VII. Foundling with a Locket: Father Unknown

From the doorway of the Essex Street Unitarian chapel Wednesday morning, Mary watched the men wrestle the closed coffin out of the hearse and enter the meeting house in which Isobel Frothingham, a declared agnostic, had prided herself on never setting foot. It was her single relative, a distant maternal cousin named Rose Wiggin, who had insisted on a church funeral, and so Mr Johnson arranged for it in his own place of worship. The expense, Mary assumed, would come out of the Frothingham estate, which would most likely fall into the purse of that lone relative. For Isobel had seemingly died intestate.

Six men in black, moving at a caterpillar’s pace, carried the oak coffin down the aisle on their bent shoulders. Behind them came four honorary pallbearers: Joseph Johnson by the left front, gasping with the dust blown through the open door; to his right the American writer, Joel Barlow, looking pious; after him, Alfred de Charpentier, grieving like any widower; and on the left rear, the rejected suitor, Edgar Ashcroft. Both of the latter hoping, perhaps, for a share in the inheritance? Ashcroft’s cheeks glistened—not from tears and grief, Mary felt, but from the effort of pacing the others as they trudged to the front of the chapel.

Behind the pallbearers came the cousin: a stout woman with black ostrich feathers bouncing on her black hat and raggedy ladders in her black worsted stockings. Her heels were worn down—she would profit nicely from any estate monies. Her husband followed: a bandy-legged fellow with the pinched snout of a weasel. Mary had not heard Isobel speak of this Rose Wiggin: the woman would have read the papers, and emerged like a mole out of the past from her northern birthplace.The cousin trod on Ashcroft’s heels; he turned to give her a black look.

Someone shut the street door, and a good thing, Mary felt, for a crowd of onlookers had been hanging about the chapel; she had heard the whispered words bewitched... the devil.... She stood in a pew across from a pair of theatre folk whom she had seen at the bluestocking’s salon: she recognized the playwright Elizabeth Inchbald, and the actress Mrs Sarah Siddons, wrapped in something turquoise-blue and filmy. Her writer friends Mary Hays and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, more sensibly dressed, stood farther down in the same pew. There was a scattering of former suitors, as well as a male actor or two, for Isobel Frothingham loved the theatre.

A maroon velvet pall draped the coffin, silvered candlesticks sat on the pulpit, and white tapers illumined the sides of the sanctuary, interspersed with wax lights. Mary imagined The Nightmare superimposed on the coffin: the leering incubus, grinning horse, the sleeping woman’s exposed breast. She saw William Blake in a far corner with his sketch book—she imagined the fantasy that would fill his sheet: this fey man who claimed he saw the face of God in a tree, and angels dancing on the head of a pin.

The pallbearers finally took their seats, and beside them, the feathered cousin and her obsequious mate. Next to them a space, where Mary imagined a thirteen-year-old girl—though Isobel had not yet adopted her, had she? There was only the receipt that Dulcie said she had found in the bluestocking’s bedchamber. And what should Mary do about that? The kindest thing would be to leave the girl in the Foundling Hospital and let her graduate, so to speak, to domestic work with some decent family.

Did the Wiggin cousin know about her? Undoubtedly not. Could a natural child, not legally adopted, take precedence over a legitimate cousin?

The thought of the child nagged at Mary. In her view, the girl was the one true heir, illegitimate or no. Not that four-times-removed cousin who was even now dissolving into false tears and already contemplating, no doubt, a move into the sumptuous (if somewhat gaudy) rooms on Grosvenor Square. The girl made Mary think of Margaret King, her charge as governess in Ireland—a bright, independent-minded fourteen-year-old—now forced by her parents, at nineteen, into an arranged marriage.

Yes, Mary would go to see Isobel Frothingham’s girl—orphaned, it would seem, for a second time.

But thoughts of the girl vanished when Lillian Guilfoy slid in beside Mary, her eyes moist under the black veil. It was not the memory of the deceased that reddened her eyes, though she gave lip service to the untimely death—but of her fiancé, Roger Peale. “Disappeared,” she whispered. “A highwayman! Somewhere south of London. Monsieur St Pierre has been searching unceasingly. To no avail. We fear my dear boy has been abducted.” Her eyes were whirlpools of bluish water.

Mary clucked her sympathy. How much ill news could one take in a short period of time? Poor Lillian. Poor Isobel. Poor foundling. Poor vulnerable females everywhere! “If for ransom, then you will soon hear something,” said Mary, squeezing the woman’s gloved hand.

“I’ve thought of that, but I’ve heard nothing. And how would anyone know where to find me? Poor Mr Peale escaped in his prison clothes! St Pierre brought a pair of breeches and a greatcoat for him, but the prison clothes were undoubtedly still in the coach. Suppose the robbers found and reported them to the prison governors? What if they’re keeping him locked up somewhere till the constables can go after him?”

Not the constables only, Mary thought, but Henry Fuseli, who had vowed to find him. Though she wouldn’t mention that to Lillian. “We must be patient and wait,” Mary said aloud, thinking of her own role in Eliza’s escape from an irate husband. And she and her sister listening to every footstep outside their rented room.

Heads turned. Someone in front said, “Shh,” and Lillian dropped her veil. She sniffled into an embroidered handkerchief.

Mary sat back into her pew. “The service is beginning,” she whispered to the weeping Lillian. “We’ll talk afterward.”

Though what was there to talk about? Roger Peale was missing. What could one say or do? She prayed it would not be Henry’s men who found him.

The Reverend Theophilus Lindsey, the chapel’s founder, was a pleasant-looking man with piercing blue eyes, a prominent nose, and a crop of unpowdered white hair. He had known Mrs Frothingham by reputation only, but he deplored her violent death, he told the mourners, and hoped she had now “found peace.” His sermon was followed by testimonials from Dr Priestley and Joseph Johnson, and finally, by the husband of Mrs Wiggin who stood up, uninvited, to advise everyone in the room to fear the Lord, for His wrath had “thundered down upon the unhappy victim.”

Mary drew the line at that. What had poor Isobel done to defy the Lord except to stay home from church and write novels and poems and offer the literary world a few bibulous routs and readings? And have a child out of wedlock, yes, but whose fault was that? At the very least the blame should have been shared by the unknown father. There were far greater crimes for the Lord to protest: he did not have time for a freethinking female.

Mary went up after the final prayer to place a crumpled rose on the coffin. What more could she do? She felt genuinely sorry for Isobel Frothingham—appalled at the manner of the death. And sorry for having criticized the woman’s novel. Had she imagined that violent death, she would have critiqued more lightly. But who could foretell something like this happening? In fiction, readers would have said, Nay, unbelievable! But truth, Mary was beginning to discover, was far more eccentric than fiction.

As she turned to go back up the aisle—Lillian Guilfoy being detained by Mary Hays—Henry Fuseli emerged from a back pew. She gasped: he always took her by surprise. Put her in a state of shock, as it were. That wild white mane, those liquid eyes that spilled into her own. The furry black brows, the sensual lips that repulsed, and yet drew her. He moved up on her, smiling. He was always more affectionate without the restraining wife. He put a hand on her arm and rubbed.

“And did you feel the wrath of the Lord on your shoulders?” she asked, teasing, yet serious. Trying to (deep breath) relax.

“Moi?” he said, innocently. “And why, pray, should I feel the Lord’s wrath?”

“Why, sir, if you had not painted The Nightmare, Mrs Frothingham would not have been strangled in such a deplorable way.”

He drew back; he had no sense of humour these days. “Madam, I see no connection here. Had I not painted The Nightmare, she would have been arranged in some other way—perhaps hanged and de-tongued. For teasing but not always delivering—do you catch my meaning?” He gave a soft, sensuous laugh. Then grew rational again. “Someone had a grudge against her, that is all. This particular arrangement shows how much influence my work has on the world, eh? Another rave review just received from Zürich, where two of my works hang in the Kunsthaus.”

Mary stiffened. She did not care for this arrogant, self-serving Henry.

No, she told herself. She loved and admired him—that is, his mind. No again: she both loathed and loved his mind, all at once. He was a destructive influence on her and she knew it. Turning, she breathed in the fragrance of the largely female mourners, already taking their leave. The wax lights flared, then dimmed in her vision. She thought she saw her publisher waving at her. Or was it the flickering light? “Pray, excuse me, sir.”

Henry ran his fingers down her back, across her buttocks, stirring her juices. Oh merciful God! She was so vulnerable, so gullible. She hated that she was. She saw the Wiggin cousin watching, and tried to pull away from him.

“Did I tell you how charming you looked in those scarlet stockings?” Henry said, pushing a knee against hers. “Red becomes you. Absolutely. It freshens your cheeks.”

She was not wearing the scarlet stockings today—she was wearing the black ones. “Charming” was one of his empty phrases. She looked coldly at him and squeezed through the crowd of mourners; she needed air. Joseph caught her hand and asked how she was “holding up.” He told her that Vindication was about to go into yet another printing, that he was proud of her. She clung to his arm. This was love, the way she felt about this sweet man. This was what the words “platonic love” truly meant.

And yet there was no frisson, no lurch, no heat in the breast or groin, no sense of empowerment, or transport into some heaven, which Henry Fuseli gave. There was no rapture from Little Johnson in his stained coat, which smelled slightly of sardines.

Henry was by the outer door now, speaking with a tall woman in rose-and-grey silk with whom Mary was unacquainted. The woman’s eyes were fixed on his face; she was holding the tip of her closed fan to her heart. In the language of fans, it meant, You have my love.

Mary would scream if he touched that woman.

She was told that the hospital governor was busy, but she barged through the study door anyway the following week and found the man at his desk, slurping chocolate, popping chunks of fresh-baked bread into his mouth. His triple chins chewed it back and forth, up and down.

“Do the children get hot chocolate?” she asked, and taken aback, he said, “Well, um, on special occasions. I do not believe we have met, madam. Are you here for—” He glanced at her flat belly; got suddenly busy, shifting papers about on his massive mahogany desk.

“I am Mary Wollstonecraft,” she said, pulling back her shoulders. Her more-than-average height served her well. He was still seated; if he got up, the chocolate might spill. He did not offer her any. Her name obviously drew a blank. He was not a bookish man.

She did not offer to leave, although his nose was in his papers. “I have come about the child,” she said, and halted, realizing she did not know the child’s name. “Isobel Frothingham’s child,” she went on. “Surely you’ve heard that Mrs Frothingham is dead. Murdered in her bed, alas. There is a nice inheritance, I understand.” Though she did not really know, did she? “Doubtless some part of it will go to this Foundling Hospital.”

The word “inheritance” caught his attention; the hospital was always soliciting funds. Mary had once heard a magnificent performance of Handel’s Messiah here. Deep in the inner sanctum was a hall hung with the paintings of English artists, William Hogarth’s among them—he had helped to found the hospital and establish a gallery. None of Fuseli’s erotic paintings, though—they might contaminate the minds of innocent orphans.

The governor knew about Mrs Frothingham’s death, but not the manner of it. He lifted up a pile of papers to show that he was too busy to read newspapers or to heed gossip. She took a seat and described the death. “Oh my,” he said, pressing his pudgy hands together. And again: “Oh my.” He got up to rummage about in a tall wooden cabinet and emerged with a sheaf of papers labeled F. “I cannot guarantee that I will find the records—the mothers don’t always tell their names.”

The governor had a quivery, sensitive mouth. If he did not share his chocolate with the children, well, it was probably because there were so many of them.

On the other hand, Mary could have used a hot cup, but remained uninvited.

“She was brought here on March seventh, 1779,” he announced. “A Mrs Frothingham, aye.” He gazed up at Mary with eyes that matched the chocolate. “They all call themselves Mrs, of course.”

Mary nodded. She thought of Fanny Blood’s sister Caroline: seduced, abandoned—and destitute, forced into prostitution. Mary had sent what money she could, but the poor girl, it seemed, was lost. The thought galled her—she must write about this.

“But we do not divulge names, no, no,” the governor said. “It is just because she is deceased, otherwise—” He cleared his throat, then spewed out facts and figures on the child: age, weight, height, moles, pockmarks, hair colour. “The mother left a poem as token—that is, inside a small locket. The girl wears it around her neck and we indulge her. She often recites the poem aloud.” He cleared his throat again. “We give our charges a considerable amount of liberty,” he said, pushing his fingers up into a steeple. “We offer lessons in morality; we instill a healthy fear of God.”

“Ah,” said Mary, “a fear of God.”

“We have begun to vaccinate now against smallpox.”

“Smallpox, yes,” said Mary, impressed with the way he moved from God to smallpox. Though on second thought she did see a connection. Children sometimes died from the vaccination, she had heard. “But, sir, this child—her name? Did Mrs Frothingham...”

“We name them. This one is Ann. Though at first we called her Silence.” He chortled at the memory, and explained that the child did not utter a word for her first three years. “But now, I understand, she has more than made up for that silence. That is, if she is in the mood. She does not always, um, respond when spoken to.” The steeple collapsed in his hands.

Mary would not want a talkative child. There was noise enough in her house with Dulcie singing off-tune as she worked, interrupting one’s writing with a hundred irrelevant questions. Now this man was humming as he explored the file.

Why, anyway, had she come here? She couldn’t think. Ah. Not only to see the child, but to discover the true father, yes. It might have been he who strangled the bluestocking. Though for what reason, she could not at that moment fathom. Her brain had spun a tale: he was a nobleman; he had a wife but she died, and now he could claim the child, someone to nurture him in his old age. He was a Lear; he needed his Cordelia.

But why destroy the mother? Hate? Revenge of some kind?

“You have no record of a father?” she asked. “The man was not mentioned?”

“Oh no, no. They never say. Are you here to adopt the child? You might find her odd, but amusing. She always has her nose in a book. I understand, in fact, that Mrs Frothingham had planned to adopt her. At least the child has been spreading that tale. We usually discount such talk, however. An adult will come to look over the children, encourage one or the other, then not come back and the child is devastated. Unfair. Oh, so, so unfair.” He lifted his eyes to the ceiling; blinked.

Adopt her? Mary had no such plan in mind. She had books to write! Although, well, adoption would be a charitable act. She closed her eyes and stood a moment in thought. Should she take the child for a short time, as an ostensible handmaid?

The man was looking at her. She coughed. “The girl would be thirteen now, I understand?”

He glanced back at the chart. “Aye, madam, as of February twenty-fifth. The reason, I expect, for the mother’s visit. We had to explain to the child that the lady would not be coming back for her. Should she, as you suggested, have remembered us in her will—” He pursed his lips and glanced discreetly down, leaving Mary to supply the rest of the sentence.

“Mrs Frothingham, I understand, died intestate,” she explained. “But a distant cousin has come to claim the inheritance. Is there no mention of beneficiaries in your papers?” She did not want the feathered cousin who had ignored and doubtless disapproved of the bluestocking during her lifetime, getting it all.

He brushed away a few crumbs and dropped his three chins back into the folder. He came up smiling. “There is indeed. Not a great deal, but something. ‘In the event of my death,’” he read, “‘two hundred pounds will go to the Foundling Hospital. You will find it in my will.’”

A will? Mary wondered. When she was told there was no will?

“We do ask this of the affluent ones,” he said. “Most are too poor to give even a farthing.”

“One is never too poor to give a farthing for a relation,” said Mary, who made a point of succouring her siblings—something she had promised her mother on her deathbed. “Now, pray, take me to the child, if you will. I would like to introduce myself to her.” A quick visit, yes; Mary was inclined to hasty decisions, and she must correct that fault. Eliza’s infant, left behind to a husband who denied the child to a “runaway wife” (Mary must change this law) had died within a year—poor nurturing, Mary suspected. And now her sister had no child. She was still married, though separated—“separation from bed and board,” they called it.

Was that why she wanted the Frothingham girl? To stop Eliza’s child from wailing in her dreams?

Mary rose and the governor rose with her. He rang a bell; an aproned women told Mary to follow her. If she came again, she would bring a copy of her Original Stories, the children’s book her friend William Blake had so beautifully illustrated.

In the kitchen, a tall, gangling girl was sweeping the floor. Her carrot-coloured hair straggled under her cap into her face. She was sweeping with one hand and reading with the other. The book was Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. A grown-up novel for a girl of delicate years, but Mary as a child had read books beyond her years, hiding them under her mattress. It might be interesting to try to educate the girl as she had Margaret King. An empty mind, needing filling. Mary might write a rebuttal to Rousseau’s Emile, where he described the education of a young boy, yet downgraded the education of females.

And there was Ann, the dust moving slowly under her broom—the name recalled Mary’s beloved Fanny; her heart staggered in her chest. “I—I’ll take her,” Mary told the woman. “On trial for a few weeks, to be sure we’re compatible. No formal adoption, no. I’ll come for her, in a day or two. I will have to prepare a room and so forth. So go. Tell the governor this moment and I’ll approach the girl.”

The woman hustled off and Mary sat down, bowled over by her sudden decision. Already she wondered how she was going to feed the child. She would have to appeal to her publisher, but how much more could she ask of him?

“I am so sorry, Ann, about Mrs Frothingham,” she said to the girl, who had stopped sweeping and was staring at her visitor.

“Annie’s my name,” the girl said. “And Mrs Frothingham was going to take me home. Why did she have to be killed?”

Why indeed, Mary thought. “It was a terrible thing, Annie,” she said, “and I know how disappointed you must be. And I may not be a good substitute, but I’ll try. Would you like to come home with me?”

The girl regarded her a moment longer and then burst into tears. Whether from sorrow or joy, Mary couldn’t tell. But suddenly the girl cried, “All right then,” dropped her broom, and ran off.

In her place a woman she had not seen before stood on two pianoforte legs with the Fielding book in her hands. She was frowning at the bold frontispiece illustration. “She oughtn’t be filling ’er ’ead wi’ such nonsense,” she said.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Mary said. “So return the book to the child, please. I’ll be taking her home—Tuesday next, I think—that will give me time to prepare. See that she is packed and ready, if you would.”

Feeling light-headed, as though body and mind had parted, Mary went out—nay, floated, out of the building and into the noisy street. Her sedan chair had not waited; she would have to walk. It was growing dark, but she felt like walking. She would go down to the river; she moved briskly, filling her nostrils with the good smells of fish, baking bread, spices, roasted meats, and puddings. She swung her arms against the March chill and felt the breeze biting her face like a live thing. She walked and swung and sang until she glimpsed the water; then she turned right along Whitehall and Parliament Street towards Westminster Bridge.

She gazed down at the Thames rushing past with its flotilla of cutters, skiffs, scows, smacks, and cockleshells; a fleet of sailing ships in from a foreign clime. She was subject to melancholy—it was the Irish in her, her mother used to say, and she felt it keenly this afternoon. The wind blew through her body; it chilled her belly and heart. Should she have offered to take the child? What did she, a bookish spinster, know about mothering? Her siblings, yes, but how helpful was she really? Would this new undertaking end as one more nightmare?

Nightmare. That word again. The incubus, the grinning horse, the sleeping Isobel, superimposed on her sister Eliza’s dead babe, lay behind her closed lids. She opened her eyes wide but the image remained, like a palimpsest on the grey surge of water some twenty feet below. She hung onto one of the piers. Each pier on the bridge ended in a small hooded alcove, like a night porter’s chair. The alcoves were built as shelters for pedestrians, but footpads, it was said, adopted them as hiding places for stolen goods. On impulse she stuck her fingers into a nearby niche—but found nothing.

Had she hoped to find a painting?

How wonderful it would be to find that painting: to see Henry’s face, his gratitude. She imagined him swinging her about, both of them laughing, joyfully embracing. She ran from pier to pier, thrusting her fingers into each of the alcoves.

Nothing.

Fool, she told herself. She was addicted to the pleasures of the imagination; she must return to reason. Stick to your essays, Mary. Stick to your facts. Alter the world with your words.

Yet she couldn’t seem to write at all these days. Was it her own procrastination? Was it because of her obsession with Henry? Or had it something to do with The Nightmare, with that note at Isobel Frothingham’s cold feet: BLUESTOCKINGS BEWARE.

She could hardly feel her fingers now; her face was numb. She turned back into the city, wanting now to go home, needing to warm herself by the fire, needing human company. Dulcie would have to do for today. Tuesday, she would go to the gathering at the bookseller’s; she would tell them about the child—before she went to fetch her. It would help to share her concerns with like-minded company.

Her own nightmares might vanish, she thought, with the return of the painting and the resolution of the murder. If the bumbling constabulary could resolve it. She could not. How could she?

She hurried back past St James’s and Green Park to Grosvenor Square where the Frothingham apartments sat vacant and drear. The street lamps barely illumined the square; snowflakes flew into the glass globes, like winged ghosts. She imagined she saw the bluestocking rise up out of her bed to repulse her intruder—had she pummeled and scratched him? Had she cried out—though there was no one in the house to hear? Had her soul flown out through the broken window, free at last, leaving the tortured body behind?

Was there indeed a soul? Some ignorami said that women had no souls.

Mary’s faith was breaking down. It was the killing and poverty and injustice that deflated her—those motherless children in the Foundling Hospital. She felt responsible for and yet helpless against the ills of the world. Who was she to save anybody: man, woman, or child?

Her foot crunched something hard, and when she leaned down to look she saw it was a small shard of glass—from Isobel Frothingham’s window perhaps; she put it in her greatcoat pocket, along with a broken quill pen she found beside the shard. It might be the bluestocking’s pen: something to remember the dead woman by, something the child Annie would treasure. And Isobel, she thought, might have used the pen as a weapon against the fellow. Should she look for a wound from a pen in the faces of all the men whom the bluestocking knew?

Alfred de Charpentier had been a pallbearer and she had not thought to communicate with him, nor Edgar Ashcroft. Nor St Pierre, nor Talleyrand. Had the latter two attended the funeral? Possibly, though she did not recall seeing them. She had seen only Henry Fuseli. The man had blinded her to all else.

She wound her way quickly through the labyrinth of shops and houses towards her own Store Street. Strong cooking smells assaulted her nose: cabbage, onions, pork—now she was ravenously hungry. The night-soil men were beginning to pull their waggons to pick up detritis from the garden privies and basement cesspits. Coal smoke hung heavy in the air. Figures loomed at every turn: drunken men emerging from taverns, young ruffians bumping their hips against her, prostitutes beginning their nightly solicitations.

She walked faster; she was sorry she had gone so far from home, dallied so long. Her nerves were weak; she should stay home nights with her books and her writing—although she used up candles, sometimes a week’s supply in a night—writing letters to Henry Fuseli that he didn’t answer. She should not go walking in the dark. The words Bluestockings Beware seemed more ominous now; she picked up her skirts and ran. She ran down Oxford Street and up Tottenham Court Road; she turned into Store Street, and hurried to the end where the small house sat dark as a tomb.

It was Dulcie’s night off, she remembered. The girl had gone to visit a friend, she said, though Mary suspected it was that tallow chandler’s apprentice. He had started calling on her—though Dulcie would deny any interest.

Almost home, she pulled out the key from her pocket and the shard of glass came with it. And fell. She stooped to pick it up and found herself flying through the air, shoved from behind into the street. A coach-and-four thundered towards her. Just in time she scrambled behind a plane tree. She looked wildly about for help, but saw no one. Had the shove been on purpose? Had the coach come to run her down as it had that poor footman? Was someone lying in wait—warning her of dire things to come? Or was this all in her imagination—had to be, yes. She had cut her face on the glass: that of itself seemed an omen. She was on fire with pain: she had turned an ankle, skinned a knee; her cheek was bleeding from the cut glass.

She dragged herself up the two steps to the front door and jammed the key in the lock. She shut the door behind her and fell back, trembling, against it. The fire was in ashes, the house cold as a—tomb.

Why did that word tomb haunt her brain? She pulled her body away from the door and lit a candle. Something crept toward her and she cried out. It was her black cat. The green eyes stared at her. Isobel’s eyes.

Tomb, tomb, tomb, her mind wept.