Fraudsters and Charlatans (7 page)

The vicar's theory of Mary being Chinese was about to take a knock, however, for when Elizabeth reported this to the Greek manservant he pointed out that the girl could not be Chinese, since her features were entirely European.

Samuel Worrall may not have known that his wife had brought the mysterious visitor to Knole, and it seems that he was displeased when he returned to find Caraboo in residence. On the day after her arrival Mary was taken to Bristol to appear before the Mayor, John Haythorne, at the Council House in the commercial heart of the city.

She had gone too far now to do anything but continue her imposture. Fortunately the Mayor was not immune to her attractions, and she spoke to him at length and convincingly in her lingo, with beautiful gestures of her white hands. He listened carefully and afterwards a magistrate present declared that ‘her language and manners were such as he had never before heard or seen'.
⁸

Elizabeth Worrall wanted to take her back home, but the Mayor agreed with her husband that the law must be observed. Mary was taken to St Peter's Hospital, a home for the poor and unemployed. Crowded, noisy, and dirty, with many of the inmates ill or mentally disturbed, this was no place for Caraboo, and Mary, retreating still further into her new persona, stopped eating and refused to sleep in a bed.

It did not take long for news of the attractive stranger to reach Bristol society, and before long, Caraboo was inundated with visitors. Many came just to see the latest curiosity. Some gentlemen, with a taste for eastern exoticism, were drawn to her air of mystery. Others were eager to discover where she was from, and brought with them any foreigners of their acquaintance to see if they could understand her language. A young Scotsman who had travelled in the East later wrote to Elizabeth to theorise that the foreigner was not called Caraboo at all, but came from a place called Karabouh on the shores of the Caspian Sea, and suggested she was shown a map of the area.

Elizabeth Worrall worried about Caraboo all weekend. Visiting Mary on Monday, and finding her tired, hungry and miserable, she at once discharged her and took her to Mr Worrall's apartment above the Tolzey Bank, leaving her in the charge of the housekeeper. The stream of gentlemen visitors continued, however, as Elizabeth was as anxious as anyone else to find out where Caraboo came from. At least Mary was able to hold court in some comfort. Just how long it would have taken for Samuel Worrall's patience to wear thin will never be known, for after ten days an unusual visitor arrived who was to change Mary's life for ever. A Portuguese familiar with Malaya and its languages, he was Manuel Eynesso, although this is not a Portuguese surname and may be a garbled version of the more likely Enes, or Ernesto. He listened to Caraboo's language, and, like the speaker of Spanish, claimed that he could interpret what she was saying. He told the astonished Worralls that ‘she was a person of consequence in her own country, had been decoyed from an island in the East Indies, and brought to England against her consent, and deserted. That the language she spoke was not a pure dialect, but a mixture of languages used on the coast of Sumatra, and other islands in the East.'
⁹

From that moment Mary was not simply Caraboo but Princess Caraboo. The means by which the Portuguese devised this story will never be known. It could have been something Eynesso fabricated himself either as a joke or out of his unwillingness to admit failure. He could also have taken cues from Mary's gestures and her ability to memorise and mimic back to him words and phrases he then recognised. It is worth knowing that the Portuguese for ‘princess' is
princesa
. Having done his mischief, Eynesso departed abroad and was not heard of again.

So Caraboo was not a vagrant at all, but foreign royalty, cruelly abducted in the most dramatic circumstances and cast, as chance would have it, upon the charity of the Worralls. Mary was at once brought back to Knole. Elizabeth, beside herself with delight at the vindication of her charge, proceeded to make the girl the whole focus of her study. Everyone she knew who might have some story to tell of the East was invited to Knole to meet Caraboo and show her pictures, books and artefacts, from which Mary gained a great deal of useful information to make the imposture more convincing.

One of the books she was shown was Hager's
Elementary Characters of the Chinese
, which showed, among other things, how counting was done by means of tying knots in string. Realising that her claims to be Chinese were in doubt, Mary did not respond to anything in the book. She was more interested in the recently published book on Java by Stamford Raffles, and the alacrity with which she pointed to the illustrations made everyone sure that at last they had discovered her origins. The very first picture in the book was of a Javanese man wearing his dagger or
kris
at his right hip. Fry's
Pantographia
, a book illustrating the world's languages and scripts, also gave some vocabulary of each language, in English. Mary examined the pages carefully, realising that her choice could be crucial. Eventually she pointed to examples of the rare Sumatran dialects, Lampoon and Rejang, and the excited ladies and gentlemen suddenly found they could match words of Caraboo's spoken language to those in the book. Mary now had ways of saying words like ‘father' and ‘mother' and ‘God', which was ‘Allah Tallah'. She had had to go to the most obscure and little-known corners of the earth in order to make her imposture believable, but she had done it.

A gentleman who had made several voyages to the East Indies was determined to discover the story of Caraboo's life before arriving in England. He spent a great deal of time with her, and, enchanted by her rosy lips and white teeth, her glossy dark hair, animated expression and theatrical gestures, was able, without understanding a word she said, apart from the few she had learned from
Pantographia
, to compose the story. Caraboo came from an island she called Javasu. (Mary showed a constant tendency to add an ‘oo' sound to the end of her made-up words.) Her father was a man of substance, a high-ranking white complexioned Chinese, called Jessu Mandu. Her Malay mother, who had blackened teeth and painted face and arms, had been killed in a war between the Malays and the cannibals or Boogoos. Her father, who had three more wives, travelled in a palanquin carried on the shoulders of ‘macratoos' (common men) and wore a gold chain around his neck and a peacock-feather headdress. When people approached him they knelt and made a respectful
salaam
. Caraboo too had worn peacock feathers (Mary must have remembered the plume maker she had stayed with briefly). Her name, originally Sissu Mandu, had been changed to Caraboo to celebrate her father's great victory. She did not worship idols, indeed she was shocked at the suggestion, recoiling from pictures she was shown. She worshipped God, whom she called Allah Tallah.

Caraboo had been abducted by pirates while walking in her garden. She had been carrying a
kris
, with which she wounded two of her attackers, one of whom later died. Bound hand and foot, she was taken on board a ship commanded by a man called Chee-min, then sold to a Captain Tappa Boo. Her distress had made her ill, and she had been treated by a surgeon with cupping at the back of her neck. When the ship approached England, she escaped by jumping overboard and swimming ashore. At the time she had been wearing a gown and shawl worked with gold, which she later exchanged for the clothing in which she arrived at Almondsbury.

This account of her travels was swallowed with delight. Asked about the flags of the ports where she stopped during her journey, she mimed that she was below deck and saw nothing, which led the intellectual circle to excuse the fact that the map she drew of her travels made no geographical sense.

Elizabeth was eager to see an example of her visitor's native costume and provided her with fabric from which Mary, an accomplished seamstress, made a gown with long wide sleeves, embroidered around the waist and hem, and a daring mid-calf in length. She wore no stockings but leather sandals on her bare feet. Unsure of the correct diet to assume, she professed a preference for vegetables and rice, rather than meat or bread, and ate curry, which she prepared herself. Later she accepted fish, and once prepared a pigeon in the Asian style, which she called ‘rampoo'.

Caraboo recognised many artefacts brought to her – a Chinese chain purse, a rose-coloured scarf, pierced ivory fans, a Chinese puzzle, Indian ink, satin stone, garnets, sugar candy and green tea, all of which she indicated came from her father's country. Cinnamon, cassia, white pepper, rice, mother of pearl, flying fish and a species of apple she identified as coming from Javasu, and coconut, long pepper and coral from her mother's land. Her listeners eagerly recorded all she said and began to create a vocabulary of her language in which she remained entirely consistent. They were puzzled at first when she used Romany expressions for English coins, such as ‘tanner' and ‘bob', but assumed that she had picked these up during her wanderings. One gentleman remarked in her hearing on the difference between the Indian and Malay
salaam
. Mary duly noted this and later adopted the Malay gesture.

Now that Mary had some examples of writing to follow she was happy to give the fascinated visitors some samples of her own and so produced specimens of graceful curving script. She was also able to read fluently from pages of obscure manuscripts that were placed before her, and since no one had ever translated these before, the readings added to the excitement of her audience. The act almost led to her discovery, however, as a visiting linguist observed in her hearing that the language she was reading was read from right to left. ‘In a few minutes she had changed the mode of her pretending to read, and now traced the words from right to left.'
¹⁰
Knowing that she was supposed to be worshipping Allah Tallah, she set about doing this in the most theatrical way possible, climbing to the top of the tower early in the morning and disturbing the household with loud chanting.

For Mary the pleasure of duping so many bluestocking ladies and learned gentlemen was somewhat mitigated by being constantly under close scrutiny. Every gesture she made was watched and noted, and she was unable to resist giving them what they were looking for. Given the run of the house and grounds, she became a wild creature of the woods. Walking by the lake she would kneel and perform rituals, creating a prayer arbour which she splashed with water. She exercised with bow and arrows, showing great skill and dexterity, the quiver slung over her shoulder, firing arrows as she ran. She enjoyed rowing on the lake, plying the oars with great skill. Mischievously she tried to induce the Greek manservant to go rowing with her, with the idea of tipping him into the water, but he declined. As the days lengthened into summer, she often swam in the lake. Sometimes, when she was sure not to be observed, she dived in naked.

Mary used her expressive gestures to devise dances the like of which her admirers had never seen before. ‘When dancing she would assume an infinite variety of attitudes, far from destitute of elegance; bend her body in numberless shapes, but never offensive to delicacy or propriety occasionally dropping on one knee, and then rising with uncommon agility, holding up one foot in a sling, and performing a species of waltz with the most singular twists and contortions.'
¹¹
Her manners were a constant source of enchantment, especially to Elizabeth, on whom she waited at her toilette as a trusted confidante.

One visitor who had been to Malaya some years previously arrived with a
kris
which Caraboo at once recognised and placed at her right side: this clearly impressed the visitor. On another occasion Mary overheard a discussion that it was the custom in the East to anoint the point of a dagger with vegetable poison. Having stored this information, the next time she had a knife in her hands she rubbed some leaves between her fingers, applied the juice to her dagger and, touching it to her arm, mimed a swoon. One day she indicated that it was her father's birthday and was able to show everyone how old he was by means of a piece of knotted string. By then everyone had probably forgotten that Hager's book illustrated this practice, and so this was yet more proof that she was genuine.

Mary also delighted her observers by exercising with a sword in her right hand and a dagger in her left. Mr Worrall was persuaded to try his skill at fencing with her, as he was reputed to have had some skill with the sword in his youth. Perhaps feeling a little awkward at fencing with a glamorous princess less than half his age, he was frequently obliged to admit defeat, and her success merely added to her reputation.

No real attempt was made to learn about Caraboo by teaching her English. She was regarded as an object of interest to be studied, her language and handwriting carefully recorded. It was not thought odd that she made no attempt to learn the language, and achieved no great facility with it in the weeks she remained at Knole. Such communication as was possible was done through gesture, or by the use of her invented lingo and words she had acquired through reading.

The Worralls' servants were less easily duped and more suspicious than the ladies and gentlemen for whom Mary provided food for intellectual pretensions. Mary continued to share a bedroom with Elizabeth's housekeeper, who took care to listen for any inconsistency in her speech, but never once heard her speak in any language or tone but the one she had assumed. Some of the servants planned to lie awake and listen to see if she talked in her sleep, but Mary overheard their discussion and was able to feign sleep during which she talked her gibberish language. On one occasion two of the maids ran into the room shouting ‘Fire!', but Mary showed no reaction.

Mary and Elizabeth regularly travelled to Bristol when the princess was sitting for a portrait by the artist Edward Bird. On one occasion Mary fell asleep in the carriage on the return journey, but on being awoken had the presence of mind not to give herself away. Even flattery could not move her. One gentleman, admiring her dark eyes and silky ‘Asiatic' hair, drew his chair close to her, gazed into her face and declared: ‘You are the most beautiful creature I ever beheld! You are an angel!'
¹²
She remained unmoved. This extraordinary self-control convinced many that it was impossible for her to be feigning. She did make one slip, however: when the Worrall's younger son, Frederick, accused her openly of being a cheat, she was stung into responding, ‘Caraboo – no cheat!'
¹³
But by then she had been in the household long enough for the incident to be explained away by her picking up a few words of English.