Turning the Stones

by Debra Daley

  ‘Unfortunately I do not have my admission number. I am not even sure of the year of my birth.’

  Mrs Collingwood said, ‘Well, your birth certificate will be able to tell you that.’

  ‘My foster family never had one for me.’

  ‘Of course you have a birth certificate. We do not take foundlings without one. We must ascertain that they are not more than twelve months old on admission.’

  I felt a rush of optimism. ‘Perhaps the certificate is held in your records.’

  ‘I could not say. You must make an appointment with the registrar.’ She excused herself and bustled away.

  I knocked at the registrar’s office and a clerk in a coat that was too big for him came to the door and told me that the registrar was indisposed and probably would not return until the next day. I asked him if I could make an appointment, but he said that must be done with the registrar directly. Oh, the frustration of it! I breathed in a huge sigh. Now that I was there, I could not stand to walk away, not knowing whether I’d even be able to come back another day.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, and stepped uninvited into the office. It contained a large table covered in papers, a couple of chairs and a tall glass-fronted cabinet tight with folios. A sickly odour of sealing wax hung in the air.

  ‘Madam? Are you in order?’

  The clerk was a dumpy man in middle age. Encouraged by the mild expression on his face, I asked him if I might sit down. His hand dangled in the direction of a chair and I sank on to it, my gaze downcast.

  He cleared his throat and said, ‘Beg pardon, madam, but I am not in charge here. The registrar …’ The sentence trailed away. His voice was soft and disheartened.

  ‘I am only trying to find my mother,’ I burst out. ‘But I don’t have an admission number and I am not even sure when I was born. I was fostered to Mr and Mrs Waterland of Cheshire in 1749, I think it was, from this hospital. I believe I was about four years old.’

  Almost before I knew what I was doing I had risen to my feet and was leaning towards the clerk in the manner of a supplicant. My heart was beating hard. He blinked rapidly. His face had turned pink.

  He must have recognised that I was an unstoppable force, because he suddenly said, ‘If you were fostered in 1749, there will be a record of that in the general register along with your admission number. Your foster parents would have been given a receipt as proof of the transaction. The hospital is always careful about that.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  He pulled at his plump lower lip and then offered me a sorrowful expression. ‘But it does not seem to me that we would release a child to permanent fosterage unless there was proof that the child’s parents were dead.’

  I said, ‘Even if I could only know that, I should be grateful. Is there any way I might consult the register now? My stay in London may be short and I am not at leisure to return and then wait for the governors’ meeting.’

  The clerk shook his head. ‘No, no, I am afraid I am not at liberty to show you the register.’

  I thought of the shilling I had brought with me in case I was pressed for time and needed to take a hackney back to Poland Street. It wasn’t much of a douceur, but still. I reached into my pocket, but the clerk said quickly, ‘I cannot take anything from you.’

  I said, ‘I understand.’ But I put the shilling on the table in any case. I had already decided that I would not leave that room until I had looked at the register. It was what I had come to do and I meant to do it. I am often a quaking, cowering milksop with a surfeit of nerves and feelings, but there is iron inside me, too.

  I thought of you. I thought how saddened you would be if I crept away without doing everything I could to find you. And I was thinking of myself, too. Perhaps I had divined that the Waterlands could not be relied on as much as I had always hoped and that it was time to look elsewhere for a refuge. And to know this one inconvertible thing alone – the date of my birth – would shore me up amid the shaky circumstances in which I found myself.

  Was it the expression on my face? I am sure it was fierce enough. But the clerk turned without a word and went to the cabinet. As he walked by the table he swept the shilling into his hand. He took a key from a chain on his belt, unlocked the cabinet and returned with a folio. He opened it on the table.

  The register gave the day of a foundling’s reception, the admission number, the baptismal name bestowed by the foundling hospital, any significant illnesses and the date of death or discharge.

  The clerk said, ‘The reason for discharge is almost always that a child has reached an age to be apprenticed. The register will say where and to whom the child has been sent. In your case it will say you were fostered. That will give me your admission number and I can find you in the billet book. Please tell me your name.’

  I told him and he said, ‘Mary Smith will not be the name your mother gave you. Infants admitted to the hospital are immediately baptised with new names and the register does not record your birth name or your mother’s name. That information was written on your birth certificate. The certificate would have been given to your foster parents. Nowadays the billet book holds a record of the mother’s name, because she must make a formal petition for admission, but in the early years of the hospital the child could be left at the door with no questions asked. Still, your mother might have left something to mark her connection with you. If that is so, the billet book will have a record. The book is an inventory of such things as the clothes you were wearing when you arrived here and physical details of identification. Do you have a birthmark? I wonder.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A pity. You might find your birth name if your mother wrote it down in a poem or a letter addressed to you. That is not uncommon, and such papers are kept in the billet book.’

  The clerk turned a page of the register and began to read. He did not object when I came to his side. I felt my pulse quicken as I scrutinised the lists. They were detailed: male child 14 days old gone to nurse, Eunice Smith returned to the Hospital from nurse, Sidcup, 3rd April, James Sooley apprenticed to engraver 28th October and so on. There were receipts for children’s clothes: linsey sleeves 6d, white baize blankets 9d each, three caps 6d each, and records of smallpox inoculation, infirmities recorded, watery breach, thrush, excoriations, names, addresses, parishes, dinner menus and even petitions for the return of a child.

  The clerk said, ‘Here is a Mary Smith. Ah, not you, unless you were apprenticed to a milliner.’ Then he found another Mary Smith, but she had died, and another, apprenticed to a lace-maker. Several pages later he found a Maria Smith, but she had gone to service in Kent. Then a Mary Smithie, dead of consumption, and a Mary Smyth, also dead.

  Finally, the clerk said, ‘I can’t find a Mary Smith who matches you, or even a single child discharged permanently to foster parents.’

  Disappointment flooded through me and I felt the chagrin of having dared to hope for an easy result from the register.

  The clerk said, ‘Of course, it is conceivable that a mistake could have been made in the record-keeping. Or I may have missed something …’

  But I had seen for myself the careful entries: the admission numbers, the inventories, the ruled columns, the minutiae.

  The clerk closed the folio and slipped it back into place in the cabinet. He said, ‘I am sorry, but without your admission number I cannot even direct you to make a petition for your birth certificate.’

  I said, ‘It puzzles me that you have no record of a permanent fosterage to Cheshire.’

  The clerk said, ‘I think, perhaps, that it is likely you were not a foundling of this hospital and that your foster parents obtained you from elsewhere.’

  ‘Is there another institution such as this?’

  ‘No, we are the only foundling hospital. But I cannot speak for the actions of private individuals who may make a business of such transactions.’

  ‘Perhaps my name might be recorded somewhere else here, on a list, say, of children inoc
ulated against smallpox or – or …’ I struggled to think of some other record where I could discover myself.

  ‘Madam,’ the clerk said with some firmness, ‘you must accept that our records show no trace of you.’

  *

  I left the foundling hospital in a daze. I crossed the forecourt and strode along a street until the sensation of my knees buckling forced me to halt. I sought to gather my thoughts – but how could my disquiet abate? Mrs Waterland’s assertion that I had been admitted to the foundling hospital in London without a birth certificate had been incorrect. There was no mistake about it. The hospital, I had learned, was scrupulous about its documentation.

  Mrs Waterland had not told me the truth – and that discovery made me feel that my situation at Sedge Court was even more precarious. I was shaken by her dishonesty. Had she obtained me privately in some way that was not absolutely legal? Perhaps she had fabricated the story about the foundling hospital because my provenance was too tawdry to be disclosed. But it did not make sense that someone of the mistress’s sensibilities would go looking for a companion for her daughter among lowlifes. Or was it rather, that on some visit to a town, her pity had been aroused by a pathetic little child living on the street and she had struck a bargain with the child’s indigent mother? But why wouldn’t she have told me so? Such a story would have reflected well on her charitable nature. Then I recalled that time Downes had said I was a poacher’s daughter. Was that the truth? Perhaps Mrs Waterland had not told me a sincere account of my origins because she wished to spare my feelings.

  So my speculations churned on as I walked and beneath them disappointment flowed. I had been soundly baulked in my search for you, and now my confidence in Mrs Waterland was undermined.

  I arrived at an ill-kept jostling intersection and here it came to me that I had been proceeding without direction for some time. As a result, I had lost my way. There were no signs to tell me the name of the streets where I stood. What a hemmedin feeling one gets from this continuous press of buildings and when one looks to the sky there is nothing but roofs coated with pigeons.

  I brought out my plan from the pocket of Eliza’s coat – and that wretched promissory note came with it and fell to the ground as though I needed reminding of things that were hopeless and useless. I picked it up and stuffed it back in the pocket. I stared at the plan, seeking to trace the path I had taken since I had left the hospital. I might have come south instead of veering westwards as I ought to have done – and I now lacked a shilling to get me back to Mr Paine’s house in good time.

  Amid the clamour of the street, I puzzled over the plan. There were two men dragging a sled loaded with broken furniture. The iron runners scraping over the cobbles were making a hellish din. At the same time a pair of milk-sellers on the corner were trying to drum up custom by banging the pails that hung from their yokes. I flagged down a woman toiling towards me with a basket of oranges over her arm and found from her that I was at a place where Fleet Street becomes the Strand. I squinted again at my plan. Fleet Street: I had a flare of recognition at hearing that name. But when I located the street on the map, I saw that I was far from Soho, where Mr Paine’s house was. I would need to walk to the west along the Strand.

  But some little recollection to do with Fleet Street tugged at me. I closed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose. One always had so much to think about. I plunged my hand into my pocket and brought out the note belonging to Johnny’s bank.

  It said: We promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of Two Guineas. Fleet Street, London, the 2nd day of July, 1761. The Governors of the Bank of Hill & Vezey.

  I was bothered by the mantua-maker’s disdaining the note at that shop in Piccadilly and I wondered if there were more to her refusal than a scruple about the note’s condition. I happened to be feeling particularly thwarted by my lack of knowledge – and since I could not satisfy my curiosity about two gaping subjects, my parentage and the nature of Eliza’s mission in London, I thought to wander towards the bank and to see what I could see. Why should I not? I was at Fleet Street and in an investigative mood. And I was already very late to go to Mr Paine’s. What would another an hour matter now?

  I had never encountered a banking house before, but my state of suspicion disposed me to boldness. I asked a passing gentleman for directions to Hill & Vezey. Was it my imagination or was there a slight raising of his eyebrows when I mentioned the bank? The place was not difficult to find. I had only to walk twenty yards along Fleet Street before I came to a building with a facade punctuated by an ecclesiasticallooking bay window behind a grille on one side. The bank’s name was engraved on a brass plaque at the portal. The door itself was guarded by a bulldoggish figure in black with a long staff. I met his challenge with a request to encash one of the bank’s promissory notes. The guard barred my way, saying that no cash transactions were taking place that day.

  I took my courage in my hands and said that I insisted on cashing the note. Perhaps the guard did not like the way my raised voice attracted the attention of passers-by, because he turned and banged with his staff on the door. Presently it opened and a footman in maroon livery appeared.

  ‘She’s making a to-do about encashing her note,’ the guard said.

  The footman admitted me to a gaunt antechamber with the dusty smell of old stone. I could sense by his emollient air that he did not intend to let me go further and that his task was to manage my expectations. He said that the bank was not at that time converting its notes into coin, because it had been overrun with counterfeits, which were threatening the credibility of its promissories.

  ‘I can assure you that my note is genuine,’ I said. ‘Shall you like to see it?’

  The footman raised a hand of protest. A very fine lace cuff flopped from beneath his coat sleeve.

  ‘If only you will be patient, dear lady –’ here he offered me a shifty bow, ‘you may convert the note in a week or two more and no harm done.’

  The footman’s tone was bland, but tension fizzed underneath it, I thought. He could hardly wait to bundle me out into the street, which he did with another bow that was rather more cursory.

  I began slowly to make my way along the raucous street, pondering on the bank of Hill & Vezey. I passed numerous coffee-houses as I went. It was hard to miss them. To the pungent aroma of coffee was added the racket made by the lads at their entrances shouting and waving bills of fare – or were they hawking news sheets?

  Do you know, over the course of time, listening to conversations at Sedge Court about investments and mortgages and shareholdings and profits and losses, I have absorbed some faint notion of the workings of money. It did not seem right to me that one could only redeem one’s banknote at the bank’s leisure. What had happened to the gold and silver coin someone would have given to the bank in the first place in exchange for a promise to pay on them? Had it all been paid out on counterfeit promissories? In which case, wouldn’t one feel a great lack of confidence in the bank’s ability to redeem a genuine note? Evidently the bank could not pay. Or else I should have been able to encash the note. Could it be, I wondered with a start, that Hill & Vezey was bankrupt?

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the coffee-house striplings leap forward and thrust a leaf of paper at a gentleman wearing the sober dress of a merchant. The merchant took the paper and perused it with keen interest. In fact, most of the patrons of those coffee-houses looked like merchants – or were they bankers? The stripling’s establishment was called Percy’s. A slate hung on the door and chalked on it was some kind of list. Of commodities, I saw, as I edged closer – cotton, sugar, tea and so on. I understood then that these lads were handing out the latest stock prices and the coffee-house was likely frequented by traders. The lad squinted at me with a face in which you could see already the future curmudgeon and offered me a sheet with an ironic smirk. As I took his list, it occurred to me to ask him if he knew of Hill & Vezey’s bank. He expressed a knowing snort.

  I rem
arked that the bank was unable to encash my promissory note, and he said, ‘It is unable to issue them neither. You can set that name down on the blacklist. A crowd has already withdrawn their investments and the bank ain’t got the wherewithal now to carry on its business. You’ll be lucky if you can ever get your money back, missus. Everyone in the city knows that H&V is done for.’

  For the price of a silver button from Eliza’s coat, which was all I had to give, he was prepared to tell me why and how Hill & Vezey had come to rupture.

  *

  As I pushed through the crowds along the Strand I pondered the news I had been given by the stockbroker’s lad. According to him, the bank’s reserves of gold had been ruinously depleted and it had effectively ceased trading. Its promissory notes were worthless. I thought of the many bills that had piled up at Sedge Court in response to the mania of refurbishment that had taken place the previous summer and the compensatory spree, ordering fripperies from catalogues, that had blown up in the wake of Sir Joseph Felling’s death. I thought of the ruins of Mr Waterland’s storehouse. I knew from Mrs Edmunds’s account-keeping that Sedge Court had been run on credit for a long time and that Johnny’s bank was the source of that credit.

  If Johnny was insolvent, so was Sedge Court. The Waterlands needed cash to pay their bills. If cash did not come their way, I could see that they were likely to succumb to an economic infirmity that threatened their way of life. If there were ever a moment when Mr and Mrs Waterland needed one or both of their children to haul in a generous annuity, then here it was.

  Had I been right to think that Eliza had been sent to London on covert marriage business? A shiver ran down my spine. Surely, surely, Barfield could not be a part of it.

  By the time I reached Poland Street my apprehension had ballooned and I was impatient to warn Eliza that a stratagem might be in play. She had not yet come home from shopping with Johnny. I was obliged to wait another two or three hours in the apartment before she returned with her new sleeves. I barely glanced at them. When I said I must speak to her about a weighty matter, she began to conduct herself evasively. She bustled about, thrusting a needless poker in the fire. She fiddled with her neckerchief. I seized her arm to force her to attend to me, but she immediately shook me off.