A Taste for Nightshade

by Martine Bailey

  Ahead, something of a palaver had broken out, but she had no inclination to look too hard towards the beams where the corpses dangled. A heavy hand fell on her shoulder.

  ‘Mary Jebb?’ She nodded at the turnkey. The other three women were being shoulder-clapped, too.

  A legal-looking fellow pushed before them and started to shout from a paper. In the midst of shrieks and boos and the rushing in her ears, it was hard to understand his meaning at first. A few words reached her: ‘His Majesty … Mercy … seven years.’ Crazily, her first thought was that the bloody king had stolen her moment of glory.

  Back in her old room at Newgate she contemplated her new fate. Seven years’ transportation to some godless place no one had ever been to, or scarcely even heard of. Lags were no longer sent to America, which at least had people and cities and regular trade. Botany Bay was some freakish wilderness across the world, spied out by that tosspot, Captain Cook.

  ‘I should rather have snuffed it with honour,’ she told Charlie.

  ‘Come now, Mary. It gives us time to get you out of here and home for good. A whole long month,’ he said in his lawyer’s voice. Charlie’s plan was to file a writ of error, after getting the cully to withdraw all charges. ‘You’ll walk free, Mary. It’s just like any sting we’ve pulled off in the past. I’ll make it easy, I’ll write the screeve saying he’s mighty sorry but he nabbed the wrong woman. It’s as easy as kiss my hand. You get the fellow to sign, and you’ll walk from here a free woman.’

  With no more than paper and ink and her own coaxing words, she persuaded the cully to come down to London. She was saved from the gallows, she said, so she wanted to forgive him, in the flesh, as a farewell gift. Like a pigeon he hopped and fluttered towards her until she held him tightly in her snare. Within a week the cove agreed to sign the retraction.

  Charlie’s paper was drawn up ready, and the gull was to visit her at three o’clock the next Saturday. At first it seemed the fellow was only late, or perhaps there had been an accident? The bell struck four, and five, then six, and seven. When the gates were locked she saw it, as clear as a gypsy’s crystal. The gull had flown away, leaving her to pay her dues on the far side of the world. The biggest sting of her life – that should have saved her from the pits of hell – had failed. She cursed him as a turncoat and a black-hearted dog, but all the oaths in the world couldn’t save her from Botany Bay.

  A week later she shuffled out into the prison yard, her legs in irons. Charlie had not shown his face again. Overnight she was dead cargo, no longer worth a swell cove’s notice. The yard was a foul place; half-naked wretches loitered in the stink, many as thin as wraiths. Bony children played at an open drain, their eyes huge in dirt-caked faces. Gin was the Newgate Master’s best trade, and those with a few pence chose oblivion on the stony ground. A racket broke out across the way; it was the other women from the Hanging Day, also bound for Botany Bay. The prisoner she later knew as Ma Watson was squawking at a fellow crouched over a workbench.

  ‘What’s it to you if I want a dog picture?’ she wailed, shaking her skinny fist. The rest of the women were spurring her on, laughing like old mares. Mary sauntered over and all fell silent, for she still had the style of a mobsman’s Poll, in her striped taffety and feathered hat. The man looked up. ‘Want a love token for your sweetheart, my pretty?’ He lifted one up for her to inspect, a sparkling disc of copper. ‘Jenks is the name. Only a bob each, best workmanship you’ll find.’

  The crone grasped her sleeve and opened her toothless mouth, ready to start up again.

  ‘Stow it, you old moaner,’ Jenks barked. ‘Let the lady look. Here’s the ones waiting to be hammered out.’

  Mary inspected the designs inked on paper, waiting to be engraved. Ma Watson’s was crude enough; an outline of a house with My Cotage of Peace ∗ Took From Me on the front, and a stick-limbed dog on the reverse above the words FOR∗GET∗ME∗NOT.

  She flicked through the rest. Most were sentimental rhymes, the usual sailor’s farewells of the ‘when this you see, remember me,’ variety.

  She lingered over an image of a man and woman, hand in hand, circled with chains: My Dear Son, Absent But Not Forgot, Your Sorry Mother.

  Too late to be sorry, now, she thought. Next, that whore Janey had commissioned seven identical tokens. Mary smiled at the picture of a man and woman coupling and the verse:

  Though My Fair Flesh Transported Be, My Blissful O still longs for thee.

  Who did Mary have to remember her? She watched as Jenks hammered the disc with a nail tip, every blow confirming the rotten truth of it. Charlie had dropped her. Any day soon she would be shipped off with these filthy slummocks to the ends of the earth. Her whole existence would be forgotten.

  Ma Watson clawed at her sleeve again. ‘He’s got no one to look after him. Bobby’s his name—’

  ‘Get off me, you crack-pate!’ Shaking off the crone she marched back to her own comfortable quarters on the Master’s Side. How had it come to this, that she had no truelove, not even a child or a mongrel dog?

  Next day when she returned to the yard she hung back while the prison guard sang the latest ballad to the band of ragtag women:

  ‘There’s whores, pimps and bastards, a large costly crew,

  Maintained by the sweat of a labouring few,

  They should have no commission, place, pension or pay,

  Such locusts should all go to Botany Bay …’

  ‘I never reckoned to be remembered in song,’ hooted the woman they called Brinny. Were they halfwits? The whole country despised them; they were being swilled away like hogwash.

  Mary strode up to Jenks. ‘Here,’ she said, handing him a scrap of paper very beautifully scribed. ‘I want it done in that Lady’s Hand, good and clear, not those bodged capitals.’

  Though chains hold me fast,

  As the years pass away,

  I swear on this heart

  To find you one day.

  Beside it was the screed for the reverse, with a pattern of hearts, chains, and knives to be incised about the edge:

  MARY JEBB AGE 19

  TRANSPORTED 7 YEARS

  TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

  ‘Two the same? Double-dealing your sweethearts, eh?’ She shot him a glance like poison, and threw down two bob.

  Jenks didn’t do a bad job. Once she’d pawned her fine hat to the jailer, she had the money to see both the tokens safely parcelled up and posted. Seven years with no return, she thought. That might suit these common prigs, but she was going to engrave her destiny with the ink of Fate. She would never let Mary Jebb be forgotten.

  At first the voyage on the Experiment had seemed a pleasure jaunt after Newgate: the master had let the convicts exercise on deck, have their saucy games, and feast on perfumed fruits with curious names and colours. A few weeks into the voyage the first floggings took place. A bunch of sots had grabbed a cask of grog and, with less brains than guts, had drunk the lot and been discovered flat on the floor. All the convicts were mustered, as the captain droned on of forgiveness and such codswallop. Still, it had been as good as a church-gathering, to get a good eyeful of all the other lags.

  As yet, Mary had scant interest in the other women; she wanted no pals. They were either rivals to be battled with or trulls to be elbowed aside. She stood alone and watchful, the habitual stance of a fly-girl like her. It wasn’t women who would keep her alive but men – or to begin with, a strong, obedient, hard-knuckled man. She was still well togged in her striped taffety, and she kept her white skin clean. Already some of the flightier young girls had paired off with the crew, but she reckoned a sailor a poor investment, no sooner bedded than he’d abandon her and sail back to Blighty.

  The topmost lags swaggered by the rail, hard-bitten mobsmen scarred by murder and villainy. Their molls would be slaveys, cursed and beaten, and shared between mates. She would have to wager on a fellow from the lower orders.

  For sure she could always do worse than Jack Pierce. When he had g
iven her the odd hopeful smile she had returned it sweetly. At first she’d thought him nothing but a flat – a sailor transported for claiming a mate’s prize money. But he was bonny, with his long fair locks and china-blue eyes. And he had a lucky shine to him; some Church Society had picked him off the streets and paid to have him trained up as a seaman. Though he was no more than twenty, he was well-liked by the crew and the redcoats. As for the navigation and such-like he had learned, she’d already calculated how useful that might prove. Within the day she had him snared. When he kissed her and told her she was his girl, she wondered if he was that square he thought her an innocent. Day by day she wound him in as tightly as she could, turning herself into a prim girl, in need of a sweetheart’s protection. Whatever it takes, she told herself, you’ve got to clamber to the top of this stinking heap.

  Then the wild South Seas had destroyed such pleasure-trip fancies and gawping at the men. For four months they were soaked in stinking green slime, while the vessel was shaken like a rat. ‘Damn you God, let me die,’ Ma Watson had groaned like a litany, and a chorus agreed. The drinking water swarmed with worms, the biscuits with weevils, the bilges stank with rancid rations and dead rats. Rumours raged that the Navy Office had given orders they all must be drowned on a certain day, so long as it was far from England. Battened down in a waterlogged rolling coffin, they would believe anything. Almost eight months from England, an island was sighted with a name that sounded like Demon’s Land, but a black squall hit them like a battering ram and there was no safe landing. To a chorus of miserable wailing, a young wife gave birth to a baby girl, as dead as a doorpost, which was cast overboard the following day. Next, a feeble-minded pedlar woman managed to bang her head and drown herself in the filthy swill. She lay dead for three days in chains before the stink of her persuaded them to report it, so fierce was the clamour for her ration. The food had dwindled to a cup of gruel each day, with a speck of fish swimming in it. That was their lot, all they had to keep body and soul together.

  It could have been day or night in the pitch-black hold, when old Ma Watson started up her wailing. ‘Is that all there is? How’m I to live on that slip-slop? I’d give me two eyes for a slice of apple pie.’ She was brain-cracked, but spoke for them all.

  Then Tabby Jones joined in, holding forth on the making of the best apple pie: the particular apples, whether reinettes or pippins, the bettermost flavourings: cinnamon, cloves, or a syrup made from the peelings. Slowly, groans of vexation turned to appreciative mumblings. Someone else favoured quince, another lemon. Apples, they all agreed, though the most commonplace of fruit, did produce an uncommon variety of delights: pies and puddings, creams and custards, jellies and junkets, ciders and syllabubs. The time passed a deal quicker and merrier than before.

  Janey, the whore who had once been famed in Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, told them, in her child’s voice, that the best dish she ever tasted was a Desert Island of Flummery, at a mansion in Grosvenor Square. ‘It was all over jellies and candies and dainty figures, and a hut of real gold-leaf. Like eating money, it were. I fancied meself a proper duchess.’

  She knew what Janey meant. When she had first met Aunt Charlotte she had gorged herself until her fingers were gummy with syrup and cream. There was one cake she never forgot; a puffed conceit of cream, pastry, and pink sugar comfits. She bit her knuckles hungrily and sucked the blood. It came to her then that they were starving, slowly and surely, to death.

  They all hushed as Brinny, the one murderess of their crew, told them of the making of her bride cake, with primrose yellow butter and raisins of the sun, fattened on smuggled brandy. The further they sailed from England, the fonder they grew of the pleasures of home: plum trees with bowed branches, brambles in the hedge, cream from a beloved cow. Someone asked if Brinny’s bridegroom was as fine as her cake. ‘Sadly he were not,’ she said dolefully. ‘Why else d’ye think I be sitting here, transported for the murdering of the old dog with a dose of his own ratsbane?’ Everyone laughed rustily at that, like machines grinding back to life.

  The women’s talk interested Mary mightily; for it stripped bare their hearts’ desires: Janey’s for luxury, Brinny’s for her wedding day’s pride, all of them for secret pleasures. And the stuff of hearts’ desires was always of interest to an out-and-out racket-girl like her. She mulled it all over, as they picked at sores and cursed every battering of the ocean against the ship’s timbers. Finally she asked a question: ‘Do you reckon a man might be snared by food?’

  Why, it was easy as pie they said – a man was not so much led by his tail as his belly. For he must eat three times a day, which was twice more than most could raise the other appetite. Surely all men longed for their mother’s milk, for a life of ease, to sprawl in a cradle of wifely care? In the hopeless darkness, secrets poured forth from those who had spent a lifetime turning tricks and picking pockets. Their talk turned to stranger receipts: the cure-alls and quackeries that transformed a few pennies into a bag of sovereigns. Janey giggled about the nostrum she had once hawked to keep the face eternally young that was mere water and ashes. Mother Watson’s cure-all elixir was mostly stinking lye from piss-pots. As for love potions, they were the easiest to fob off on simpletons. A pretty-coloured water and a few magic words – it was astonishing how fast a fool was parted from his purse. Death potions, too – Brinny told them everything she had learned from her lover the apothecary, before she tired of him, too, and dosed him with his own poison.

  All the while, Mary picked out the chief threads of their notions: that a body wanted pleasure in this life and not the next, and eternally longed for youth and health, and would risk a fortune for beauty. The purchase of love was irresistible, and the procurement of murder more common than even she had guessed. The best of it, the essence, she scratched so deeply in her memory that it left an enduring trace, like the ghosts of letters on a well-worn slate.

  Five years later

  3

  Greaves, Lancashire

  Summer 1792

  ∼ To Make Knotted Biscuits of Apricots ∼

  Take ripe Apricots, pare, stone and beat them small, then boil them till they are thick. Take them off the fire and beat them up with sifted Sugar and Aniseeds to make a pretty fine paste. Make into little rolls the thickness of straw and tye them in little Knots in what form you please; dry them in the Stove or in the Sun.

  The best receipt of Mrs Jonah Moore,

  given to her by her grandmamma

  I fancy you think little of who makes the food you eat. Thrice a day it appears. Do you truly know whose fingers touched it? Do you give a moment’s attention to the mind that devised your dish, its method and ingredients? Of course you do not. That would drag you out of your comfortable chair, along the corridor, down narrow rickety stairs, along a greasy stone floor to the under-regions of your home. There work a pair of quick but red-scabbed hands, a pair of eyes that judge and shape your food upon its platter. A mind entirely unknown to you directs these preparations – yet you allow it to choose each morsel that will enter your mouth. You are not a menial, a scullion. Your thoughts are occupied with higher matters.

  It is a notion of mine that we distract ourselves with false fears, turning our eyes from the true horrors stalking this world. When I was young I had many foolish terrors: a dread of speaking in large company, or having to dance or sing or exhibit some other accomplishment. My name is Grace, but I was never as graceful as my name promised. I envied those girls who were bright and glib, for I was left much alone, and developed a habit of watchful silence.

  When I was a child we were as good as anyone else who lived in Greaves. Mother’s dowry had bought Palatine House, the largest house on Wood Street. My father decreed I must not be indulged by learning of any kind, it being sure to spoil a female. He especially forbade any education in the Fine Arts, though my mother had been a painter of some talent when they first met.

  My mother rebelled, cautiously and craftily, as thwarted women will.
She gave me lessons in the stolen time while Father was away at business. I remember her standing before me in a bluebell-striped dress, her tired face suddenly shining as she opened A Ladies Instructor For Painting Diverse Delights, so we might copy its hand-coloured plates. ‘Grace, you have a fine eye,’ Mother said. I wanted to dissect the heart of my subjects, to catch the shadow of the wilting rose in cadmium red, and conjure the snow tumbling like thistledown outside the window in washes of cerulean blue. One day, when painting the gleaming sphere of an apple, a black wriggling creature punctured the skin from the inside. Mother was bemused that I carried on painting, recording the creature’s ugly pointed head and shiny segments. ‘That is the truth,’ I insisted, proud of my picture.

  In turn, my mother portrayed me in delicate shadowy pencil: a serious, thin-featured child; long limbed and shy. Even when alone with brushes in hand we spoke softly, alert to heavy footsteps on the drive. My mother’s high-strung nerves had trained my own. ‘He is here,’ I would whisper, my heart stirring as if an ogre crossed the threshold, and not my own father. Our work was rapidly hidden away in the seat of an oak settle. There must have been other lessons too, for I wrote with an elegant looped hand, and borrowed every new novel from the town’s paltry Circulating Library. Genteel crumbs of knowledge I think them now, remnants of a gentler age, like the biscuits Mother once twisted in Elizabethan knots.