Rough Justice

by Gilda O'Neill

With his traumatised child now wrapped in the folds of his shabby black overcoat, Henry shoved his way through the crowds of revellers as they laughed and sang in their drunken huddles in the freezing, fog-shrouded riverside byways, courts and alleys. For once, he wanted nothing to do with such things; he just wanted to stick close to the high, blind walls of the massive bonded warehouses, to seek the anonymity of their shadows and the shelter they offered from the bitter wind that was slicing through his threadbare clothes as it gusted in off the Thames.

  Now almost completely sobered by a combination of the realisation of the enormity of what he had done and the perishing bite of the night air, Henry came to a halt by a crumbling terrace in Old Gravel Lane in Wapping. It looked, even by a slum-dweller’s standards, as if it should have been abandoned or even demolished a long time ago.

  After swallowing hard and taking a deep breath, he banged on the front door with the side of his fist.

  What seemed like an age passed, and then a downstairs window was thrown up with a crack of splintering wood and a muttered oath. A wild-haired woman stuck her head out into the street.

  ‘Blast your eyes, whoever you are. What do you want, disturbing me at this time of night?’

  ‘They say you take in young ones.’

  ‘Who does?’

  ‘A girl who works in the Dolphin and Crown. That pub, the one up on the crossroads.’

  Henry knew what he said was true, he’d heard the barmaid talking about the woman only the other day; he’d gone in there as part of a pub crawl when the landlord in the Old Dog had refused to let him have any more drinks on the slate. The girl had been telling another barmaid where she could find someone to look after her newborn baby. Henry Tolliver now conveniently chose to forget the fact that the new mother hadn’t seemed very impressed with what she’d been told the woman had to offer by way of caring for youngsters. But then maybe she’d had more choices than he did.

  There was a brief silence while the woman considered this piece of information, weighing it up for reliability. She did recall a dark-haired girl, a silly daft tart who was always singing to herself like she had something to be happy about. She remembered minding her kid for a good few months – till it was carried off with the whooping cough. She knew that girl had sometimes done a bit of work in a pub over that way.

  The woman decided to tolerate this intruder into her sleep for a few moments longer – maybe he had some business to put her way, and she never said no to a few bob extra.

  ‘And what if I do take people’s chavvies in?’ she ventured cautiously, not wanting to seem keen, or he might try to get her to lower the price.

  ‘I’ll pay you.’

  The woman let out a loud, scornful grunting sound that might have been a derisive laugh, but could just as easily have been the start of a fit of repulsively bronchial coughing.

  ‘Will you now?’ Her head disappeared back into the room, and Henry listened as she first cleared her throat and then spat noisily.

  ‘You don’t think I look after the little bleeders out of the goodness of me own heart, now do you?’ he heard her rasp.

  Henry closed his eyes, feeling the bony featherweight child against his chest, as sleety rain began to drive through his coat, chilling them both. ‘Let me in. Please. I’ve got a proposition for you.’

  The woman smiled horribly to herself as she unbolted the street door. She could smell someone’s desperation as surely as she could sniff out a stinking fish washed up on the mud at low tide.

  Eliza Watts, the brown-toothed old hag of a baby farmer, tied her grey, greasy wrapper more tightly around her middle – as though she had anything desirable to hide from a man – and then peered at the pitifully narrow wedding band that Henry had handed her. He had also tried to hand her the now urine-soaked child that he had produced from under his coat, but when Eliza brushed his efforts aside he had set the little one down on the cold flags of her scullery floor.

  The woman curled her lip at the wafer-thin gold of the ring; she’d got this one completely wrong. Admittedly he looked a bit manky, but she really hadn’t thought he’d be this mean. Guilt usually had even the poorest of them nicking something better than this as a down payment for her services. Blast him; she’d gone and let him in for nothing.

  ‘This won’t pay for much,’ she said, making a final effort to see if he had anything hidden away that he might just be willing to part with. ‘Young as they are, these nippers have bellies to fill. So I’ll be needing the next instalment sooner rather than later, or I won’t be held accountable for what happens to the poor little thing. Worst comes to the worst, and it’ll have to be a foundlings’ home for her. You do know that, don’t you?’

  He nodded, a picture of self-pitying misery. ‘I know.’ He also knew that as sure as his soul was cursed to damnation for what he had just done to his wife, and for what he was about to do to his daughter, he had nothing more to give her. Nothing. He could have lied to himself, could have made plans that he would find work, pay this woman to care for his daughter until he could afford a decent home where he could make a life for them that would be worth living. But why bother to lie? He knew that a foundlings’ home would be his child’s sad lot in life. At least he wouldn’t be soiling his hands any further by being the one who took her there.

  Even if he could find the strength to take her to such a place himself, they’d be sure to guess he was her father and refuse to accept her. There were too many calls on the orphanages, settlements and churches around those benighted parts for them to be anything other than discerning about whom they chose to help. It would have been laughable if it wasn’t so heartbreaking, but having a parent, any parent – even one as useless as him – put the child, as far as the already overpressed charities were concerned, in too fortunate a category to warrant their attention.

  The Lord alone knew what might happen to her if even the sanctuary of the orphanage was denied her.

  ‘You’ll have your money by the end of the week. I swear on my life.’

  The baby farmer scratched herself, absorbed for the moment in something lodged in the recess of her armpit. Then she looked Henry directly in the eye. ‘What’s your trade?’

  ‘I’m in the docks.’

  ‘What? Stevedore, are you?’

  He bowed his head. ‘No. I’m a casual.’

  With those words, Henry had sealed his child’s fate.

  He couldn’t bring himself to look at his daughter. ‘Her name’s Nell,’ he said, his voice cracking with emotion. ‘After her grandmother. My mother.’ He turned his head to hide his tears. ‘May God take care of her soul.’

  Eliza Watts wasn’t sure whether he was talking about God taking care of his mother or of his child.

  And nor was he.

  As Henry made his way back through the crowds down towards the river in search of a ship that might prove to be his salvation – if he would ever deserve such a thing after what he had done – the bells of nearby St George’s began ringing out their joyous message of welcome to the new year.

  The crowds erupted into yet more ebullient shouts, laughs and cheers, and he was surrounded by roaring, drunken women trying to kiss him and hug him, even to dance with him. He pushed them all away.

  What could he possibly ever have to celebrate again? All he could do was pray that 1914 would bring him some sort of peace and forgiveness, that his dead wife would find some sort of rest at last, and that their child might be granted some sort of a life – if there was a god who would even begin to listen to the prayers of a man as wicked as Henry Tolliver.

  Eliza Watts tossed Lottie Tolliver’s sad little wedding band into a cracked blue and white jug that stood on the dust-laden overmantel above the blazing fire in her front parlour, the room where she slept on a battered, old-fashioned couch. It was the only room in the house that she ever heated, and she was the only person who was ever allowed to go into it. Being suspicious of anyone and everyone, Eliza was a woman who preferred to keep her own
company and her own counsel. Nell, chilled to the bone, still silent, and soaked in urine, had been dumped on a foul-smelling palliasse in one of the two upstairs rooms that were packed with all the rest of the young charges in Eliza’s supposed care.

  ‘Some chance of getting any more dough out of that one.’ Eliza Watts spoke out loud even though she was the only one in the room. ‘In fact, there’s as much chance of that bloke turning up again with money to pay for the upkeep of his little bastard, as there is of them posh tarts getting anywhere with all their old votes for women nonsense. Votes? What good’s votes to anyone? Money, that’s the only thing of any use.’

  She spat into the fire and sniffed inelegantly, staring at the flames as she worked out her plan of action.

  ‘I’ll wait till it gets light. That’s what I’ll do. Then them fools out celebrating the new year’ – she said celebrating as if it were a curse – ‘will have either collapsed unconscious in the street, or they’ll have found their drunken way home. Then I can offload that louse-infected little mare in a bit of privacy.’

  She laughed coarsely. ‘Can’t have me reputation for looking after all the dear little kiddiewinkies being ruined, now can I? Aw no, that wouldn’t do at all.’

  Poking thoughtfully at the roaring coals, Eliza Watts considered the options. ‘Now let’s see – Whitechapel. That should be far enough away. I mean, I don’t want no one checking up on me, now do I? Bleed’n’ welfare ladies. I’d never hear the end of it. Never see the back of the buggers.’

  Eliza Watts had no place in her home – or her heart – for nosy parkers, or for sentimentality, or, least of all, for unprofitable children.

  Chapter 3

  The matron tapped the end of her pen on a heavy, leather-bound ledger that took pride of place on the immaculately polished desk in her office – a tiny cubbyhole of a space that smelled of a combination of boiled cabbage, coal tar soap and wet laundry. She studied Eliza Watts through her wire-rimmed spectacles, her eyes small in her chubby face, despite the magnifying thickness of the lenses. Eliza was sitting on a straight-backed chair, sniffing pitifully as she twisted a grubby-looking handkerchief through her fingers in a dramatic gesture of inconsolable anguish.

  ‘So,’ said the matron, ‘she was left on your doorstep last night, Mrs Jenkins. In weather as cold as we’ve been having?’

  Eliza Watts adjusted her features into what she believed was an even more distraught expression, but which actually contorted her face into a rictus-like grimace that was more likely to provoke horror than sympathy.

  ‘That’s right.’ She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Who’d warrant such cruelty, eh? It’s terrible, that’s what it is. Proper shocking. I tried to get her to talk to me, to try and find out where she’d come from, but I’ve not been able to get a peep out of her. So my hands were tied. What else could I do but find somewhere respectable for her to stay? Trouble is, see, everyone knows how I look after people’s dear little ones, and so the chancers out there, well they just take advantage of me. It’s my kind heart, see. It’s made me a fool to myself over the years.’

  The matron lifted her chin and looked along her nose at the increasingly aggravating woman. ‘So you said.’

  ‘It’s a real service I provide. But I still have to pay my way.’ She dabbed at an imaginary tear. ‘I have to put a little bit of grub in my belly.’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Jenkins,’ said the matron, her disgust at the woman’s coarse language obvious in her tone. ‘As do we all.’

  ‘Well, when I woke up this morning and found the little mite sitting out there all by herself, well . . .’ Eliza Watts could only hope that the child continued to keep her mouth shut – at least until she’d made her way safely back to the anonymity of Wapping, when there’d be no chance of them tracing the non-existent Mrs Jenkins.

  ‘My heart, it went out to her. But what could I do? I knew I couldn’t afford to keep her with me, much as I’d have loved to.’ She sighed histrionically. ‘And her such a pretty little thing and all. So I asked around and everyone, every single soul, spoke so highly of your establishment here that I knew this was the right place to come to, to ask for help for her.’

  ‘You asked around did you, Mrs Jenkins? And these people knew about the home. So that means you’re local then.’

  Eliza Watts stood up; this wasn’t as easy as she’d hoped. The last thing she wanted was to be questioned by this old bag. She should have taken the little brat round to the railway arches and left her there – someone might have found her before she froze to death. Why had she been so soft-hearted?

  ‘Look, I’m very sorry Matron but much as I’d like to stay and have a chat, I do have my own charges to get back to.’

  ‘You’ve not left them alone, surely, Mrs Jenkins?’ The matron intended to keep very much on the high ground in this discussion.

  Eliza Watts looked suitably scandalised at the very idea. ‘Of course not,’ she said, crossing her fingers behind her back to excuse the lie.

  She might have been a hard woman, and even a wicked old liar, but she was as superstitious as the next slum-dweller. When you had little but your wits to depend on for survival, it never hurt to shorten the odds a bit, maybe by repeating a special rhyme when you passed the fever hospital, or by touching a sailor’s collar for a bit of good luck. Mind you, fat chance there was of any of that coming her way, when all she wound up with as payment for her trouble and her generosity was a cheap wedding ring – and that was probably made out of brass.

  ‘Well that’s me then.’ Eliza Watts backed towards the door. ‘Aw, and a happy and a prosperous new year to you and yours, Matron.’

  Five minutes later, and without the cup of tea she had vainly supposed she’d have at least been offered – not that she would have fancied hanging around to drink it – Eliza Watts was standing in the corridor outside the matron’s office. She hadn’t been quick enough on her feet and the matron had followed her out and caught up with her. They were now staring down at Nell, who was sitting on a miniature Windsor chair. The tiny child hadn’t shifted so much as an inch since Eliza had told her to wait there while she went and talked to the lady in the starched white cap and apron.

  Now even more keen to get away – before the child opened her mouth and more awkward questions were asked – Eliza Watts replaced her sad look with a sickly smile.

  She touched the matron on the arm, cocked her head to one side and said, with a grateful smack of her lips, ‘I know you’ll take good care of the poor orphaned little dear.’ Then added with what she thought was a kind touch to win the old cow over, but immediately realised was a mistake, ‘Nell, her name is. Bless her little heart.’

  ‘How do you know her name, Mrs Jenkins?’ said the matron, staring icily at Eliza’s grubby hand on her clean white sleeve. ‘You said earlier that she hadn’t said anything to you.’

  ‘Pinned to her front on a bit of old paper,’ she blurted out, and with that she marched briskly off towards the big double doors without so much as a glance over her shoulder, or even the slightest glimmer of pity in her eyes.

  The matron, well aware that she would be wasting her time trying to get any further information – never mind the truth – out of such a malodorous harridan, let her go. From her long experience it was obvious that the woman was a baby farmer, who no doubt had been welched on by some slum Jezebel or other, and there were plenty of those to choose from. Anyway, it probably wouldn’t hurt to keep the child. When the charitable ladies came on their visits to the home, the sight of the smaller ones – especially those with blonde curls and big grey eyes like this one had – always had them sniffling into their handkerchiefs and then digging into their husband’s bank accounts to make some very generous donations.

  ‘So . . . Nell,’ she said, shooshing her stiff white elasticated cuffs up her arms. ‘Up you get. You’re going to have a bath, child.’

  Chapter 4

  Clara Sully, the thin-lipped, wobbling mound of a matron of the St L
awrence’s Whitechapel Foundlings’ and Orphans’ Home, didn’t think of herself as unkind, but rather as a pragmatic type of woman – and she considered practicality to be the most important trait in a matron. Why waste time on sentiment when there were ledgers to be filled, lists to be made, orders to be issued, and jobs – no matter how unpleasant – to be completed?

  And the job before her – bathing this very damp and smelly child – was certainly unpleasant. One she could definitely have done without at this time of the morning, or at any time of the day for that matter.

  It was all a case of bad luck. On any normal morning Matron Clara Sully would have had any number of girls on call to do it for her, as some of the older orphans and foundlings – because they were either too stupid or too disagreeable-looking to find alternative employment – stayed on as ill-paid employees of the home, despite having reached fourteen years of age. But, for some reason that Matron Sully preferred not to think about too much, Walter Thanet – the senior governor of the home’s board, with authority over the entire staff in the establishment – had chosen to give them all the day off to mark the opening of the new year. He had added that so long as the cook left sufficient provisions for the day, he would take care of the younger children himself. It was only the outbreak of a spate of vomiting, and the subsequent admission of four of the children to the hospital ward, which had caused Mr Thanet, somewhat reluctantly, to request that the matron should come down from her top-floor quarters and then remain on duty with him.

  Clara Sully had agreed to do so with a mixture of anger and relief: anger at missing the opportunity to visit her brother and his wife in their neat little home in Bow, but relief that the children would have her there on the premises should they need any sort of . . . well, help or protection. Not that there would be any circumstance or even any likelihood that they would need her for either of those, of course, she added to herself in the mental note that had become automatic over the years of her employment by Mr Thanet. This thought process allowed her to carry on in the self-deluding pretence that nothing wayward had ever occurred in the home. And neither would it ever occur in the future.