‘Nor do I.’
‘I’m going to tell Matron it wasn’t me who broke that plate, I am you know.’ Sarah Brown widened her eyes at her best friend and confidante, who took the hint and gave a suitably awe-filled response.
‘You’re not, Sarah, I wouldn’t dare. She won’t believe you, you know Mary’s her favourite and the sun shines out of her bum. You’ll just get into more trouble.’
‘I don’t care.’
The two little girls, each in the sombre uniform of faded blue dress and starched white pinafore the institution demanded, were in the middle of a crocodile of identically attired children being marched round the stone-slabbed quadrangle by a grim faced ‘Mother’. Sarah liked some of the Mothers: home-helpers who were as much prisoners of the Home as the children were, if the truth be known; but the one leading them that morning she hated with a vengeance, an emotion which was fully reciprocated by the woman in question. Florence Shawe was ugly; not just plain - ugly, and her small hooded eyes, set either side of a nose that was little more than a beak, could hardly bear to focus on the beautiful little elfin child who had been a thorn in the thin spinster’s side from the day Sarah had come into the main house from the foundling nursery four years before.
‘Don’t care was made to care.’ Rebecca imparted this piece of wisdom with one eye on the silent figure leading the procession. Mother Shawe had it in for Sarah this morning and she’d try and catch them talking if she could, and then that would mean standing in a corner of the big hall with their backs to the others all lunchtime, and no dinner. And it wasn’t fair - Mother Shawe was always picking on Sarah and getting her into trouble.
‘Huh.’
The careless shrug of the shoulders and defiant tilt to Sarah’s blond head didn’t fool Rebecca. Sarah was just as scared of Matron as the rest of them but she wouldn’t admit it. Rebecca decided it was safer to try and pour oil on troubled waters; as Sarah’s best friend she had learned any trouble had a way of working back down to her eventually. But it was worth it to be Sarah’s friend, Rebecca thought now, covertly eyeing Sarah’s angry face. She didn’t know what she’d do without Sarah. She put out a hand and gripped Sarah’s fingers as she said, ‘Let’s forget about them all now, eh?’ She tried a placatory smile. ‘We can get Mary back later, but with Mother Shawe on her side Matron won’t believe you didn’t do it, and you’ve had your five strokes.’ Which had been applied with relish on the back of Sarah’s bare legs by Florence Shawe wielding the long thin cane kept for punishing unruly or disobedient children.
‘I hate her.’ Whether her friend was referring to Mary or Mother Shawe Rebecca didn’t enquire. They had completed their ten circles of the quadrangle, which passed as morning exercise, and were now filing into the building for morning lessons, bringing them fully under the eagle-eyed scrutiny of Florence as she stood with sergeant-major stiffness in the doorway.
Sarah had found, in her short life, that once a day started badly it got worse, and this day was no exception. First Mary Owen had knocked her breakfast plate off the refectory table on purpose and then said it was her, just because she’d done better at sewing the day before and finished her sampler. And Mother Shawe had taken Mary’s side, although she
knew
the Mother had seen what had really happened. She hadn’t even eaten her slice of bread and jam either. A low growl from her stomach pressed home the unfairness of life as she tramped up the wooden stairs to the large classroom on the first floor, and the smarting from the raised weals on the backs of her legs seemed to increase a hundredfold.
And now it was arithmetic all morning and she
hated
arithmetic, and Mother McLevy was ill and so they had to have Mother Shawe all day . . . She wished it was a Saturday so she could work outside in the vegetable garden; she never minded getting her hands dirty like some of the girls did, and she liked talking to the boys too. It was silly that they had to be in a different building to the boys, she’d found boys were much more interesting than girls. They never moaned about getting tired or having dirt in their nails, and they didn’t go all loolah if a wasp flew by or they dug a worm up. Not like Mary Owen . . . The thought returned her mind to her old enemy.
Perhaps it was better it wasn’t a Saturday after all. Mary was always worse on a Saturday when her mam visited, crowing over Sarah just because she’d got a mam and aunties and things. Well, she wouldn’t want a mam who looked like Mary’s - all fat and dirty and with bright orange hair. The thought was without conviction. The sick empty feeling that always accompanied reminders of her own lack of parentage rose as bile in her throat.
Her mam and da had been rich anyway, and they’d all lived in a big house with servants and everyone for miles around had looked for her when she’d been stolen out of her perambulator by the gypsies. She could remember her perambulator, it had been big and all pink and soft, and she’d had a solid silver rattle hanging from a ribbon attached to the satin-lined hood. She nodded to herself. She had told herself the story so often it was now unshakeable fact in her mind. And her mam and da were still looking for her, every day they looked for her and her mam would cry buckets, and one day they would drive up to the Home in a great big car, shiny with gleaming brass lamps on the front, and they would walk into the refectory when they were all eating and her mam would shout, ‘That’s my child’, and they’d all go home. And everyone who’d ever been nasty to her would wish they hadn’t when they saw how rich she was, and she’d have her friends for tea . . .
The story always went one of two ways here, depending on her mood. Sometimes she’d have Mary Owen and Mother Shawe and the Matron and everyone to her house for a party, just so they could see how lovely it all was and how kind and nice she was, and other times she would drive away with Rebecca beside her and leave them pea-green with envy, or even running beside the car pleading with her for forgiveness as she sorrowfully shook her head—
‘
Sarah Brown
.’
She was brought sharply from the satisfying vision of watching Mother Shawe galloping by the side of the car, tears of remorse streaming down her shaking jowls, and into the stark reality of the classroom where, she now realized, all eyes were trained on her.
‘Everyone else has their book open and ready to start the lesson as I have requested, pray tell why you are different? Is there something about you we don’t know, something that makes you special perhaps?’
The sarcasm was heavy and biting, and out of all proportion to the offence, but as Florence Shawe glared at the goldenhaired girl in front of her she wasn’t seeing a ten-year-old child, but the epitome of youth and beauty and bright tomorrows; everything, in fact, that had been denied her. Not that she had ever rationalized her resentment of Sarah in so many words, even in her mind, and if someone had told her the real reason for her persecution of this child she wouldn’t have accepted it, but it was true none the less. And Sarah wasn’t frightened of her, that was another thing that she found almost impossible to accept. She had used the formidable weapon of fear to cover her own insecurity and inadequacies with the children all her life, and to great effect, but with this particular child it was useless. And it wasn’t to be borne.
‘Well? I’m waiting for an answer, miss.’
The class had relaxed as Sarah had whipped open her book and found the appropriate place with Rebecca’s prompting, but now, as the Mother’s tone made it clear she wasn’t going to let the matter drop, the atmosphere tightened again, most of the faces expressing anticipation. Not that any of her classmates had anything against Sarah personally, apart from Mary Owen that was, but any delay in starting the dreaded arithmetic was a bonus.
‘I didn’t hear you.’
The light, bell-like voice was another acute irritation. How, Florence had asked herself countless times, could a child born in the gutter, as this one undoubtedly had been, possess such a voice? Admittedly she had been under the influence of Matron and the Mothers for the whole of her life, unlike some of their children who came in at a later stage of their development when they had picked up the dialect of the northern streets, but that still didn’t explain the - her mind balked at the word pure, and substituted clear - tone of that voice.
‘I didn’t hear you,
what?
’
‘I didn’t hear you, Mother Shawe.’
‘Everyone else heard me perfectly well as far as I am aware. Cissie, did you hear me?’ A small mousy girl nodded quickly. ‘And Kate, how about you?’ Another bobbing head. ‘So why not you, miss? I repeat, what makes you different?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing,
what?
’
‘Nothing, Mother Shawe.’
‘Well for once I agree with you, Sarah Brown. It was your good fortune to come under the care of Matron Riley at an early age, and for that you ought to be down on your knees thanking God every night, because left to your own devices you would soon go astray, do you hear me? You are nothing, girl, worthless - you always have been and you always will be. You came from the gutter and to the gutter you’ll return—’
‘I didn’t.’ A voice in her head was telling Sarah to keep quiet and let the tirade pass, but she ignored it.
‘You didn’t?’ There was a note of vicious scorn in Florence’s voice as she baited the angry child facing her with blazing eyes. ‘Oh well, this is news indeed.’ She paused, her gaze flicking over the sea of small faces watching them with rapt attention, before she said, ‘Perhaps you’d care to enlighten us all as to your beginnings then, miss?’
‘I . . . I—’
‘Oh come, come, don’t be shy.’ The venom emanating from the scrawny body was tangible and had caused an electric silence no one dare break. ‘You obviously know more about it than me. Maybe you come from the gentry? Is that it, Lady Sarah?’
Perhaps if the story she had told herself so often hadn’t been at the forefront of her mind, or if Florence Shawe hadn’t hit a nerve that seemed to confirm the dream, or if the day had started better - possibly then she might have kept quiet. But before she could stop herself Sarah was speaking out loud the words that opened Pandora’s box and changed her world for ever, destroying the innocence of childhood and revealing the world in all its ugliness.
‘My mam and da wanted me, they did, but I was stolen away.’ Her chin was up and she was facing the woman who loathed her, thrusting away Rebecca’s hands as they tried to pull her back down in her seat. ‘But they’ll come to get me one day and then you’ll see. They live in a big house, a great big house, and there’s white linen tablecloths and silver knives and forks, and a maid that answers the door—’
‘
That’s enough
.’
‘It’s true, it is.’ Sarah appealed to the rest of the class who were sitting with open mouths, swinging her arms wide and pivoting on the heels of her coarse leather boots. ‘My mam’s looking for me—’
‘
Your mother left you in a filthy toilet to die of exposure when you were just a few hours old.
’ Florence didn’t shout, she didn’t have to. ‘You were abandoned, do you hear me, not stolen. There is no big house, no maid - she didn’t want you.’
Sarah knew she had to deny it. Mary was there, and Jane, she couldn’t let them believe such lies, but there was a sickness in her that was rising up in her throat and making her ears ring, and she couldn’t get the words past it.
‘You were left there and you were found, and brought to the foundling nursery that same night by the constable.’ Florence was growing uncomfortable now, there was something in the child’s face that was frightening and she found herself wishing she had never started this. But Sarah always brought out the worst in her, she told herself irritably. The child set out purposely to annoy her wherever possible. It was easy to bring the excuse to mind; she had used it often enough in the past when the little quiet voice of conscience had prevented sleep from coming.
What would Matron say when she found out one of her Mothers had revealed confidential information? This last thought had the power to make her voice flat when she said, ‘So we’ll have no more of this storytelling, Sarah, and I think you’d better—’
‘Shut up, you.’ Sarah’s face was as white as a sheet, her blue eyes dilated and round. ‘You’re a rotten liar, that’s what you are, a dirty rotten liar.’
‘
Sarah
.’
‘My mam’s looking for me—’
‘We’ll talk of this later; children, page twenty please—’
‘And I wasn’t left in a filthy toilet, I was stolen and I had a silver rattle.’
‘Sarah, sit down at once.’ Florence had advanced to the child’s side with the intention of pushing her down in her seat, but something in Sarah’s face stayed her hand and actually caused her to retreat a step or two. ‘I shall take you to Matron if we have any more of this.’