‘Then I will take you home; my house is a few streets away. We can walk in five minutes, or I can send for the carriage.’
‘No, thank you. I should go home. Please tell your grandfather I’m sorry.’ I turned from him and walked briskly away. Mrs Callard’s carriage was already nearing the gates; I’d have to hurry if I was to see them again. I was vaguely aware of attracting glances – chins turning sharply over shoulders, and eyes following me down the drive – but as I moved through the gaps I did not look back, letting them bounce from me like hailstones.
Beyond the gates the road was straight for a quarter of a mile, and I followed on foot past the open fields either side, where curious cows lifted their heads at the procession. At the end of the road I watched it turn right and roll west, towards Bloomsbury. I kept it in my sights, walking on the roadside, side-stepping horse dung, as any woman might after a church service on a bright winter’s day. My pace was purposeful, but I felt as though I would burst apart at any moment. I focused on putting one foot before the other, and keeping my cloak from turning around my neck, and followed the glossy black carriage as it rolled through the Sunday traffic. After only a few minutes it slowed and turned left down a street stacked with townhouses so identical it was enough to make you feel drunk. My head spun, and my mouth was dry, so certain was I that my daughter was sitting yards away from me, dressed in silk the colour of sunshine, with a strange shelled creature in her pocket. She had shown it to me, a secret in her palm, and smiled.
The carriage was drawing to a halt. We could not have been more than two streets away from the Foundling. I stood for a moment, blinking stupidly like a mouse on a dinner plate, before sense took over and I moved to stand against the black iron railings of a house across the street. I pulled my cloak tighter, and my bonnet further over my face, and watched the coachman climb down and drop gracefully to the ground before a four-storey townhouse. Steps led up to a wide front door painted black. There was no space between the house and the others either side, standing as they were like soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, and so similar that if I looked away and back again, I might not have been able to tell it apart. I peered more closely, searching for a feature to know it by. The shutters of the first-floor windows were red, and there was something funny about the brass door-knocker. I squinted, and took as many steps closer as I dared. The door-knocker was a whale.
A green dress appeared, and with it the woman who wore it. Her face was turned away, so I could only see gold hair piled high beneath a hat. I realised I was shaking, my legs threatening to buckle beneath me. Two little feet appeared, and the hem of a yellow dress. She held her skirts and jumped again, and though I’d only seen it once before, it was so dear and familiar it made me ache. The woman was already moving into the house without a backward glance; she did not offer her hand to her daughter.
My daughter.
The little girl skipped onto the doorstep, and I saw the creamy curve of her neck, and dark ringlets falling from her cap. She gave a cursory glance up and down the street, as though wishing to remember it on that bright winter morning, and then the black door was opening, and they were vanishing through it, and I leaned back against the railings, feeling for them behind me, and watching as, with a flash of glossy paint and a thud, the door closed, and the house shimmered into stillness.
PART TWO
ALEXANDRA
CHAPTER 7
Every day at three o’clock I took tea in the withdrawing room with my parents. Before that, I would sit in my parlour at the back of the house, and when the slim gold hand on the mantelpiece clock reached fifteen minutes to the hour, I would fold my newspaper and set it on the table next to my chair. On it was a little dish of water and a handkerchief for me to wash the ink stains from my hands. I did this very carefully, removing my rings and cleaning each finger one by one, polishing the nail until it shone and listening for Agnes’s tread on the stairs and the jangle of the tea service. At a minute before three I would examine myself in the glass between the two windows and tidy my hair, brushing down my skirts and pinching my jacket sleeves straight where they had creased. Then I would cross the landing and go in.
The withdrawing room overlooked Devonshire Street below and the terraced houses opposite in a mirror image. The view from every window front and back was of more houses, identical to our own – four storeys, with two windows on each of the floors and one on the ground by the door – and so close to one another that when we moved in I saw a delft jug sitting on a washstand in the house opposite, where a family of five lived, with three children. From the way the husband dressed and the hours he kept, I expected he worked as a lawyer or doctor. They were very social creatures, and often had all manner of guests at the table, going through five or six sets of candles, and sometimes not getting up from dinner until supper was served at ten or eleven o’clock. At first it seemed strange, as though we were all living behind eyeglasses. But quickly I’d got used to it, finding comfort in the proximity and the false intimacy it created. I did not know my neighbours, but I watched them, and no doubt they watched me, too.
No. 13 Devonshire Street was one of my father’s houses. The street was just wide enough for two small carriages to pass one another, which they did with great ceremony, each coachman being territorial about his space. At both ends of our street were large, handsome squares with young plane trees and wide green lawns around which the houses sat, looking in at one another like diners at a table. Of course I had only seen one, and studied the other on Mr Rocque’s map. I lived on the very edge of London, before the houses fell away and the countryside began. The city sprawled south, east and west from Devonshire Street, but not north, where brick and roads gave way to grass and fields. Daniel had not liked living in a townhouse at first, likening us to horses in a stableyard peering out at one another. I’d reminded him that if he wished to work as a merchant he had to be in London. Gradually, life here had seduced him, and his business had grown, and after a year he had said he would rather live the rest of his days as a merchant than a marquess.
Agnes was setting out the tea things when I went in. I kissed my parents and took my usual chair opposite them by the window. As it was winter, the room was dim, and it would be dark soon – our faces were already half in shadow. I lit a splint in the fire and took it to the lamps before throwing it back on the flames.
‘The linkboys will have less work soon,’ I said. ‘The nights are shortening by two minutes a day.’
In firelight, Father’s dark eyes were kinder, and the years were ironed out of Mother’s pearly skin. I poured three cups and stirred in sugar for Father and me; Mother had none, complaining it hurt her teeth. My hands were clean, at least – they did not like to see me reading the papers, which was why I washed them, but Father was always interested to hear the shipping news. I read those parts just so I would have something to talk to him about. As a girl I would sit on his lap in my nightgown as he read the announcements of the Evening Post he thought I’d find interesting, squinting in the candlelight. That was how I’d learned to read: as his eyes deteriorated, mine grew more useful, and I knew the words ‘consignment’, ‘insurance’ and ‘speculation’ just as other children were learning ‘cat’, ‘apple’ and ‘boy’. Once or twice Charlotte had sat with me to do the same, but quickly tired of the long words and dull topics. Agnes was much better than I at telling stories, and more often Charlotte sat by the kitchen hearth with the cat on her lap and a biscuit in her hand while Agnes rolled dough and invented tales. Sometimes I stood behind the kitchen door, listening myself.
‘Did you hear about the new bridge at Blackfriars?’ I asked them. ‘Why we need three across the river I do not know. Surely one is enough.’
My mother smiled placidly; my father was benign. I was older than them now. It was a strange thought. We passed half an hour with idle chit-chat, and once I had finished my tea, I put the lid back on the sugar box and extinguished the lamps, for the room would be unused until the sa
me time tomorrow. Before I left I polished their frames with the handkerchief I kept in my sleeve: Father first, on the left alcove of the fireplace, and Mother on the right.
Charlotte was standing on the landing when I closed the door quietly behind me. I rarely heard her soft feet on the carpets, and she often startled me, which caused me to scold her.
‘Who were you talking to?’ she asked, not for the first time.
‘Nobody,’ I replied, not for the last. Sometimes she would go into the room after me and look around, crouching to peer beneath the dresser, behind the curtains and once even up the chimneybreast. Her curiosity was boundless; it filled the house, pressing at the windows and flooding the rooms, finding its way into cracks and corners, drawers and cupboards. Soon it would spill over altogether. There would come a day when the things I’d bought to keep her entertained – instruments, pets, books, dolls and her once-weekly outing (five minutes in the carriage, an hour in the chapel, then five minutes home) – would no longer be enough. I knew the time would come when she would want to feel the sun on her face and walk through a park among strangers like an ordinary person, and I dreaded it. For now, though, she knew we lived this way to stay safe.
I ran through all the locks in my mind, counting them on my fingers. There were three doors – front, kitchen and basement stairs – and sixteen windows, fastened at all times. My modest townhouse was no palace, but there were at least two rooms on every floor – the kitchen and scullery with the pantries and storehouse in the basement, the dining room and what used to be Daniel’s study on the ground floor, my parlour and the withdrawing room on the first, and all the bedrooms above that. Charlotte slept in the chamber opposite mine, and Agnes, my maidservant, and Maria, the cook-housekeeper, were in the attic. Instead of a garden there was a small courtyard, enclosed by a brick wall about five or six feet high, in which Agnes hung washing and Maria took deliveries from the narrow alley, reached from a passage at the side of number 10. Beyond the alley were the backs of the houses on Gloucester Street, identical to mine but for their outbuildings and window dressings. My sister Ambrosia used to suggest I’d be more comfortable in the countryside, in a house with gates and a long drive. She had no memories, though, of our old life. She did not know what it was to lie awake listening to the wind tear-ing at the windows, groaning to be let in. Our house in the Peak District had felt on the edge of the world. The darkness, so black you could almost touch it. The unsettling silence. London knew neither. And that was how I liked it.
The door-knocker echoed through the house, and Agnes shuffled up from the basement to answer it while I waited on the turn of the stairs, out of sight. It was Ambrosia, announcing herself loudly and dripping all over the hallway, bringing the cold air in with her. It was a hideous night, and she had paid a call only two days before, so I did not expect her. She came to see me once a week, sometimes bringing her children, more often bringing her dog. Tonight she’d brought neither, as the streets were already dark, and the weather foul. I was even more surprised to see what she was wearing.
‘What have you got on?’
My sister was what the periodicals would call a beauty. She was a large woman, and everything about her spilled over like champagne from a saucer: her breasts, her laughter. She was as loud as a fishwife, could smoke like a skipper and outdrink any man. At thirty-three, a woman’s best years were behind her, but not my sister’s: somehow she only grew more dazzling. She and her husband George Campbell-Clarke were as indulgent, narcissistic and wasteful as it was possible for two people to be, and I was remarkably fond of them. They lived in a large house on St James’s Square, when they were not at all the most fashionable assembly rooms and drawing rooms of the rich and celebrated, often coming home at six or seven in the morning and meeting their servants on the stairs.
She pulled her muslin cap from her head and wrung it out on the the stone floor. ‘Agnes, the mangle might be necessary, I’m afraid,’ she announced in her singsong voice.
‘Your coat . . .’ I said.
‘Is George’s, yes. It’s a dreadful night and I didn’t want to spoil my things.’ It was a masculine, grey thing, sleek and warm and perfectly suited to a wet winter shower, but it made her look like a dray horse.
‘But you might have been seen. Wearing your husband’s clothes!’
‘By whom?’ Ambrosia teased. ‘I assure you the sedan I hired was very discreet.’
I raised an eyebrow. Ambrosia took lovers, and sometimes it got her into trouble – not with George, who was just as adulterous as she – but with her paramours’ wives and mistresses. She loved to regale me with her adventures in my parlour, even with her children present. Her two sons and two daughters were wan-faced, disappointing things, more like me than their mother. Just one of her exploits could entertain me for a week; when she left I would be half-startled not to see smouldering cigars in an ashtray, and stockings trailing from the furniture. I knew of the ballrooms and parties at the mansions in Grosvenor and Cavendish Squares, but the places themselves were as unknowable to me as Nazareth and Jerusalem, though they existed fully formed in my mind, and of course on Mr Rocque’s map. For I had seen some of the world a long time ago, and could easily recall the vast carpets, the brocade draperies and silver dishes circulating beneath glittering chandeliers, the roaring men with foetid breath and powdered women with patches of sweat at their lips and armpits. I had seen enough of it for a lifetime.
‘So why have you come?’ I asked.
‘Agnes.’ Ambrosia spoke to my maid, who was caught in a scuffle with the monstrous coat. ‘If I were to find a hot buttered crumpet and a glass of sherry at my elbow, I would not be vexed.’
‘Yes, madam.’ Agnes beamed. Ambrosia was always a welcome guest at Devonshire Street – a cat among the pigeons – and provided all the joy of a roadside spectacle to the servants. ‘I shall hang this afore the kitchen fire for you, madam, to dry it off.’
‘You are an angel. Oh, and do something with this, would you? Though it may be beyond mercy.’ She passed Agnes the sodden cap, which off her head had all the glamour of a dishrag. Beneath George’s coat was one of her usual splendid ensembles: a sack-back of pale grey, with violet skirts the colour of storm clouds.
We went up to my parlour, where the lamps were lit and the fire built. The London Chronicle lay folded on the table beside the little dish I used to wash my hands, and Ambrosia appraised the arrangement with an amused smile. She went straight to the looking glass and peered into it.
‘My, my.’ she spoke to her reflection. ‘Aren’t I quite the muse tonight?’
The parlour on a winter’s night was my favourite place. With the curtains drawn and the fire lit, it was cosy as a nest. Agnes brought a plate of hot buttered crumpets and a crystal decanter of sherry with two glasses, and I poured us both a measure and watched Ambrosia eat with relish, wiping butter from her chin. Father had been enthralled by the classics, and in Greek my sister’s name meant ‘food of the gods’. There was more than a touch of the deity about her; lounging with her feet on a stool and a sherry in her hand, it was easy to imagine grapes instead of a glass, a cloud for a chair, and a sheet to preserve her modesty, of which she had none. I did wonder what our parents’ design was, giving a baby such a sensual name – it could have been a glaring irony, but instead had been a prophecy.
‘No dog today?’ I asked.
‘The children were dressing him up in the baby’s gowns so I left them to play.’
‘I presume you have not come all the way from St James’s for crumpets?’
‘No, I have not. I have come to tell you we will be going to the country tomorrow, George and I, and the children. George has got himself into a rather compromising situation, shall we say, and it’s necessary for us to sortie for a season or two.’
I fixed her with a stare as she licked her fingers. ‘A compromising position of the financial or carnal?’
‘The latter. It involves a viscount’s daughter and a miscommunicat
ion in age, and now one very furious viscount, who challenged George to a duel, of all things. No matter, the girl will be sent to the continent and be back by Whitsun.’
Ambrosia treated George’s infidelities as she did one of her children breaking a vase. Anything else would have been hypocrisy.
‘For how long will you be away?’ I asked, trying to hide my disappointment.
‘A few months, I suppose. I told George it wasn’t necessary and everyone will have forgotten in a week, but he has recently discovered a passion for horse racing and says there are two courses in the north-east he wishes to visit.’ She sighed. ‘I would stay in London but alas, I am his wife. You do understand?’
‘The north-east?’ I swallowed. ‘How far north?’
‘Durham, I think, or Doncaster. He might have mentioned somewhere else, too, but the provinces elude me.’
I went to my bookcase and found the relevant book of maps. ‘Doncaster is in Yorkshire, and Durham is further north. So you are to stay in two counties?’
She waved a dismissive hand, licking butter from the other. ‘I am not certain. Maria really does make the most marvellous crumpets; I may have to steal her from you.’
‘You will find out before you go, though, so I can follow your journey?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ll send a message and I’ll write once we are there.’ She smiled, as if that settled it.
‘And the stopping places on the way?’
‘It’s not always easy to know . . .’ Ambrosia looked at me, then nodded. ‘Yes, and the stopping places on the way.’
I opened the well-thumbed pages of my map book at Skipton. ‘I expect you will be on the road between a week and ten nights, with all your things. How are the roads up to the north at this time of year?’
‘They are much better these days.’
‘Because snow will slow you. And ice could be dangerous.’
The Foundling Page 8
