Foundlings

"Dorothy?"

"Yes, Alice?"

"Will you be my sister?"

A pause, a sigh, and an answer on a trembling voice. "Yes, Alice."

Dorothy woke up with Alice curled under her chin. Dorothy was all of eighteen years old, and a woman full grown in the eyes of a world that had no place for children. Alice was only six. No place for children. Dorothy pressed her cheek against the top of Alice’s filthy head, smelling the odors of a young unwashed body, and old food. Dorothy didn’t know who smelled worse, the kid, or herself.

Alice was about the same age Dorothy’s first stillborn baby would have been. While Alice still slept, Dorothy hugged her tighter. "I’ll be your sister," Dorothy promised on a cold whisper, seeing her breath in the air over Alice’s warm head. Her body where the child curled was warm and snug in a way it hadn’t been in ages.

Dorothy was a baby magnet, although she couldn’t seem to keep any of her own alive long enough for them to enter the world whole and healthy. She didn’t know why her babies were such monstrosities, but a more pragmatic part of her mind told her that it was better that way for them anyhow. A baby born dead didn’t have to die later at the hands of the weather, or of starvation, or of other people on the streets looking for a quick turn of coin. That didn’t stop Dorothy from being overjoyed every time she became pregnant, nor heartbroken to the point of suicide every time one of her babies died. She’d been pregnant five times in her short life. Some rapes, some trades - her body for a meal or a warm bed. One or two an actual attempt at a real life. She had really loved those couple men.

Alice stirred next to her heart. Dorothy raised a filthy hand and stroked Alice’s filthy hair. Usually when a young one found her, Dorothy would go to the ends of the earth to find a home for her, and she had a pretty good placement rate - much better than the orphanages around here. Baby mills, those were. Dorothy secretly suspected that they kept the older children around for breeding purposes, just so the orphanage proprieters had a steady influx of cash from the rich families who bought the babies that came out of there. Dorothy sought out the people who couldn't buy babies. She looked for people who deserved the children who flocked to her for assistance. The streets of London was no place for a pretty eighteen-year-old girl, but at least she could take care of herself. The saddest thing in the world that Dorothy had ever seen in her short life was a little ten-year-old girl, hugely and uncomfortably pregnant, weeping softly while she offered her body for a silver coin. Dorothy sometimes wondered whatever happened to that girl. She’d tried to save her, but she couldn’t get through the pimp - which caused her to lose the baby she herself was carrying at the time. She was what, fourteen, then?

She couldn’t save her own children, so she did what she could to save other people’s children. Get them off the streets. Find them nice houses in the country. Hell, sometimes, people heard of her, and they sought her out to find a child for them. They didn’t care if the kid was older, or slow, or illiterate. They just wanted children to love. There was one woman who’d taken in three of Dorothy’s foundlings. Sometimes, Dorothy would visit them, and it made her happy to see that they were doing well.