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‘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.
