An Almond for a Parrot: the gripping and decadent historical page turner
Wray Delaney
‘shades of Sarah Waters…irresistible’ – The Guardian‘I would like to make myself the heroine of this story – an innocent victim led astray. But alas sir, I would be lying…’London, 1756: In Newgate prison, Tully Truegood awaits trial. Her fate hanging in the balance, she tells her life-story. It’s a tale that takes her from skivvy in the back streets of London, to conjuror’s assistant, to celebrated courtesan at her stepmother’s Fairy House, the notorious house of ill-repute where decadent excess is a must…Tully was once the talk of the town. Now, with the best seats at Newgate already sold in anticipation of her execution, her only chance of survival is to get her story to the one person who can help her avoid the gallows.She is Tully Truegood.Orphan, whore, magician’s apprentice. Murderer?A compelling mix of bawdy romp and magical realism.’-Sarra Manning, Red magazine
WRAY DELANEY is the pen name of Sally Gardner, the award-winning children’s novelist, who has sold over 2 million books worldwide and been translated into 22 languages. She lives in London and this is her first adult novel.
For my mother, Nina Lowry.
The third female circuit judge to be appointed in England, she sat for twenty years at the Old Bailey. For her service she was given the Freedom of the City of London with the right to drive a flock of sheep across London Bridge. She has yet to do so.
A remarkable woman, who I’m very proud to call Mum.
Fleet Marriages
One of the most disgraceful customs observed in the Fleet Prison in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the performance of the marriage ceremony by disreputable and dissolute clergymen. These functionaries, mostly prisoners for debt, insulted the dignity of their holy profession by marrying in the precincts of the Fleet Prison at a minute’s notice, any persons who might present themselves for that purpose. No questions were asked, no stipulations made, except as to the amount of the fee for the service, or the quantity of liquor to be drunk on the occasion. It not unfrequently happened, indeed, that the clergyman, the clerk, the bridegroom and the bride were drunk at the very time the ceremony was performed.
Appendix VI, The Newgate Calendar
Contents
Cover (#u1c12f88a-400d-5424-9fed-f21dce6286fb)
About the Author (#u8e097a8c-65a7-5343-937c-108fd1d736fc)
Title (#ubf90e992-63c4-5ce5-b291-fa05b64d250b)
Dedication (#u59e387b6-a854-5a15-8955-3f220a8de981)
Chapter One (#ulink_6c317e58-0762-58f4-8da7-3b749980820f)
Chapter Two (#ulink_76fbb0cf-afb2-5495-a306-ee515dd631b3)
Chapter Three (#ulink_e3b0d941-dcfa-517a-a14b-13c5c4b927da)
Chapter Four (#ulink_0a97931f-e746-5b27-8793-9177755b2115)
Chapter Five (#ulink_dfb59692-9039-51b5-8aff-03461dda44e3)
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
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Acknowledgements
Copyright (#u96fee307-bd0f-5bc2-9611-2614cc8ff5be)
Chapter One (#ulink_f9ef3812-ec74-5ec2-a0e7-d7a1314f16d4)
Newgate Prison, London
I lie on this hard bed counting the bricks in the ceiling of this miserable cell. I have been sick every morning for a week and thought I might have jail fever. If it had killed me it would at least have saved me the inconvenience of a trial and a public hanging. Already the best seats at Newgate Prison have been sold in anticipation of my being found guilty – and I have yet to be sent to trial. Murder, attempted murder – either way the great metropolis seems to know the verdict before the judge has placed the black square on his grey wig. This whore is gallows-bound.
‘Is he dead?’ I asked.
My jailer wouldn’t say.
I pass my days remembering recipes and reciting them to the damp walls. They don’t remind me of food; they are bookmarks from this short life of mine. They remain tasteless. I prefer them that way.
A doctor was called for. Who sent for or paid for him I don’t know, and uncharacteristically I do not care. He was very matter of fact and said the reason for my malady was simple: I was with child. I haven’t laughed for a long time but forgive me, the thought struck me as ridiculous. In all that has happened I have never once found myself in this predicament. I can hardly believe it is true. The doctor looked relieved – he had at least found a reason for my life to be extended – pregnant women are not hanged. Even if I’m found guilty of murder, the gallows will wait until the child is born. What a comforting thought.
Hope came shortly afterwards. Dear Hope. She looked worried, thinner.
‘How is Mercy?’ I asked.
She avoided answering me and busied herself about my cell.
‘What does this mean?’ she asked, running her fingers over the words scratched on a small table, the only piece of furniture this stinking cell has to offer.
I had spent some time etching them into its worm-eaten surface. An Almond for a Parrot.
‘It’s a title for a memoir, the unanswered love song of a soon-to-be dead bird. Except I have no paper, no pen and without ink the thing won’t write at all.’
‘Just as well, Tully.’
‘I want to tell the truth of my life.’
‘Better to leave it,’ she said.
‘It’s for Avery – not that he will ever read it.’ I felt myself on the brink of tears but I refused to give in to them. ‘I will write it for myself. Afterwards, it can be your bedtime entertainment, the novelty of my days in recipes and tittle-tattle.’
‘Oh, my sweet ninny-not. You must be brave, Tully. This is a dreadful place and…’
‘And it is not my first prison. My life has come full circle. You haven’t answered my question.’
‘Mercy is still very ill. Mofty is with her.’
‘Will she live?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And is he alive?’
‘Tully, he is dead. You are to be tried for murder.’
‘My, oh my. At least my aim was true.’
I sank back on the bed, too tired to ask more. Even if Hope was in the mood for answering questions, I didn’t think I would want to know the answers.
‘You are a celebrity in London. Everyone wants to know what you do, what you wear. The papers are full of it.’
There seemed nothing to say to that. Hope sat quietly on the edge of the bed, holding my hand.
Finally, I found the courage to ask the question I’d wanted to ask since Hope arrived.
‘Is there any news of Avery?’
‘No, Tully, there’s not.’
I shook my head. Regret. I am full of it. A stone to worry one’s soul with.
‘You have done nothing wrong, Tully.’
‘Forgive me for laughing.’
‘You will have the very best solicitor.’
‘Who will pay for him?’
‘Queenie.’
‘No, no. I don’t want her to. I have some jewels…’
I felt sick.
‘Concentrate on staying well,’ said Hope.
If this life was a dress rehearsal, I would now have a chance to play my part again but with a more favourable outcome. Alas, we players are unaware that the curtain goes up the minute we take our first gulps of air; the screams of rage our only hopeless comments on being born onto such a barren stage.
So here I am with ink, pen and a box of writing paper, courtesy of a well-wisher. Still I wait to know the date of my trial. What to do until then? Write, Tully, write.
With a hey ho the wind and the rain. And words are my only escape. For the rain it raineth every day.
Chapter Two (#ulink_4e560ac1-0712-5894-929e-04a4b95d38d2)
To Make a Hasty Pudding
Take a quart of milk and four bay leaves, set it on the fire to boil. Beat up the yolks of two eggs and stir in a little salt. Take two or three spoonfuls of milk and beat up your eggs and stir in your milk. Then with a wooden spoon in one hand and the flour in the other, stir until it is of a good thickness but not too thick. Let it boil and keep stirring then pour it in a dish and stick pieces of butter here and there. You may omit the egg if you do not like it but it is a great addition to the pudding and a little piece of butter stirred in the milk makes it short and fine. Take out the bay leaves before you put in the flour.
Written in Newgate Prison
September, 1756
I would like to make myself the heroine of this story and my character to be so noble that you could not help but be in love with me. Perhaps I should portray myself as an innocent victim led astray. But alas, sir, I would be lying, and as I am on the brink of seeing my maker, the truth might serve me better.
Feathers and dust. Let me try to tell you my truth as seen through these two green eyes, not just the one eye that is always blinkered in favour of its owner. Forgive me if I don’t throw myself into the most saucy parts of my life first – like all seductions, it is the undoing of layers that makes the moment the greater by anticipation. Haste is always a lover’s downfall. Whether that be the same with my story only the telling of it will show. I would like to make you laugh, to see that smile that curls across your lips. Laughter is by far the better remedy for all life’s ills. Our days are measured too often in woes and too seldom in humour, which is a pity, for what is this world if not a farce, a comedy of follies performed without rehearsal, a stage waiting for a strumpet to tell her tale? So let me start, sir, before the clock runs out of hours.
Is it breeding that makes us what we are, or the muck we are born into, be that of a stable or a palace? Perhaps it is a smattering of both – and in my case, mingled with a sprinkle of magic. My father – if he really be my father – was one Captain Truegood, who gave up the Seven Seas to become a merchant in bricks. Finding that, like bread, bricks cannot be done without and like bread they are needed daily, soon he possessed more money than his feeble senses knew what to do with. His wealth enabled him to purchase an accomplished wife from a noble family, whose fortune had dwindled to little more than a title. My mother was seventeen when the contract was signed, and I can only imagine the disappointment of the marriage bed. Captain Truegood, no doubt drunk as was his way, made a hasty pudding of me. My mother’s sentiments upon such pitiless passion I will never know, for no sooner had she seen my face, than she decided very sensibly to depart this world. If there was misfortune in my life it was, I suppose, not to have had the sense to follow her, but once I made my arrival there was little I could do but grab life by the dairies and live it to my best advantage.
What philosophical thought my father had about his nine months of marriage and subsequent widowhood, he never said. But Captain Truegood was a man of few words and those that came to him came through the grape and the grain, only to be distilled into ill-thought-out mumblings and ill-thought-out doings.
My father had no interest in me other than to see me at first as a great nuisance and later as little more than a chambermaid. I will skip-hop over the inconvenience of my infancy for it is the general belief that nothing of value is to be remarked upon in the early stages of a female’s life, unlike that of the male. Several writers have deemed the early years of a young man to be of such momentous importance that they have even recounted the circumstances pertaining to the time before the sperm meets the egg. All I will say is that my father begat me and my father promptly forgot me.
My first conscious memory is of the large wooden table in the kitchen. I spent most of my younger days hidden under it, keeping out of sight. That table was the centre of my world, the only solid thing in a house built on sand. I imagined its legs turning into roots that burrowed deep into the earth. No matter what else might befall me, the table would remain unmoved by fortune’s wheel, a constant, like Cook.
Cook as good as brought me up; half-baked me, as she would say. Having no children of her own and little understanding as to what infants might need, for guidance she relied on her cookbook as if she hoped to find the method for the growing of children, just as there were recipes for every other kind of slaughtered meat. I’m not certain that she fully understood the recipes for she told me she believed reading was nothing to do with letters. Recipes, she said, were weighed in words and words were weighed in time. As with so much that Cook said, this meant little or nothing to my green ears, but I would often fall asleep to the rhythm of Cook kneading bread, rolling pastry, cutting meat.
Did I long for my mother? Yes. Of a need for love, all children who haven’t known one put the absent parent into a cabinet of angels – or fairies, as in my case. The only place I felt close to my mother was the blue chamber. I knew her spirit had long escaped the house in Milk Street but the walls of her room held tight to her memory. I would talk to her about my many frustrations and ask why it was that my father had so little regard for me. She she was wise enough never to answer, but I would always find solace knowing her to be listening like a benign angel.
I much preferred the company of servants to that of my father’s chuckle-headed friends whose delights mainly seemed to be pinned on wine, peppered by the gaming tables. The world beyond our house was to me but a small theatre seen through shuttered windows. The comings and goings of the players were all such a narrow view of the great metropolis allowed. They were accompanied by the changing scenery of the seasons, signalled more by the fashions than anything nature had to offer.
I never liked the house. The furniture was heavy and given to chattering, or so I believed when little. The worst offender was the grandfather clock. It stood on the first floor landing, an immovable exclamation mark, its face as large as the moon without any of the illumination. Its chimes called to the dead more than to the living. The grandfather clock’s quarrel was with a young boy by the name of Samuel. In tick-tock talk, it would say:
‘What-have
‘you-to
‘show-for
‘your-self
‘young-Sam?’
I told Cook there was a boy trapped inside the clock. The thought of it gave me nightmares. Cook, who had to share a bed with me, soon lost patience at being woken by a terrified child, and without my father’s permission took the key to the clock from his study.
‘There,’ she said, as she opened the clock. ‘You see? It’s empty. A pendulum and two weights, the sum total of time.’
I could say nothing. For there crouched a small boy of about my age, his hands over his face. I never spoke about the clock again and neither did Cook.
As the outside world was forbidden to me, I organised the interior of our house into the streets and alleyways of the city I didn’t know, of which I had only heard Cook speak. The main staircase was Gin Alley; at the top of the first flight was the step I called the Coffin-Maker, for it groaned every time I stepped on it. The seventh step from the ground I called Dead Drunk for it wobbled like my father in his cups.
The problem of how to avoid them tied me up in knots until it occurred to me that the simplest remedy would be to learn how to fly. To that end I took to practising, at first by jumping off a chair. I was deeply disappointed to find I was unaccountably earthbound. I thought I needed more height to achieve my goal, and so it was that one morning I stood on the top landing and threw myself off. As I hurtled downwards, I realised I was about to land flat on my face on the stone floor and I willed myself to stop.
I stopped.
I hung in the air on an invisible step, and it was then I heard Cook scream. I landed with a bump. Cook hit me with her wooden spoon.
‘What are you about?’
‘I’m learning to fly,’ I said.
‘Well don’t. You can’t. So there.’
Strange to say that after that I never could do it again. Perhaps I had never done it at all. I wonder what would have happened if Cook had told me that my other notions were impossible, but she didn’t and I came to believe that everyone must see the world as I did.
Once a week, Mrs Inglis would call on Cook. Mrs Inglis was a large lady with a face so folded with jowly flesh that it resembled an unmade bed. She always seated herself in the chair near the stove where she would pull up her petticoats and rest her feet on a stool. Her legs were blotched and itchy. Sighing, she would say what a trial it was to be old and who would have thought it would have come to this pretty pass. Cook would sit opposite and they would chinwag away the woes of the world into a bottle of gin.
Mrs Inglis always brought with her a sickly child of about thirteen. She would stand beside Mrs Inglis’s chair but not once did Mrs Inglis talk to her.
‘Back in the days…’ as Mrs Inglis loved to say. ‘Back in the days, I ran a good school, I did. I had good girls, such good girls. I never let anything untoward befall them – could have done, earned a little extra on the side. It would’ve been legal, but I never. Was it my fault, what happened?’
‘No, Mrs Inglis,’ Cook would say. ‘Let’s think on something merrier.’
Then they would start on the gossip.
If I thought it odd that the girl should be so ignored I said nothing as long as she stayed by the chair and didn’t come near me.
One day, while Mrs Inglis blabbered fifty to the dozen about nothing, or nothing I understood, the girl joined me under the table.
‘How old are you?’ she asked.
I was five at the time.
‘Are you hiding from the gentlemen?’
‘What gentlemen?’ I said.
‘The gentlemen who take you on their laps and ask to see what shouldn’t be shown. Pretty Poppet they call me.’
I didn’t like the way Pretty Poppet spoke and asked Cook why Pretty Poppet came all the time.
‘Because some griefs you never rise above,’ she said.
Mrs Inglis continued to visit and while time passed Pretty Poppet didn’t age. I decided it would be pointless to say anything more to Cook, for surely both she and Mrs Inglis could see her just as well as me.
So it was that out of the rubble of neglect I slowly grew with a head full of recipes and ghosts.
Chapter Three (#ulink_f0e3279a-300f-5974-aeac-15301820a0b3)
Three events stand out in the sea of sameness and have become magnified in my memory. Each in their way forecast the future and, although I didn’t know it, gave me a glimpse of what my life might hold.
At eight years I was employed to clean the downstairs parlour – a gloomy, wood-panelled chamber that appeared to vanish into the darkness. Mr Truegood and his friends would meet there in what my father loosely called the Hawks’ Club. Its members were gunpowder-blasted mumpers, broken-limbed soldiers, sham seamen and scaly fish, all of whom had long left the shores of sobriety. Here they sang their bawdy songs, gambled and drank well into the night until they could see the silver of their dreams in the bottom of a pewter mug.
The following morning it would be my job to bring a semblance of order to the chaos. I would find the chamber shuttered and through the shutters urgent pinpricks of light would show a yellow, wheezy fog that hung mournfully in the middle of the room, smelling of stale tobacco and defeat. I would polish the round wooden table, sweep the floor and lay the fire. This chamber in its various states of debauchery was my storybook. The main character the table itself, the empty plates and broken wine glasses spoke the lines and gave away the players of last night’s revelry. Among all the clutter lay treasure forgotten by these fuddled-headed gentlemen. A button, a snuffbox, a pipe in the shape of a man’s head: I would stash them away, pirates’ gold waiting to be reclaimed.
One wintry morning I opened the shutters and saw, propped upright by the side of a chair, a wooden leg with a scuffed shoe attached to it. The leg was so finely carved and painted that for a moment I thought it to be made out of flesh and bone. I didn’t fancy touching it, so left it where it was and set about my work. My heart as good as stopped when I discovered a dead man sitting in the chair by the fireplace. He had his eyes wide open and was staring at me, his face whiter than Cook’s flour. I was about to call for help when his hand shot out and took hold of my arm. My cry was swallowed back down upon itself.
‘Who are you?’ asked the dead man.
‘Tully Truegood,’ I replied, feeling my legs to be made of marrow jelly.
All his features were delicately rendered, each with a point to them. His hooked nose ended in a point, his chin jutted, even his ears appeared more pointed than the few ears I had seen before. I had no idea what an elf might look like but from the stories that Cook had told me I imagined that the dead man’s face couldn’t be so dissimilar from those of fairy folk. His eyes were set back into his face, his lip but a thin bow, his tongue the arrow. I saw now why I had thought him dead for his face was painted white and his almond-shaped eyelids had another set of eyes painted on them so that when they were closed they appeared open. The whole effect was most disconcerting.
‘Captain Truegood has a daughter,’ said the man. ‘Then you are the answer to the riddle. How old?’
‘Eight.’
‘Is there any more wine in that bowl, Miss Truegood?’ he said.
‘I think so.’
‘Then fetch me a glass and my leg, if you would be so kind, before the devil takes it to dance a jig.’
The moment he spoke, all my fear of him dissolved into excitement. Having concluded that he was a character from a fairy tale, I was no longer afraid. Up to then most of my days had been humdrum to say the least; so much so that I was scarcely conscious of which month it was. I had lately in my childish wisdom fallen into a gloom at the thought that time might have forgotten me altogether, that I would never be pulled into the adult world. Perhaps the dead man was here to do just that.
Once he had his painted leg back, he rolled up his breeches and I watched, fascinated, as he attached and strapped the wooden limb to his stump. When he stood and dusted himself down I was surprised by how tall he was, and that his clothes were colourful, his coat being striped. He squared his wig in the mirror.
‘You are no hen-hearted girl,’ he said, and whistled.
I could not for the life of me see why he needed to whistle, but then, from the darkest part of the parlour, appeared a little white dog.
The dead man watched me as he clicked his fingers. The dog, obeying his master’s command, danced on his hind legs. Thrilled, I knelt, clapping my hands as the little white dog came to me and I held him in my arms as he licked my face. It made me laugh, and I closed my eyes and relished the feel of that soft tongue. When I opened my eyes again the dead man and his dog had gone. For a long while I wondered if I had conjured them up and if I had conjured the boy in the grandfather clock for there was no other explanation for the appearance of any of them. Perhaps everyone could do it and it was nothing to wonder at. I thought to ask Pretty Poppet next time she came with Mrs Inglis, but Mrs Inglis didn’t come again; she had been taken to the Fleet Prison for unpaid bills.
I tried to ask Cook; but she huffed, and said, as she always said when there was no answer, ‘Butter and salt.’
I count my life as having begun that day, the day I saw the little white dog. All before that I consider to be nothing more than an audition for the main play.
The second event took place when I was nine. The boot boy, who was twelve, told me he loved me and wanted to see what lay under my skirts.
I, being innocent, replied, ‘Petticoats.’
‘No,’ he whispered. ‘I want to see what is there after you have lifted them aside.’
If this was what love was, it seemed a trifling thing to show him, and being curious as to what lay in his breeches, I agreed, if he would unbutton himself.
I remember a pink plug tail that hung down and that I wasn’t much impressed. But a bargain being a bargain I duly pulled up my petticoats and was surprised to see the way the small shrivelled plug tail became all perky and stood engagingly to attention. After that I don’t think I saw him again, and lost all interest in the rising and falling of such a small drawbridge.
By now my father had become attached to the whorehouse and addicted to the gaming tables so that his considerable fortune began by degrees to diminish. As it depleted, so did his servants, until there was only Cook and myself to run the house, and it was in these very diminished circumstances that the third event took place.
I was twelve when I was married.
Ah, sir, I see now I have your full attention. My unexpected wedding took place one Friday in the middle of the night. My father, roaring drunk and mighty out of temper, came all bellowing, sail flapping, into the chamber I shared with Cook. She, poor woman, did her level best to guide the Captain’s sinking wreck into a safe harbour.
‘No, sir, leave the girl alone,’ she said.
But Captain Truegood was set on his course and neither the cook nor the devil was about to stop him. He was persuaded that he should at least wait downstairs until I was dressed.
Sleepily, I put on my threadbare clothes, Cook put my hair into a cap and thus attired in the plainest of styles I went to join my father in the hall. Two sedan chairs and their porters were waiting. I could only think of the mess they had made of the white stone floor and wondered if my father had need of me to clean it after he and whoever his guest was had departed.
To my astonishment it appeared that the second sedan chair was for me and for the first time in my life I was to be allowed out of the house. Where I was bound I had no idea and could not ask my father, for Captain Truegood had not left off his shouting at one and all to make haste. I remember the journey vividly, though having no knowledge of the city I had been born into I cannot say where I was taken other than it was a tall house where a great number of people were gathered within. Most lined the stairs. They were a motley crowd made more merry by the gin. Captain Truegood, still roaring, waved his stick about, clearing lovebirds from the stairs for each couple seemed very free with one another.
‘She’s a bit on the young side,’ said one woman.
‘Do you know what you’re about?’ another asked me.
‘Let me pass, madam,’ thundered Captain Truegood, who, having hold of my hand, near as dragged me to the first floor and along an ill-lit corridor. Only when we were outside a door did he stop. Fumbling in his pocket, he took out a mask and told me to put it on.
‘All you need do is say, “I consent”, nothing more. Do you understand?’
Not waiting for an answer, my father, swimming in wine, threw open the door and, tripping on the carpet, nearly capsized altogether. He was saved by a minister of the church.
The chamber we had arrived in was empty but for a minister and a gentleman in a fine wig who appeared to be as drunk, if not more so, than my father.
‘You are late, sir,’ said the gentleman.
He was dressed in a grand style in a brocaded coat. With him was a black spider of man who scuttled to a curtain at the end of the room where he seemed to take instructions and papers from someone before returning to the side of the grand gentleman.
I knew that I was to be married, but which of these unpleasant-looking men I would have the honour to call husband I couldn’t say. The whole idea of being married was one I had given little thought to, but remembering my father’s words, I said nothing until I couldn’t help but speak. The room was in such darkness that for a moment I wasn’t sure what tricks the light played: for seated behind the minister was a shrivelled-up woman dressed in the dustiest of clothes.
‘Who is that?’ I asked.
The minister turned and seemed shocked to see her there. ‘That,’ he replied unsteadily, ‘is my wife.’
‘Then, sir,’ I said, ‘I am afraid she is dead.’
The remark was greeted with laughter, not from the minister or my father or his pissed acquaintance but from the folds of a curtain. A young gentleman, also wearing a mask, stepped out into the light and stood beside me.
‘Of course she’s dead,’ he said, his words slurred. ‘Marriage is murder.’
Whether or not the minister heard I wasn’t sure, but much to my father’s fury it made me giggle. Everyone was drunk except me and the minister, and I wasn’t sure how sober he was. Surely, I thought, a wedding this soaked in liquor could never be considered binding.
The minister raised his eyes to the high ceiling as if hoping to find a god to calm him and said, ‘My wife has been shown to me this night. It is a sign to remind the living of the passion to be found in life and the brief amount of light there is before everlasting darkness.’
‘On with the thing, sir!’ shouted my father.
‘This is no time for ghosts,’ said his brocaded friend.
The minister, somewhat shaken, went on, though every now and again he glanced uneasily behind him to where his dead wife sat watching.
The wedding service consisted of nothing more than the young gentleman and myself giving our consents and signing the papers that the black spider eagerly put before us.
And that was that. I never saw my bridegroom’s face, nor was I informed of his name, nor the purpose of such a hasty marriage. Cook told me the next day that my husband had gone to join the navy and I need think no more about it.
‘With luck,’ she said, ‘you will be a respectable widow by the time you’re fifteen.’
I mention these three events only because by the time the years had chased the child in me away I saw all too clearly how the upturned cart of my life was settled. I was destined to live out my days emptying my father’s chamber pot and serving him his meals. This may well have been my fate, but it was at this very low juncture that the tide changed in my favour.
Chapter Four (#ulink_4d27b1f9-171a-5650-9df8-8b82dae02bef)
My father was to remarry.
When I heard the news that I was to have a stepmother I was completely flummoxed. I could only assume that this lady, whoever she was, must be wealthy and my father had tricked her into believing she was marrying a respectable merchant. There seemed no other explanation for her acceptance of such a foolish proposal.
By this time, I was sixteen and had by degrees taught myself to read from cookbooks, discarded newspapers and the salacious pamphlets that Captain Truegood regularly purchased. It was in one of the newspapers that I had first come across advertisements by gentlemen for wives and occasionally by women in want of a husband. I made up one I thought my father might have written if he had resorted to writing to the paper in search of a wife. I read it out to Cook and it tickled her fancy no end.
An Invitation To The Ladies.
A captain who left the Navy to become a merchant finds himself shipwrecked on dry land with a wet whistle that can never be satisfied. Losses and crosses have reduced his fortune to no more than his wardrobe, a diamond ring, a gold watch and an amber-headed cane. In addition to the above he has a flaxen full-bottom, flea-ridden wig befitting a man of his age and position. I plead to the generous ladies of the cities of London and Westminster: SAVE ME. Letters to be sent to Truegood, Milk Street at Cheapside.
Cook told me only three days before the wedding that my stepmother-to-be had two daughters of about my age. That went some way to explain her decision to marry. Perhaps she wasn’t wealthy after all and was in search of respectability. Between you and me and a four-poster bed, there was little to nothing to recommend my father.
On the day of Captain Truegood’s nuptials he, was surprisingly sober and dressed in his flaxen full-bottom wig and his best suit of clothes. He stood in the hall clutching his amber-top cane, tapping it on the barometer and bellowing as if there was a house full of servants, not just Cook and myself.
‘Everything is to be shipshape,’ he roared. ‘I am off to be married.’
No one replied, only the front door groaned as it was closed.
There was a wonderful peace to our house, as there always was the moment the captain left. I could almost hear the walls let out a sigh and settle back to relish their bricks, bones and plaster conversations. It was at these moments that the house became bearable; the quiet peace of it, the enticing smell of fresh bread wafting from the kitchen. I thought I would have the best part of the morning to enjoy the silence before Captain and the new Mrs Truegood returned.
‘Do you think…’ I asked Cook. She had just taken a batch of fresh-baked rolls from the oven and I was putting them on a wire rack to cool. They smelled so good that my mouth watered and I slipped one surreptitiously into my apron.
‘I saw that, miss. Now put it back.’
Reluctantly I did as I was told and she huffed.
‘Do you think – ’
‘I try hard not to,’ interrupted Cook, stuffing a fowl.
‘Do you think that my father will tell my stepmother that she has a stepdaughter?’
Cook was never a great conversationalist and my question was greeted by a grunt, which I took to mean ‘no’.
I sighed. I had asked as I was certain that it would come as something of a shock to my father’s new wife for I doubted that he had told her of my existence. The reason, I supposed, was that he had so long persisted in treating me as a servant that he must have felt it to be the truth. Quite why he saw me in this unfavourable light I have never fathomed. I didn’t think for a moment that my stepmother’s discovery that I had sprung from Captain Truegood’s loins would go in my favour.
‘Do you think I will be asked to leave?’
‘Leave where?’
‘Leave here.’
‘What? You buffle head, of course not. What would you do?’
‘Be my own mistress,’ I said, ‘for I am determined not to be beholden to a man – especially one like Mr Truegood.’
‘I have no time to listen to this stuff and nonsense.’ Cook softened. She took one of the rolls and handed it to me. ‘Help yourself to butter then go and see if the canaries are still alive. I’ll call you if I need you. And try to bring some reason into that muddled head of yours.’
All that was left of the grand furnishings in the blue chamber was a four-poster bed. The chamber smelled of oranges and cloves just as it always had done. When I was little I would sit at the table with Cook, my fingers hurting as I pushed cloves into the orange flesh, releasing its puff of perfume. I felt cross at the idea of anyone else occupying this chamber, removing the veil of my mother’s ghost by their presence.
I opened the shutters and sunlight showed up the shabbiness of all within. It was only in candlelight that the chamber had any pretence to grandeur. I took the cloths off the two cages, pleased to see that the canaries were alive, and put them in front of the window where the birds started to sing, their bright yellow in such contrast to the blue.
Satisfied that all was as it should be, I resigned myself to the fact that I would no longer be able to come here. I took a last glance at the antechamber. The only piece of furniture there was my mother’s full-length looking glass.
I decided then that this was perhaps the only opportunity I would have to take stock of my figure. I had read somewhere that an accomplished young lady should be able to play a musical instrument, speak French fluently and dance. I could do none of the above. The writer also said that a good figure and a pretty face could outshine all these achievements.
My father, in his drunken wisdom, had decided not to waste his money on my education. He strongly believed that knowledge gave women the wrong ideas and made them a nuisance to their husbands. I cannot tell you how much I longed to be in charge of my own destiny. Never again did I want to be beholden to another soul. I had lived sixteen dull summers subjected to the tempestuous seas of my father’s ill-spent fortune and if I was ever allowed to have a life I did not want to be held prisoner by another man’s purse strings. In short, I was determined to earn my own way in this topsy world.
If there was a time for an honest appraisal of my assets, surely it was now, there being no one else in the house apart from Cook. I undressed and for the first time stood as naked as Eve before the mirror and studied myself in the long glass. I had rounded ivory globes that sat well, but I thought were a little too large for such a trim waist, though they did have pleasing rose petal nipples. I had a flat stomach, and a dark, soft covering of downy fluff hid my Venus mound. As for my shoulders, they were not too bony, more soft as was the fashion of the day. Those at least I thought were passable. My legs I decided were shapely. I had fine ankles and slender wrists, all of which I put down to being in my favour. But my face was the greatest disappointment. I could tell I was not destined to be a beauty. It was long, as was my neck; my nose, alas, seemed snubbed. I had thick eyebrows that met in a bow in the middle and lips too full. My teeth I deemed to be my only asset worth a mention: they were neat and white. I felt the whole composition had been put together in a clumsy, ill-thought-out manner. The portrait was framed by thick, unruly hair of a mouse-coloured hue. The only striking quality about my looks, or so I thought, was the colour of my eyes. They were green and my skin alabaster, which was not due to any design but by the mere fact that I had hardly seen any sunlight since the day I was born.
The front of me being thoroughly weighed and found wanting, I had turned my attentions to my bottom, when to my utter horror the door to the antechamber opened and there stood a gentleman in the finest clothes I had ever seen. Such was my embarrassment to be discovered this way that I daren’t look up and neither did I think to find my shift to cover my modesty. Instead, head bowed, I stared at his riding boots.
‘Madam, pardon me,’ he said, as calmly as if he had found me fully dressed. ‘I did not mean to intrude upon your toilette. I am looking for Captain Truegood.’
‘He has gone off to be married,’ I said. ‘No one is at home.’
‘And who do have I the honour of addressing?’
‘Tully Truegood, sir.’
Daring myself to look up, I was struck dumb by his appearance, for he was not only most handsomely dressed but possessed a face which, unlike mine, seemed to have been put together with great thought, and a certain knowledge of how good features and a strong jawline and a straight nose could make a girl weak to the knees.
I must have gone white, or whiter still, for he helped me to a chair then went in search of port wine. I found my shift and hurriedly, if unsteadily, put it over my head.
He re-entered the chamber with a glass and, smiling, said, ‘Madam, I prefer you as you were for you have been blessed with a figure that is a delight to look upon.’
He handed me the wine and I drank it down in one great gulp.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I will come back,’ he said, ‘when your father is at home.’ He bowed and went to leave.
‘Who shall I say called, sir?’
He didn’t reply. And then to my amazement he came back into the room and lifted my face to his and kissed me. Having never been kissed before I was uncertain as to what I was supposed to do. He wasn’t, and before I knew what had happened my mouth was full of his tongue and a part of me that had never ached before felt as if it might die if something wasn’t done to soothe the yearning.
He pulled away from me so suddenly that I felt bereft and without a thought to modesty I put my arms round his neck. Laughing, he untangled himself from me and undid the ribbons on my shift so that it fell once more to the floor. He stroked my face. His fingers were long and elegant, and slowly they went down my neck, over my breast, and circled my nipples, which had the effect of making them hard. His hand caressed my stomach and wherever his fingers went they seemed to waken the flesh of me that before had been fast asleep. He touched the inside of my thigh and then up into the soft purse of my Venus mound.
I should have been outraged and I was not, just ablaze with longing – for what, I didn’t know. I felt certain that I was about to find out, but he took his hand away.
‘Don’t give that sweet, white rose of yours to any stranger,’ he said. ‘Wait for your husband to come and claim it, and more besides.’
‘I don’t think he ever will,’ I said.
He smiled and kissed me once more. ‘Oh, he will. Believe me, he will.’
And with that he was gone.
I tried to compose myself but the ache in me was so terrible and all of it stemmed from between my legs. I wondered if I was ill with a fever but could not think of any remedy. How long I sat there in that bemused state I could not say. At length I was startled into action by the sound of a carriage pulling up outside our house and the noise of people arriving. Hurriedly, I dressed, my cheeks still on fire.
I went down the stairs and stopped on the first floor landing from where I could see all the people in the hall without being seen.
Quite a party had arrived and I could not fathom which of three elegantly dressed ladies was my stepmother for all were so beautifully turned out. But it was not the sight of the exotic plumage that unsettled me: it was the tall, thin man with a wooden leg coming in with my father. His face was bleached of colour as I remembered it and behind him came the little white dog. I held tight to the banister for there was a whooshing sound in my head and the taste of iron in my mouth. The little dog discovered my hiding place, ran up the stairs and jumped up, asking to be lifted from the ground.
My father, upon entering the hall and seeing me, gave me a look and, if looks could be fired from pistols, that look would have killed me.
‘This way, madam,’ he said, and guided one of the ladies into the parlour where Cook had laid the wedding breakfast.
It was then that I was overtaken by a most strange occurrence that I put down to the unusual excitement of seeing the one-legged man again. He whistled to call the little dog back and winked at me, showing his painted eye. The whooshing sound in my head said he had seen right through me, that he knew about the gentleman. I was standing on the Coffin-Maker’s step and in my hurry to move on I must have tripped, and it felt to me as if my clothes were wings, unravelling from me, and I had taken flight. The one-legged gentleman’s face appeared to become detached from his body and floated nearer to me and at that moment I saw the stairs rise, felt myself falling into them, and fortunately remembered no more.
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