Shadow Baby (23 page)

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would be taken away from her. Sometimes, though rarely enough, Evie opened the door to him and then he did everything he could to prolong the interchange between them. His heart always went out to her - she was such an appealing elf of a child with her huge dark eyes and mass of unruly hair. There was nothing of Leah in her that he could see, but that did not detract from the fascination she had for him.

But a strange man opened the door, giving Henry a fright. He visibly started and was for a moment speechless.

‘Were you wanting something?’ the man said, belligerently, and made to close the door.

‘Please,’ said Henry, clearing his throat, ‘please, where is Mary Messenger?’

‘Who?’ the man said. ‘Mary who?’

‘Messenger, Mary Messenger, who lives here with the child Evie.’

‘That the old body found dead?’

‘Dead?’

‘Aye, a month back. Found dead.’

Henry stared at him, shocked and faint, and put out his hand to steady himself. He must have gone paler than he already was, because he heard the man say, ‘Here, are you took badly?’

‘No,’ Henry managed to say, ‘no, it was a shock, the news. Do you know what happened to the child?1

‘No,’ the man said, ‘never heard of a child.’

All the way home Henry was rehearsing what he would do. The next day he would begin inquiries and find out where Evie was, then he would go and rescue her and bring her back with him. He would stand no nonsense from Leah. Had he not always said that when Mary died Evie must come to them? It had always been intolerable that she did not live with her mother, and this cruel and unnecessary separation must cease. But when he did reach home Leah greeted him with smiles and her own happy news, and he was not able to plunge immediately into telling her what he had decided.

She was once more expecting a child and that very day the doctor had pronounced her particularly healthy and well. She was to take things very easy, not allow anything to upset her and all would go well, he was sure. So was Leah. She said she felt confident in a way she had never done before and had only waited until he was better to tell him of this latest pregnancy. She was four months now, past the danger period, and the baby would be born close to Henry’s own

birthday, in September. Seeing her joy, Henry was trapped. Any mention of Evie would result in storms of argument and protest and endanger his wife’s well-being. He could not tell her Mary had died nor could he find and claim Evie until after this baby was born. As it was, his quiet rather than rapturous acceptance of the news made Leah anxious once more about his health.

But he began making inquiries, secretly. He quickly discovered where Mary was buried and went to pay his respects and place a wreath on her grave. It was unmarked so he arranged for a stone cross to be made and erected with her name and dates carved upon it. Feeling furtive, he then visited the workhouse to see if Evie had been taken there but, to his relief, she had not. She must be in one of the city’s homes for abandoned children, and he did not know where to start, nor was he sure if he should simply tour all the likely establishments in an effort to locate Evie. What was the point if he could not then take her back with him? And besides, a man coming to claim a little girl as his stepdaughter would seem suspicious. He had no proof, no documents to brandish nor any explanation which sounded feasible as to how Evie had come to be in a Home. He needed Leah with him and he could not have her at his side until after the baby was born, if then.

Still determined to do the right thing, Henry bided his time uneasily, vowing to himself that he would make these miserable months up to Evie when finally she was with them. Leah never once asked about the welfare of either Mary or her daughter. She never mentioned them, which struck Henry as a sign that she had consigned both of them so successfully to a past she wished forgotten that in her own mind it had, in fact, been obliterated. Meanwhile, she flourished, growing happier and happier as the birth approached. This time, all went well. Leah was safely delivered of a baby girl on 14 September, Henry’s own birthday. She would have preferred a son but the relief of giving birth to a fine, strong child was great enough to banish any feelings of disappointment. The baby, named Rose, thrived. She was like Leah from the beginning, with her mother’s eyes and mouth and, once it began to grow, her mother’s lovely golden hair. Yet gazing adoringly at her or nursing her in his ever-willing arms Henry still thought of poor Evie. When Rose was six months old he decided that at last he could safely speak.

He waited until Rose was asleep and Leah was in a visibly tranquil

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mood before he began and when he did he begged her first to listen to the end of what he had to say before she said a word herself. Quickly and unemotionally he told her of Mary’s death and of Evie’s disappearance, and then he said he would not stand for the child’s abandonment. Firmly, he said it was their duty to locate and claim her as their own and that he was prepared to override any objections of hers. He understood them but they no longer carried any weight beside Evie’s plight. She was only six or seven years old, a poor little thing, and would fit very neatly into their family as an elder sister for Rose. He finished by urging her to consider how there was room enough, surely, in their own happiness for a child who had done no wrong and would have been obliged to suffer much through no fault of her own.

Leah, as instructed, kept silent and did not interrupt. Even when he had stopped speaking she remained quiet. But her expression was mutinous. She turned away from him, walked to the window that overlooked the marsh and stared out of it, though it was already dark outside. He went over to her and put his hands on her shoulders, but she shook them off and moved away to poke the fire. Then she sat herself in front of it, hugging her knees and swaying slightly.

‘We’ll start visiting the Homes tomorrow,’ Henry said. ‘There aren’t so many, we should be able to go round them all in a few hours. It’s a simple question we’ll be asking, only a yes or no needed.’

‘It isn’t simple,’ Leah said, and smiled in a way he knew well, in that proud, sly way she could have when she was conscious of her own superiority.

‘It is,’ Henry said, but warily. ‘All we do is ask if Evie Messenger has been brought to them.’

‘Messenger isn’t her name,’ Leah said. ‘You won’t find her that way, not by giving that name.’

‘But it’s your name .,.’

‘True. But it isn’t hers, not on the certificate, not in the baptism register.’

‘What is her name then?’

‘It is her father’s.’

‘But you weren’t … you weren’t …’

‘Afraid to say it, Henry? We weren’t married, is that what you’re too kind to point out? That’s true too, we weren’t, but I gave her his name. I said we had been married and showed the ring, and no one

queried it. I gave her his name because she was his and I thought it only a matter of time before she was entitled to it.’

‘Well, then, we ask for a child of that name.’

‘We? I’m doing no asking, Henry.’

‘What was his name?’

‘You promised never to ask.’

‘I’m not asking to know about him, only so as to know the name Evie goes by.’

Leah rocked in front of the fire and said nothing.

‘I can find out,’ Henry said. ‘I can search the baptism register for your name, Leah.’

‘You won’t find it. I told you. I gave his name.’

‘I know her birth date, I can do it that way. I can search the records for that month, June, wasn’t it?’

Leah smiled again and Henry realised he did not, in fact, know Evie’s birthday. He did not know the day or month and was not even certain of the exact year, it could be 1888 or 1889, or even

1887. Nor, it now occurred to him, did he know where Evie had been baptised. Had it been in Wetheral parish church? Mary would know but Mary was dead.

‘Damn it, Leah,’ he said, ‘you think you can make a fool of me.’

‘No,’ said Leah. ‘You’re not a fool. You’re good and kind, Henry, I know that, and you want to do right by Evie, but I told you from the start how wicked I was. I cannot bear to have her near me. I wish I could. I know it is not her fault. I know I am unnatural and fail in my duty. You can damn me. But nothing has changed.’

‘It has, it has,’ broke in Henry excitedly, ‘everything has changed. Mary is dead. Evie is suffering in a Home …’

‘You don’t know she is suffering. It is a year now, or nearly. She may be settled, or she may have been given to a family. Let her have her own life.’

‘Leah,’ said Henry, despairingly, ‘I don’t know how you sleep at night with this on your conscience.’

‘My conscience? What do you know about that, Henry Arnesen? My conscience is black and heavy, but I sleep. Whether he does I can’t know and I don’t want to.’

‘You could make it light, you needn’t have this on your mind.’

‘It is not on my mind. I said my conscience was black and heavy, not my mind. My mind is as clear as it ever was. I can’t bear to have

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that child with me and that is that. She’s gone now, wherever she is. She’s young, she will have no memories.’

‘But you’re her mother, Leah.’

‘I am, and it means nothing beyond the word, not where Evie is concerned. To Rose, I am a mother and always will be. I cannot help it, Henry.’

‘Evie will never know a mother now …’

‘She might. You cannot tell. She could be with a woman mothering her already. And I did not have a mother, you forget that, and I managed, as children do.’

‘But your mother was dead.’

‘As I am to Evie.’

There was nothing Henry could do, or nothing he felt able to do, but he bore great resentment against Leah. She had outwitted him and prevented him from following his own instincts. He felt how powerful his wife was in all matters emotional and it angered him. But because he was not the sort of man in whom rage could be sustained, this anger melted down into disapproval and this in turn trickled into feelings of detachment towards Leah. She was set apart somewhere within him because of Evie. Sometimes he found himself regarding her with such a sense of distance that it shocked him. He had to remind himself that this was his wife, the woman he loved greatly and to whom he had once felt joined in every respect. It worried and puzzled him, this strange awareness, but he found he had not the will to fight it. The birth of another daughter, Polly, two years after Rose made Leah into even more of a mother and, so it seemed to him, less of a wife. In a way it was a relief. He got on with his work and she got on with her mothering and he never again mentioned Evie.

The Arnesens stayed in Rockcliffe until Rose was of school-age and then Leah began to think they should move back into the city. She wished her daughters to be educated in a way she had not been and, though the village school would serve to begin with, she thought Rose and Polly ought to go on to the new Higher Grade School. Henry, whose own education, while far superior to Leah’s, had not amounted to much (though he wrote a fine hand and kept excellent accounts), was in agreement. So when Rose was seven they moved back to Carlisle to a house in Stanwix with a fine view of the park and the river. It was a larger house than they had had in Rockcliffe but still a modest dwelling, though its location made it

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more expensive than Henry had expected. The girls went to Stanwix School, of which Leah greatly approved. The children were all from good homes and were clean and well-dressed, as of course were her own daughters, clad in the dresses and coats their father made so exquisitely. To be the wife and daughters of a tailor was a fine thing, though Henry himself did not do much of the actual tailoring any more. He was head of a regular little emporium, Arnesen & Co., with premises in Lowther Street, and supervised a staff of thirty. His own prosperity pleased him but he never took it for granted. Every year he salted away his profits in careful investments and, though he was generous to his family, he never got carried away. Leah took pride in Henry’s carefulness. It was why she had married him, recognising as she had done his sound commonsense as well as his talent and willingness to work hard. Whenever Polly, who was inclined to impertinence, complained of her father’s meanness Leah would admonish her sternly and declare Henry the most generous man in the world and tell Polly she did not realise how grateful she should be.

Leah was grateful. When she looked back to the horror of that period after the birth of Evie and remembered how Henry had provided the way out of the trap she had sprung on herself, she was overcome with gratitude. She thought she might have ended by murdering Evie. She had been mad inside herself while functioning perfectly on the surface - mad with grief and resentment and a terrible unjustified hatred. She’d seen her whole life wrecked by Evie, whom she would have to carry on her back for ever. At first the tiny child had been a symbol of that love she and Hugo had had for each other, and she had been precious, but gradually she had become significant in a different way, as a symbol, instead, of betrayal, of stupidity. She could no longer see Evie in her mind’s eye, which was a comfort since that image had the power to torture her with its pathos, but she still felt her presence in a shadowy way from time to time, usually in occasional moments of low spirits.

She trained herself not to wonder, not ever, where Evie was, or what she was doing - that way real madness lay. Evie was gone, long since. Guilt had been kept at bay for so long that Leah considered it defeated, but never quite admitted this to herself. Five years, ten years, nearly twenty years, and now Evie would be a woman. No longer need fear of her lurk within that conscience she had once told Henry was black and heavy. Whatever had happened to Evie was

now complete. The child had grown, the pathetic mite was no more and not even Henry could reproach her by trying to conjure up a vision of a poor weeping little soul searching for her mother. Evie would no longer need a mother. But she did.