She exhaled through her nose. “We don’t usually help a girl after she leaves. Our resources are severely strained already.” She turned her head to the window, then faced me again. “You should let the baby go, Lilli.”
“Let her go?” I blurted. “Thee would have her killed and buried in that horrid place?”
Anne cleared her throat and rose from her chair, elegant and unyielding. “I understand the hazard. The situation is truly sad. But some infants at Blockley do survive. And you must face the world you live in. You could start anew, were it not for this impediment.” She began walking around the desk, indicating my dismissal.
“Impediment?” I stood. “I’m begging thee. Have the documents ready by tomorrow morning.”
Anne nodded, her cheekbones made more prominent by her tight expression. “As you wish.”
She escorted me out.
Even with no papers from Anne, I wanted to try to enter Blockley once more. So I had the hack driver return—along the same chaotic roads, through the same gate, past the same imposing buildings. This time the windows to the Insane Department were opened, releasing to the outdoors the expulsive yells and groans of the lunatics confined within. I recalled a photograph, circulated at Meeting during Blockley’s recent scandals, showing inmates with grotesque expressions, their bodies held by stakes and chains. Some had blocks of ice strapped to their heads, ostensibly to cool their thoughts. I shivered as the driver swerved to avoid a line of curiosity seekers that stretched across the dirt toward that department’s door. The well-dressed visitors craning their heads were awaiting their turns to gain a glimpse of the mad.
At the Children’s Asylum, I stepped into the glare of the white-hot sun. Along the front of the building I tried the doors; all were locked. But at the back, a high row of windows ran for thirty feet or so, and a modest tree protruded from the dirt. It offered a chance I couldn’t decline. I hiked up my gown, took hold of the dun trunk, and hauled myself to its lowest branch, then to the one above.
If I could erase what I saw next from my mind, I would do so rather than suffer my hand to write it down. But the hollow cheeks and feeble cries of those hundred friendless persons will never leave me. It might be less cruel of the nurses to give the infants arsenic when they’re taken in, so as to let them be done sooner with their lot. Except that Charlotte is likely among them—and a few others, as Anne noted, might somehow live.
I leaned to the windows and saw a single enormous hall with cribs in rows, holding perhaps a hundred babies, with only the littlest ones crying or moving. The rest lay silent and immobile, while their stick-like limbs and bony faces spoke volumes. Malnourished or dehydrated or diseased or all three, they looked as though they could exhale their souls with their very next breaths. Their swathing cloths were stained with spit-up, the only sign of their having been fed.
And who was caring for these frail beings? Two debilitated women were slouched in rocking chairs at each of the hall’s four corners, and two more were seated halfway down each of the four walls. That came to sixteen—one per six or so children. A pap boat sat beside each chair, used for feeding the babies no doubt, along with a pitcher of grayish milk and a glass—probably for the women’s nutriment. The women looked into the air ahead, each with a failing baby at her breast, perhaps thinking of the men who had violated them, run off, or died, or of their own misdeeds, or of the families who were unable to help.
My view of the large room was unimpeded, but the farthest rows of cribs were hard to make out. And with the infants swathed in coarse cloths and wearing identical brown caps, I couldn’t discern if one was Charlotte. I scanned the rows again. Was that her? No, its mouth was larger. Was that? No, its chin was pointy. Nowhere did I see her fat cheeks, her lively eyes, her red curls that shine out when light hits them. But her hair would be covered by a cap, and her fat cheeks would have at least begun to melt away. Or her body might already have been ferried across the river and sold to dissectionists.
Dear Lord, I prayed, preserve my Charlotte.
I felt no relief, no reassurance from these words. But I must have spoken them aloud and been heard through a window, for a nurse returning an infant to a crib looked up and spotted me.
“What’re you doing up there?” she yelled. “Get away!” The other nurses stared with alarm in my direction.
I scurried down the tree, catching and tearing the hem of my skirt on its trunk. My chest was so tight that I couldn’t get air. Somehow I reached the carriage. I asked the driver to bring us quickly from the premises, which he did. He stopped outside the gate for further instruction.
Feeling as if a rock was lodged in my throat, I asked him to bring me back to the stable where I’d hired him.
He leaned his head of dark hair toward me and tilted it in a sympathetic look. “I gather yer in a kind a trouble, ma’am. If ye’ll pay me nine dollars for all, that’ll be enough.”
Nine dollars? On seeing my stunned face, he said he’d shaved more than a dollar from the fee to make it nine, and I had to consent. Of course I’d spend every penny and beg for more to regain Charlotte—if she remains among the living.
I passed the ride back to Germantown in a stupor. At the stable I paid the man. As I walked away, cracks of lightning began to breach the sky, and booms of thunder answered. It was lucky that the storm kept other folks indoors, for I stumbled and keened and grew ever more despondent as I made my way toward Henry.
When I entered the kitchen door, Margaret rushed over with Henry in her arms, saying that he wouldn’t take a bottle or stop screaming and fussing. The poor fellow grabbed me with his fists and scratched me with his fingernails while sucking at my swollen breasts. But soon he settled into a well-fed daze and slept.
I cannot sleep. Out the oval window at the foot of my bed I see the cold moon hanging, pitted with scars from untold battles. Bathed in its glow, I send up a prayer.
Charlotte, Charlotte, wherever thee is, please wait for me. Please live through the night. Please give me another chance to hold and kiss thee whose smells and sounds and sweetest flesh I adore, my baby.
Sixth Month 5