The Unadoptables Read online

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020

  Published simultaneously in the UK by Puffin Books, Ltd.

  Copyright © 2020 by Hana Tooke

  Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Ayesha L. Rubio

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Viking & colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  Ebook ISBN 9780593116951

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For my wonderfully weird family.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter Zero

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ZERO

  Little Tulip Orphanage, Amsterdam, 1880

  LITTLE TULIP ORPHANAGE

  Rules for Baby Abandonment

  Rule One: The baby should be wrapped in a cotton blanket.

  Rule Two: The baby should be placed in a wicker basket.

  Rule Three: The baby should be deposited on the topmost step.

  IN ALL THE YEARS that Elinora Gassbeek had been matron of the Little Tulip Orphanage, not once had the Rules for Baby Abandonment been broken. Until the summer of 1880. Five babies were abandoned in the months that followed and, despite the Rules being clearly displayed on the orphanage’s front door, not one of these babies was abandoned sensibly.

  The first baby arrived on a bright morning at the end of August, as dew glistened on the city’s cobblestone streets.

  Swaddled in a pink cotton blanket and placed on the appropriate step was a baby with cocoa-bean eyes and blond fuzz on its head. However, the way in which Rule Two had been disregarded left no room for forgiveness. The child was snuggled inside a tin toolbox, which had been wrapped with emerald-green ribbon, as if it were a present.

  “Ugh!” Elinora Gassbeek squawked, looking down at the toolbox baby in disgust. She signaled a nearby orphan to retrieve it. “Put it upstairs.”

  The orphan nodded. “What name shall I put on the cot, Matron?”

  The matron curled her lip. Naming children was tedious, but necessary.

  “She’s got a lotta fingers, Matron!”

  The baby was sucking its thumb, making loud slurping noises that sent ants crawling up the matron’s spine. She counted the child’s fingers. Sure enough, it had an extra digit on each hand.

  “Name it . . . Lotta.”

  The second baby arrived on a blustery evening in September, as a mischievous wind rattled the orphanage’s many wooden shutters.

  An orphan walked into the dining hall, cradling a coal bucket as if it were a bouquet of flowers. Something was whimpering inside the bucket. Peering in, the matron was displeased to find a raven-haired infant, wrapped in a soot-stained shawl, blinking up at her.

  “Poor thing was abandoned beside the coal bunker,” the orphan said.

  “Disgraceful!” Gassbeek screeched, referring to the breaking of Rule Two and Rule Three. “Take it away.”

  “A name for him, Matron?” the orphan asked nervously.

  Elinora Gassbeek took another reluctant look at the coal-bucket baby, its charcoal-blackened nose, and the shabby shawl wrapped snugly around it. The cotton shawl looked like it had, possibly, been brightly colored once. Now, however, it was a mottled shade of gray, with a barely discernible pattern of darker-gray ovals. Like rotten eggs, the matron thought.

  “Name it . . . Egbert.”

  The third baby arrived on an unusually warm afternoon in October, as ladies with parasols paraded on the sun-warmed street.

  Sitting on a bench outside, in her finest puffed-sleeve dress, Elinora Gassbeek opened her picnic hamper and found a wriggling baby, wedged in amongst the cheese sandwiches and almond cake. It had a shock of curly red hair on its head and was babbling incessantly.

  No blanket. No basket. Not on the front step.

  The matron screeched, shrill and loud like a boiling kettle. The picnic-hamper baby immediately fell quiet, its eyebrows squeezing together in a frightened frown. Up and down the street, curious faces appeared in the windows of the tall, narrow brick houses, and the strolling ladies came to a halt. Elinora Gassbeek gathered her wits and forced a smile for her neighbors. An orphan wove through the throng toward her.

  “She wasn’t in there a minute ago,” the girl insisted, picking the baby up delicately.

  “Take it away,” Elinora Gassbeek said through gritted teeth.

  “Yes, Matron. But . . . a name?”

  The orphan rocked the now-silent baby, gently brushing fennel seeds from its hair. The matron shuddered.

  “Name it . . . Fenna.”

  The fourth baby arrived on a gloomy morning in November, as a blanket of fog curled over the canal behind the house.

  The delivery bell on the second floor jangled, rung from a boat on the canal below. Using the pulley system attached outside the window, an orphan hoisted the bucket winch up. As it emerged from the fog, Elinora Gassbeek’s eye began to twitch. Inside the bucket was a baby, wearing a wheat sack and a sad frown. Two holes had been cut in the bottom of the sack, to allow its unusually long legs to poke through.

  The matron hauled the wheat-sack child inside, cursing the madness
that had befallen her orphanage.

  “Put some clothes on it,” she cawed at the orphan hovering beside her.

  She looked at the baby’s wonky ears, its gangly limbs, and the wheat-colored hair that stuck out from its head at the unruliest of angles. Printed on the wheat sack were the words SEMOLINA FLOUR. The matron groaned.

  “Name it . . . Sem.”

  The fifth and final baby arrived under a full moon in December, as the constellations shone brightly above Amsterdam’s skyline.

  Elinora Gassbeek had sent an orphan out onto the orphanage’s roof to investigate a strange noise. Wedged behind the chimney stack, inside a coffin-shaped basket, was a baby, cooing contentedly up at the starry night sky. It had hair as dark as midnight and eyes that were almost black.

  Gingerly, the orphan brought the coffin-basket baby inside, where it immediately began to wail. Careful not to touch the infant, the matron reached down and pulled a toy from its clutches: a cat puppet, made from the softest Amsterdam cotton and dressed in fine Antwerp silk. A faint ticking noise emanated from the toy, but the matron was tutting too loudly to hear it.

  “Ridiculous!”

  She tossed the puppet back in the basket, on top of the black velvet blanket in which the baby was swaddled. On the corner of the blanket, embroidered in white thread, was a name:

  Milou.

  ONE

  Little Tulip Orphanage, Amsterdam, January 1892

  THE LITTLE TULIP ORPHANAGE was an unusually tall house, wedged in the middle of a long row of unusually tall houses. In the small window of the very top floor, a girl with unusually dark eyes gazed down at the frozen canal below her. Milou tracked the falling snow as it settled over the ornate rooftops like a layer of cake frosting. Crowds were gathering on the ice below, their pink-nosed faces beaming. Bicycles had been swapped for toboggans, clogs for skates, and cries of delight mingled with the neighing of cart horses.

  The view became steadily more blurred as Milou’s breath misted the cold window, and with a final heavy sigh, she turned away. As she did so, a frozen piece of peeling paint on the wall beside her fell to the floor with a clink. Even the dormitory’s floorboards had developed a thin layer of frost, and Milou’s eyeballs were so cold that it hurt to blink. The small fireplace on the adjacent wall was empty and dark, as always.

  “Frozen orphan,” Milou said to the red-haired girl sitting on the bed opposite her. “Sounds like some sort of fancy dessert, don’t you think, Fen? I wonder if that’s Matron’s new plan; if she can’t market us as potential sons and daughters, perhaps she hopes to sell us as ice cream.”

  Fenna grimaced and rolled her eyes, then went back to hand-feeding stale crumbs to a small gray rat nestled on her lap.

  Milou scrunched her nose and pushed her mouth into a pinched pout. “Iced orphan!” she cawed, in a perfect copy of Matron Gassbeek’s squawkish tone. “Come and get your iced orphan! Best iced orphan in all of Holland! Only five cents a scoop!”

  Fenna’s eyebrows unfurrowed and the corners of her mouth twitched. Milou felt a twinge of satisfaction that warmed her from the inside, ever so slightly.

  “We’d better hurry,” Milou said, turning serious. She rubbed a circle on the window and squinted at the clock tower at the other end of the road. “There’s only four more minutes until laundry inspection; Gassbeek will pull out our arm hairs if we’re late again—”

  A prickling shiver started at the tips of Milou’s ears and ran down the back of her neck. It was not a shiver of cold but a shiver of warning.

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway. The girls shared a panicked look. Milou jumped down from the windowsill. Fenna rolled backward over the bed, the rat clutched to her chest. As Milou grabbed an armful of laundry from the end of a bed, Fenna hid the rat in her picnic basket, a mere moment before the dormitory door burst open.

  A boy’s head appeared in the doorway, possessing two oddly proportioned ears and a straggly tuft of blond hair. A gangly body followed immediately after, with spidery limbs that appeared to belong to four entirely different species of spider.

  “There you are!” he said, breathlessly, his long fingers fiddling with the hem of his grease-stained shirt.

  “Oh, Sem, it’s only you,” said Milou with relief. “What is it?”

  Sem grinned lopsidedly. “We have visitors.”

  He spoke with such breathless hope that a ghost-like fluttering started in Milou’s belly. There was only ever one kind of visitor that could make Sem so eager.

  Adopters.

  Fenna gave a tiny gasp.

  “Visitors,” Milou repeated.

  It had been months since anyone had come to the Little Tulip to look for orphans. What if today was the day? What if her parents had finally returned for her? She couldn’t remember them, of course, but she had theories. An entire Book of Theories, in fact, which at that moment was tucked into the left sleeve of her smock. In all her theories, her parents were clever and brave. In all but one, they were desperately making their way back to her. Perhaps, after twelve long years, they’d finally succeeded.

  “Milou,” Sem urged. “We need to hurry.”

  “Just a moment.”

  She clambered over three beds to get to the one she shared with Fenna and Lotta. Fingers trembling, Milou reached under the bed and pulled out her coffin basket, which was always packed and ready, just in case. Inside, on top of everything, was her cat puppet. Milou ran a finger over its foot, where the words “Bram Poppenmaker, Puppeteer” were written in swirling red letters. The puppet was cradling a lock of red, curly hair, which had been tied with an emerald-green bow. Milou placed it aside and reached into the basket to move two pieces of paper: a charcoal portrait of herself, and a poster advertising the famous Parisian circus troupe Cirque de Lumière. Tucked beneath these treasures was a neatly folded bundle of fine Amsterdam velvet.

  Sem sat on the bed beside her, his legs tucked up under his chin. “Milou—”

  “Just one minute.”

  He gave her that look again—the one she knew said he thought she was silly for holding on to the hope that her parents would come back for her. He’d never held that kind of hope; he’d only ever shown disdain for his birth parents. Milou reckoned that if she’d been abandoned in nothing but a wheat sack, she might have felt the same way. He didn’t understand that she just knew she’d find her family one day.

  It was a question of when, not if.

  Milou slipped the black velvet dress over the stained cotton one she was already wearing and ran her fingers over the plush smoothness of it. If it was her real parents arriving, they should recognize her old baby blanket. It was a snug fit; Sem had taken it out as much as he could over the years, and soon the dress would not fit at all.

  Sem looked at her outfit with a frown, then carefully adjusted her collar. Milou repacked her basket and grabbed her cat puppet, holding it over her thumping heart. When she’d been much younger, she’d been certain the puppet had a heartbeat of its own. It had soothed her through many cold, sleepless nights until, several years ago, it seemed to have stopped, and Milou realized that she had likely imagined it all along.

  Perhaps the cold, sleepless nights would finally end now.

  Perhaps today would be the day she finally left this place.

  “Perhaps we should hurry?” Sem said impatiently, walking toward the door with Fenna.

  Milou stood and followed them out of the room. Their dormitory was on the fourth floor of the old, narrow canal house—a building mostly constructed of deep shadows and loose floorboards and barely held together by peeling paint. Milou stomped down the treacherously steep stairs, past the mending rooms on the third floor, the laundry rooms on the second, and the schoolrooms on the first. Sem practically flew ahead of her, hopping down three steps at a time. Fenna seemed to glide, her feet as silent as they were nimble.

  The ground flo
or was the only part of the orphanage that didn’t look like a mere sneeze would demolish it. In the main foyer, the marble floor was polished to a shine, the walls were painted a charming shade of violet, and a tall grandfather clock ticked and tocked in the corner. A motley collection of children were arranging themselves in a line against one wall; younger ones at one end, older ones at the other. They were all frantically trying to make themselves presentable: rubbing at grease stains, tucking in shirts, adjusting petticoats, pulling up socks. But there was no disguising what they really were: scruffy, hungry, desperate orphans.

  Sem and Fenna slipped into the line just as three small brown rats darted across the marble floor in different directions. A girl with a waistcoat over her blue cotton dress was scrubbing at a raven-haired boy’s fingers. She shot Milou a worried look.

  “What took you so long?” Lotta asked, then noticed Milou’s dress and the cat puppet in her arms. “Never mind. Quick, help me get this charcoal off Egg’s hands.”

  Milou took Egg’s other hand and began rubbing at it with the inside of her sleeve. The charcoal smeared, leaving his hands an interesting shade of gray.

  “Gassbeek wanted another portrait,” Egg said, his voice full of worry as he peeled his hands from theirs and carefully adjusted the soot-stained shawl that hung around his neck. “I didn’t have time to wash.”

  “Don’t worry,” Milou said. “It’s just—”

  The prickling shiver started at the tips of her ears again. The sensation intensified, until it felt as if a thousand needles were pricking at her earlobes. Milou pulled Lotta by the arm and shoved her in line beside Sem. She had just positioned herself next to Lotta when a familiar sound echoed out from the hallway leading to the Forbidden Quarters.

  Click. Clack. Click. Clack.

  All twenty-eight children straightened as if pulled by invisible strings.

  Click. Clack. Click. Clack.

  Twenty-eight staccato breaths sucked in, in quick succession.

  Click. Clack. Click. Clack.

  Twenty-seven sets of wide eyes fixed firmly on the wall ahead. Milou peered through lowered lashes at the darkened hallway to her left.