They take the long route to avoid the little vegetable seller on the corner of White Lion Street, for Adah cannot face the thought of another confrontation with him. On the way, they pass the rickety gateway that leads into the wasteland where Rosie Creamer’s body was found. Someone, she notices, has patched up the gate with a couple of planks of wood, and fastened it shut with twine. They make slow progress along Magpie Alley, for Caro is at that awkward age when she is almost too heavy to carry, but her efforts to walk on her own plump legs are slow and wavering. She insists on walking by herself at first, but halfway down the street she starts to fret, and wants to be carried again, so Adah hoists the child up onto her hip. Caro nuzzles her face into Adah’s neck, mumbling something that sounds like ‘buzz, buzz.’
‘Enough, you’re tickling me!’ laughs Adah.
The child’s warm sweaty skin smells of sugar and salt.
Sally, meanwhile, has to stop every couple of minutes to examine something that she has discovered by the roadside.
‘Look, Mammy, lace,’ says Sally, holding up a grimy corner of a torn handkerchief that she has found lying by the side of the road.
‘Oh, throw that away, my love. It’s covered with dirt,’ says Adah, at which Sally flings the piece of cloth into the gutter with an expression of disgust and promptly turns her attentions to an equally grimy black feather, which she plucks from a pile of rubbish by the road and begins to stroke lovingly.
As they enter Bishopsgate, Adah seizes Sally firmly by the hand and steers her through the traffic of carts and horses, gigs and hand-barrows that throng the thoroughfare. On the far side, at the corner of Primrose Street, Adah catches a sweet whiff of freshly baked bread and spices. A baker’s boy stands at the corner, the tray around his neck laden with gleaming currant buns, still warm from the oven. She’s tempted to buy a couple, but then remembers her promise to herself that she will save her pennies until her next visit to the market tomorrow.
Bishopsgate is bathed in sunshine, but when they turn the corner into Sun Street, the shadow of buildings falls across the road, and the air suddenly feels clammy. The cobbles are rough and the street pitted with holes, so even though Caro is squirming and asking to be put down, Adah tightens her grasp around her little daughter’s waist. Sarah instantly darts in the direction of the gutter, where a particularly bad-smelling trickle of brown water moves sluggishly between green streaked stones.
‘Come away from there, Sal!’ calls Adah sharply. She is already wondering whether it was wise to bring the children here.
Bly’s Buildings stands halfway down the street on the left-hand side – an ugly tall edifice with ancient timber beams still visible in the upper storeys, but the lower part clad in brown brick which looks quite new, although the windows are grimy and a couple have been broken and patched up with bits of sacking. It feels strange to realize that this place holds the key to the tragedy of little Molly Creamer. No wonder William spoke of the case with such interest – it all happened almost on their doorstep, though just outside the bounds of the Liberty.
Sally has found a sleek black cat with two mewling kittens, and is absorbed in playing with them, so Adah sets Caro on the ground and allows her to toddle over to her older sister.
‘Don’t pull their tails, mind,’ she calls, ‘and don’t let them scratch Caro. Do you hear me, Sally?’
Adah looks up and down the gloomy street, trying to imagine the scene: Sarah Stone alighting from a carriage, somewhere beside the street corner, and walking to Bly’s Buildings, with the infant bundled in her arms. What time of day would it have been? Late afternoon, at the earliest. The hand bill, which Adah has read so many times that she can almost recite its contents by heart, speaks of Molly Creamer being snatched from her mother at about three o’clock in the afternoon. If Sarah Stone was the child thief, she must have set off at two or earlier to walk to St. Paul’s churchyard, somehow discarding along the way the cushion or other padding that she was using to make herself appear pregnant – for Catherine Creamer’s description said nothing about the kidnapper looking as though she were big with child.
Did Sarah Stone wander the streets for an hour or more looking for an infant to snatch? Or had she already seen poor Catherine Creamer begging at St. Paul’s some days earlier, and marked her out as a target? It seems a strange way to steal a child. Adah remembers how often she has seen infants left by their mothers in a basket outside a shop or an inn, always mentally scolding the parents for their recklessness. How much safer and easier to seize an unattended baby while its mother’s eyes were elsewhere, rather than choosing to walk the streets of London with the victim for half an hour or more, giving Catherine Creamer ample chance to observe her face and clothing. But Sarah Stone had chosen this perilous path to crime. And then, having seized the child… What then? She must have wandered the streets around the Commercial Road a little longer, for to return home too quickly with the child would surely have aroused suspicion. Then, somehow, she had found a carriage to take her to Sun Street. Would a woman who lived in a rented room in crumbling Bly’s Buildings really have money to pay for a carriage ride?
Again Adah tries to conjure up the scene in her mind’s eye. October 1814. Perhaps five o’clock in the evening; already growing dark. The woman who lives across the road from Bly’s Buildings saw Sarah alight from a carriage, carrying an infant in her arms; but how clearly could she have seen the figure of the woman with a child at that hour of the day in this gloomy street?
Adah can imagine that figure now: a dark haired, pock marked woman of about forty (as the hand bill records) hurrying through the shadows of the street with a bundle in her arms, furtive perhaps, trying not to be seen. It is a strange thing to live in a city of a million people – the greatest city in the world, William always liked to say. Every day you pass dozens, hundreds, of strangers. You see their faces. Sometimes you look fleetingly into their eyes, or give a little nod of greeting. But you never know what goes on in their minds. Their lives and deaths remain total mysteries, of which you can see only tiny, broken fragments.
Sun Street is so close to the courthouse where Adah spent all her married life that, quite possibly, she may even have seen Sarah Stone in the street, around the time when the child was stolen. What was I doing on that day when Molly was snatched, Adah wonders. But no memories return, not of the day, nor even of the whole month of October 1814. A month of my life vanished into nothing, she thinks.
What makes a woman steal another’s child? Somewhere in the cold depths of her mind, Adah knows the answer. She remembers the dark days after her own Sarah Ann, her firstborn daughter, died. She recalls the tiny lifeless form of her dead child, like a wax doll. All the passion and anger and tears in her own body could not breathe life or warmth into that waxy form. And then, the first day she ventured out of doors after Sarah Ann’s death, seeing a warm, living, crying baby lying in a basket outside an inn door, and being seized by such an urge to pick up that child and take it home that she had fled from the scene in terror that she might become a child-stealer herself …
Then another thought strikes her. Did Sarah Stone have other children? There was no mention of this in the account of the case that Raphael gave her. But the hand bill describes the kidnapper as being about forty years old. Forty seems an old age to bear a first child – or to pretend to bear one. Is it possible that Sarah Stone was unable to give birth to her own children and, growing desperate as she reached the limit of her child-bearing years, decided to steal a baby and rear it as her own?
The front door of Bly’s Buildings suddenly opens, interrupting Adah’s musings, and a middle-aged woman with a ruddy complexion – surprisingly well dressed and carrying a parasol in one hand – comes down the steps.
Seizing her opportunity, Adah calls out, ‘Excuse me, ma’am. I’m looking for Isabella Gray. I believe she’s the landlady here.’
‘Good gracious, no,’ replies the woman in surprise. ‘Isabella Gray moved away years ago. Came into some money and bough
t a better place than this, in Holborn, I believe. Are you looking for a room? You’ll have to ask Mr Patullo about that. He’s the landlord now. Lives round the corner in Primrose Street.’
‘No,’ says Adah. ‘I’m not looking for a room.’ Having come this far, she may as well continue. ‘I am the Searcher of the Liberty of Norton Folgate, and I am making some inquiries about a matter from a few years back. May I ask you if you live here, and if so, whether you have been here long?’
The woman stares at her coldly, clearly resenting the questions, but answers simply enough, ‘Yes, indeed. Not in Bly’s Buildings, I should say, but in number eight.’ She points towards a more substantial looking house on the opposite side of the street. ‘We’ll have been there ten years this December.’
‘And do you, by chance,’ asks Adah, drawing a breath, ‘recall the events surrounding the arrest of Sarah Stone, who used to live in Bly’s Buildings?’
The moment the words are out of her mouth, Adah sees that she will get no help from this quarter.
‘Never knew her,’ snaps the woman. ‘That business had nothing to do with me. It was a matter between the Grays and that Stone woman and her sailor. I bid you good day.’
And she turns abruptly on her heel and strides off in the direction of Crown Street.
At the same moment, Sally utters a piercing shriek and rushes to her mother to cling to her skirts, with Caro tottering unsteadily behind her.
‘It scratched me! That cat scratched me!’ wails Sally.
‘I told you not to pull its tail,’ responds Adah calmly though rather wearily. She is long accustomed to these dramas. ‘Let me see the scratch.’
Weeping just a little too piteously to be convincing, Sally raises one hand, on which Adah can just make out two faint red scratch marks.
She bends down and gives it a kiss, and her good resolutions falter.
‘How would you like a currant bun?’ she asks the weeping child.
A small smile appears on Sally’s tear-stained face, and she nods solemnly.
Adah hoists Caro into her arms again and takes Sally by her uninjured hand.
‘Come on, let’s see if we can find one,’ says Adah.
This time there is no mystery about the body that lies on the truckle bed in the Norton Folgate watch-house.
Adah is already on her way to the courthouse to give the room its weekly clean when young Sam Sloper, the lad who has replaced Jonah Hall, comes running to meet her.
‘We need you to look at a body, Mrs Flint,’ he cries, with an air of palpable excitement. ‘It’s Old Mother Leigh. Found her myself, first thing this morning, in that alleyway just behind the corner of Gun Street. Stone dead, she was.’
And here the old woman lies, strands of her thinning white hair straggling over her wrinkled forehead, her cheeks sunken and her pursed lips clamped tight shut over her toothless gums.
Everyone in Norton Folgate knew Mother Leigh: long widowed, seldom without a bottle of gin in her hand, and slightly addled in the head, though harmless. Her favourite occupation was accosting strangers in the street with unexpected remarks like, ‘That Boney’s rotting in his grave now, you know’, or ‘Did you hear that the King’s sired seven bastards?’ and then she would cackle with glee as she watched the confused expression on the faces of the hapless targets of her wisecracks. The mystery is not that Old Mother Leigh is dead, but how she managed to live so long. She must have been well over eighty.
As Adah takes a knife to cut open poor Mother Leigh’s stained and ragged dress, holding her breath against the smell that rises from the dead woman’s garments, she wonders at the contrast between this shrivelled sack of bones and the delicate body of Rosie Creamer, which she examined almost four months ago now. Will my body too look like this someday, she wonders. The only marks on Mother Leigh’s body are the dark freckles and blotches of old age. There is nothing to show how the old woman died, but Sam Sloper says he saw her just three days back, coughing as though her lungs would burst.
Though it hardly seems necessary, Adah feels that she should at least make the effort to look at the place where the poor woman’s body was found, in case it reveals anything more about her death, so she and Sam set out down White Lion Street and through the marketplace towards the far side of Spital Square. As they pass the herb and spice stall, with its rich admixture of smells, Adah reflects that the liquorice posset doesn’t seem to have done much for Richard’s cough yet, despite all the money she spent on it. But perhaps it needs longer to work its magic.
The alleyway behind Gun Street is a dark and dingy spot, littered with splintered planks of wood and empty rotting baskets.
‘A sad place to breathe your last,’ says Adah with a sigh. ‘Old Mother Leigh’s husband Jack was a barber, you know, and they say he left her a fair bit of money, but I suppose she must have drunk it all away.’
There is nothing to mark the place where Sam found the body, except for a crumpled and stained kerchief, perhaps left there by the dead woman.
‘Will you come back to the courthouse now, Mrs Flint?’ asks Sam, after they have gazed at the place in silence for a moment without seeing anything that adds to their knowledge of Mother Leigh’s fate.
Adah performs a moment’s mental calculation. She needs a walk, to shake off the gloom of this dark alleyway and to rid her mind of its images of the old woman’s lonely death, and it can’t be more than twenty minutes on foot from here to Rosemary Lane, where Sarah Stone claimed to have given birth to the child. Eight years on, how likely is it that Elizabeth Fisher would still be living in the same room in White Hart Court? And even if she is still living there and can be found, how likely is it that she would have anything to add to the story she told the judge and jury at the time of Sarah Stone’s trial? Not very likely, but it can surely do no harm to take a look at the place.
‘No, Sam,’ she replies. ‘I have a small errand to run first. I’ll be back a little later in the day, and thank you kindly for your help.’
But when she reaches the entrance to Rosemary Lane, Adah’s heart sinks. She had forgotten what a rabbit warren the place is. The lane itself is lined on either side by rickety old houses with lead-paned windows, every one crammed to the rafters with old clothes for sale. The clothes spill out onto the crooked pavements. They hang from rails along the shopfronts and on poles that protrude from windows on the upper floors. There are once-white sailors’ breeches and tattered nightshirts, red and golden silken shawls and fraying embroidered waistcoats, exotic blue pantaloons with embroidered garters that must come from some distant country, and here and there a surprisingly grand velvet gown. Adah picks her way with difficulty between the mountains of boots, shoes and hats heaped on sheets of sacking in the laneway, avoiding the hands that clutch at her cloak, and the wheedling voices tempting her to buy their wares. A mass of tiny alleyways runs to the right and left off Rosemary Lane. The very thought of finding anything or anyone in the midst of this pandemonium seems hopeless.
She asks an elderly boot seller the way to White Hart Court, but the woman just grins and shrugs. ‘Ain’t no White Hart Court round here, my love,’ she says.
Adah presses on a little further before trying again. This time, too, the response is a frown and a shake of the head, but then a little urchin, perhaps ten or eleven years old, pops his grimy face out from behind a stand of tall hats, breaking into the conversation to say, ‘Hey, missus, it ain’t White Hart you want, it’s White Horse. Just down the way on the right, behind the White Horse Inn. Folk around here sometimes call the yard at the back White Horse Court.’
‘And do you know a place called Johnson’s Change?’ asks Adah, feeling that, after all, her journey may not be in vain.
‘Course I do,’ retorts the urchin, as though it were the most ridiculous question he had heard. ‘Everyone round here knows Johnson’s Change. C’mon. I’ll show yer.’
And he darts off through the throng at such high speed that Adah is barely fast enough to follow h
im. There are plenty of inn signs of all shapes, colours and designs on the corners of the alleyways off Rosemary Lane, and it takes her a few moments to find the fading wooden sign with its emblem of a winged white stallion in improbable flight. Just in front of the inn, the lad vanishes into a dark alleyway, and Adah, running and stumbling in his wake, finds herself in front of a gaping brick archway which leads into a huge, dimly lit covered market. Even though it is still mid-morning, the tall windows on either side of the building are so grimy that some of the stall holders have had to hang flickering lanterns on hooks at the corner of their stalls to make their wares visible.
Adah’s young guide has vanished into the gloom, leaving her to make her own way between the trestle tables and packing cases covered with bolts of cloth, pinafores and cheap trinkets. Beneath one window she spots a length of muslin in a lovely grey blue that looks as though it is just the colour of little Amelia’s eyes, and is tempted to stop and ask the price. It would make a perfect dress for her daughter. But she resists the distraction and heads instead towards the staircase that she can see in the far corner of the building.
The stairs, uneven and made of dark brick, lead to the first floor of Johnson’s Change. At the top, Adah finds herself in a wooden-floored corridor which runs along the front of the building, with a row of windows on one side and a row of battered doors on the other. There are no name plates by the doors, but here and there, an occupant has tacked a piece of handwritten paper by the door. Lucy, reads one; Pretty Polly, reads another.
Adah knocks at random on one of the doors. After a long wait and sounds of coughing and shuffling inside, the door is opened by a frowzled, fair-haired young woman, aged little more than sixteen, Adah guesses. She is dressed in a night shift and shawl, and has clearly just been woken from sleep.
‘What is it?’ asks the girl sullenly, rubbing her puffy eyes with the back of her hand.
‘I’m looking for Elizabeth Fisher,’ says Adah. ‘I heard she lives in this building.’
Searcher Page 14
