The Daughters of Foxcote Manor Page 11

  We’re by the stream now, which is gushing through its narrow gully, excited by the rain. My arms are starting to ache. I sit down. She fits perfectly in the sling of my crossed legs, the dough of my thighs, like a missing bit found.

  I wriggle the note out of my pocket: Please look after me. I am a good baby who needs a home. Just that. Like she’s Paddington Bear. No useful tips at all! Not even a name. If I were her mother, I’d have written a detailed manual, just in case, like the one in the glove compartment of the car.

  The bag is more helpful. I spread its contents on the grass: cartons of milk powder, two glass bottles with rubbery brown teats, Babygros, and nappies. Hungry? Maybe that’s why she’s doing that funny stretching sideways thing with her mouth, like a swimmer. I’m going to save this baby. Like I didn’t save my little sister.

  I rest her on the mossy bank. She likes it there, listening to the water, turning her hands slowly in front of her eyes, astonished, like they’re starships, not hands at all. The more I look at her, the more things I notice: her teeny ammonite ears; the little white spots around her nose; the crust on her scalp, flaky like candle wax. I press my finger onto the soft hollow on her head and imagine her blood rushing underneath it, like the stream.

  Then I remember. She needs milk.

  The stream? Clean enough. I hold a glass bottle against the current so the water sloshes into it. I shake in the powder, but it goes everywhere and the powder that does fall into the bottle won’t mix properly and floats in cratery chunks. She spits out the teat and starts to whimper. So I give up on the milk and hold her tight until she stops, mid-scream. She slackens in my arms. Her eyelids close.

  I am the world’s best big sister at last. Hugging her warmth to my body, something strange happens. I feel myself being pulled back in time, day by day, month by month, like paper folded over, until I’m in my Primrose Hill bedroom again, the night my baby sister was born.

  The ambulance is waiting. The midwife’s clomping down the front steps. I’m looking down through the wisteria into the blanket in her arms, spotlit by the lantern over the door, and I can suddenly see what I’ve not been able to recall this last year: the gash where her nose and mouth are meant to be. I also know this: it would have made no difference. With or without a proper face she’d be my baby sister. I’d have loved her just the same.

  20

  Sylvie

  You were found by a lovely young girl in a magical forest one warm summer’s night, safe on a tree stump,” my mother would whisper to me at bedtime. I’d immediately beg her to tell me the story again, enchanted by it in the same way I was with Santa Claus or the possibility of fairies at the bottom of the garden. It didn’t feel real, but it did feel true, like all good stories. My parents first told me when I was five: “There’s something you need to know . . .” Apparently I shrugged, nonplussed, and asked for a biscuit. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t grasp the enormity—and wouldn’t until I was much older. My mum and dad had searched for me and loved me so much they adopted me as their own: I liked this. As Caroline was also adopted, a few months after I was, this was our normal. We both knew what it was like to be chosen, not simply born.

  I’d always known a vein of wildness ran through me. Like Caroline loved dolls, I was drawn to trees. I’d climb the old apple at the bottom of our garden every day and sit on the highest branches, sniffing the sea. I couldn’t concentrate in the classroom—my mind hopped about like a sparrow—but outside, in a tree, something in me would still.

  Anyway, I decided, not every girl got to star in her own bedtime story and close her eyes and hear the feathery brush of an owl’s wing or the burrowing of hedgehogs through crispy leaves, all while tucked up in the comfort of her bed. Or gaze at the bedroom walls in the dark and see a forest, like Max in Where the Wild Things Are. Neither were other girls discovered, like a rare species of butterfly, as I was: Sylvie, a name of French origin, meant “from the forest.” So I enjoyed my foundling story on a childish level. What I didn’t understand was why my mother’s voice went croaky in the telling or why, if I ever asked her questions, the air went crackly.

  When I was about nine, everything changed. It was recess at school and raining, the drops dancing on the corrugated outdoor-play roof. For some reason I thought this a good moment to confide my birth story to Donna, not an ally, who was standing next to me with her Heidi blond plaits and boasting about her pony. Donna’s eyes widened. “So your real mummy didn’t want you and left you to die?” I’d trumped her pony. But at some personal cost. That evening I told Mum I didn’t want that bedtime story anymore. (I’ll never forget the look of relief on her face.) I didn’t climb the apple tree ever again, either. I dug out my one neglected doll from the toy box, brushed her matted hair, tied in pink ribbons, and dressed her up so she looked neat and shiny, not wild or foresty. I’d pick the forest out of me too. And I told myself that life starts only when you can remember it.

  My first real memory—the one with the grainy photos to prove it, along with thumb shadows and the requisite red eye—is of me sitting on a damp slab of beach, Dad bending down, pawing at the sand with a spade. Caroline is gripping his hairy shoulders and shrieking with delight. My mother is wearing the tiniest of crochet bikinis, with beaded bits dangling down, a top like two triangle-cut sandwiches, and holding up the big black camera that I loved. Sticky ice cream is trickling down my arm. I am three. Sylvie—me—has begun.

  But the fear remains. Is there someone else, dormant, curled inside, like a young green nut in a shell? Could my brain reach further back if I let it? Into that void between being born and being found? And what about Caroline? Might she remember stuff too? Even if she doesn’t want to. And she doesn’t. She never has. She’s more past-phobic than I am, which is saying something. We made a vow. Shook little fingers on it. Sisters. Strong and loyal. Not victims.

  I read once that the hippocampus, where memories are stored, is not fully developed in a baby’s brain. But the amygdala, where emotional memory lives, is already up, its engine running. And this worries me, the possibility that memory is more about retrieval than storage, that the memories might be there, like unread books buried deep in underground library stacks. Fortunately, most of the time trying to imagine my abandonment is like peering into a block of gray ice. There’s nothing to see, just the ice. It’s only on rare days, raw-edged, disintegrating days like these, after a big shock—and Annie’s keeping the baby is an earthquake in my brain—that shapes start to form, not so much a memory but something else, an untold story I can somehow feel without the language to describe it.

  I feel it now potently as Annie and I crawl out of the sea foam. “Are you okay? You sure?” I pull her up to her feet. She’s shaken. Neither of us was braced for that boom of water to the back of our legs. We’re soaked. Sand in our hair. Our mouths. It could have been much worse. I glance nervously over my shoulder. The rogue wave has retreated to a frothing tongue of shallow water. But I can feel its big sister farther out at sea, pulsing in the dark, gathering energy, starting to roll. And I immediately think of the folder of newspaper clippings, waiting back at the house, secreted by my mother all these years. Like that wave, energy moving through matter, intent on release.

  21

  Rita

  There it is again. The cry Rita heard earlier in the evening with Robbie. Her heart beats faster, percussive, as if her body already knows something she doesn’t. She can’t turn back. Under the carapace of an enormous yew, she stops and listens. Nothing. Perhaps she imagined it. Her head’s scrambled by the kiss.

  She pushed Robbie off, of course. Big, plain Rita, fine for a fumble, not a dance! And she’d run back inside the house, only for Jeannie to mention Hera had not yet returned. But Hera wasn’t beside the bonfire when she’d passed it, as she’d have expected, and it was far too late for her to be out alone. Her thoughts flicked to Fingers. Her own neglect. She should never have left the children alone wit
h Jeannie . . . Anxiety squeezes her ribs.

  She hesitates where the path forks: log pile or stream? Left, yes. Hera loves the stream. She starts walking, quicker now. Where is she?

  She can smell rain. She cups her hands over her mouth. “Hera?”

  “Over here,” comes a voice.

  Rita squints into the gloom, frowning. Yes, she’s there, the scallywag. Thank goodness. But why is there a doll on her lap?

  Hera beckons giddily.

  “What’s going on?” Rita rushes over. A baby? A baby here? She touches the infant. Alive. But the forehead is cool as plastic. “Where’s her mother? Is the baby hurt? Goodness, give her to me. Quick, quick.”

  The baby is small, dainty, no more than a few weeks old, and almost weightless in her arms. Her fingers are white-tipped, as if frost pockets are forming under her nails, and her face is scoured with insect bites. Rita lightly strokes her sore cheek, trying to bring some comfort. The baby whimpers and watches Rita’s mouth speculatively, as if this might offer a clue as to what is happening, what she must do next to survive. Rita tucks the baby under her cardigan for warmth, folding the wool around her body, like a blanket, cradling the curve of her spine with one spread hand. “Hera, what on earth . . .”

  Hera’s gabbling an explanation. Something unlikely about the baby being left on the tree stump. “See.”

  Rita believes it only when she sees the crumpled note from Hera’s pocket. The bag containing the baby gear. Such a pitiful collection of things. So Dickensian. “My god.” The cruelty of the world takes her breath away. She rubs the baby’s back with the pad of her thumb, relieved at the hum of body heat. “Are you sure there’s no one around?”

  Hera shakes her head. “I looked.”

  Rita peeps under her cardigan at the baby, who stares back with wide blue-black eyes. Her vulnerability opens something inside Rita. She can feel it, like a muscle stretching, a valve opening. Despite the ravaging of bites and cold, the baby’s exceptionally pretty, not one of those squashed babies that look like Winston Churchill. She’s silent now, as if Rita’s body is all she needed. “You should have got an adult straightaway, Hera,” she admonishes.

  “I thought I’d get into trouble.” Hera doesn’t mention that the only adult around was Jeannie. Neither does Rita.

  Rain starts to fall in fat drops.

  * * *

  Jeannie’s waiting for them in the hall. “So there you are, Hera! I told you not to do anything silly, didn’t I? You’ve made me look a quite hopeless mother. And now Rita’s had to go searching for you and got soaked to her . . .” She stops talking. She frowns and stares, puzzled, at the bulge in Rita’s cardigan. “What’s that?”

  Rita swallows. She has no idea how Jeannie will react. The silence stretches. Their sodden clothes drip onto the wooden floor. The baby wriggles against Rita’s ribs. She grabs fistfuls of cardigan.

  “Rabbit? Baby deer?” Jeannie frowns and laughs thinly, looking from Hera to Rita and back again. “Dinner? Show me.”

  As if in answer the baby starts to cry, a low huh-huh-huh.

  It sends a volt of electricity through Jeannie.

  Hera grins. “I found you a baby.”

  “No,” breathes Jeannie, shaking her head. “Don’t say things like that.”

  Rita lifts one side of her cardigan. The baby peers out, like an animal in its pouch.

  “For the love of God.” Jeannie covers her mouth with her hand. “Hera, what have you done?”

  * * *

  Outside the kitchen window, a silver-foil sky flashes. But the baby, who has survived, but only just, Rita thinks, is safe, bottle-feeding on her lap, frantically sucking, her toes curling. Hera and Teddy press close, fascinated, their faces tender and alert, as if the baby is both a previously unimaginable wonder and someone they’d been waiting for to arrive. Only Jeannie maintains a terrified and awed distance. Her eyes are wide, startled, revealing too much white above the irises. She cannot look away.

  The soft wet sounds of the baby’s feeding fill the room, and they all listen in silence, rapt, like an audience of exquisite chamber music. The baby takes one last loud slurp and her eyes close heavily. A calm settles over the kitchen, soft as the silence after a night’s snowfall. And for a magical moment, it feels like they’re all knitted together around the baby, a world apart.

  “Can I?” Jeannie asks, her voice tremulous. She walks slowly toward them.

  Rita passes the baby over, apprehensively, wishing she didn’t have to. She has a strange sense that she’ll always remember this moment, that something is ripping through the fabric of her life as she’s always known it. The baby leaves a small indent on her navy skirt, and the warmth of her remains for a moment or two after she’s gone.

  “I’d forgotten,” Jeannie whispers, marveling, tentatively pressing the baby to her chest and closing her eyes. “I’d quite forgotten.”

  Half an hour later, Jeannie still won’t let go of the baby. She’s lying on the sofa, her eyes vague and dreamy, the baby spread-eagled across her chest. In the firelight Jeannie’s face has a soft lambent glow, a flushed placidity, as if the baby’s vital life force is transfusing into her. The children seem to sense it too, sitting on the floor, leaning against their mother’s legs, the silky pool of her dressing gown, staring up at the baby’s fingers opening and closing like stars.

  So no one else notices the streak of movement at the window. Only Rita. A face? A flash. Something pale. She walks toward it and presses against the flaking paint of the sill, the cold draft leaking through the ramshackle window frame.

  Outside, the storm throws itself violently at the trees, like a living thing, rocking them by their roots. The sky is a glowing charcoal gray, flecked with angry embers of orange. Rita squints into the garden, seeing more now her eyes have adjusted. But whoever or whatever was there has gone. An animal probably, she decides. Or a falling branch. Still, it tips her mind to the world outside. It makes the hairs rise on her arms. “Shall I call the police now?” she asks, turning to face Jeannie.

  Jeannie’s eyes snap open. “What? No!”

  Rita is taken aback. She doesn’t understand. “But the authorities will know what to do next.”

  “I know what to do.” Jeannie sits up and rearranges the baby in her arms, more tightly. The baby’s downy fluff of black hair spreads over her pale forearm. “She’s just arrived. She can’t leave yet.” She looks down at the baby, her eyes flashing, fierce and protective. “Can you, sweet thing?”

  The cuckoo clock squawks. Although it feels like the baby’s stopped time altogether, it’s been well over an hour. Someone somewhere will be out of her mind with worry, Rita thinks. Her heart starts to race. “Shall I call the village doctor, then?”

  Hera shakes her head. “The doctor will call the police, won’t he, Mother?”

  “That’s right.” Jeannie shoots a warm smile at Hera. “Well said, darling.”

  Hera seems to grow two inches. Rita feels more confused.

  “No police. No doctor.” Jeannie lifts the baby up and blows the fuzz of baby hair lightly, watching it move with delight.

  “Jeannie, she might be poorly,” Rita points out, with a surge of panic. “And someone will be looking for her. Her mother.”

  “Sick babies don’t feed, Rita. And whoever left her on the tree stump knows exactly where she is.” Jeannie’s face hardens. “Let’s not forget that that beast of a woman abandoned her. She could have been taken by a fox, had her eyes pecked out by crows, anything. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  “She was left there on purpose, Big Rita,” says Hera, enjoying siding with her mother. “Near Foxcote. Near us.”

  “For us.” Teddy grins, joining in and waggling the baby’s foot. “Like a present. Baby Forest.”

  “Oh, Baby Forest, I do like that, Teddy,” coos Jeannie. “I like that very much.”


  “Me too,” says Hera, making Teddy beam. She repeats, “Baby Forest,” a couple of times under her breath, like an incantation.

  Rita can only imagine Walter’s take on this. The knife Jeannie kept under her mattress glints like a warning in her mind. Then the entrance to The Lawns, the stone pillars and soaring iron gates, topped with impaling spikes. “Jeannie, we really have to contact the police. I can drive her to the station.”

  “Drive? You? I don’t think so. Christ. Take a look out of the window, Rita. It’s wild out there. Lethal! All those flying branches.” Jeannie strokes the baby’s cheek. The baby looks puzzled. Starts to bleat. “There, there. You’re safe with us, my little poppet.” She glances up at Rita. “Just one night, okay? To give this poor little thing a chance to recover from such a horrific ordeal.”

  Rita’s aware of something intractable taking shape. A wrongness. “But . . .”

  “Shush. Can you hear it?” Jeannie holds a finger to her mouth. “You want the baby out in that, do you? You really want to get behind the wheel?”

  Rita listens to the awful sound, too close for comfort, a deep groaning, as if the earth itself is splitting in two, then a scalping rip and crash as the first tree falls. “I guess we should wait for it to blow over,” she concedes reluctantly, sensing a different sort of storm stirring, not outside Foxcote’s walls but within.

  22

  Hera

  The gigantic tree lies across the lane, upended with a huge skirt of earth, its pale roots thrust in the air, like legs. I feel so sorry for it but am glad that it keeps Marge—and any other visitors—at bay. Two days since I found the baby, and still no one knows we’ve got her. The only problem is Big Rita, who is behaving sort of strangely, like she’s growing her own private opinions. Like she doesn’t love Baby Forest as much as we do. Like she might snitch.