A Taste for Nightshade (8 page)

‘Grace, dear,' Anne started up again, as we parted at the top of Wood Street. ‘You have not told me anything of his friends, his pursuits, his reading matter. Are they to your taste?'

The truth was I did not know. Many people mistake my character, thinking that because I am softly spoken I am weak, or that not always having a ready answer means I have no spirit. They are wrong. Having lost John Francis, I was not going to lose Michael Croxon. My temper leached into my tone. ‘What does that matter? I love Michael.' She reached out to me and squeezed my hand, but I snatched it away.

‘Oh, Grace,' my friend said wistfully. ‘You know so little of the world.'

After parting from Anne I could not bear to go home to my father. I was crackling with an agitation that sent me striding through the town and up into the surrounding hills. It was good to climb my favourite path, my heart pounding in my ears, my legs stretching beneath muddy hems. At the top of the hill I stood panting, surveying the huddle of buildings far below: the grey spire of Greaves church and the straight line of the High Street, leading to the Market Cross and the roof of Palatine House. Turning to the north, my eye followed the road to Michael's home, hidden behind a thick stand of trees. Further north, past high brown crested ridges and far blue hills, away in the distance, lay Whitelow, and my new home at Delafosse Hall. I was sorry I had too little time to paint the scene before I left, to make a remembrance of my old home in viridian and dark ochre. I had seen nothing of the world but Greaves – and now I was to launch myself into a new life, with a heady mix of hopes and fears.

It was a blustery August day, and a restless warm wind whipped my hair across my face. From far above, the sound of a skylark drifted down to earth, a dancing speck on fluttering wings. I stood transfixed by its lonely song, a liquid hymn to freedom. Poor lark, stay safe away from shot and snares, I thought. And please let my waiting be over. I ached to see into the future. Anne vexed me because she was right: I was not so blind as to think Michael would want me without my land. But I was hopeful nonetheless. And what other course did I have? To be a lackey to my father, forever? I needed only courage and all would be well. True, some nights when sleep evaded me, I touched my crucifix and asked my mother out loud what I should do. No answer came; I was alone with Anne's cautionary words churning in my mind.

Walking over to the group of weathered boulders, called by long tradition the Ring Stones, I touched the surface of the mightiest. It was surprisingly warm, and I recalled tales of their mysterious movements in the moonlight, of midnight trysts and frolics. ‘Whatever awaits me – keep me safe,' I whispered to the lichen-grey stone, feeling foolish enough. Then, looking for a token to offer to whichever ancient spirits inhabited that place, I found one of my mother's silver buttons in my pocket and pushed it hard into the turf at the stone's foot. I might have lingered all afternoon, but over to the west, where the land stretched to the sea and Ireland beyond, a cloud bank of sooty grey had appeared. The warm breeze dropped; the air was oppressive. I hurried home, racing the plashes of rain.

 

 

Here was the Pen and Angel again, still standing five years on, the sign creaking in the Manchester rain, the frontage betraying long years of dust and decrepitude. As for the Palace, that had used to be hid around the back, that was something else now; some sort of workers' hall or meeting place. In the shop there was a new boy, who gave Mary directions to the Cupid, a smart public house near the law courts, with wooden booths for private conversation. The tapster there was a stranger too; a stoat-faced youth who would not meet her eye.

‘Mr Trebizond,' he said, polishing the bar as if it were made of crystal. ‘On my mark, he don't come here no more.'

At first she was furious, and then she recalled that ‘On my mark' was the gang's old signal. She laid her hand on the bar and splayed her fingers, so the fellow could see the five dots tattooed in the crease between her thumb and first finger.

‘On my mark, he'll know me all right,' she said in a low voice. The man nodded, and, without a word, let her pass behind the bar.

After following him down corridors and crossing a gloomy courtyard, they arrived at a painted back entrance with a brass knocker, where the tapster motioned her up a flight of brass-railed stairs. Her heart beat fast. She could almost smell Charlie in the grand style of the place. Then there he was before her, the same old Charlie, sitting alone at a desk with his pen in his hand.

‘Mary!' As he jumped up, she read him closely – there was at least an appearance of delight on his ugly monkey face. He was still the genteel swell of her memory, all gold fobs and velvet trim. ‘Well, who would have believed it? Sweetheart!' He held out his arms, and they embraced, just as they had done a thousand times before. He looked down at her, his hair thinner and his eyes as sharp as ever in a new web of creases. ‘Was it terribly bad?' he asked. He still had that treacle voice, bookish and legal, even though he'd never had the proper schooling; only what he taught himself while fiddling his master's accounts.

She could not answer – only shook her head.

‘But – wait. You're back early? You?' He frowned. ‘Great God, Mary. Have you bolted?'

She kept her face hidden against his chest. ‘I've had me fill, Charlie.' They sat down in his smart chairs, and she told him, as if it was just a yarn, of how she had sailed home as Flora Pilling, all the while searching his face for signs.

‘Sharp as a pin, you are, Mary,' he said, full of the old charm. ‘You know I did my best to prevent it? You do know that?' He cocked his head sideways and looked at her with what seemed honest pleasure. Had he truly done his best? Five years ago he had visited her in Newgate and told her she would walk free. Then, after the gull had flown, Charlie had never shown his face again. So much for a family of thieves: one thing she had learned across the herring pond: you were born alone, and alone you were left to die.

‘Come here, then.' Smoothly does it, she told herself. She went to him, and he pulled her tightly towards him; she closed her eyes and breathed in the soap from his shirt. They went to the bedroom, and his bed was just as she'd conjured it so many times before, while she tried to sleep on rocky earth or wooden planks – cloud-soft, with lavendered sheets, and pillows stuffed with feathers. And he was her old Charlie again, familiar to every inch of her; the same crooked teeth, same narrow body as lean as a boy's, the same hard manhood, rising at the flick of a petticoat. Coupling with him was as easy as falling backwards into that younger Mary, when they followed The Life, and delights were all for the light-fingered taking.

Afterwards, when Charlie snored beside her, she couldn't sleep, for it was only three in the afternoon. Getting up to use the pot she took a prowl about the room. It was then that she noticed the girl's garters hanging on the back of the looking glass. So someone had taken her place as Charlie's girl after all. Lovely blue silken things, they were, to be tied above white silk stockings. Soft-hearted tears welled in her eyes. It took her a moment to swallow hard and get her bearings. Even after all these years it cut deep to know that Charlie had a new girl.

Years back, Charlie had been another of Aunt Charlotte's strays, a man of eighteen to Mary's ripening fourteen years. Auntie had brought Charlie up to the fake-letter dodge; she would slap her wobbling knees to hear him read his screeves out loud, for it was clever stuff. His game was newspaper advertisements for unclaimed legacies, crooked loans, and lottery rackets. And when the money rolled in from the dupes, he'd always come down to the Palace to throw a heap of chink on the kitchen table, brighter than any coin earned the honest way. And then would come a flurry of new shoes and frocks, and porcelain and paints. All of it bright to the eye and so lovely, lovely, lovely.

At first Mary had only watched Charlie from a distance; the young prince holding court amongst the women. She made cupboard-love treats for him, the crunchy Little Devils that he loved, and it had worked too, that night she had chased after him down Jerusalem Passage. She didn't speak, only offered him a paper twist of chocolate almonds. He laughed at her, shaking his head in a kindly, resigned manner. ‘Come here then, Mary,' he said, and they had kissed, hard and greedy, against the wall.

At sixteen she moved into Charlie's ken above a tavern. After leaving his job as clerk to a man of law, Charlie lost no time becoming a swell mobsman. He liked it that Mary was as close to family as could be; for none of them wasted trust on strangers. While he was at his business, she made a few bob for herself, hawking eatables on the streets, a cover for palming coins and the short-change racket. When Charlie needed her, she personated a caller at a sham agency, or acted a weeping witness in the law court. One day they would feast at a chop house, and the next day work the horse-racing crowds. ‘A heavy purse is always in fashion,' was their favourite quip. They drank like thirsty fish, and rutted the nights away. Charlie called his crew the Snakeskin gang: there was Humbug Joe the personator, a decayed gentleman who acted any character as well as Mr Garrick. Then Sal and Cog, the finest pocket-divers in the north, lifting dozens of pocket watches and purses every day. Aggy was their watcher, a nondescript crone with a pair of hawk's eyes. And then there was Red, a crag-faced wheedler who had the secret of forging notes. Life on the high-fly had been one long lark: thrilling to the nerves, a harum-scarum sort of life.

‘Supper time,' Charlie said, stretching himself awake. She had dozed a little and now rolled lazily over to him. ‘I've a boy waiting out in the hall. Order what you will, there's an excellent cook shop around the corner.' Her stomach rumbled as she tried to recall every foodstuff she'd ever longed for.

‘I‘d give my eye tooth for a hot meat pie. Just like I used to sell 'em, all yellow crust and the gravy oozing out. Wait, I'll have two pies. And some buttered rolls and some chops and a jug of beer. And one of them hot puddings sprinkled with sugar, the ones with the currants.'

When the boy brought the feast in to them, she ate it at the table, unwrapping the greasy parcels as if they were Christmas boxes.

‘Still got your scribings, I see.' Charlie was lying naked across the bed, bird-bright eyes watching her from low lids. She turned to the looking glass to inspect the blue tattoo pricked into the narrow flesh of her back: Adam and Eve, naked beneath a tree, through which the serpent wound his coils. Below was inked the motto of the Snakeskin gang: ‘The Serpent Tempted Me and I Did Eat'.

Before boarding the convict ship, she'd had to strip naked before the surgeon, who had prodded her with a ruler and asked her to give an account of her scarification.

‘I made a start to screeving the entire Bible,' she'd replied. ‘But that's as far as I got. Genesis, in't it?'

She'd got a slap for that, but the surgeon had copied the picture down in his book nonetheless. There were other prisoners' patterns drawn there: teardrops and handcuffs, helmeted Britannias, and Irish harps aplenty. Hers was the grandest of the lot.

As she looked in Charlie's mirror, her eyes shifted back to the other girl's garters. She took a long breath so her voice wouldn't betray her hurt. ‘And how's business?' she asked in a jovial fashion. Lord, he had come into chink, there was no doubt of that. When he'd paid the cookshop boy, she had glimpsed a purse thick with coin.

‘Good, good.' He nodded, self-satisfied. ‘The populace is flooding here for work. Everyone's chasing a share of the cotton trade; and that's brought a great deal of business to the screeving game.' He half-shut his eyes, for he still loved the sound of his own voice. ‘Here no one knows his neighbour and no one cares a jot. I made a biggish sum on an inheritance racket last year. The judge sent a People Finder to track down the relatives, but I got my claim in fast. You remember Humbug Joe? He played a long-lost beneficiary, and we got the whole pay-out. I can find you something right away. I need a woman for a job. I've not forgotten your talents.'

‘What about a crib?' She had to know how things stood.

He lit a pipe with a great deal of unnecessary fiddling about. When he looked up again, he was watching her through curling smoke. ‘Cat's Castle needs an experienced woman at the helm. Look after the girls and keep them out of the Justices' way. '

So that was all the rotten deal – to be a poxy bawd. And all the time some younger trull would be bouncing on Charlie's feather bed.

‘Aunt Charlotte,' she asked spitefully. ‘You ever think of her? It broke me heart, her snuffing it while I was doing a stretch.'

‘How could I forget?' he said with a big shrug that she thought rather hollow. He owed everything to Aunt Charlotte. The consumption had killed her and most of the other women at the Palace, all in a few plaguey months. Auntie had loved Charlie like a son. Aye, eaten cake is soon forgotten, that was a true saying if ever there was.

‘And the few that was left? When the Palace closed – where'd they all go?'

He shrugged. ‘Miss Dora, she's still about, she runs a House of Correction down Chandler Lane. And that Frenchie one has a set of rooms on King Street paid for by a lord. The rest have gone where all the old whores go. Dead or poxed or playing the strumpet down twopenny lane.'

She was struck by a fit of the dumps to think of them all gone. And Charlie, had he truly done his best to free her? Charlie and all his appeals and reprieves, his promises that broke as easily as pie crusts.

‘Mary – remember this?'

He reached under the bed, and from a silver case, drew out the Penny Heart she'd sent him. She hid a shiver at the sight of it. It had been back in the yard at Newgate she had last seen it. Now here it was again; turning up like a bad penny, a disc of mellowed copper strung on a green ribbon. In his beautiful voice Charlie read the verse she'd penned herself:

He lifted his brows. ‘Well, Mary, your day has come. You always were true to old Charlie, weren't you? I won't forget that.' He patted the sheet beside him, and she climbed back into the warm spot. As he turned the coin over, silently, they both read:

MARY JEBB AGE 19
TRANSPORTED 7 YEARS
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

She touched it with her fingertips, and it was uncanny; the rough metal seemed to pierce her like a needle, striking back through time, a talisman joining past and present.

‘Very touched I was, sweetheart, when I got that,' Charlie was saying, as if from a long way away. ‘I'll see you right, Mary. Get you settled at Cat's Castle.'

She blinked herself back to the present. Perhaps his bedding her earlier had been a kind of sop to her dignity? Soon, no doubt, his blue-gartered chicken would be back. By then she must be long gone.

Still, he had no notion there were two Penny Hearts, both identical. That other heart. Where was it now? Where was that other poxy cove she'd sent it to? She had to pick his ample brain.

‘What was that you was saying about the inheritance racket earlier? Something about a People Finder. That's a new one, Charlie. How does that work?'

‘Oh, I've done a bit of that myself,' he boasted. ‘The authorities have printed up some most helpful registers, detailing everyone of property. I've my own set in there.' He nodded towards his office next door. ‘Damned useful to a letter-writing man.'