, ‘how could we possibly seek the help of Mrs Fry? Such a prominent person. I heard she is even a confidante of the queen.’

  ‘As it happens,’ says Raphael pensively, ‘I am quite well acquainted with Mrs Fry’s brother-in-law, Fowell Buxton. I had some business dealings with him once, a few years back now. I haven’t seen him for a couple of years – more, I suppose – but he always seemed a cordial and honest man. I could try to contact her through him. Of course, it might all be to no avail …’

  ‘Please, Raphael,’ says Adah. ‘You may well be right. This may be a hopeless quest. But if I can at least feel that we have done all we can, I may be able to rest easy at night. And Raphael,’ she adds more softly, ‘thank you. Thank you for helping me and for caring for the child. And thank you for your offer to
Annie. I will surely speak to her about it, and give you our answer very soon. You are a kind man.’

  By the end of the next week, they have fallen into a daily rhythm. Annie rises at dawn every day and goes to Raphael DaSilva’s house to light the fires and prepare breakfast for Raphael and Stevens, and to make a bowl of gruel or porridge for the child. She spends all day helping Stevens with tasks about the house and nursing the child, singing to her and telling her stories.

  Adah takes her turn in caring for the child as often as she can, but other tasks distract her.

  Amelia has a toothache, and Beadle Beavis needs assistance with a case that involves searching the persons and possessions of a group of girls arrested for picking pockets and selling stolen goods. The girls – the youngest of them just ten years old – seem to Adah to be some of the most hardened criminals she has ever met. They show neither remorse for their crimes nor fear of the officers who have arrested them, and when Adah strips them to search their persons, far from appearing embarrassed, they flaunt their naked bodies, lewdly waggling their hips and lifting their budding breasts in front of you. ‘I’ll wager you wish you had a pair like this, Grandma,’ says one of the older ones. Adah clenches her fists tight to suppress the urge to give the girl a slap, and goes about her painstaking examination of their clothes, finding four stolen silver rings sewn into the hem of the young hussy’s pinafore. What future can we hope for, she wonders, if girls barely out of childhood are already so practised in crime? Is it living in the midst of a great city like London that makes them so depraved?

  It is a relief when she can find a moment away from her work and her family to sit quietly for a while at the child’s bedside. The little girl’s fever is gone, and her appetite has returned. The sunken sallow cheeks are beginning to fill out and even look faintly rosy. Her hair, which Adah and Annie have painstakingly washed with soda ash, is starting to grow back, thick and dark.

  But she speaks not a word. She has a voice, for sometimes she sighs or sneezes, and once, when a half-empty bowl of gruel slips from her hands and falls to the floor, she gives a little cry of alarm. But neither Adah nor Annie can coax a word from her mouth. When Adah brings Sally along for a visit, hoping that the presence of the lively little five-year-old may evoke some response from the child, the two little girls stare at one another with unfeigned curiosity. The child takes hold of the rag doll which Sally has brought with her, examines it carefully, and then lays it gently by the side of her pillow, but she neither smiles nor speaks, and Sally quickly loses interest and wanders off in search of Raphael’s broken mandolin.

  Adah even tries a trick that always produced fits of giggles from her own children when they were young, screwing her face into a grimace and wiggling her ears up and down. The child stares at her with silent puzzlement, but without the ghost of a smile.

  After all this searching, thinks Adah, I sit beside the person who knows the answer to all the mysteries I have tried to solve. She knows how she and her twin Rosie found each other again, how they came to be sleeping in the stables behind Magpie Alley. She probably knows the name of the person who snatched her from her mother’s arms eight years ago; and she surely knows how little Rosie died. I sit here and look into her eyes, and all that I find there is silence. Poor child. Poor child. What has happened to you?

  The child is well enough to stand now, and can walk, a little unsteadily, around her small makeshift bedroom, so Adah and Annie decide that it is time to take her out for fresh air.

  ‘What shall we say if we meet anyone we know, and they ask about her?’ says Annie anxiously.

  ‘Let’s just follow Raphael’s story. We’ll tell them that she is his niece who has been staying with him and has fallen ill, and that you’ve been hired to be her nursemaid.’

  The following day, the rain falls heavily and incessantly, so they abandon the idea of an excursion. The bleak weather dampens Adah’s spirits. It is St. Swithin’s Day, and she worries that the bad weather portends another forty days of rain. But the folk prophecy proves false, for the morning after dawns clear and sunny. They dress the child in cast off clothes of Annie’s, and a little pair of soft shoes that Adah found in an old clothes stall round the corner from Spitalfields Markets. With Adah and Annie holding her arms on either side, the child walks slowly and cautiously down the front steps of Raphael’s house and into the open air.

  At the foot of the steps, she pauses for a moment, gazing around as though trying to find her bearings. There is a pleasant clarity in the air after the previous day’s rain. The child gazes up at the sky, which is patterned by a gentle speckling of cloud. Then she looks intently at the ground beneath her feet for a while, before allowing herself to be led slowly across Spital Square and down White Lion Street in the direction of Adah’s house. The only familiar figure they pass on the way is the tall angular form of Hetty Yandall, who is busy sweeping up straw and horse manure on the far side of the street. Catching sight of the scavenger, Adah feels a fleeting moment of panic, for if there is anyone who might recognize the resemblance between their small companion and the dead Rosie Creamer, it is surely Mrs Yandall. But fortunately, Hetty Yandall is too far away and too intent on her tasks to do more than raise an arm in silent greeting.

  At the Blossom Street tenement, Adah guides the child gently up the stairs to the bedroom, and seats her on the bed.

  ‘Stay here a while, my love,’ she says. ‘We won’t be a moment.’

  While Annie puts soiled clothes in the wash tub, Adah goes to fetch a julep that she has mixed the previous day for the child to drink, only to find Amelia sitting on the kitchen floor in tears, a broken butter dish on the flagstones beside her, and whitish streaks of butter all over the hem of her dress.

  ‘Lord have mercy!’ cries Adah. ‘Whatever have you been up to? That’s enough butter to last us for the rest of the week, all gone to waste!’

  At which Amelia’s tears turn into wails of grief.

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ says Adah grudgingly. ‘Let’s clean you up. There’s worse things happening in the world.’

  She seizes a cloth and gives Amelia’s dress a cursory wipe, scoops up the fragments of the butter dish and the spoilt butter from the floor, rinses her hands and pats Amelia on the head.

  ‘Go and play with your sisters, now, and keep out of mischief. Heaven knows I’ve got enough to look after without any extra trouble from you.’

  Adah has just started to climb the stairs with the tumbler of cool green liquid in her hands when she hears the sound of a voice – something like a small exclamation – from the bedroom above. Startled and fearful, she runs up the stairs as fast as she can, and finds the child standing, with her back turned, at the table in the corner of the room. Again Adah hears the same small sound, surely coming from the child.

  ‘What is it?’ she cries in alarm.

  The child turns and look at her, and Adah sees the small solemn face transformed. The child’s eyes are shining, and her lips are half parted in a radiant smile. Her face is no longer a blank mask. She is a living child again. Adah is suddenly, heart-wrenchingly, reminded of the sweet and innocent smile that used to illuminate young Will’s face when he was just that age.

  The child holds her hand out flat towards Adah. She takes a step forward. Some small thing is balanced in the centre of her palm. Something round and white. When she speaks, her voice is soft and a little hoarse, but perfectly clear.

  ‘Button,’ says the child. ‘Captain’s button.’

  September 1822

  East Ham

  As the wherry pulls away from the stairs and out into midstream, Adah loosens the ribbons around her neck and lets her bonnet drop back from her head so that the wind can ruffle her hair. The breeze is surprisingly mild for late September, and the sky is filled with autumn light. It is years since she last took a boat on the river. She feels like a wide-eyed child, gazing in sheer delight at the wonders around her. The river is a great highway thronged with traffic: barges lade
n with barrels of wine and mountains of gleaming black coal, coasters with their white sails rippled by the wind, little wherries like their own. Further downstream, she can see the masts of the tall ships rising from St. Katharine’s Dock.

  Raphael sits on the seat opposite her, legs stretched out before him, deep in thought. He has arranged this journey with care. She wonders how much it is costing, but knows better than to ask. The waterman’s oar slices through the turbid water, from time to time sending a fine spray of droplets flying in their direction. The river’s surface is slick as oil, its colour constantly changing from mud brown to ochre to pearly grey. The wind that blows in from the distant sea fails to dispel the pervasive smell of sludge and ordure and rotting fish, but even this cannot dampen the strange joy that fills Adah’s heart as the boat skims eastward.

  ‘Just look at that!’ she says to Raphael, with a little laugh of amazement: the steam packet is pulling out from the wharf at Billingsgate, for all the world like a miniature factory adrift on the river, its tall chimney billowing a column of black smoke into the clear air, and its great mill wheel clanking as it slowly begins to churn the river into brownish foam.

  If it were not for the distant but palpable shadow of Miriam in Jamaica, they might be a middle-aged couple enjoying a day out on the river. Or perhaps a respectable widow being courted by a suitable widower. Adah envisages Miriam as heavy-boned, dark and frowning. Raphael has never concealed his wife’s existence, but never discussed it, except to say that Miriam’s health is frail. She wouldn’t be able to stand the rigours of an English winter, he says. There must, of course, be more to it than that. There is a sadness about the way Raphael speaks of her – an air of irreparable regret. It seems they married very young.

  But, for today, Adah is content to pretend. She gazes at the multitude of coloured flags that flutter at the bows of the ships, trying to guess the countries they come from. She can imagine these ships, large and small, tracking their many shining courses across the oceans of the globe from every direction, all converging in this great lake: the Pool of London. To the south, the wind ruffles the river, seeming to push its flow back inland, but the water around the boat flows steadily seaward, carrying them towards their destination. They pass Limehouse, where the ancient sails of the windmills along the embankment turn ponderously, unhurried by the wind. The flotsam of the city drifts past the wherry: a crate of oranges, its bloated contents spilling out across the surface of the waters; the ragged remains of a fishing net; a dead dog. The dog floats on the surface with its paws extended on either side and its head lowered into the murky water as though in a gesture of surrender. Its long black fur spreads out like seaweed from its body.