Stars Across the Ocean Read online

  Agnes didn’t know if this comment called for a response, but an unspoken one jumped into her head. Can you blame a caged bird for beating its wings against the bars?

  Finally, he looked up. ‘Agnes, on the occasion of your nineteenth birthday, I take great delight in releasing you from your obligation to Perdita Hall.’

  Her face could not contain her smile. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘You will be released with all your papers, references, and of course a small sum of money to take you into the city to look for work.’ One of Captain Forest’s edicts was that Perdita boys and girls needed to travel ten miles to York to make a new life: coach fare and a month’s board. ‘My brother runs a laundry near Petergate; he could offer you—’

  ‘I doubt that I’ll stay long in York,’ she declared, though she didn’t know why. Perhaps it was simply the prospect of Captain Forest taking control of her opportunities again.

  His hairy eyebrows shot up. ‘No? You have broader horizons?’

  Agnes glanced around at his paintings of ships, and wondered how he could ask that. ‘Aye, sir. I do.’ The truth was she didn’t know what she was going to do. She had written away to a ladies’ home that would take her for a few weeks and help her find a position, but she hoped to work a month or so and save a little and then head somewhere with a view of the sea. She had never seen the sea.

  ‘I admire your courage, but listen to me: find good honest work and don’t live beyond your means or aspire above your station. That is the key to happiness. None of this … misbehaviour, and you’ll be happy.’

  Agnes was well used to holding her tongue while receiving such lectures. ‘Thank you, sir. I intend to be happy.’

  He shuffled the papers back into the folder and tied the ribbons around it with a flourish. He stood, and with ceremony, handed it to her. Her history, finished with. Her future, waiting just outside the high iron gates of Perdita Hall.

  ‘Fare well, Miss Resolute. You are named after a fine squarerigger that was nimble and steadfast. May you emulate her and uphold the good name of this fine institution.’

  ‘Thank you, Captain Forest,’ she said, with a shake of his curiously soft hand. ‘Fare well.’

  She left and sat on the stairs, untying the ribbons on the folder. Her skirt pooled around her, and she could feel the cool of the stone through the layers of material. Agnes was keen to see what Mrs Robbins in the laundry had said about her in her letter of recommendation. They had never got on, and she needed good recommendations to get work as a seamstress. The first document she came to, however, was the list of information about her admission to Perdita Hall, and she paused to read it.

  It was set out in a table. Name: Agnes (suggest Resolute). Every Perdita child was surnamed after a famous ship. HMS Resolute was a Royal Navy gun-brig that had been broken up before her birth.

  Father: Unknown.

  Mother: Unknown.

  Agnes skimmed past those. The facts were no surprise, but they still had the power to cause her pain, dull and dim though it now was.

  Surrendered in person?: No. Left in portico early morning.

  More lines, more details. Her weight and length, her lack of distinguishing marks, her head listed as well shaped and her ears as rather small. Agnes self-consciously touched her ears. She’d never thought them too small before now.

  Her eyes ran all the way to the bottom of the document, and there she saw it.

  Token: button with unicorn.

  A tiny jolt of recognition, like a moth against glass. Most children were left with some token from their destitute mother: a ribbon or a lock of hair or even a piece of string found on the street. Agnes had always assumed she had no token, given that she was not surrendered in person, not ever intended to be identified or collected. But she had been left with a button. A unicorn button.

  The memory is upon her in an instant, brightly lit around the edges. The voices of children and hoofbeats. She is very small, maybe five or six, and she is in the village with her classmates and a teacher. Across the road she sees a tall, fair woman, with a straight spine, who argues with a ruddy-faced man. The man tries to be quiet and calm, but the woman denounces him imperiously.

  ‘Do not seek to control me!’ she cries, and flounces across the road towards the children.

  Agnes has been so closely watching the argument that she has lagged behind, and now in her hurry to catch up with her classmates she trips and falls, hands flying out in front of her, elbow landing in a muddy puddle.

  Then the tall, fair woman is there, helping her up.

  ‘You’ve made your dress all dirty,’ she says, with a small smile, brushing off a damp leaf. Agnes is bewitched by the woman’s high colour and bright eyes. She looks as though she has won something. Her miserable opponent skulks away on the other side of the road.

  Then Miss Candlewick grabs her arm roughly, thanking the fair woman and hustling Agnes back towards the group. ‘Come along,’ she says. ‘Naughty, wilful child.’

  ‘Who was that beautiful lady?’ Agnes asks.

  ‘Genevieve. Lord Breckby’s daughter,’ Miss Candlewick says with a frown. ‘Do you think her beautiful?’

  ‘Aye. Beautiful and fierce.’

  ‘What nonsense,’ Miss Candlewick replies, then in a quieter voice, ‘Though you would think that; cut of the same cloth you are.’

  •

  ‘Sitting on the stairs like an urchin, Miss Resolute?’

  Agnes quickly gathered the folder together and tied it again, taking care to ensure her hands did not shake. ‘No, ma’am. I dropped the papers and had to gather them.’ She looked up into the eyes of Mrs Archer, the home-management mistress. Agnes and home management had never got on particularly well, and Mrs Archer had always thought this to be a moral failure on Agnes’s part.

  In truth, Agnes and moral failure were almost synonymous at Perdita Hall.

  ‘You’re still a Perdita girl for another few days, Agnes,’ Mrs Archer said in her sharp, southern accent. ‘Mind how you present yourself.’

  Agnes watched her go. She might have laughed. That would be her last lecture from Mrs Archer. Agnes stood and smoothed her skirts, and headed for her dormitory. Back in her childhood memory, she’d thought Miss Candlewick’s ‘cut of the same cloth’ an offhand comment, comparing naughty Agnes to wild Genevieve. But now, she suspected something quite different.

  •

  Motherless. Was there a sadder word in the English language? Agnes had often considered that question while sitting on this narrow bed, in this crowded dormitory, over the past nineteen years.

  Afternoon sun struggled through the high beech trees that crowded against the windows. She didn’t open the folder again. She didn’t want others to hang about and ask her questions. When she was ready, in her own time, she would share some of the details within with Gracie Badger, her dearest friend of childhood. But for now, as other girls chatted and folded their clothes and read to each other from books, she thought again about being motherless, about believing herself a girl from nowhere and nobody, and how a button with a unicorn on it might mean she had provenance.

  One could endure a great deal as a foundling. Becoming inured to suffering was Perdita Hall’s great gift. The children were taught from the outset that while nobody had wanted them, it did not mean they were valueless in society. When Agnes misbehaved, which had been often, it was assumed she did so because she felt adrift or abandoned in the world. ‘Look at the next bed and know you are not alone in feeling so,’ Mrs Watford had told her again and again. After she climbed a beech tree and plopped over the wall to hunt for mushrooms in the woods. After she was discovered to have drawn lurid pictures in her notebook rather than copy out spelling words. After she had got into a screaming row with that mealy-mouthed Charlotte Pelican, who insisted that because God created Eve second, woman should always be second to man.

  Agnes had to admit, though, that the staff were mostly kind, and even those who were unkind only served to tough
en the overly hesitant, or humble the overly proud. Perdita Hall presumed itself a good place for a foundling to grow up, and perhaps that was the truth. But the highly controlled environment had pressed against Agnes from all sides. Nineteen years of rising at six, praying at six and ten, pissing at six and fifteen, mustering at six and forty-five for lessons or work; following the bugle to breakfast, lunch, dinner … nineteen years lived between the heavily inked lines of the Perdita schedule.

  And of course no matter how kind the institution, everyone here longed for a mother. Most of the children imagined mothers as warm and soft and loving. Agnes, though, imagined mothers were mirrors, showing daughters who they might be, what they might become beyond the schedule, beyond the gates.

  Maybe mothers owned riding coats with unicorn buttons, just like the one Agnes had seen on that coat …

  But no, she couldn’t conclude that. Not yet. She had to see the token with her own eyes to be certain. The tokens were all in Captain Forest’s office. Everyone knew that. He kept some in a glass-fronted cabinet and showed them to visitors: Agnes had glimpsed them on her tenth-birthday visit, when she had sponge cake. She had ever after thought it such a strange collection of things to be on display, let alone to be proud of: knotted strings and pins and scraps of stained lace. The thing that seemed to unify the collection was that the items were so pathetic.

  But thirty years of operation and nearly seven hundred children later, many other tokens had been handed in with abandoned children. Once they were described in the paperwork, according to Captain Forest’s cleaner, an ex-Perdita girl herself, they were sorted into a chest of drawers. That meant Agnes needed to get into Captain Forest’s office when nobody was there.

  •

  Agnes was a well-practised liar when she needed to be, though even she baulked a little at lying in order to miss church. Still, nothing seemed so pressing to her at this moment than to know. She prayed to God to forgive her as Nurse Maggie, fetched by her nearest dorm-mate Alexandra Orion, sat lightly on the edge of her bed and pressed a warm palm against Agnes’s forehead. The dorm was chilly and quiet, girls slowly climbing out of bed in the early morning light. Church bells sounded in the distance, from the village of Hatby. Perdita’s chapel had no bell beyond an old ship’s bell hung in the vestibule.

  ‘No fever,’ Nurse Maggie observed, in her thick Scottish accent.

  ‘A stomach ache.’

  ‘How bad?’

  Agnes winced. ‘Awful.’

  Agnes knew Nurse Maggie would take no chances. Six years ago a bout of typhoid fever went through Perdita Hall, killing four children. Captain Forest had been inconsolable.

  ‘Rash?’

  Agnes shook her head, but Nurse Maggie bunched up her nightdress nonetheless, to check her legs and trunk. She pressed her hand under the waistband of Agnes’s bloomers into her tummy, a little cruelly, Agnes thought.

  ‘You’ll have to go to the infirmary until the physician can get here,’ Nurse Maggie said. ‘We’ll have a time of it calling one in on a Sunday morning.’

  ‘I don’t mind waiting.’

  Nurse Maggie narrowed her eyes. She was not easily fooled and Agnes’s reputation preceded her, so she wilted a little further into her rumpled bed.

  ‘Right, then,’ Nurse Maggie said. ‘Up you get. I’ll take you over.’

  Agnes smoothed down her yellowed nightdress, a hand-me-down whose ribbons were all frayed, and gingerly climbed out. Her slippers were under her bed, and she slid her feet into them and reached for her threadbare dressing gown. Nurse Maggie, who was an imposing woman of nearly six feet, waited with a grim face, then took Agnes’s elbow and steered her along the dormitory between all the beds, down the stairs and out across the quadrangle. Agnes’s breath fogged in the early morning air. She could hear some of the junior boys playing games on the grass on the other side of the wall that divided the boys from the girls, before the ship bell rang. Birdsong filled the clear morning air, but the sun hadn’t risen above the dark stone buildings. Agnes’s soles grew damp with dew. She hadn’t been given new slippers at the start of winter, on account of her approaching departure from Perdita Hall. Nurse Maggie marched along ahead of her, but Agnes knew better than to try to keep up. If she was able to keep up, she was well enough for church: Nurse Maggie’s pace was a test, for certain.

  The infirmary was at the back of the main building of Perdita Hall, the same building that housed Captain Forest’s office. Nurse Maggie waited for Agnes at the large double doors, then closed them behind her. Around behind the staircase and down to the half-lit basement level, and then through the lime-washed corridor to the infirmary, with its low dark ceiling. A yeasty, cold smell welcomed them.

  One other child was there, a lad of about twelve with a wet cough.

  Nurse Maggie showed Agnes to a bed at the opposite end of the ward and cautioned her to stay still, that they would send for the physician the moment Sunday morning service ended.

  ‘I’m off to chapel now,’ she said, striding over to the boy and tucking his blankets in firmly. ‘I’ll be back within the hour.’

  Agnes nodded, then lay very still, listening. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. The boy’s wet cough went on and on, but in a gap where he drew breath, she heard it dimly: the ship’s bell on the chapel. The service was starting.

  And everyone, except the sick boy and Agnes, was there.

  She flipped back her scratchy blanket.

  The boy stared at her with red-rimmed eyes. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Hush now. If you tell, there’ll be trouble.’

  He descended into another coughing fit, and guilt speared Agnes’s heart. He was just a boy, a sick one at that, and she was torn between hoping Nurse Maggie would return soon to tend him, and hoping Nurse Maggie would stay away long enough that Agnes may find what she needed to find. That she was thinking such thoughts on a Sunday, instead of praying in chapel, struck her with doubly guilty force. ‘Sorry, God,’ she muttered, and hurried away from the infirmary.

  Agnes stopped to listen at the top of the stairs. The tick-tock of the immense grandfather clock in the foyer, but no other sounds. She slipped out then rounded the bottom of the staircase up to the offices. One step at a time, her whole body tensed against discovery. Once she was in the dim corridor, she allowed herself to breathe. There were plenty of places to hide up here, should somebody return from chapel early.

  Agnes approached Captain Forest’s office for the second time in a week. This time, her heart was thudding. If she was found sneaking about where she oughtn’t be, in her dressing gown and slippers, they might take away her references or refuse to give her the travelling money. She opened the door and slipped in, then closed it behind her gently. She was in. Excitement bubbled warmly inside her. The room smelled of lemon wax and the macassar oil Captain Forest wore in his hair. She glanced around at the cabinets and chests of drawers, all polished to gleaming. She opened the closest one, beside his desk, and found only papers. Next, she tried the drawers under the window. The top drawer squeaked so loudly on opening that Agnes was certain someone would hear. She straightened her back, heart speeding. What excuse could she make if she was found rifling through things that weren’t hers, in a place she wasn’t allowed, after lying about being sick to get out of church? How was she to describe to another the strange, mad impulse that had caused her to act this way? After all, if she found the unicorn button, perhaps it was utterly unlike the one in her mind’s eye …

  But a minute passed, and nobody came. She returned her attention to the drawer. Wooden dividers had been built into it and each square contained tokens. There were so many squares. How would she find the unicorn button? She began sifting through the tokens with her fingers, then noticed that each square in the drawer had a card slid into the back, and each card had a year written on it. 1874. 1873. 1872 … She ran her eyes over the cards, then realised she needed to go to the next drawer down.

  1859, 1858 … and there it was, 1855. The year
she had arrived. A dozen or so tokens rattled in the square. She saw it almost immediately.

  She withdrew the unicorn button with trembling fingers.

  It was exactly as she remembered it.

  •

  Agnes had been ten, and it was the third day of her first week in the laundry. Mrs Watford had declared that ten hours a day in a steaming workroom would finally cure Agnes of her wickedness, but within a day Mrs Robbins had seen the quality of her needlework and shifted her to the sewing room. Yes, she still learned how to scrub and rinse and mangle and shake and hang, but for the most part her work was pleasant and dry.

  That’s when the basket had come in. Delivered by a tall, bent man who said he was a servant from Breckby Manor, the immense estate on the hilltop above Hatby owned by Lord Caspian Breckby.

  ‘I have secondhand clothes from his Lordship’s daughter,’ he said, sliding the basket onto the long bench where the folding usually took place. ‘Miss Genevieve says that all of these are to be given to charity. Perhaps some of the young lasses here can make use of them.’

  Agnes had been instructed to secure all the buttons and hooks, darn any holes and tighten any loose seams. She remembered Genevieve from their encounter, and was thrilled for a chance to work with her clothes, even though they were off-casts. First to hand was a riding jacket. Agnes had never ridden a horse but had formed an opinion of them as a potent symbol of freedom. She and Gracie made up stories while sharing a bed at night, in which a herd of wild horses broke down the gates of Perdita Hall, and only the two girls could tame them. The fantasy always ended with them escaping onto the moors riding bareback, at one with the night and the clouds shredding across the moon. But on the riding jacket was something even more enchanting than horses: round crimson buttons, with a gold unicorn rearing on its hind legs. A horse with a stabbing device! As she secured each button with thread, Agnes was overcome by wild imaginings, in which she, dressed only in her nightdress and this tiny-waisted riding coat, forged a bloody path out of Perdita Hall for good.