Song of the Sea Maid (2 page)

‘This is Dawnay Price. She has no family we know of and was found today on the street. Be charitable to her for she is different from you and has no one to recommend her. Now, ready yourselves for bed.’

Matron stands while we undress in solemn silence and place our clothes at the base of our beds. We lie in our shifts on low, hard cots on thin, straw mattresses with one sheet and one blanket each, the warmest and most comfortable I believe I have ever been for sleep. There are even the vestiges of a small fire in our room – I discover later this is only lit for one hour every evening – but enough to feel like a furnace to me. It transpires that all seventeen girls are in this one room, while all fourteen boys sleep in the other on the second floor. Presently, that is our entire number and Matron says there is no room for more, until someone leaves. We are forbidden from speaking once the candle is snuffed and placed on a stool by the door, but I lie awake in my bed opposite the one window and hear the other girls whispering.

I sit up in my bed and say, ‘Does anyone here have a brother?’ and the whispering stops, but no one answers me. It is in my character to ask questions. I persevere. ‘I had a brother but men came and took him on a boat.’

Then a voice speaks, a low flat voice of an older girl. She says, ‘He was pressed.’

‘What?’ say I.

‘Taken by the press gang. You won’t be seeing him again.
Ever
.’

Then another girl speaks, this voice high and chiding: ‘We all came here as babies. We were not street rats. Not like you.’

‘I am not a rat.’

Another says, ‘Our mothers could not keep us, so they brought us here for a better life. Where was your mother?’

‘Giving your father a favour under a thick hedge!’ cries the first and then all the girls are jeering at me, I know not why. I listen to them without a word. In my sensitive soul, I take this as a declaration of war and from that moment on, I determine I will not have friends in this place.

We are woken at dawn by Matron, the others say prayers I do not know and we wash our faces from a hand-basin. I am shoved about by those beside me as I do it, spilling water and attracting tuts and sighs. They dress quickly but I forget the order of clothing and am laughed at for my ignorance. Matron assists me and finally – glared at smugly by each girl long since finished as they file past me – I pull on the last item, the jacket adorned with the asylum’s emblem.

‘Why do we wear a flower?’ I ask Matron.

‘’Tis the daisy. I suppose you have never seen one.’

I shake my head.

‘The daisy means innocence.’

‘In-sun-se?’

‘Purity. Now stop testing me and get yourself to the refectory. You will miss your meal.’

After a taciturn breakfast of bread and cheese and a cup of water, Matron takes me aside and leads me down the long corridor to the front hall. We stand outside a grand door and Matron straightens my cap, which will not sit neatly.

‘This is called the court room. ’Tis where the meetings are held, guests are received and the master works, and is a room you will never set foot in again after this day. You are about to meet the founder, child. Speak not one word, a graceful sink when you are introduced and when you are dismissed.’

‘How do I sink?’

‘Oh, my eyes! You
were
born in a field. A sink, a curtsey? Watch me.’ Matron joins her hands at the waist, slides one foot forward, takes a sideways step and slides her first foot to join the other foot. Her heels touch, toes turned out, then she bends her knees outward and sinks.

‘I cannot do it!’ I cry. It would take a month of lessons to master its intricacies.

‘You
will
do it because you
must
,’ says she and knocks on the door.

A man’s voice from within calls, ‘Enter,’ and the great door opens to reveal heaven on earth in all its wonderment.

My young eyes have never seen such a room, my unformed mind never dreamed of such a place. It is the white ceiling that captures my eye first: adorned with intricate carvings of branches, leaves and flowers twisting among themselves in joyous writhing. The walls are green and hung with paintings of fat women and burly men, of naked flesh and flowing robes, and the enacting of mighty and important deeds. Smaller pictures show buildings of white stone surrounded by trees and acres of land. A massive hearth is charmed by a hearty fire and above it another imposing scene in white plasterwork tells of boys reaping amid sheaves of corn, girls sweeping and washing clothes and a giant man standing above all smiling down on them, ships of the navy swaying to the horizon behind one shoulder and an ox bellowing beside the other. Before all this embellishment a real gentleman sits in a high-backed chair, wearing a neat periwig, his arms resting on a polished table before him and a long feather in his hand. He places it down, slowly shifts back his seat and stands up, immensely tall.

I am brought before him. He comes out from behind his grand table and looks down upon me, an ant at his feet.

‘Sir, this is Dawnay Price, our newest foundling,’ says Matron. She glares at me and I know I must do it.

I stare at my feet and cross one before the other and begin to bend, yet find myself bowing forward like a man and thereafter decide I have nowhere else to go but back up.

‘A fine gentleman!’ jests the founder, his eyebrows arched. ‘Named for a very good friend of mine, also a fine gentleman. If you honour that name, you will go far in life. So, child, welcome to your new abode. All who enter here are fortunate base-born objects. Those who have been saved from the streets, alleys and rubbish heaps of London, the abandoned vagabonds of the poor. Here you will be provided with shelter and sustenance. And furthermore, a virtuous education to make you useful – on the land, on the sea or in the home – instead of falling into rough ways and becoming swindlers and cutpurses, or else molls and jades, ending your portion shackled in a coffle of prisoners shuffling through the streets to be transported on ships to foreign lands or to break your necks on the gibbet. Is that what you want, child?’

I have listened to each word and surmise I understood perhaps one quarter. But I know what the gibbet is and shake my head.

‘I do not want to hang, sir.’

‘Quite. But there are fates worse than death, Dawnay Price. If you were not the luckiest wretch alive to be found by my good friend and brought to this sanctuary, it is likely you would have ended up in the hell they call the workhouse, that den of disease where the weak go to die in misery. You are fortunate that I have saved you from such a fate and you will work hard for me every day you pass here, Dawnay Price, to thank me for my charity. Here you will learn a trade and your catechism. We will prepare you for a life of service to society, where instead of fouling the streets with your poverty, you will be reformed. All children come into the world unblemished. It is the cruel world itself that stains the child and turns it to roguery. We are here to save the child, turn it from sin and render it beneficial to the public. Do you understand me?’

I have been looking at the feather on the table. Beside it is paper and a pot of black liquid. On the paper are words, black words. Beneath it is a board stretched with cream-coloured paper with dark stains on it. On a side table behind the founder there are more pots and feathers too, stacked in a vase. What can they possibly be for? I have never seen such curious and lovely things.

I ask, ‘What does the feather do?’ I feel a sharp cuff to the back of my head. I forget myself and try to sink, this time tripping forward and almost knocking the founder’s knees with my head.

‘It is a fool!’ he cries and I am swiftly removed from this handsome room.

In the months that follow, I become accustomed to our rigid routine. After breakfast, we spend the morning in the schoolroom on the ground floor. Our schoolmaster is a young man I discover is Matron’s nephew, who also looks to the welfare of all boys in this institution, as Matron does with us girls. We are put to school in a trifling manner, with reading and arithmetic. Once I learn my letters, I can read my brother’s note and I know then that Matron was right. But I am grateful to him for his kindly deception. I look it over often and if I squint hard and long enough, I believe I can see the words he spoke writ on the paper and it comforts me. At the very least, his hands have touched the paper I touch. At times I weep over it for so long that my eyes smart afterwards and my head aches like a beating drum. I hide the note from the others in a crack in the dormitory wall behind my cot.

I consider my brother often, or the fact of him. After all, he claims all my infant memories. I call him up into my fancy and recall his features or a kind word. I picture him aboard ship, a resourceful sailor I imagine, considering how he kept us thriving in those early days. Perhaps he was drowned at sea or caught the yellow fever in some distant port. If he lived, I hope he resides in a warm place, with victuals and drink and some portion of love or friendship. I want that at least for the one who fed me, who told me to run those many moons ago. He was a boy of a free and merry turn and I loved him.

Every Sunday, we gather in the schoolroom for a lengthy sermon by our founder. Here we are read stories from the Bible and are taught of hell, omens and to be suspicious of fanatics, as they began our civil war after all, not so very long past. He makes quite clear to us his views on the poor.

‘When you leave this place in apprenticeship, we will have chosen a place for you in a respectable and useful profession, to be nurtured by those of the working classes who appreciate religious moderation and our noble nation. Together we will make good citizens of you and force the kingdom of darkness to totter. And hear this: never shall a child from my institution be sent to fester with porters, higlers, chair-men, day-labourers or market folk, as these people are one and all an insolent rabble who encourage revolt and, what is more, they never go to church on Sundays.’

I ask Matron afterwards if poor people have a day off from work.

‘Sundays for some.’

Say I, ‘No wonder they do not go to church if it is their only day free from work. They might want to go for an airing or sport and play.’ I am smacked on my leg for this, for blasphemy and cheek. But I notice Matron fidgets during churchtime and always disappears after for a little and I wager she would welcome the extra morning of freedom.

Lunch is the same as breakfast – bread and cheese – for five days of the week, with boiled tripe on Saturdays and some sort of brown soup on Sundays. Supper is bread and cheese again, though at times we have boiled greens if someone has found some dandelions to pick. Once a month we have one small potato each with our Friday supper. After lunch, we are given a brief period of fresh air, whatever the weather may bring, in the walled yard behind our building. There are grey walls and a dusty floor to it. Not quite room enough to run and jump, so some of the girls skip about, little ones play pat-a-cake, and the older boys form animated knots and brag of exploits. Sometimes I creep along each of the four walls, counting my steps, and thereby roughly calculate the area of the yard. Most often, I find a corner and watch. I am alone, yet surrounded by others. From my first day, I continue my silent stand against them and feign to revel in my solitude. The boys ignore me anyway, and the older girls ensure the younger ones have nothing to do with the street rat. One time in this yard I find a magpie with a broken wing. I cup it in my hands and take it to Matron who says, ‘One for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a wedding and four for death,’ and promptly breaks its neck. ‘You orphans have enough room for sorrow in your lives, without inviting it in.’

In the afternoons, we are instructed in trade. The girls are split into small groups and assigned to a maidservant, where we are taught the art of domestic service, the hundred small skills it takes to become a charwoman or laundry maid. The boys are permitted to leave the building to pursue grander trades, such as boot black or sweep. It is hard, busy work and the only junctures at which we stop are mealtimes, but I am so empty when I sit to eat that I do not enjoy this moment of stillness but think only of my belly and the food that barely fills it. It is never enough and we are always hungry, all of us.

Our only moments of rest are the minutes in bed before sleep steals our minds till morning. I lie and think of my brother and where he may be; I think who my mother and father might have been and if they are dead or in the workhouse or hanged from the gibbet; I think of how the window in our dormitory is split into four squares and that each pane has four sides and I multiply the four sides by the number of panes and I imagine if the room had four windows or eight or sixteen or thirty-two windows how many panes of glass there would be altogether and how such as glass is manufactured and what ingredients might be needed to make glass and whether it is a material one finds in the ground or the fields or the mountains or if it is something that is made by the hands as bread or cheese are and how light and cheerful our room would be with such a prolific number of glass panes letting in the sunlight all the long day. This is but one of the many ruminations my mind considers each night in the quiet and the darkness before sleep. Yet these thoughts move so fleetly I never have the chance to grasp them and by the next night they are gone and replaced by more and new ones, so many it hurts my head.

One evening after dinner, Matron summons me to the kitchen and bids me sit before the fire, as I did that very first day with her.

‘You have been with us for one year now, Dawnay. We ask each of our new arrivals how they are settled in their new life after this period. ’Tis part of my role so I do it. How is it with you, child?’

‘What is the feather for?’

Matron’s eyes grow wide. ‘Still harping on this?’

‘Is it for writing? I think it must be for writing.’

‘Yes, for writing. ’Tis named a quill.’

‘Quill.’

‘Quill,’ says Matron.

‘Do we learn to write? Will we learn to use the feather, the quill?’