Children of the Archbishop (3 page)

Lesser women would have been broken by such an experience. But not this one. She had rallied, struck out, tried to save her own honour. Pawning the only present that Mr. Gurnett had ever given her—a dressing-set in imitation tortoiseshell—she had bought herself a complete set of widow's weeds, and had returned to London, tragic, shattered and with a mythical funeral in the background. It was only the name that haunted her. Much as
she would have preferred to become plain Miss Lippitt again, widowhood, even false widowhood, was indispensable to her good name. Swathed in her own deceit, Mrs. Gurnett she remained. And she had prospered. Worked her way upwards to matronship of an Orphanage. She was independent again. Still heartily and unfluctuatingly opposed to sin, she had lived for twenty years largely supported by the fruits of it.

She had reached the bottom of the stairs by now, and was drawing back the bolts that secured the door. A swirl of rain eddied in on her and the gas-jet in its glass cage jerked and bounded. But Mrs. Gurnett promptly thrust out her head full into the fury of the storm.

“Did you get her?” she demanded.

“Too quick,” Sergeant Chiswick answered. “She'd got away.”

“Ugh!”

Mrs. Gurnett had spoken. And, in speaking, she had uttered the very sound that such a mouth was made for. But this was no time for recriminations: there was a baby that needed looking after.

“I'll call Nurse Stedge,” she told him.

Nurse Stedge's room was at the far end of the bottom corridor. She was a light sleeper and, as Mrs. Gurnett approached, the door opened obediently. A tall, giraffe-necked woman, Nurse Sedge stood there in the gas-lit passage, her black emergency bag—the one with the curved pins and the nappies and the pair of blunt-nosed scissors in it—clasped ready in her long blue hand.

“Come along,” Mrs. Gurnett told her. “We're wanted.”

Mrs. Gurnett led the way, Nurse Stedge fell in behind and Sergeant Chiswick, who had temporarily crept into the shelter of the hall, followed up the rear. Together the three of them went out into Sid Harris's weather.

They had got as far as the entrance to the courtyard, and were just turning into the covered part, the cloisters, where a bracket gas-lamp was gleaming, when they were nearly bumped into by someone. It was Canon Edward Mallow, the Warden. He had not seen them coming because he was walking with head down, violently opening and shutting his umbrella in an endeavour to shake the drips off.

At the sound of footsteps, however, he looked up in surprise.

“Ah, Mrs. Gurnett,” he said. “Going out I see?”

As he looked up, the light from the gas-bracket fell full on him and showed a round, pink face with very wide-open pale blue eyes. It was the face of an elderly and puzzled cherub.

And, as he looked, his expression of puzzlement increased.

“Nothing wrong, is there?” he asked.

There was something in the quiet and gentle undertone of the Canon's voice that came as bitter and corrosive poison to a woman of Mrs. Gurnett's temperament.

“Sergeant Chiswick's got a new baby in his room,” she told him. “That's what's wrong.”

“A baby?” Canon Mallow repeated as though the whole idea of a baby in the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital came as a surprise to him. “Ah, yes. I thought I heard one crying as I came in. Where did it come from might I ask?”

“Orf the doorstep, sir,” Sergeant Chiswick replied. “I just found it.”

“How dreadful,” Canon Mallow answered. “In all this rain, too.”

He had turned by now and was walking back with them towards the gate-house.

“The mother got away,” Mrs. Gurnett interjected suddenly. “Chiswick wasn't quick enough.”

“And he hasn't told the police yet,” Nurse Stedge reminded them.

Canon Mallow, however, made no movement. Indeed, by simply standing there in the doorway, he impeded them.

“But don't you see?” he said. “It's providential. It means we've kept our numbers up. We're back on the 500 mark again.”

They made quite a crowd, the four of them, in the small, stuffy room with the flowered wall-paper and narrow Gothic windows. Like everything else in the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital, the room was bleak, ecclesiastical, uncompromising. Even the wall-paper—upside down bunches of peonies, tied round with knots of lavender ribbon—had faded with the years into no more than a faint, autumnal background; and the coronation group of Edward and Alexandra, painted in brightly varnished colours on the lid of a biscuit tin marked Family Assorted, assumed in its setting the formal, devotional air of a rich and rather splendid icon.

But already Nurse Stedge was getting down to her work. With the uncontradictable authority of her calling, she pushed in front of everyone—even in front of Mrs. Gurnett—and began to undo the baby's shawls. It was obvious from the number of them, and from the skill with which they had been wrapped, that whoever it was who had left the baby had taken good care that no harm should come to it. Someone a short while ago had loved that baby a very great deal. Probably still did love it, in fact.

Immediately the baby felt Nurse Stedge's fingers, it began to howl louder than ever, expressing a gaping, toothless rage to heaven. But Nurse Stedge was familiar with the habits of babies. She had a way with them. Twisting and turning the bundle on her lap like a bobbin she soon had it stripped down to a flannelette vest and nappies. And as soon as the small dappled shoulders were bare she inspected each bicep critically.

“Ah,” she said, “not vaccinated.”

“Or christened, probably,” Canon Mallow added.

“Or registered,” Mrs. Gurnett said, snapping her mouth to again when she had spoken.

“Or wanted,” added Sergeant Chiswick in an undertone.

But meanwhile Nurse Stedge was steadily burrowing deeper. Then, as she loosened the vest, she said “Ah” again. She had come on something. There was a length of ribbon fastened round the baby's neck and on the end of the ribbon was hung a piece of card. Mrs. Gurnett realised at once that this was important. If there was a name on it, it might even clinch matters: it might be evidence. Therefore, feeling that she had been kept out of the mystery quite long enough already, she abruptly thrust Nurse Stedge to one side and removed the card herself. Holding it up to the light, she examined it. And she was right: there was a name on it.

Across the card in large, irregular letters, appeared the one word, SWEETIE.

But that was all there was. The unknown writer had used an ordinary HB pencil so there wasn't so much as a split nib or an unusual coloured ink to provide a clue. The letters had been deliberately printed in capitals to defeat the calligraphists. The cardboard was of the kind that is found in the cheapest of cheap boxes. And cheap cardboard boxes are thrown away every day in their tens of thousands.

Canon Mallow, however, was not content until he had examined the card himself. He took it from Mrs. Gurnett's fingers. Then,
slowly, with a maddening and unspeedable slowness he changed into his other pair of spectacles—his reading ones—and scrutinised the card as though he expected invisible writing to spring to life as he looked at it. Finally, he turned it over and inspected the back as well. But “Sweetie” was still all it said.

“Extraordinary!” Canon Mallow remarked. “Really most extraordinary.”

But Mrs. Gurnett and Nurse Stedge were used to ignoring Canon Mallow at such moments. They were already engaged in the ultimate and profounder intimacies. And they were clicking their tongues disapprovingly over what they found.

Sergeant Chiswick, therefore, addressed himself to Canon Mallow with the air of man turning to man in too exclusive a feminine society.

“Whilst they're gettin' on with 'im, sir,” he pointed out, “one of us 'ad better ring up the Station. Shall it be me or you, sir?”

Canon Mallow frowned slightly.

“The Station?” he inquired. “Now?”

“Police Station, sir,” Sergeant Chiswick explained.

Canon Mallow's frown cleared away.

“Ah, yes, to be sure. The Police Station. We mustn't forget the Police Station.”

Having disposed of that point, Canon Mallow shook his head thoughtfully.

“The sadness of it,” he said slowly. “The tragedy.”

Sergeant Chiswick stroked at his moustache in a manner which indicated that he too was of the sensitive sort who recognised sadness and tragedy when he met them.

“‘Ardly a month old,” he continued in the same vein. “And such a fine little lad, too.”

“Girl,” said Mrs. Gurnett suddenly turning her small fierce eyes contemptuously in Sergeant Chiswick's direction.

“And under the week,” Nurse Stedge added to complete the picture of Sergeant Chiswick's ignorance.

But Canon Mallow merely smiled. “I thought it was a very odd name for a boy,” he said. “If it's a girl, that explains it.”

As he said it, he bent over the child.

“Poor little Sweetie,” he said. “Let me give you a kiss.”

Mrs. Gurnett and Nurse Stedge both stepped forward to prevent him.

“You don't know what that baby's got the matter with her,” Mrs. Gurnett said sharply.

“And the child requires attention,” added Nurse Stedge decisively.

Canon Mallow, however, suddenly found that he had no patience with either of them. Picking the baby up, he kissed her in the centre of her forehead.

“You're one of us now, Sweetie,” he said. “And I hope you're going to be very happy here.”

But don't begin getting wrong ideas about the place. Don't imagine that there were mysterious women tugging away at the bell-pull of the Archbishop Bodkin Hospital every single night. Dismiss entirely the mental picture of unwanted babies landing up on the doorstep as a kind of regular daily delivery.

That wasn't a bit the way things were in St. Mark's Avenue. If anything, life there was rather on the quiet side; just the fiddling day-by-day affairs of a big institution.

Admittedly, an ornamental weather-vane was blown from its moorings in the autumn gales of nineteen twenty-three and crashed through the skylight into the probationer nurses' sitting-room; and, in the January of twenty-six, something—a shot from an air-gun probably—went clean through the windows of the laundry, in one side and out the other, without harming a soul.

But that is about all on the structural side. And there wasn't very much more among the inmates, either staff or children. One of the girls' mistresses, a Miss Dewchurch, resigned to look after her invalid father; and a Miss Seedworthy (whose own father incidentally was causing quite a bit of anxiety within the family circle) came in to take Miss Dewchurch's place, no one could say how permanently. An Old Boy, one Charlie Spencer, got himself sentenced to three years' hard labour on a charge of burglary—two other charges of housebreaking, and one of receiving, being taken into account, and the sentences allowed to rim concurrently. A present Bodkinian, Ginger Woods, aged three, in a sudden fit of temper threw an ink-well at another inmate. And a red-haired
and rather short-sighted little girl, Lettice Moon, died from complications following a sharp attack of measles. But that's nothing, really. Not among five hundred.

As for Sweetie, she had settled herself in very nicely. Or, rather, they were always on the point of thinking that she had. But she was a highly strung sort of child: a perfect little angel on Monday, she would be all tantrums—stampings and pinches and rages—by Tuesday. And, just when she should have been taking her place among the others, it was discovered how secretive she was. She didn't seem to be like the other children. She was awkward and acquisitive. Not over sweets, which she didn't seem to care about. But over things like toys. There was one particular pink rabbit that she seemed to regard as her own, despite the fact that there was an absolutely clear rule that was explained to all the children in the Hospital that every toy was to be shared in common.

They had removed the rabbit from her they couldn't remember how often. But somehow she always contrived to get it back again and was usually discovered somewhere by herself, talking to it, kissing it, putting it to sleep. Obviously, there was affection and to spare inside the child; and it was largely a matter, as Canon Mallow told them, of developing it, making it grow outwards, teaching her that there were more important things than pink rabbits in the world.

As it was, there was only one person of whom she seemed fond. Really fond, that is. And even there it showed what a queer, contrary nature the child had. Because it wasn't Nurse Stedge or Mrs. Gurnett or anyone who did things for her all the time. It was one of the Hospital visitors who came only on Thursdays when the nurses had their time off.

What's more, it didn't even seem a particularly good choice. For, instead of choosing Mrs. Lamprett, who was a doctor's widow, or Miss Giles, who had a brother who was a magistrate, or even Mrs. Chapman, who spent her whole life visiting infirmaries and children's homes and prisons and things, she chose Margaret, who was a nobody. No family, no background, no position. Merely one of the maids in the household of Dame Eleanor Pryke, Chairman of the Archbishop Bodkin Board of Governors.

It had, indeed, come as rather a surprise to some people that Margaret at her age should want to spend so much of her spare time in looking after other people's children. But it was all put down to the splendid seriousness of purpose with which Dame
Eleanor infused anyone with whom she came in contact. Even to enter into Dame Eleanor's service was to become a kind of social missionary. And there was no finer training for marriage, Dame Eleanor had repeatedly and emphatically declared than practical babycraft.

That was presumably why Margaret was there. Because it was obvious that she was one of the marrying kind all right. Placid, sensible, well set-up and undeniably good-looking, it was assumed that she was just getting her hand in, preparing herself for life and babies of her own.