Beatrix sat on the edge of the bed and pulled on her stocking, ‘Where’s the other one, George?’
George laughed and looked among the sheets that were tangled about his legs. ‘Here it is, love,’ and he waved it in the air just out of reach so she had to lunge over him to get it.
And now, thought Beatrix, putting on her other stocking, Missus Cottingham had gone and died, God-bless-her-soul, and they’d need to put the child somewhere. A new baby, only a few weeks old, a rich baby.
‘I could ask a sovereign a week for the care of the Cottingham baby, I reckon,’ she said and George slapped her bare bottom and readily agreed. He said her bottom was like two warm loaves of bread, soft, doughy and pliable. He said she was so comfortable that a man just wanted to plunge himself into her and forget all his worries, which he did every Wednesday afternoon at two when he should have been walking the streets.
She thought about the last kid she’d taken on. It was only last week she’d got rid of her, so the Cottingham baby had come along at just the right time. The mother of the other kid had turned up on her doorstep looking all mournful and in a hurry and offered her half a sovereign a week for the kid’s keep and said she was off to Hamilton to work as a housemaid. Beatrix had looked hard at the kid, trying to assess whether she was a brat or not, whether she’d be more trouble than the mother was willing to pay for her keep. The kid looked at the ground like she wanted it to open up and suck her into a different world. She looked hungry, Beatrix could see that much straight off, she looked like a half-drowned kitten.
‘All righty,’ Beatrix said to the mother, ‘I’ll keep your pup as long as you keep paying. On time. I ain’t a charity.’ The mother looked relieved. Beatrix wondered what was really waiting for the mother in Hamilton — it’d be a fella for sure. A fella that didn’t want some other dog’s pup to look after.
‘Up front,’ said Beatrix. ‘I need the first eight weeks right now.’
Those eight coins were the only ones Beatrix Drake ever saw. When she’d had the kid for another six weeks without a brass razoo arriving, she did the only thing she could do in the circumstances and made an application to have the kid committed to the orphanage. She’d hauled herself to the courthouse in Camp Street, dragging the silent three-year-old girl along behind her and waited for three hours on a hard bench in a dreary corridor until a clerk finally yelled out their names: ‘Beatrix Drake and Constance Hardy’. Beatrix took the girl’s hand and dragged her into the courtroom where Judge Murphy sat behind his huge high desk looking down on everything and everyone.
Beatrix had a good mind to give that Judge Murphy what-for for keeping her waiting so long out in the corridor when she saw him at mass the next Sunday without his wig and robe and he looked just like the rest of us. It was a waste of her precious time, it was.
Judge Murphy was absorbed in a mountain of papers when she entered the courtroom and the clerk had motioned for her to sit down in the front row. She’d lifted the girl up onto the bench and looked over at her fella, George, who was sitting with the other coppers who had to give evidence in the other cases. He smiled at her.
The only sound was the child’s sniffling.
‘I’ve heard of this practice of leaving children in the care of so-called nurses,’ Judge Murphy’s voice sliced through the silence, echoed down the corridor and made them all jump.
‘I’m registered!’ she’d said much too loudly and her voice ricocheted around the room. It was as if she was on trial when it should be the girl’s bloody mother.
‘I’m aware of that, Nurse Drake, and in future you should make full enquiries before taking a child.’ The judge put down his gavel and peered hard at her. ‘This practice of leaving children in the care of nurses and not paying for their keep is now the vogue way in the city to have a child placed on the state by negligent mothers who have decided there are more exciting things to do in life than raise their offspring. This isn’t the city and for that I thank God. I don’t want the practice creeping into our community. If I place the girl in care I am condoning the mother’s behaviour and before you know it every mother in town that’s doing it a bit tough or is a bit bored with being at home with children and fancies themselves a bit of a flibbertigibbet is going to be on your doorstep. I’m more inclined to make you her legal guardian,’ said Judge Murphy.
Beatrix looked at George open-mouthed; it had never entered her head that she could be stuck with the kid.
Then Constable George Stephens stood up and certified to her good character and, despite the city influence creeping into the regional town, Judge Murphy made the kid a ward of the state, to be delivered to the orphanage. Beatrix Drake wasted no time in carrying out the judge’s direction and walked straight from the courthouse in Camp Street down to Victoria Street to the orphanage with the kid trotting along behind, struggling to keep up with her.
There
