The Foundling’s Daughter

by Ann Bennett

  ‘Cedar Lodge and the orphanage, Cedar Hall, were all I’d ever known, you see. Evie and I were born in Cedar Lodge a year apart and we grew up there together. Living alongside a hundred or so other babies and children in that huge building next door felt quite natural to us. We just felt part of an enormous family.

  ‘Mother was a school mistress and taught the younger children in the big schoolroom in the orphanage every day, so Evie and I spent our early years in the nursery with the orphan babies. As we grew older, we took breakfast and lunch in the cavernous dining room with the other children, and sat side by side with them in the schoolroom for lessons.

  ‘Mother was kind to the children. She was a patient teacher. But she was shy. She always spoke in a timid voice, as if she was always ready to change her mind if someone disagreed with her. She used to blink a lot too, like a startled rabbit. She seemed never to change all through those years. I remember her wearing a plain dark dress down to her ankles, with a starched white collar. Her hair was always pinned up in a severe bun. She despised adornment and never wore jewellery or lipstick or even put cream on her face.

  ‘Despite that, I always thought that Mother had a sort of understated beauty. It had never been allowed to blossom. I suppose it was supressed through constant prayer and self-denial. It’s strange, but I have no memory of Mother’s hair being anything other than grey. In fact, Mother herself has almost disappeared from my memory, like a photograph that has faded in the sunlight.

  ‘Father was quite the opposite. He was what people might call a ‘larger than life’ character. All the children loved and almost revered him. Evie and I had been taught that these poor children had no families of their own and that they looked on Father as their own father. I knew it was wrong of me, but sometimes I felt a pang of jealousy when I saw other children running after Father in the yard, clinging onto his coattails as he swept through the corridors, or when they looked up to him with shining eyes as he led prayers before breakfast every weekday morning, or gave his sermon in the Baptist church on Sundays.

  ‘Father was a highly religious man, you know. He had once been out in India, spreading the word of God. He ran a mission and a church near a military station, Kandaipur. There’s the picture of it on the wall up there. I told you about that before, Sarah.’

  Sarah glances up at the picture of the church amongst the tropics on the far wall, the one she first saw above the mantelpiece in the study at Cedar Lodge.

  ‘From an early age I was fascinated by his stories about India. He would sometimes take me on his knee and tell me about his time out there. He would tell me about how he had to go into the mountains to help the villagers in times of disease or famine, how once he shot a tiger that was threatening a village. They were impossibly exciting, romantic stories.

  ‘Despite his high religious principles though, Father loved fine clothes. He had expensive tastes in almost everything. He would often go to London to get fitted out for three-piece suits in Savile Row. He had a luxury car too; a silver Jaguar. That car was his pride and joy and sometimes he would take Evie and me out in it for a special treat.

  ‘He kept the Jaguar in the old coach house, and he would pay some of the older boys in the orphanage a few pennies to polish it every week. Later he hired Tommy to look after it and to be his chauffeur, didn’t he, Tommy?’

  Tommy nods gravely.

  ‘He kept the car in the old coach house behind the house. There was a room above it for a coachman or stable lad. Father had the room done up for himself and he stopped Evie and me from ever going up there. Mother told us never to disturb him and never to question him about it. He wouldn’t go up there for weeks on end, but at other times he would spend hours up there alone, with the curtains drawn. Sometimes he would even sleep there overnight and when he came out he would look tired and dishevelled. Not his usual spruce self at all. But we got so used to it, we stopped even thinking about it.

  ‘But one day something happened to pique my curiosity. It was when Evie had started teaching in the schoolroom and I was still a pupil. I was coming back to the house alone after my lessons one day.

  ‘A storm was getting up and a gust of wind snatched my exercise book away and blew it across the garden and into the garage. I followed it in there to get it and as I picked it up I thought I heard a sound coming from the room above.’

  Connie pauses and looks up at Tommy. Sarah can see the fear in her eyes, the fear and the dread that had dominated her life.

  ‘It was a muffled sound,’ she said. ‘But I was almost sure it was the sound of someone crying.

  Twenty-Nine

  Connie

  ‘I didn’t dare ask Father about the strange sounds I’d heard coming from the room above the garage. How could I risk provoking his anger by being so inquisitive? Hadn’t he said over and over again that what went on in his hideaway was nobody’s business but his own? I realised I had to keep it to myself, and to try to forget about it.

  ‘A few days later though, something happened to take my mind off the incident: a foundling baby appeared on the doorstep of the orphanage. The housekeeper found the baby girl as she was unlocking the front door first thing one morning. We took the baby into the orphanage, but unlike the other children and babies, this one wasn’t destined to stay with us for long. Father found a home for this baby after a few months; a wealthy couple who lived near Oxford. He drove the baby to their home himself, setting off with the Moses basket on the back seat of the Jaguar along with bottles of milk for the journey.

  ‘Time went on and every few months another baby would appear. Father would take them himself for a private meeting with the local Registrar to register their births. The Registrar was one of Father’s inner-circle, a man I’d seen during smoke-filled meetings in Father’s office. He was a regular at the house. So was the chairman of the local council, the local solicitor Joshua Cartwright, and other prominent members of the community.

  ‘Young girls in trouble must know we’ll take care of those poor foundling babies and find homes for them,’ said Mother once. Word must have got around.

  ‘But there was something that didn’t feel quite right about it to me. Why didn’t Father get the authorities involved instead of finding these babies homes himself? I wondered if he was leaning on the chairman of the council to turn a blind eye, but I couldn’t say anything. God forbid that I should even think to question him about it!

  ‘Little by little I started to see Father in a new light. I began to think about some of the things I had accepted without question for years. I wondered about those secretive meetings he had in his office. What were they all about? I wondered too about the strange sound of crying in the hideaway, and about what he did up there when he disappeared for days on end. I also started to wonder for the first time in my life about his expensive tastes. It had never occurred to me before, I was so used to Father’s extravagant ways, but how could the superintendent of a county orphanage possibly afford Savile Row suits and own a Jaguar motor car? And the more I thought about it the stranger it seemed.

  ‘A couple of years after that first incident, some other things happened that confirmed all my suspicions.

  ‘One day I was bringing Father a cup of tea in his office. The door was slightly ajar, and I was about to go in when I realised he wasn’t at his desk. Instead, he was kneeling down in front of the fireplace. The rug had been pulled back and a section of one of the floorboards had been removed and laid aside. At first, I thought he must have been mending something, but Father never mended anything. He would always call for one of the orphan boys to do that sort of thing. And there was something strange in his manner, something furtive. He didn’t know I was there, so I just waited quietly behind the door. I watched as he put something under the floorboards. Then he slotted the board back, covered it with the rug and stood up, dusting down his knees. I’d waited until he was seated at his desk then went into the room with the tray as if I’d seen nothing.

  ‘When he w
as out at the orphanage the next day, I crept into the office and pulled back the rug. When I looked at the floorboards I realised there was a loose one that wasn’t nailed down. It was easy to lift it up. I peered under the floorboards, my heart in my mouth in case someone discovered me snooping. There was a small metal box inside. I took it out. To my surprise the lid opened easily. Inside were several letters addressed to The Rev Ezra Burroughs at Cedar Lodge. They were marked Private and Confidential. I took one out and opened the envelope. I knew it was wrong and that God must be watching me, but I had such a need to know I put all such thoughts aside. I opened the letter and scanned it quickly.

  ‘The letter was from Joshua Cartwright, the solicitor. As I said, he was one of the frequent visitors to Father’s meetings. It was very formal and was about some sort of service that my father had agreed to perform for one of Joshua’s clients who was apparently coming from India specially. It didn’t say what exactly, but it discussed payment to Father in two tranches of the sum of five hundred pounds. At the end, the letter said something about the importance of discretion and confidentiality in the matter.

  ‘There was a silver key in there too, hidden in the bottom of the box. To this day I don’t know what that was for. But then I heard someone in the hall and shoved the letter back.

  ‘What did it all mean? I would lie awake at night going over and over it in my mind. I would watch Father as he went about his daily business, wondering. I knew about his missionary days in India. I knew he still had letters from people he’d known out there, gifts too. Only the previous week a box had arrived with some exquisite carved Hindu gods inside. I wondered what kind of service Father could offer someone from India who was willing to pay such a huge sum.

  ‘I knew I couldn’t ask Father, nor Mother, it was out of the question. I tried to pluck up courage to talk to Evie about it. I could hardly find the right words to broach the subject. In the end I began by asking her if she knew what Father did in his hideaway. Evie just stared at me with horrified eyes and shook her head.

  ‘’We mustn’t speak of those things, Connie,’ she said. She told me it was Father’s private business and to not mention it again.

  ‘But a few months later something else happened. I’d been watching the coach house carefully, and sometimes I saw a light in the upstairs window even when Father wasn’t in there. I went into the garage to listen a few times, but I never heard anything.

  ‘One night I was convinced that there was somebody in there, though. Father was in bed in his room inside the house, but I was almost certain I could see movement behind the curtains. The compulsion to find out who or what was in there became overwhelming, even though I was quite terrified. I got out of bed, dressed quickly, pulled on an overcoat, and went out into the garden. It was raining heavily, although it was springtime and it wasn’t cold.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if I had the courage to go up the side steps to the door. I had in mind that I would go into the garage first and listen. I might be able to hear something from inside there. But as I crossed the lawn I was astonished to see the side door to the upstairs room open slowly. Someone came out and stood on the top step. I froze to the spot. It must be Father after all. But as I looked closely, I realised it wasn’t him at all. It was a slight figure. A young woman with long dark hair. She was dressed in a white nightgown. I remember wondering if it could be a ghost.

  ‘I went to the bottom of the steps and I could tell she had seen me. She hesitated, but then carried on coming down the steps towards me. As she got close I could see that her face was deathly pale, and her hair was lank and wet. Rain was already soaking through her nightie and she was shivering.

  ‘I asked her who she was. She told me her name was Anna. She said she was supposed to stay inside and not make a sound. But then we did hear a sound. A sound that was so familiar to me; the whimper of a sleeping baby.

  ‘Anna looked scared. She told me that she’d come all the way from India. The baby’s father didn’t want a scandal and had paid for her to have her baby here, under Father’s care.

  ‘The poor girl sat on the step in the rain and sobbed her heart out. All I could do was to hold her hand and stroke her shoulders. When she had finally stopped crying she told me more.

  ‘She told me that Father would find the baby a good home when he was about six months old. That he would be cared for in the orphanage until then. The poor girl was heartbroken. She said it would tear her heart out to return to India without him. She begged me to help her. Asked if I would write to her, letting her know where her baby ended up.

  ‘Of course I was terrified. If Father found out I was helping this girl, well, just the thought of his anger made my mouth go dry. She took my hand and pulled me up those steps, and my own heart was breaking just seeing the little thing sleeping.

  ‘Anna wrote down her address for me. She also handed me a blue, leather-bound book.’

  Connie picks up a blue book from her bedside cupboard.

  ‘It’s her diary. I’ve kept it all these years.’

  Connie shows Sarah and Tommy the pendant hanging on the chain around her neck, explains about the key to the diary hidden behind it.

  ‘She asked me to look after it and to pass it on to the baby, so he might read it when he grew up, and understand why his mother left him.’

  The old woman takes a breath, wipes a tear from her eye with a trembling hand.

  ‘And she went back to India?’ Sarah asks.

  ‘Yes, the poor girl was distraught. She said her address was in the diary, asked me to write to her. I decided there and then to defy Father.’

  ‘So what happened? Did you write to her about her baby?’

  ‘Yes, I did. As I thought would happen, a few days after she left, another foundling baby appeared on the steps of the orphanage. A baby boy this time, of course. Father took him in. He said he’d registered his birth as a foundling. The baby stayed with us in the orphanage for several months. He was a beautiful baby, that one, with dark, sparkling eyes and dimpled cheeks. Very quick to learn.

  ‘I wrote Anna two letters in the next few weeks. I told her all about the baby’s daily routine. About his development. How he started to smile, to grip people’s fingers. I had told her not to write back to me at Cedar Lodge. I was worried that Father would intercept the letter. I asked her to write to Post Restante at the post office if she needed to contact me. A letter arrived from her within a month and I was stunned by the contents. I still have it here.’

  Connie fumbles in her bedside drawer and brings out a yellowing envelope and hands it to Sarah.

  Sarah removes the letter and reads it.

  Dear Connie,

  Thank you for writing to me about my baby’s progress. I have been missing him so much I am finding life unbearable without him. I was distraught for the whole journey home and hardly came out of my cabin, not being able to face the world. I couldn’t bear to be without him.

  I have only been back at home in Kandaipur a week, but I’ve decided to come straight back to England again to fetch my baby. It will mean defying my husband and living a life of poverty in England by myself, but I’m prepared to face that. I need you to respond to me and say you will help me. As soon as I get your letter, I will book my passage and will get the next P&O liner out of Bombay to Southampton. Please write to me, Connie. I know you owe me nothing, but I could tell in the short time we spoke that you are a good, kind person. I’ll need you to take my baby out of the orphanage and bring him to Weirfield station to meet me when I arrive. I will take him straight away on the next train. I have it all planned out. Will you do that for me, Connie? Please think of the baby and how he needs his mother.

  ‘That’s so sad,’ Sarah says.

  ‘My heart sank when I read her words. I stared at that letter for a long time. Writing to her to tell her of the baby’s progress was one thing, but actively removing him from the orphanage and stealing him away was quite another. What would Father do to me if I did that? I
couldn’t even begin to imagine his anger. He would disown me. He would throw me out of the house and refuse to speak to me again. I would lose my family and my livelihood. Besides, I knew that Father was likely to be looking for a home for Anna’s baby right then. None of the foundlings had ever stayed in the orphanage for more than six months. What if Father took him to his new home while Anna was on her way back to England? Her journey would be pointless, and she would be left distraught.

  ‘I hid Anna’s letter away and tried to forget about it. But every time I saw the baby in the orphanage nursery, I caught a glimpse of his mother in those shining dark eyes and it tore my heart out to think that it was in my power to reunite them and that I was doing nothing about it. How could I fail to fulfil a mother’s wish to be with her child? At night I would take the letter out and re-read it.

  ‘A few weeks went past, and I knew that time was running out for Anna and her baby if I didn’t act soon, Father would find the baby a home and he would be whisked away.

  ‘I realised that this was my opportunity to do something worthwhile, and that I now had to face up to the reality of what Father was doing up in the coach house. I knew it to be deeply immoral and probably criminal too. Now was my chance to stand up to my father and against what he was doing.

  ‘One night I was lying in bed mulling over my dilemma. I was wide awake, but Evie was sound asleep in the bed across the room. I heard a noise coming from across the yard and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. It was happening again. There were cries coming from the coach house. I crept over to the window and saw that there were lights on in there. As I watched, I saw Father coming out of the side door with a bundle of rags. He crossed the garden and came into the house. After a few minutes I heard him coming up to the room. I dashed back to bed, and had to pretend I was asleep, although my heart was hammering against my ribs. I was terrified he would realise that I was awake.