I did learn that first day that the nun who had beat me for stealing an apple had died the year before. I felt no remorse, only relief that she would never again inflict the sort of pain that I had experienced on anyone else.
She was buried in the cemetery adjacent to Saint Mary’s. I had no interest in seeing a stone monument to someone so cruel. It was enough that she was gone.
I spent three days after, returning to go through another set of voluminous records in search of some information that might tell me something about myself, my family, how I came to be at the Foundling Hospital.
It was painstaking, but I persisted. It was a cold, wintry afternoon, when an assistant to the bishop returned to the room where records were kept that I was allowed to use.
“Miss Montgomery, you did say the name of the woman was Jacobson?”
I looked up to find Father Michael with a leatherbound registry in hand.
“I may have found what you are looking for from the date 6 April 1880.” He crossed the room and placed the enormous book before me and pointed to the faded ink.
It was there, along with the name of the person who had brought me there!
Female, age three years, goes by name of Lily.
Surrendered into the care of St. Joaquim’s Foundling Hospital by Mary Jacobson, no relation.
06 April 1880
I read it, then read it again, then sat back in the chair where I had spent the last days. I had found myself, or at least that part of myself that had been surrendered to the Foundling Hospital by Mary Jacobson—whose name I had somehow remembered, now gone. But I was unable to answer so many more questions.
I wrote the information in my notebook, thanked Father Michael, then waited on the steps at the main entrance of the cathedral for Munro to return.
“I won’t need to return tomorrow,” I told him.
“Ye found wot ye were lookin’ for?”
A name and a date. Yet, I had hoped for more.
Who would surrender a child? Cast them off, unwanted? Or was there another reason? Something so dangerous to someone that it made her a target for murder?
Mary Jacobson was the connection, but she was no relation.
How had I come into her care as a child? Was I no more than a nameless bairn on the street, cast away by a poor woman who couldn’t care for one?
“I have handled business for her ladyship,” he said on the long ride back into the city with its monuments and parks,tenements and marketplaces soon under a new layer of snow that began to fall.
I had thought about all of it. Everything that had happened. The secrets, and other things I didn’t yet understand.
“I’m not going back to London,” I replied. I looked at him then, that sharp blue gaze softer around the edges, a change that I had noticed the past few days after he found me on the roof of the tenement on Albany Street.
There were other things that had changed, small things. When we had argued afterward with no small amount of criticism over the danger I had put myself in with the encounter with Mr. Elias, he had simply stopped, shook his head and walked away.
I considered it a small victory, but a victory, nevertheless.
And now…
“I need to think, to try and understand everything.”
In the past, he would have made some Scottish sound, called me an irresponsible chit, and added that someone should put me over their knee.
None of that was there. No criticism, no reprimand as if I was a child, no threats to pack me back to London where I belonged.
“Aye, then.”
EPILOGUE
