Joy To The World

She crossed busy London streets, alive with the joy of the season, carrying her precious bundle…

Craven Street and starting as a chambermaid, carrying coals and boiling water and eventually rising upwards in the house, from a cot in the kitchen to a bed in the attic.

I’d been twenty-nine years old then, was now forty-five, in the twilight of my life. Nobody had been more surprised than me to find myself with child. In seven years of marriage to Albert my monthlies came without fail, and all the little blankets I’d sewn and saved I gave to a neighbour, who birthed a babe every year between January and April.

Lincoln’s Inn Fields was quiet, the law men home for the holiday, their wigs and books shut away. My daughter was sleeping, unaware of the fact we were outside, that it was Christmas Eve, of what would happen next. She was a week old exactly, though I felt I’d known her all my life.

A man snored in a sedan, and one of his carriers shared a wry look, glancing at the baby in my arms and giving a smile. It was a comfort to me, the assumption he made, that I was an ordinary mother, on her way perhaps to her own mother’s, or somewhere else for Christmas. I nodded politely and continued north, crossing the thoroughfare to Red Lyon Street, which began amid throngs of carriages and shops and people, peering out from between a vintner’s and a furniture shop, and melting into countryside half a mile north, where fields spread wide beneath a velvet-dark sky. With all the coal smoke the stars did not often come out in London, but here at the edge of the city, on the distant horizon they glittered like snow.

The street was quiet, the grander houses here shut up for the season, their occupants gone north and east and west to even grander homes. A set of wide black gates stood at the furthest point, with a statue atop a stone edifice. No carriages came here, and the road was deserted as I came to a halt and heaved a great sigh. A porter’s lodge glowed merrily behind the gates, a trail of smoke

dreadfully moving I could not bear it, but I let go, and she was inside the basket, like Moses in the reeds. A great bell hung on the gate, and I rung it before scurrying off like a beetle into the darkness, empty of arm and heart, finding a spot beside a high wall and watching the porter’s lodge. The chimney went on smoking, the windows glowing. I watched and trembled but nobody came out.

I had no sense of how long I waited. I turned my attention to the laundry, and the larder, and Alice’s forgetfulness, reminding myself to check that the cornicing in the hall had been dusted. Tomorrow the family would descend, Mrs Spencer’s three grown-up children, two of whom had families, bouncing babies and older children, filling the house with noise and life and joy.

Joy, that was her name, I realised as still no one came. I hadn’t wanted to name her, knowing she wasn’t mine to keep, but it felt right, the curling J like her little finger, the perfect round O, like her tiny pink mouth.

Mrs Hobbes had bought two plump birds for tomorrow, a goose and a chicken for the feast. She had been very kind to me, sending up ginger biscuits and brandy when I was lying in. She had been practising her recipe for the youngest Spencer son returned from Antigua, for they were his favourite. She wanted to perfect it because he always made such a fuss of her, and it was his first-time home in over nine months.

Before I knew what I was doing, I walked to the basket and lifted the baby, putting my hands beneath her, holding her to me. She barely stirred, tilting her head towards me, to where it fit at my breast. Together we walked back the way I came, down through Bloomsbury and Covent Garden. The streets were quiet; Christmas had moved from the pavements to the parlours.

The carol service was almost over at St Martin’s as I carefully entered the vestibule, shutting out the cold and the silence, and finding the warmth. The congregation was standing, a body of hats and coats and voices. I opened my mouth and began to sing.

TheFoundling by Stacey Halls, Manilla Press, PB, £8.99. Out now.

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