A Taste for Nightshade

by Martine Bailey

  I grew into a child inhabiting an over-tall body, a half-formed woman lacking even a working woman’s sense. And so you see, I have tasted the life of a drudge – the treadmill of unrewarded industry, of scalding pans, and battling against mud and dirt. My only pleasurable hours lay in the secret pursuit of my drawing: my pencils sharpened to needle points, my miniature portraits shrinking the world to a fairy size. I re-drew John Francis’s portrait from memory, seeking to resurrect something of his warm gaze, seeing again his lips parted in an indulgent smile. The precious lock of his hair shone a rich orpiment yellow in the sunlight; I wove it in a plait to set below his portrait.

  Then a letter arrived at Palatine House, and inside was such news that I was roused to startled wakefulness. I have heard it called a sort of murder to wake a sleepwalker; that the heart may be shocked into stopping. But is that sufficient reason to let a slumberer sleep on?

  4

  The Pacific Ocean

  Summer 1792

  ∼ To Broil Sea Lion Steaks ∼

  Cut your steaks from the shoulder about one inch thick. When your fire is hot lay them on your gridiron, upon a little melted blubber. Turn until enough and send to the table hot. Said by some to be superior to beefsteaks, if one can ignore the odour of aged mackerel.

  A receipt from the log books of Pacific whaling ships

  Just after eight bells on a Friday night, when the parson of the Forbearance always performed Evening Service, Mary began a careful search of his cabin. Dimming her lamp to a sulphurous glow, she surrendered to the old thrill, the thievish itch for gain. She began by rifling through the contents of the little cupboard in the wall. It held nothing but trifles; a chipped cup, a balding brush, nothing she could pledge for a few bob, back in England. As silent as a shadow, she flicked through a pile of mildewed books, and then ransacked his seaman’s chest, lifting each fusty item and shaking it hard. A few sheets of clean paper were all she found, and these she hastily stuffed in the front of her gown. Noiselessly, she moved towards the bunk to search beneath the mattress.

  All at once a dark body rose from the sheets, towering above her. ‘What are you doing here?’ the voice boomed, a loud bass, husky from sleep.

  Before she could run for it, he grasped her hard by the arm and snatched her lamp away, thrusting it toward her face.

  ‘Didn’t reckon on my curate taking the service tonight, eh?’ said the grizzle-bearded parson. ‘Thought you’d have a bit of a prowl, did you, Flora – or whatever you call yourself?’

  So he knew. The captain and the others had swallowed the tale that she was Flora Jean Pilling, shipwrecked daughter of the Reverend Pilling of Mission Bay, the rest of her family slaughtered in a native attack. She had produced the girl’s brooch, that bore a portrait of her father and a Bible-screed inside its clasp, and everyone but this Devil-baiter had been gulled. He had more skill than most, she supposed, in the secret language of souls.

  ‘What have you taken?’ he growled. She made a performance of searching her own person.

  ‘There.’ He pointed at her bulging pocket.

  She emptied it: a pair of blood-seeping seal ribs, wrapped in a pocket handkerchief. The crew had slaughtered two fat seal-cows, but it seemed only she appreciated the silky, fishy flesh, and she had filched the others’ leavings. He winced in disgust. It was a mighty shame he had found her supper. She was weary of oatmeal burgoo and had looked forward to gnawing the ribs, alone in her cabin.

  ‘I were famished,’ she protested. ‘And no one else wanted them.’

  ‘I know your sort.’

  She cast a guarded glance towards him. He was standing now, his rough-hewn face fierce in the lamplight

  ‘Sometimes what happens in a place so far from God can fester like a wound. Turn a good soul bad.’ Behind the lamp-gold reflections in his eyes lay something unreadable. It might have been kindness; it might have been a trap.

  ‘Confession is the only medicine,’ he said, lowering his sermonising voice to a whisper. ‘I could hear your confession now, girl.’

  Was it his fatherly concern that made her throat burn for a moment? Then she dismissed his compassion as fakery. And she was no fool. For four months they had voyaged together, England-bound from New Zealand, and she had lived by her wits. Not for the first time, she wondered if she was properly well. She had put on some welcome flesh, and the sores on her body were slowly healing under papery skin; but the wound the parson talked of, that was not so easily mended. Its pain fretted her like a splinter of steel, lodged awkwardly close to a bone. But to speak of what had happened? She glanced up from the pitching floor of the cabin. The parson was waiting, his eyes narrowed in his crumpled face. The glib words that had always been her trade refused to come.

  ‘Forty years I’ve sailed the blue Pacific,’ he declaimed like a prophet. ‘This ocean has a dark tide, which sweeps the unsuspecting sinner far beyond dry land. I’ve rescued my share of the lost and castaway. Some with tattoos carved in their flesh like pagan picture-books, others plain crazed or starved away to bones. Such derelict souls can acquire uncivilised tastes.’

  He gazed at the bloody bones seeping into her handkerchief.

  ‘And some can begin to forget the English tongue,’ he added slyly.

  ‘I have not forgot it,’ she said quickly. For she could now understand most of the English she heard – she was not as she had been at Hokianga, when it had at first seemed only gibbering sounds. ‘I know ma own tongue,’ she added, remembering the Edinburgh lilt this time. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Then use it while you have the chance,’ he said fiercely. ‘Unburden yourself, Flora Pilling, or whatever name you travel under. Confess – or I’ll send word to the Naval Office. Perhaps they have a record of a young wanderer – or would that be deserter, from Sydney Cove?’

  What had Charlie always said? Quiet is best, as the fox said when he bit the cock’s head off. She summoned an injured whimper. ‘I have a toothache. I was only searching for a thread to pull it, not wanting to disturb you. You are wrong to accuse me, after all my sorrows. If you persist, I shall complain to the master.’

  He motioned her to go, mistrust still pinching his face. Damn you, she thought as she hurried away. Sermonising crow!

  Back in her own cabin, she slammed the door shut and pulled her blanket around her shoulders. Tossing on her bed, she began to croon savage curses to herself. The prick of tears started up behind her eyes, but she damped them down, proud of not weeping now for many long years. Fury, as thick as molasses, pulsed through her veins.

  A despatch to London might see her marched right off the ship and straight to the gallows. Devil rot the parson, she enjoyed being Flora, the captain’s favourite. Her days were idle and her thoughts her own. By personating Flora she had planned to sit quiet all the way back to old England.

  A true confession was beyond her. Might she make a sham confession? Damn him, that soul-snatcher would catch her out. She smashed her fist into the pillow and wished it was his grizzled jaw.

  Next morning, waking in her plump feather bed, she chided herself for acting like a dumb-witted flat. Just before dinner time, she sought out the ship’s cook in his filthy galley. His one skewed eye moved across every part of her but her face; he was an ill-favoured cove much scarified by cannonball. Breathlessly, she told him she wanted a handful of oatmeal to make a rinse for her hair, all the time lifting and stroking her unpinned tresses. He nodded, gape-mouthed, and she squeezed past him to where the supplies were kept.

  Her nose led her to what was seeking. Trying not to breathe, her long fingers delved into the remains of the seal carcasses, finding slippery pale blubber, a jagged jawbone, leathery flippers. There it was – a yielding sliver of jellified mush that stank of metal. She pulled off a hunk of the rotting liver and slid it into a pot inside her pocket. Offering to carry a few plates to dinner, it was the work of moments to mix a little into the dish of lobscouse on the parson’s plate.

  By midnight the old crow was smitt
en with a pain in his skull that left him half-blind and speechless. She joined the rest of the crew in speculating on the cause: could it be a fever, a foreign leech in the eye, or a bubole in the brain perhaps?

  A few days later, her dear protector, the captain, looked in on her as she sat with the invalid. ‘I do like to see a tender-hearted female about the place,’ he told her with fatherly regard. She looked up from the parson’s writing desk, and poured a cup of sweetness into her smile. ‘He is no trouble at all, now, Captain. His kind attention to me and my history must be repaid.’

  When the captain had stumped away she cast a chill glance at her charge. The old man was shrunken and almost sightless. There was no expectation of his recovery before they reached England.

  Dipping her quill she completed the receipt she was copying into one of the parson’s memorandum books. She felt a swell of pride that she had obtained proof of a culinary experiment; one that the crew of a visiting whaling ship had warned her of, back in Sydney Cove.

  Sea Lion: Said by some to be superior to beefsteaks if one might ignore the mackerel odour the liver is a strong poison which in small doses will attack the brain and make the eyes no longer able to tolerate even candlelight. By some accounts it will kill dogs and men; one spoonful will leave a large man insensible.

  Smoothing a new page across the tiny table, she again stabbed a quill into ink. It was time to set all the rest of it down too, before the crowds and clamour of England barged it all away. She remembered those fancy receipt books written by Lady Nonesuch, or Countess Thingumabob, and laughed out loud. They boasted how damnable high bred the lady was, and how the reader might herself be reckoned à la mode, if she could only cook such stuff herself.

  No, her book would hold a dark mirror to such conceits. Since Mother Eve’s day, women had whispered of herblore and crafty potions, the wise woman’s weapons against the injustices of life; a life of ill treatment, the life of a dog. If women were to be kicked into the kitchen they might play it to their advantage, for what was a kitchen but a witch’s brewhouse? Men had no notion of what women whispered to each other, hugger-mugger by the chimney corner; of treaclish syrups and bitter pods, of fat black berries and bulbous roots. Such remedies were rarely scribbled on paper; they were carried in noses, fingertips and stealthy tongues. Methods were shared in secret, of how to make a body hot with lust or shiver with fever, or to doze for a stretch or to sleep for eternity.

  Like a chorus the hungry ghosts started up around her: voices that croaked and cackled and damned their captors headlong into hell. Her ghosts were the women who had sailed out beside her to Botany Bay, nearly five years back on the convict ship Experiment. She made a start with that most innocent of dishes: Brinny’s best receipt for Apple Pie. For there was magic in even that – the taking of uneatables: sour apples, claggy fat, dusty flour - and their abradabrification into a crisp-lidded, syrupy miracle. Mother Eve’s Secrets, she titled her book, a collection of best receipts and treacherous remedies. As her pen conjured the convict women’s talk, she reckoned it one of the few good things to have come to her from those last terrible years. Well, there had been Jack Pierce of course, but— she suffocated any further memory of Jack fast, before it shattered her to pieces.

  As she wrote, the means to accomplish her revenge formed in her mind, so boldly that she laughed out loud, and clapped her hand across her mouth. She would be a cook! The very word delighted her. She would make herself busy in the downstairs of the household, butchering and baking, and doling out whatever was deserved. As she recalled incomparable dishes and counterfeit cures, she imagined herself the mistress of a great store of food. As big as a house, she dreamed it, a palace made of sugarplums, or a castle baked of cake. The serpent that would be a dragon must dine well. But could any store ever be vast enough, to sate her hunger for all she had lost?

  5

  Greaves, Lancashire

  Summer 1792

  ∼ Pease Pudding ∼

  Take your pease and wash and boil them in a cloth, take off the scum and put in a piece of bacon and whatsoever herbs you have. Boil it not too thick, serve with the bacon and pour on the broth. Next day, whatsoever you have left over, slice it and fry it.

  Grace Moore, her cheapest dish

  It was a dream that heralded the day my life changed: a dream of John Francis aged seventeen again, a long-limbed, smooth-faced youth. He had been invited to dine at Palatine House. My mother, bless her soul, was alive again and smiling, and even Father was agreeable. I too was young again, sixteen years old, overflowing with feelings since quite lost to me.

  We sat about the table and picked at Mother’s genteel sweetmeats: apricot biscuits, quince paste, and sugared walnuts. John caught my eye whenever he could; there was a teasing mischief to his looks that banished my usual awkwardness. When my parents left us alone, John’s large hand, very warm, slipped under the table and took hold of mine. Then he kissed me, very tenderly and moist, on the lips. He held my face in his big-knuckled hands and something passed between us; something so powerful that my girlish hopes burst into life. I was like a scrawny chick comprehending its marvellous change into a dove. I was young and giddy with pleasure, struck with wonder that this was how my life would be.

  Instead I woke to a muzzy July dawn. My feet poked out from the end of my childhood bed. I idled for a while, picking those strips around my nails that they call ‘mother’s blessings’, rehearsing my dream to extend its pitiful life. Then, as the Brabantists do, I asked myself what portents it contained. Food was generally deemed to be God’s bounty, unless it was a monarch’s banquet, when it signified the sin of gluttony. Was that slow kiss the Devil’s work? I could not believe wickedness could feel so thrilling.

  I got up, for my nail began to bleed from an ugly wound. Perhaps the dream was only a cruel figment sent to torture me? Above me hung John’s portrait; all I had left of him since he’d sailed away. And I remembered events as they truly had been, my father lying drunken on the ground, and John Francis looking at me in a sort of agony. After that, any lad who even smiled at me got short shrift from my father. Then Father made his decision. ‘You must bide with me now, Grace,’ he said. ‘I’ll not take a servant, for no free soul should slave for another. But as my daughter it’s your duty to keep house for me, now your mother has gone.’

  And it had not escaped my notice that I did not even cost a servant’s wages.

  The thump made my bedroom door shake. ‘Grace! Fetch my breakfast, you lazybones.’

  ‘Father, please! A moment.’ I scrabbled about, bundling on my clothes as he hammered again. I feared the lock might break from its housing – I worried, too, that anyone passing might hear him. But when I finally unlocked my door and swung it open, the landing was empty. I found him downstairs in the parlour, lying twisted on the ground, drunk and helpless. I held my hand out to him, but he stared at it suspiciously, as if he didn’t know me, his only daughter.

  ‘Away, you useless creature. Look at yourself, you scarecrow!’ It shamed me to see him like that, with the spittle on his lips and his breath foul from liquor. At some time in the night, after staggering home drunk, he had thrown last night’s supper against the wall. The remnants of my pease pudding had grown a brown crust and the bacon looked like rusty leather. It was no feast, but still, a morning’s labour had been spent to turn a few pennyworth of stony peas into a palatable dish. That’s how much you care for me, I thought.

  ‘Come along, Father,’ I said gently. ‘Let me help you up.’

  He let me hoist him upright, his bulk pressing heavy on my shoulders, till he staggered on his own two feet. Then, with no warning, he swung out with his fist and hit me hard on the side of my head. I cried out and recoiled, dizzy from the blow. With lips pressed tightly, so he might not hear me whimper, I stumbled back upstairs to my chamber. There, a wet cloth against my thumping head, I surrendered to self-pity. I turned to my dear mother’s portrait, recollecting that happy season when she had sat for me each
afternoon.

  No sooner had I wiped my face dry than a smart knock rapped at the front door. Passing downstairs to the parlour, I was grateful that Father had at least hauled himself up into a chair, from which he eyed me fiercely, as if I were to blame for all his troubles.

  ‘Mr Croxon,’ I said, dismayed to see our landlord on the doorstep. ‘I hope all is in order?’

  Mr Croxon hesitated, then gave me a tight nod. He too had high-coloured cheeks; I wondered if he had come directly from the Quince and Salver.

  ‘All could be put in order, yes, Miss Moore. With a little plain dealing.’

  Our landlord had once been a carpenter, before shrewd use of his small capital had allowed him to buy and put to rent a number of properties in the town. Once he had been Father’s customer too, and it was a credit to the man that he still tipped his hat in greeting, where many now cut him dead. I had not forgotten that it was thanks to Mr Croxon that we stayed on at Palatine House, for without his having made an arrangement with Father, we might have been turned out by bailiffs.

  He strolled past me and pulled up a chair beside my father. I listened at the door as they talked of news from France. Some dreadful machine had been invented to decapitate the French nobility, Mr Croxon recalled with some glee. ‘Had enough of French Liberty yet, eh, Moore?’ My father mumbled in reply; the fire for reform was dying within him. Like many Britons we had rejoiced at the Bastille’s fall, but now read each news despatch with horror.