VIRAGO

First published in the United States in 2021 by HarperCollins Publishers First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Virago Press

Copyright © 2021 by Justine Cowan

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-349-01316-9

Virago Press

An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

www.virago.co.uk

FOR PATRICK

To do a great right, you may do a little wrong.

—Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

CONTENTS

  1 Dorothy Soames

  2 Ghosts

  3 Secrets

  4 Scrutiny

  5 Bastards

  6 Running

  7 Admission Day

  8 Hope

  9 Fear

10 Longing

11 Healing

12 War and Isolation

13 Sustenance

14 Escape

15 Mothers

16 Belonging

17 Reunions and Reckonings

18 Love

Acknowledgments

Notes

Source Materials and
Selected Bibliography

1

DOROTHY SOAMES

I always knew my mother had a secret. She guarded it fiercely, keeping it under lock and key. That was how I envisioned it—a hidden chamber tucked away in the recesses of my mother’s twisted mind. But her secret was too big to be contained, and it would ooze out like a thick slurry, poisoning her thoughts and covering our family in darkness.

When I was nineteen, my mother accidentally gave me a clue to her past, yet it would take me years to gather the courage to learn more. Eventually I followed a trail of bread crumbs that led me across an ocean into an institution’s macabre and baroque history. Only then did I discover the agony of generations of women scorned by society, and of thousands of innocent children imprisoned although they had committed no crime. And I would dredge up family secrets that forced me to reassess everything I had ever known.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that when the phone rang that morning. I only knew it was an odd time for my father to call.

“I need your help. It’s your mother.”

His voice was strained and loud.

I had trouble concentrating as he described the events that had unfolded earlier that morning—my mother tightly clutching the steering wheel as she careened through a labyrinth of twisting hillside roads, my father racing close behind in his matching black Jaguar, desperate to stop her. Luckily, he’d caught up with her before she could run herself off the road.

“She said she had to go to the hospital.”

“The hospital? Why? Was she hurt?”

“No.” My father offered no further information, but he wasn’t really calling to explain. And I wouldn’t find out where my mother had been trying to go that day until years after her death.

“I have to be in court today.”

I don’t care, I wanted to say, but the words stuck in my throat. One thing I’d picked up in my nineteen years was the intuition to dread what I knew was coming next.

“It’s not safe to leave her alone.”

Images flashed before me. Jagged shards of glass on an Oriental rug, a papier-mâché piñata swinging from a tree, broken dolls strewn across sleek hardwood floors. I pulled my textbooks out of my backpack and returned them to the desk as my arms began to tingle, my fingers going numb. I usually had more time to prepare myself.

I tried not to think about what I would find as I drove across the Bay Bridge, watching the city’s skyline come into view before heading south, toward Hillsborough.

We’d left San Francisco when I was six, my father eager to escape the damp city fog that triggered his claustrophobia, my mother more than happy to relocate to one of California’s most prestigious zip codes. On the face of things, the wealthy enclave where we landed was a magical place for a child, and the neighborhood kids had the run of its wide, quiet streets. We’d duck into gaps in the hedges that concealed manicured gardens, using the holes in the thick vegetation as secret tunnels to evade capture during our games of hide-and-seek. On our corner stood an empty manor house we’d crawl into through an unlocked window, running through its grand rooms with our arms spread wide as if we were flying, or taking turns riding from floor to floor in the dumbwaiter. One at a time we would climb into the small wooden box to be hoisted and lowered by the rest of the group, the ropes creaking as they threaded their way through the rusting pulleys.

But Hillsborough lost its brilliance as I got older, and soon I could see only its blemishes, reflected in my mother’s eyes—her blind idolatry of wealth and status, how she name-dropped the famous people who lived around the corner in the English accent she hadn’t lost despite her decades in the States, her triumphant grin when we scored the best table at an exclusive restaurant.

My eventual escape to Berkeley had given me the perfect antidote to an upbringing I’d grown to despise, the clamor of urban life providing a comfort our home never could. I basked in the grittiness of noisy streets, the beatnik cafés and bookstores, the street vendors and shirtless hippies whooping through games of hacky sack on Sproul Plaza. Even though I was only forty minutes away, my life felt like my own.

By the time I pulled into the driveway, my father was gone. I parked a few feet behind my mother’s shiny black Jaguar, in its usual spot. Nothing seemed out of place. The lawn was freshly mown, the roses untrammeled. I climbed a set of brick stairs to the front door, surveying the row of arched windows that lined my childhood home for any hint of what awaited me.

The front door was unlocked. I took a deep breath as I pushed it open and peeked into the living room, where the gold-upholstered furniture perfectly complemented the giant handwoven rug, and the various objets d’art gathered by my mother on her frequent trips to Butterfield & Butterfield were strategically placed on antique tables and in glass display cases. It was the sort of room designed to impress or intimidate. But I was only looking for signs of disarray—a couch cushion off-kilter, a toppled figurine.

None of the ornate furnishings appeared to have been disturbed, so I inched down the hallway, gently dragging my fingertips along the bright white walls. Each week a young woman who spoke little English spent hours mopping the floors, scrubbing the bathrooms and the kitchen, dusting every room and nook and cranny, though rarely to my mother’s satisfaction. After the house cleaner had finished her tasks, I often found my mother wiping the walls with a vinegar-soaked rag. Scratches and red patches on her knuckles were telltale signs that she’d been on her hands and knees, rescrubbing the bathroom floor.

My shoes made no sound as I approached my mother’s room and knocked lightly, hoping she was asleep.

“Justine, is that you?” she called out.

I tiptoed inside, feeling a familiar wave of guilt over the fact that I didn’t actually want to see or speak with her. The room was dim, but I could make out my mother’s silhouette as she sat up in bed. Her nightgown reflected the light streaming through the gaps in the heavy white curtains.

She was holding a notepad. I immediately recognized her old-fashioned calligraphic script, with its precise bends and curves. I couldn’t make out the words in the shadowy light, but I saw deep indentations in the thinly lined paper, along with dark smudges and small tears where it looked like a pencil might have broken.

She turned the notepad toward me, and a splash of morning light illuminated the page. Each line contained a name, written over and over, with the same unwavering precision. It was a name I had never heard before, and would not hear again for many years.

Dorothy Soames Dorothy Soames Dorothy Soames

2

GHOSTS

I didn’t love my mother, but I cried when she died.

Twenty-five years had passed since I left California and moved into an adult life that kept my mother at arm’s length, and I’d made it to her bedside with hours to spare. Her battle with Alzheimer’s had been lengthy, but at the end her decline was swift. In a matter of months the disease had transformed my mother into a soon-to-be corpse that bore little resemblance to the woman who had raised me. Gone was the imposing figure who radiated nervous energy and was rarely at rest. Any idle moment would be spent flitting around the house, tidying up invisible clutter. Even while sitting still, shoulders square, her spine barely touching the back of her chair, she would fiddle with her fingers or pick nervously at the skin on her arms until she bled. Now, no longer able to speak or move as she slipped in and out of consciousness, her arms sank into the thin hospital blanket like leaden stumps, her contorted fingers curved under her bent wrists.

I sat solemnly beside her, watching her die. My father and sister were in the room, too, but we rarely spoke. The stillness was broken only by the quiet wheezing that emerged from the back of my mother’s throat as she struggled for air. Once she’d heaved her last, gasping breath, I rushed from the room and huddled on a small bench in the hallway, sobbing wildly, struggling to breathe, my head between my knees. The wails erupted from deep inside, one after the other, as if they had a life of their own.

During the days that followed, I would be bewildered by the strength of my feelings for a woman who had caused me so much pain. Eventually I transitioned into a heavy fatigue, palpably weighed down by the emotions that had overtaken my body. I found it difficult to perform even the most mundane tasks, and sought escape in sleep whenever I could find it. When I did leave the house, I was prone to weeping at inopportune moments. Strangers would approach to ask if I needed help. The woman who took my dry cleaning came from behind the counter just to hug me.

“My mother died,” I told her as she wrapped her arms around me.

But she was comforting a fraud, a cheat. Would she have held me with such compassion had she known how I truly felt about my mother?

We buried her in the town of Rogersville, where my father was born, in a small cemetery near the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. She was laid to rest beside long-deceased family members of his, people she had never met, in a town where she had never lived. My father had picked out their plots long ago, and my mother didn’t object, having no family of her own.

A year later he joined her, in a grave not far from where his own parents had been buried.

I never spoke to my mother about Dorothy Soames, or the day she’d taken off through the winding streets in her shiny black car. Not even as I watched Alzheimer’s whittle away at her brain, stealing a few words here, a memory there.

I didn’t want to know her secrets. Perhaps I suspected that her story would be too painful for me to carry. More likely, I feared that knowing the truth would give her a power over me that I couldn’t bear.

She had tried to tell me, but only years after I had left home. Once I’d graduated from Berkeley, I moved as far away as possible. I traveled to Asia on a whim, living for a year on the wages I earned teaching English to schoolchildren, then on to Washington, DC, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, always ensuring that there were thousands of miles between us.

I was living in Nashville when I got the letter. It was brief, with few details. She wanted me to call her. It should have been an easy thing to do—pick up the phone, ask her what she meant by the cryptic phrase she’d dropped near the end of the letter.

She wanted to tell me about her life as a foundling.

It was an old-fashioned word, not one I’d ever heard uttered in our household. But it soon slipped my mind as I tucked my mother’s letter under a stack of unopened mail. I had long since stopped caring about her secrets or her motivations, a mode of self-preservation I’d refined into a precise form of science.

She called me later that week, asking if I had received the letter. “We can go to London if you like, together,” she said. “I can show you where I was raised, and where it all happened.”

Instead of piquing my curiosity, her call aroused my suspicions. It had always been understood that my mother’s past was off-limits. To bring up the subject was to risk a swift rebuke—or, worse, a retreat, my mother disappearing into her bedroom and emerging hours later, eyes red and swollen. Now she was proposing a visit to her homeland? Lunch would have been a stretch. A girls’ trip to London seemed as distant a possibility as a quick trip to the moon.

“I want to tell you everything,” she added, her voice filled with an unfamiliar buoyancy. Her willingness to talk seemed sudden, to say the least, and I was dogged by the fear that whatever she had to say would somehow be used against me.

“It’s too late,” I told her.

She didn’t need me to expand to understand what I meant, and her disappointment was unmistakable. But I was unmoved, resolute in the stance that my mother’s past meant nothing to me.

And that was true. Until twenty years later, when I went to London with the man who’d recently become my husband.

The trip was a belated honeymoon of sorts, a monthlong tour of Europe. Our actual honeymoon to Costa Rica had been cut short—a car accident on a curvy mountain road, followed by a tropical illness that sent Patrick to the hospital. It was just as well. In the months surrounding our wedding, we’d buried Patrick’s mother, his sister-in-law, and both of my parents.

Our trip to Europe was supposed to be our fresh start, the beginning of a promising life unburdened by the past or our mutual grief. Our ambitious itinerary reflected our hopes, with stops planned in London, then Paris, Bruges, Amsterdam, Florence, and Rome.

A visit to London would be no different than traveling to any other city, I tried to convince myself. We would visit the sights, sample the local food, and come home with full bellies and a spring in our step, ready to begin our new life together.

My husband didn’t understand why I’d avoided England so stubbornly. He’d heard stories from my traveling days—how I’d pedaled a bicycle from Salzburg to Vienna with my belongings strapped on a rack, stopped alongside the Danube to eat cheese and bread, crisscrossed Europe on high-speed trains. Once I’d seen enough of Europe, I traveled to Southeast Asia, flouting government warnings to venture into conflict-ridden jungles, and through western Africa, braving military checkpoints to discover villages untouched by modern technology.

But the thought of London tied my stomach up in knots.

It’s going to be different, I remember Patrick saying. She’s dead now. She can’t hurt you anymore.

We’d met late in life, as adults, and married in our mid-forties. We were an unlikely pair, at least on paper. Patrick was a laid-back jazz musician and animation artist, while I was a driven public interest environmental attorney hell-bent on taking down polluters. Yet our connection was instant.

He was quick-witted and handsome, with curly hair, an infectious smile, and kind brown eyes. I could hardly believe my luck. He could have his pick of women, I thought. Why had he chosen me? He showered me with compliments, told me I was perfect, beautiful, and brilliant. I chided him, accusing him of flattery, but he continued, undeterred. And so I learned to keep my doubts to myself, silently answering his praise with a ready-made list of my imperfections.

We were matched by one of those online services that promises to find your soul mate based on answers to a series of questions. If your friends could describe you in four words, what would they be? What are you thankful for? What’s your favorite book? I’d answered dutifully and earnestly, hopeful that my responses would bring me the love I yearned for. Instead I spent my evenings reviewing seemingly endless profiles of men who didn’t appeal to me, or vice versa. An early match who’d seemed promising asked me outright about my relationship with my family, his line in the sand. If you didn’t have a good relationship with your family, then how could you have a good relationship with your partner? His reasoning filled me with anxiety, my troubled relationship with my mother casting a pall over a process that was already difficult.

The issue continued to gnaw away at me as things with Patrick got more serious. The last thing I wanted was to scare off a prospective partner by introducing him to my mother. So I tested the waters slowly, gradually revealing eccentricities like her belief in ghosts, or her inside scoop on government plots to poison our water supplies. I carefully watched his reactions, fearful that if he had any inkling of the sickness that afflicted our family, he would run for the hills.

None of that mattered to Patrick, who never batted an eye as I slowly unraveled the complexities of my family dynamics.

As we descended into London, he reached over and took my hand, squeezing it as the plane touched down on the tarmac.

We stayed in Westminster, in a boutique hotel overlooking the Royal Mews of Buckingham Palace. Brimming with old English charm and replete with cozy rooms and the requisite afternoon tea, it was staffed by an attentive doorman clad in traditional livery, complete with a top hat. His accent delighted me, a thick cockney brogue that sounded like it belonged in a Dickens novel.

My mother would have disapproved.

I could easily see her curling her lip, raising an eyebrow ever so slightly to register her displeasure as the doorman gave us directions to Victoria Station. I’d been taught at an early age that a person’s status in society could be discerned by his or her diction, and my mother took particular objection to those who spoke with a cockney accent. Riffraff, she called them. She had little tolerance for the working class, in any context.

I heard her voice as we wandered through London’s narrow alleys or popped into a pub to escape the wintry rain. The fish and chips we feasted on brought back the tastes and smells of my early childhood. Our cupboards were always stocked with the malt vinegar we used to generously anoint the lightly battered cod she regularly served for dinner. The vinegar’s pungent odor would linger on my fingers for hours.

Like a ghost, she appeared in Harrods in a small hallway at the bottom of an escalator, where a memorial statue of Princess Diana and her lover, Dodi Fayed, had been erected several years after their deaths. Just for a moment, I saw my mother’s large brown eyes, pools of tears spilling down her face when she heard the news.

And so my mother had gotten her way, traveling with us through London. Hers was a constant and familiar voice in my head, fading only when our plane landed back in the States. We had gone together, after all.

As the wheels touched the ground, I reflexively reached for my phone.

My mother would always call after my adventures, sometimes several times, ostensibly to make sure I had arrived home safely. I resented those calls, knowing they would inevitably lead to arguments, harsh words, tears, and phones slammed down onto the receiver, followed by the inevitable follow-up call from my father. Why couldn’t you just keep the peace? As soon as technology gave me the gift of caller ID, I would send her straight to voice mail, only calling her back when guilt overcame my misgivings.

This time there would be no call from my mother. No one checking to see if I’d made it home in one piece. My older sister and I had been estranged since my father’s funeral, eleven months after my mother’s. In the space of a single year, my birth family had vanished.

I’d have expected to feel relief in my mother’s absence. Instead warm tears streamed down my face as the plane taxied toward the gate.

I had spent a lifetime loathing my mother, moving thousands of miles away to be rid of her, only to be haunted by her after she was gone.

When I returned home, instead of organizing photos or turning my focus back to work, I began my search for Dorothy Soames.

IT STARTED SLOWLY, as small chunks of time surfing the web. I don’t know what I expected to find, or even exactly what I was looking for. My efforts amounted to aimless googling of a few words in various combinations—“Dorothy Soames” and “England,” for example—each of which yielded disappointing results. I found a reference to Lady Mary Spencer-Churchill Soames, best known as a member of London society and the daughter of Winston Churchill. A connection to Winston Churchill wouldn’t have been unwelcome, but even if his daughter had married into a Soames clan with some relationship to my mother, it was difficult to imagine how they could have been connected. My search uncovered various other people named Dorothy or Soames, but none of them wound up giving me any clues into my mother’s past.

I could have stopped there. At that point, my level of curiosity hadn’t progressed beyond a vague interest. But ever since I returned from London, I had felt a growing sense of unease. My mother’s letter, the one she sent all those years ago, kept on tickling the back of my brain—along with the specific word she had used to describe herself.

I stared at the computer screen, the cursor blinking as if awaiting instructions. I placed my fingers gently on the keyboard and typed:

Foundling London

And there they were, right there at the top of the page, the words that would take me back across the Atlantic to find the answers to questions I didn’t yet know I had: the Foundling Hospital.

“I THINK SHE may have been my mother.”

I had no idea if anyone at Coram would be able to help me when I sent an email through the general contact channels, asking for any information about a girl named Dorothy Soames.

The Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children, or the Foundling Hospital, as it was commonly called, was founded by a shipbuilder named Thomas Coram and granted a royal charter in 1739. Its stated mission was to care for “helpless Infants daily exposed to Destruction.”¹ More than two hundred and fifty years later, the institution still exists, though now it’s known simply as Coram, in honor of its founder.

I waited for a reply, checking my in-box multiple times a day.

A few days later, it came. Yes, someone would look into the files to see if the institution had records on Dorothy Soames. But the promise of assistance came with a caution—don’t expect much. Even if they could find her records, it would be unusual for a search to unearth many details. The most I could hope for would be a confirmation of whether and when a child had been at the Foundling Hospital. Only in exceptional circumstances would there be anything more.

At the time, Patrick and I were living in Florida. He had landed a job on a team creating high-end video games, and we’d packed everything up and headed south from Atlanta. Leaving behind my position as the director of a nonprofit environmental law firm had been a difficult decision to make. Holding polluters accountable had once been my dream job, the reason I’d gone to law school. I filed lawsuits against unscrupulous paper mills, coal plants, and waste management companies for spewing dangerous toxins like mercury, arsenic, and lead into the air and water. Each case was grueling, the stakes always high, and my never-ending responsibilities ran the gamut from supervising staff to drafting briefs, managing the budget, and raising money for the cause. I was filled with an intoxicating sense of purpose. But after thirteen years, I was exhausted.

Overnight, my life morphed from a continuous flurry of court hearings, meetings, and phone calls to days with seemingly endless hours to fill. We’d moved to Orlando’s historic district, a tree-lined neighborhood with an eclectic mix of 1920s Craftsman bungalows and Mediterranean-style homes. I took on a few clients, but spent most days roaming the brick streets shaded by ancient oaks laden with Spanish moss, their sturdy branches fanning out above me as the humid air weighed me down like a blanket. I sat for long hours on a bench at a nearby lake, monitoring the progress of a pair of swans giving flying lessons to their cygnets. I wandered through the old cemetery, where I discovered an eagle’s nest in the fork of a lone pine tree and a pair of nesting owls perched on the branch of a cypress. The days spread out with a slow pulsing rhythm, my mind freed from the specter of endless meetings and impending court deadlines.

With little to occupy my time, I ordered one of the books I had come across during my brief inquiry into the Foundling Hospital. Written by a former chief executive of the institution, it was a quick read, and soon I purchased another, this one by an academic and historian. Each page was dense with facts and statistics chronicling the early years of the hospital, and I would sit on my back porch, turning the pages slowly as I listened to the chorus of frogs that lived among the ferns and bromeliads, occasionally glancing up to see a lizard scamper across the burnt-orange Saltillo tiles.

Eventually I heard back from Coram. A woman named Val confirmed what I had already suspected: my mother had been raised in the Foundling Hospital under the name of Dorothy Soames. Val provided me with some general information—a timeline, a confirmation of my mother’s stay at the institution. If I wanted to know more, I would need to come back to London to look at the files in person.

Months passed as I stalled on making any kind of decision, the contents of the books I’d read fading away in my mind. I was beginning to imagine that my dive into the Foundling Hospital’s history had been a momentary diversion, a fleeting detour into some mildewing family archives, when Patrick nominated Barcelona as his destination of choice for our annual getaway.

“We could stop off in London first,” I responded, the words spilling from my mouth without forethought. “There’s a direct flight,” I added, as if I were indifferent to the outcome, my suggestion only a matter of logistics.

Looking back, I don’t believe that I consciously decided to return to London to research my mother’s past. Why would I? The five years since my mother had died had been calm, even peaceful.

Nothing would be served by stirring up the past.

During the summer days of my youth, I’d taken riding lessons at an equestrian center nestled below the ridge that ran from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. After hours of demanding instruction, I would sneak away and ride through the labyrinth of trails that crisscrossed the adjacent hills and mountains. The sun would soon disappear as I followed the well-worn bridle path through a gap in a stand of giant redwoods. I would ride aimlessly for hours, no map or plan to guide me, turning onto one path or another, enticed by the way a root curved along the ruts and grooves worn down by rain, the bend of a tree limb, or how a ray of dwindling sunshine snuck through the canopy to cast a shadow on a flowering bush, all of it demanding further investigation. The air was cool and damp, and in the dappled light, I would let the reins go lax. Allowing my steed to choose the path, I would stroke her wide neck as if to encourage her to make her own choice, content to see where she would take me next. When I lifted my chin toward the sky, I could see only ancient trees towering over me. And without any conscious aim or desire on my part, there I would be.

Deep in the forest.

That is how my journey began—without a blueprint or master plan, or any carefully weighed options. Yet once our plane landed in London that second time, there would be no turning back.

After a fitful night of rest at our hotel, I found myself in the lobby of Coram, in the heart of Bloomsbury, a fashionable area of central London. I anxiously tapped my feet, glancing nervously over at Patrick as a woman approached us with a purposeful gait, a file folder tucked under one arm. Her gray hair was thick and wavy, with white tresses that cascaded around her face. Her attire was understated and professional, an unassuming button-down blouse and a simple wool skirt. She introduced herself as Val, and while up until that time we had exchanged only emails, I felt instantly at ease in her presence. She smiled sympathetically as she greeted me, as if she knew that my journey of discovery would not be easy.

She led me to a small room, then placed the file folder carefully on a table. I recalled her earlier words of caution about managing my expectations, not to hope for much. Still, my heart beat a little faster when I noticed that the folder was several inches thick. I tried not to look at it as we exchanged pleasantries about my flight.

“We can make copies to take with you, if you’d like. And after you have looked at the files, we can head over to the museum.”

Once Val had stepped out of the room, Patrick put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed. I took a breath and turned my attention to the file, which seemed to pulse with anticipatory energy. As I began gently spreading out the thick stack of documents yellowed with age, my eyes fell on a bundle of letters dating back to the 1930s. Some were delicately handwritten in thick black ink, faded with time and difficult to decipher. Other letters were more formal, usually a sentence or two, with no name, just the word Secretary typewritten where a signature would be. There were a few photos interspersed among the letters, and what appeared to be reports, some several pages in length.

On some of the letters, I could make out a signature: Lena Weston. The first name didn’t ring any bells. But the last name did. It was my mother’s maiden name, and my stomach churned at the sight of those six familiar letters.

I’d never heard my mother mention anyone named Lena. Then again, I’d rarely heard my mother mention anyone beyond the immediate sphere of our neighborhood, my school, and my father’s office. From time to time she mentioned a friend who lived in Europe, but I knew little about her—only that her name was Pat.

There were too many files to review, and the feeling in the pit of my stomach gave me the sense that I’d be better off examining the contents on my own, somewhere private. After flagging a stack of promising documents for Val to copy, we walked over to the Foundling Museum, located just a few steps away at 40 Brunswick Square. The Georgian-style brick building, once the site of the Foundling Hospital’s administrative offices, had been turned into another kind of public institution: a place for the curious to learn about the history of the hospital and the “foundlings” who were raised there.

A foundling, I’d learned over the course of my initial research, was not an orphan. And the Foundling Hospital was neither a hospital nor an orphanage.

An orphan was a child whose parents were dead, whereas a foundling likely still had parents, somewhere. Perhaps due to poverty, or more likely because of illegitimacy, those parents had given their child over to the care of the Foundling Hospital. Which meant that, despite its name and the fact that it did provide medical care, the “hospital” was more akin to an orphanage. The term foundling was technically a misnomer in the case of the children who’d ended up at the institution, for only a child who had been abandoned could be properly described as a foundling. For most of the hospital’s history, admissions were limited to children who were personally handed over by a parent, following a rigorous process of review.

The files I’d begun to thumb through contained some early clues, in the form of a document on parchment, from an era before ballpoint pens and mechanical typewriters. “The Foundling Hospital” was written across the top in elegant calligraphy; just underneath was a simple title in block print—“Rules for the Admission of Children.” As I scanned the document, my eyes lingered on a few choice phrases: previous good character, in the course of virtue, the way of an honest livelihood. I would learn more later.

At the museum I wandered through exhibits on the daily life of the foundlings, photos of identically dressed children filling row after row of a chapel. There was a small black iron bed, along with a display of the uniforms that the children were required to wear. They hung neatly in a row, on rounded pegs. The serge cloth was thick and coarse, a homely russet brown, chosen as a symbol of poverty, humility, and, as I would later learn, disgrace.

The garments were strangely familiar to me.

I had grown up in a wealthy family, but while other children at my school wore clothes purchased at upscale department stores, my mother frequently sewed my clothes by hand. I remember watching her work, hunched over her sewing table, lips pursed as she skillfully guided the fabric under the rapidly dancing needle. The clothes were flawless, with tight stitches and straight hems, but always brown and loose-fitting. I would plead with her to let me wear something else. The drab and shapeless clothes would make me the target of ridicule, I told her. She told me that I was too fat to wear anything else, and that children wouldn’t tease me. Both statements were equally false.

I remember standing in the center of the playground, wearing one of the brown skirts that my mother had carefully sewn for me. The hem fell below the knees, too long to be fashionable. The outfit was completed by an oversized shirt, plain white socks, and sturdy brown shoes, which did nothing to help the cause.

My eyes were fixated on the rectangles forming a hopscotch pattern in the asphalt beneath me. I counted the numbers drawn in brightly colored chalk as I tried to drown out the taunts of my classmates.

When my mother picked me up, she had a different take on the playground dynamics. I wasn’t the freak, the weirdo in ill-fitting clothes—and the children’s taunts were just a cover. “It’s because you play the violin,” she whispered as if she were sharing a secret. “They’re just jealous.” I turned my head and watched her as she spoke, but the expression on her face revealed nothing other than a pure, fiery certainty in her convictions. I remember it vividly, her breathless voice and wide eyes. It was a small, insignificant moment, but it may have been my first realization that I wasn’t the only member of my family who was out of step with the outside world.

As I gently ran my fingers over the uniforms the foundlings had worn, I wondered whether they were the reason my mother had dressed me as she did. Perhaps, for her, coarse brown sacks that might as well have been used to transport potatoes were simply what children wore.

I headed upstairs to the Court Room, the place where the “governors” of the Foundling Hospital had conducted their business. This room, where the men responsible for the administration of the hospital had spent countless hours debating the fates of their charges, had a familiarity about it as well—the formal furniture and lush Persian rugs reminded me of pieces my mother had chosen to decorate our home.

As I wandered into the picture gallery, adorned with large-scale portraits and a marble fireplace, my breath caught in my chest at the sight of two tall, ornate chairs. Featured prominently in the center of the expansive room, with intricate carvings that crept up their upright backs, they looked stately, like wooden thrones. They’d been used in the chapel, I was told. The resemblance was more than uncanny. The chairs were indistinguishable from a pair that were prominently displayed in the living room of my childhood home.

Wandering through the museum, I was overcome with a certainty that this was the place where it had begun—the darkness that consumed my mother, smothering any chance for tenderness or affection in our household.

Everyone I encountered treated me with kindness—the docent who showed me around the museum, the curator I met with later that afternoon. They must have known my interest wasn’t purely academic. Maybe my reddened eyes gave me away. Some appeared to know to exactly what had brought me to the museum. One woman approached me and explained that she herself had been a ward of the hospital in the early 1950s. We chatted for a while.

“We were fortunate,” she volunteered. “Where else would we have gone?”

I shouldn’t have been surprised by the woman’s gratitude to the institution. I’d passed right by Coram’s motto that very morning: “Better chances for children since 1739.” And as I roamed through the halls of the museum, I was surrounded by portraits of the dukes, earls, and other noble men extolled for their roles in creating and managing the Foundling Hospital throughout the centuries. The men in their elegant clothing, perched atop richly brocaded furniture, seemed to radiate pride in their philanthropic achievement.

I stood for a long time under the portrait of Thomas Coram, depicted in his later years, with white hair and a ruddy face, wearing a sturdy coat spun of worsted wool, and surrounded by evidence of his travels and station in life. The oil painting was mounted in a burnished golden frame. As I contemplated the face of the man whose vision had carved out a place for children like my mother, I felt a familiar bitterness rise up in my chest.