The Humphrey Institution for the Betterment of Unwanted Children was in Hackney Wick, the Lea running almost at its back, although Denton wasn’t to realize that the river was there until almost the end of his visit. It was a wet, raw day, a fine drizzle boring down like somebody’s bad intentions, drenching and chill. It smudged distance as if a fog, and as Denton and Mrs Striker jogged through unfamiliar streets in a mouldy cab, he thought that this might be one idea of hell, going on endlessly towards a dimly glimpsed nowhere in the damp discomfort of the grave.
‘I’d like a hot drink,’ he said, when neither of them had spoken for several minutes.
‘A lap robe would do.’
He grunted. They were crawling through mean streets where nothing else seemed to move. It was as if the entire city had died. He shrugged himself deeper into his overcoat. ‘Poor people around here,’ he said. ‘Not enough money to buy a louse a wrestling jacket.’
‘Your grandmother? Definitely Irish.’
‘Scotch and proud of it. Worshipped John Knox, believed a blow was healthy for a child, saw the world as good or bad, white or black, all choices made on principle.’
‘Hard to live with?’
He hesitated. He had been talking for the sake of talking; now he had to think about what to say next. ‘It sounds peculiar, but she wasn’t. Sure, she whacked us now and then, but she was protective.’
‘Against the world?’
‘Against my father.’ It came out slowly, an intimate admission, painful. ‘She used her hands; he used a piece of firewood.’
‘On you?’
‘Until I was as big as he was. Then he tried it and-’ He shrugged himself into the coat again, shivered. ‘We fought.’ His shoulders were trembling with cold, perhaps with memory. He wondered what she would do if he moved closer to her for warmth. ‘I joined the army when I was fifteen.’
‘I wouldn’t think they’d take you so young.’
‘I lied. I was big for my age. My grandmother signed the paper.’ He smiled. ‘She could read and write. That’s Scotch, not Irish.’
‘Was that her way of protecting you?’
He looked out at the wet house fronts, an ironmonger’s shop, a scene of water and soot and lifelessness. He had never told anybody this story. ‘It was for my sister.’ He felt the fine drizzle on his cheek, realized his trousers were getting damp. ‘She was fourteen. She didn’t have a dowry. I got a hundred dollars for enlisting.’
‘For her?’
‘There was somebody would marry her if she could bring some money. My grandmother told me to do it.’
Janet Striker was silent, staring, too, at the bleak, blackened bricks. Then she said, ‘Because of your father?’
The question surprised him, an insight straight to his secret self. He had his hands in his overcoat pockets, his long legs stretched out; he moved, a kind of squirming, acutely uncomfortable. ‘My mother died,’ he said uncertainly, almost stammering, ‘when we were kids. Fever. Josie never had a proper mother. My grandmother-’ The memory was acutely painful.
‘Did you understand what was going on?’
‘I don’t think anything was really-’ He trailed off. He couldn’t picture his sister as she was at that time; had he erased her? But he had ‘understood’ something about her — and about his father. He mumbled, so low he was never sure she heard him, ‘My father said things to Josie — he started touching her-’ He trailed off. ‘My grandmother said it was best for Josie to get married.’
She looked at him. ‘You could have been killed in the war.’ As if she distrusted the effect of her eyes, she turned her head towards the street and leaned back. ‘Did it work out for her?’
‘She had four kids of her own and raised my two, after-When I couldn’t. She seems content enough.’
‘And you? The army suited you?’
It made him laugh, part of it relief at the changed subject. ‘The army doesn’t give you a chance to say if it suits you. It was war. I went in a private and came out a temporary lieutenant, got shot at and paraded and marched and starved and rained on and thrown into battles like a piece of meat to a hungry dog. No, it didn’t suit me. But I did it, and it took me off the farm. The army showed me another way to survive than trying to grow potatoes out of rocks. The army’s a hard mother and a hard teacher, but there’s worse. Far worse.’
‘Were you ever wounded?’
‘Twice. A musket ball and a bayonet. Neither fatal. Obviously.’
They rode along. The horse’s hooves rang on the wet street, now wider, opening out into the newer, less impoverished neighbourhoods beyond Victoria Park. A few living beings appeared — a dog, a shopkeeper in a doorway, two women with a child. Janet Striker said, ‘And your father?’
‘He married again. He left the farm to his widow.’ Ahead, he saw a grey building, stone, neoclassical by suggestion but essentially ugly; he guessed it was the Humphrey Institution. ‘I never went back,’ he said.
‘And your grandmother?’
‘I hated my father. But after I’d knocked around a while-’ He stared at the ugly buildings along the cab’s slow progress. ‘Poverty drove him mad. He worked and worked-’ He made a gesture of futility. ‘My grandmother died while I was away. There was nothing for me to go back to.’ But there had been his sister — why hadn’t he gone back to her?
The cab pulled up opposite the building’s entrance, a set of double doors up two stone steps from the street. The doors looked as if they had been closed and locked when the building had gone up, closing in a prison for lifers. They got out and he paid the driver, a hopeless-looking man who neither smiled nor thanked him but wiped his wet nose on his sleeve and passed his whip over the horse’s back as if too tired to lift it higher, and the cab passed away into the drizzle like a phantom. Denton and Mrs Striker were left standing on the narrow pavement, the only living things to be seen in a square of which the Humphrey took up an entire side; inside an iron fence, five leafless trees reached up like blackened hands. There was a smell, familiar but unpleasant, that Denton couldn’t place.
‘Hell,’ he said.
‘Its entrance, anyway.’ She went up the steps and yanked a bell-pull. After several seconds, she said, ‘Somebody’s coming.’ She looked down at him, seeming to gauge him, to estimate just what he might be. ‘I think you’re a far better man than I first took you for,’ she said. The door opened.
The smell was laundry. Wet laundry, soap, steam. The Humphrey Institution for the Betterment of Unwanted Children operated a sizeable commercial laundry that took up the entire rear of the stone building and two sheds behind, as well; it was in the laundry that the wayward ones earned their keep.
‘Work is their salvation,’ the woman who met them said. ‘They scrub clean their souls.’ The words seemed to be quotations that she had by rote. Mrs Opdyke was a big woman in a black dress a few years out of fashion, the cut emphasizing her bigness, her chest and abdomen, as if she were some male figure of power whose belly was called a ‘corporation’, but within this was a less certain woman. She was tall, made taller by grey hair piled on her head in lustreless clumps like dirty wool, and she stooped as if her tallness was a burden. Keys jingled at her waist, suggested a saintly emblem — the keeper of the keys — that was belied by her wary eyes. Denton wondered if she was afraid for her job. ‘We would do them a disservice to indulge them.’ She meant the women.
‘How many live here?’ Mrs Striker said.
‘We have close to a hundred at any particular time.’ She bent her head to look at Mrs Striker; there was a sense of expecting contradiction. ‘But they don’t live here. They are permitted to await the birth of their babies here.’
‘And then-?’
‘And then they must make their peace with the world, as we hope they have made their peace with Him who sees all transgression.’
‘Do they understand transgression, do you think?’
‘We always say, show me a young woman who is weeping in her bed, and we will show you a soul yearning for its maker.’ Again, she seemed to be quoting somebody else.
‘And the infants?’ Denton said.
Mrs Opdyke glanced at him. She flinched, as if he had surprised her, perhaps the rarity of his maleness. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ she said. She had a big voice, big like the rest of her, but raspy, as if she had used it too much. ‘I caught your name but not your purpose.’
‘I’m looking for a young woman who gave birth here.’
‘Are you a relative? Her father?’ She seemed ready to disbelieve him. ‘An uncle?’
‘The young woman is dead. I’m trying to find what happened to her.’
‘It seems to me you already know what happened to her, if, as you say, she’s dead.’ She dropped her chin and looked at him over the top of silver-rimmed glasses. ‘Are you a policeman?’
‘Mr Denton is a famous author,’ Janet Striker said. ‘He is acting philanthropically.’
They were standing in a lobby that lay immediately behind the front doors, a long, bleak room almost without furniture but overseen by the life-size portraits of two elderly men in the fashions of the seventies. Denton had been wondering which of them was the founding Humphrey, had decided that the more severe and lifeless of the two probably was he, the other being altogether too ruddy and too plump. Now, he smiled at Mrs Opdyke, trying to look philanthropical.
‘We encourage good works,’ the woman said, but the idea of philanthropy seemed to worry her, and she frowned. ‘Many gentlemen are able to practise good works through us. Many.’ She turned to stare at the portrait that Denton had not chosen as that of the onlie begetter. ‘We were founded by a man. Men serve on our board and our inspection committee.’ She turned back to stare at Denton. ‘Good works are one route to bliss.’
Denton was confounded by this — not the idea, but bliss, which seemed to him dated and poetic and, anyway, unattainable — and he said weakly, trying to smile, ‘“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”’
Mrs Opdyke’s frown deepened. ‘I don’t see the aptness of that,’ she said. For the first time, she seemed stirred to something other than quotation, and her cheeks reddened. ‘Forgive me if I miss something, but the aptness of that escapes me, escapes me altogether. Is this intellectualism? ’ Before he could answer, she rushed on. ‘There is too much intellectualism. We don’t allow our girls to engage in it.’ She turned to Mrs Striker as if for support, common understanding. ‘Our charity is based on the founder’s ideas and is straightforward and simple — work and prayer. “Work to weariness, pray to tears.” We always say that to new intakes, and I say it to each as she leaves. Work and pray, work and pray, I tell them — your lives are over, you are ruined, pray for release, nothing more can be expected.’ She raised a hand towards the portrait. ‘Our founding philosophy.’
‘I was quoting scripture,’ Denton said.
‘Were you ironic? We detest irony. It is part of intellectualism. ’
‘The girl’s real name was Ruth,’ Mrs Striker said in the voice of somebody bringing a meeting to order. ‘But after she left here, she called herself Stella Minter.’
Some of the colour left the woman’s face and she seemed to slump back to her normal posture. Denton had the sense that she saw him as an enemy, even the enemy — because of the men who had got her women pregnant? Or, more likely, because of the founder and the all-male inspection committee? At any rate, she was far more at ease with Janet Striker, to whom she now said in a lower, almost confiding voice, ‘I don’t understand this gentleman’s interest. I have a duty to protect the, mm, the premises.’
Mrs Striker produced the two letters they had prepared, the one from Hench-Rose about Denton’s sterling character, one from her own organization. ‘He is above reproach,’ she said.
Mrs Opdyke removed her glasses to read the letters. Her eyes looked undefended, timid. ‘Well-’ she said. ‘Well.’ She read both letters twice, then folded them and handed them back. ‘Well — very well.’
‘What can you tell us?’ Janet Striker said.
‘I can’t say anything, standing here in public.’ Only the three of them were in the draughty hall; nobody else had passed through it; nothing suggested that anybody else even had access to it. ‘We must go to my office. I’m sure you will want to see the work rooms and other, other — facilities.’ She had replaced her glasses, now looked at the portrait of the founder as if hoping the subject might step down and order them to leave.
‘Who’s the other fellow?’ Denton said. He jerked his head towards the other, more severe figure that he had thought the founder.
Mrs Opdyke stared at it. She drew a breath. ‘My predecessor, ’ she said. She turned away and moved towards a door at the far end of the long room, seeming to move on rollers, her skirts giving no hint of legs moving beneath them. Denton, wanting to get away as fast as possible, still cold and miserable, looked at Janet Striker. He was astonished to see her wink.
The visit became a kind of tour of inspection. Denton thought that they missed nothing except the water closets and perhaps some secret room where the staff sipped gin and smoked cigars. They were shown the kitchens, the dormitories, the chapel (stark), the classroom (girls under twelve were given two hours of lessons a day), the refectory (scrubbed wood tables, grey-green walls, a lectern for ‘improving lectures’ while the women ate), the lying-in rooms, the nursery, the infirmary, the morgue. ‘Yes, we have our deaths,’ Mrs Opdyke sighed. ‘Little deaths, mostly.’ She waved a hand at a pile of fresh wooden boxes that might have held papers but were infant coffins.
Ten women, all young, had been nursing babies in the nursery. They had thirty minutes off from their work, four times a day, Mrs Opdyke said. None of the young women looked at them. Their faces were healthy but tired, perhaps sullen. The kitchens told him in part why: great piles of cabbages lay on central tables; more young women with the same healthy, unhappy look were splitting the cabbage heads with cleavers, then chopping them and flinging the pieces into huge pots.
‘Boiled salt beef once a week,’ Mrs Opdyke said. ‘Fish on Fridays. Milk, four glasses a day, the last before bed with patent malt extract. Porridge found to be excellent for their general health. We do not approve of sauces.’
The lying-in rooms were closed to Denton, but he was allowed into a huge space where babies, new-born to four months, lay in rows like bullets in a belt. Surprisingly few of them were crying. Two women in striped caps and dark aprons moved among them but never picked one up.
‘They get no coddling?’ Janet Striker asked.
‘They are fed, changed, kept warm. Mothers don’t feed their own babies; they don’t know which are theirs, in fact. No, we don’t believe in coddling. These children face a harsh world.’
‘Where?’ Denton said. ‘Adoption?’
Mrs Opdyke turned eyes as weary as those of any of the women on him. ‘One in twenty is adopted. The rest go to institutions.’
Coming out of the babies’ room, they met a spry, angular man who was introduced as Mr Orkwright of the Eugenical Sterilization Society. He shook hands and passed on, grinning at the staff women, who all seemed to know him. Janet Striker stared after him and murmured to Denton, ‘Trolling for victims.’ If Mrs Opdyke heard her, she said nothing.
The work rooms were last. These were, in fact, the two wooden buildings that stood behind the stone structure and were the source of the smell that hung over the place and spilled into the square.
‘Our clients are some of the finest firms in London,’ Mrs Opdyke said.
Women, mostly visibly pregnant and with their sleeves pushed up and their damp hair falling down, stood over vats full of clothes; others turned the handles of big wringers; still others, using sticks like oversized broom handles, lifted wet cloth from the vats and turned it, stirring the water and the thick mass within. The air was wet; condensation clouded every window and lay as big drops on every cool surface; the floor was slippery. The women, like the others inside, had the ruddy, almost chubby look of the founder, like well-fed animals readying for slaughter.
‘Work and weep,’ Janet Striker said. ‘Dear God.’
In a separate room, six women sat at mangles and foot-pumped the dry cloth over big, heated rollers. Against the far wall, ten more, their bellies prominent, stood over ten ironing boards, running ten sad irons over shirts and collars. In the middle of the room, an oversized stove held a coal fire; irons and mangle cores stood all over its surface. The temperature, Denton guessed, was close to ninety.
‘Are they paid?’ he asked.
‘Of course not.’
‘I’d have thought there was a law.’
‘We are a charitable institution.’
Going back out through one of the wash houses, his eye was caught by a white bit of cloth hanging from a rolling basket between the wringers. It was damp but not soaked; he picked it up, smoothed it, recognized the Napoleonic emblem and the regal R — it was a napkin from the Café Royal. Perhaps he had wiped his mouth on it a couple of evenings ago. He dropped it back into the basket.
‘I think that now you have seen everything,’ Mrs Opdyke said.
‘Enough, at least,’ Janet Striker said. She smiled. ‘Enough, I mean, to appreciate what you do here. May we talk about Stella Minter now?’
Mrs Opdyke had perhaps hoped that they would somehow not get to the moment — perhaps they would change their minds, or die — but she tried to straighten her slumped shoulders and led them back into the stone building and along a wood-floored, scarred corridor to the front, again into the lobby with the portraits, and through a door in the far side. Beyond it was a dark-panelled office that might have suited a particularly hard-hearted banker: everything was dark, nothing was comfortable, not even Mrs Opdyke’s chair. Boxes with faded orange ties and labels rose up the walls on shelves perhaps meant once for books; only two black-and-white engravings relieved what wall space was left, one of them, Denton guessed, having something to do with Rome and rapine, the other too dark to see. A single window, barred, heavily draped in old brown velour, looked out on the square, where it was still raining.
Denton was assigned a chair too low for him, so that he sat with his knees up and his hat beside him; Mrs Striker got something a little better, although hard and straight. Mrs Opdyke, seating herself behind a black oak desk that seemed to have the mass and weight of a safe, sighed, as if to say So we’ve come to this ugly business at last, and said, ‘What was it you wanted, again?’
‘A young woman named Ruth, also known as Stella Minter,’ Janet Striker said.
‘Ruth. We’ve had several Ruths. Many, in fact. We don’t use last names here. Ruth or Stella, then.’
She bent and unlocked a drawer with one of her keys, removed a large ledger, opened it and, forehead propped on her left hand, began to turn pages. Janet Striker told her when they thought Stella Minter’s baby had been born, about when they thought she had left the institution. Mrs Opdyke made ambiguous sounds and turned a number of pages at once. Denton described the girl as he had seen her in the operating theatre and as she had appeared in Mulcahy’s photograph, and Mrs Opdyke seemed to recognize her, for she sniffed mightily. She seemed then to be looking for something specific, not browsing names, and she seemed to have found it when she said, her voice almost angry, ‘Oh, yes.’
Denton tried to sit forward, almost fell off his inadequate chair. ‘You have her?’
‘A bad child. An evil child.’
‘Ruth?’
‘I could hardly forget her — rebellious, ungrateful, vicious. What happened to her, then? Did she take to the streets? I predicted that she would — dirt seeking dirt. Did she?’ She glowered at Denton. ‘If it is through that connection that you know her, you will leave at once, sir.’
‘She was murdered, ma’am. I learned of her only after she was dead.’
Mrs Opdyke nodded. ‘Murdered. Of course.’ She shook her head, spoke to Mrs Striker. ‘It was foreordained. We could see it in her from the first week she was with us. Twice, I considered ordering her out. A bad child.’
‘Do you have her name?’
‘Ruth — what I have is Ruth. I told you, we don’t deal in last names. They come to us with their histories behind them; they leave us, we hope, with no history whatsoever. If they return to families, that is their business; if they go elsewhere-’ she waved several fingers — ‘so be it. We are here to accept the innocents they have carried. Did she go on the streets?’
‘She did.’
‘She was far too knowing for a girl of her age. A sly girl, her language sometimes highly offensive. I would say she had already been on the streets, but she insisted not. But they lie, of course — they lie.’
‘Who was the father of her child?’
Mrs Opdyke held up both hands. ‘We dare not ask; if we learn such a thing, it is locked up in our hearts and never committed to paper!’ She looked in her book again, rubbing her eyes. She read off the dates when Ruth had arrived and left; Denton wrote them down on a cuff. ‘Demerits, demerits, punishment, severe punishment, more demerits — a thoroughly bad young woman.’ She raised her head. ‘She disappeared two weeks after she gave birth. We make every effort to keep track of our women, but this isn’t a prison. She went out through the laundry gate, we think — chatted up one of the draymen, I should imagine. She could be charming when she chose. Without a backward glance or a thought of her child, I’m sure.’
They asked more questions — Ruth’s age, anything she’d said about parents or family, any idea of where she’d come from, anything — but Mrs Opdyke’s ledger was unyielding.
‘Was the birth registered?’ Mrs Striker said.
‘Our legal adviser keeps a record by date and sex, but without names. No other formality is required by law.’ She drew her lips in. ‘He makes an annual report to the registry office.’
‘And her baby?’
‘I am not at liberty to tell you. The child is long gone from here, at any rate. And from its mother, to its eternal benefit.’ She put her glasses back on. ‘Murdered, you say.’
‘Quite savagely.’
‘I shall not be so unkind as to say that she put herself beyond God’s mercy with her wilfulness.’
Denton smiled. ‘“And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”’
She glanced quickly at him; her cheeks reddened again. ‘Sparrow me no sparrows, sir — she was an evil girl and I was glad to see the last of her. Rather than concern yourself with an object of God’s justice, you might turn your attention to good works.’
Denton struggled to his feet. ‘Finding the girl’s murderer is a good work, ma’am. Maybe I’m an agent of God’s interest in sparrows, too — in my way.’
She stared at him, then said, ‘Hmmp,’ and stood. Janet Striker tried to ask another question, but Mrs Opdyke said, ‘You know everything I am able to tell you,’ and moved towards the door.
Out on the front steps with the door closed behind them, they stood close together and stared into the rain. Janet Striker took his arm and held it as if glad for its warmth. ‘What a God-awful place,’ she said. ‘Do you suppose it was a day like this when she ran off? Oh, God, if she’d only come to me!’
He wondered how they were going to get a cab. He didn’t want to think of what it would be like to be out on such a day with no money, no warm clothes, nothing. ‘I wonder how she found this place,’ he said.
‘Maybe she lived nearby.’
‘Or the opposite — she wanted to be as far as she could from — from whatever it was.’
They stared into the rain. ‘We didn’t learn much,’ she said. Abruptly, as if she’d just realized what she’d done, she jerked her hand out of the crook of his arm.
Nothing moved. The smell of laundry was thick, troubling. She said, ‘I wish one of us had brought an umbrella.’