A Taste for Nightshade

by Martine Bailey

  8

  Manchester

  Summer 1792

  ∼ Penny Mutton Pies ∼

  To make five dozen pies take one and a half pounds of mutton and boil with a little brown colouring. Make your pastry from a quartern of flour and two pounds of suet. Season with a deal of black pepper and be heavy with the salt and you will sell much drink besides. The cost will be half a crown and the profit to your pocket, the same again.

  Mother Eve’s Secrets

  Here was the Pen and Angel again, still standing five years on, the sign creaking in the Manchester rain, the frontage betraying long years of dust and decrepitude. As for the Palace, that had used to be hid around the back, that was something else now; some sort of workers’ hall or meeting place. In the shop there was a new boy, who gave Mary directions to the Cupid, a smart public house near the law courts, with wooden booths for private conversation. The tapster there was a stranger too; a stoat-faced youth who would not meet her eye.

  ‘Mr Trebizond,’ he said, polishing the bar as if it were made of crystal. ‘On my mark, he don’t come here no more.’

  At first she was furious, and then she recalled that ‘On my mark’ was the gang’s old signal. She laid her hand on the bar and splayed her fingers, so the fellow could see the five dots tattooed in the crease between her thumb and first finger.

  ‘On my mark, he’ll know me all right,’ she said in a low voice. The man nodded, and, without a word, let her pass behind the bar.

  After following him down corridors and crossing a gloomy courtyard, they arrived at a painted back entrance with a brass knocker, where the tapster motioned her up a flight of brass-railed stairs. Her heart beat fast. She could almost smell Charlie in the grand style of the place. Then there he was before her, the same old Charlie, sitting alone at a desk with his pen in his hand.

  ‘Mary!’ As he jumped up, she read him closely – there was at least an appearance of delight on his ugly monkey face. He was still the genteel swell of her memory, all gold fobs and velvet trim. ‘Well, who would have believed it? Sweetheart!’ He held out his arms, and they embraced, just as they had done a thousand times before. He looked down at her, his hair thinner and his eyes as sharp as ever in a new web of creases. ‘Was it terribly bad?’ he asked. He still had that treacle voice, bookish and legal, even though he’d never had the proper schooling; only what he taught himself while fiddling his master’s accounts.

  She could not answer – only shook her head.

  ‘But – wait. You’re back early? You?’ He frowned. ‘Great God, Mary. Have you bolted?’

  She kept her face hidden against his chest. ‘I’ve had me fill, Charlie.’ They sat down in his smart chairs, and she told him, as if it was just a yarn, of how she had sailed home as Flora Pilling, all the while searching his face for signs.

  ‘Sharp as a pin, you are, Mary,’ he said, full of the old charm. ‘You know I did my best to prevent it? You do know that?’ He cocked his head sideways and looked at her with what seemed honest pleasure. Had he truly done his best? Five years ago he had visited her in Newgate and told her she would walk free. Then, after the gull had flown, Charlie had never shown his face again. So much for a family of thieves: one thing she had learned across the herring pond: you were born alone, and alone you were left to die.

  ‘Come here, then.’ Smoothly does it, she told herself. She went to him, and he pulled her tightly towards him; she closed her eyes and breathed in the soap from his shirt. They went to the bedroom, and his bed was just as she’d conjured it so many times before, while she tried to sleep on rocky earth or wooden planks – cloud-soft, with lavendered sheets, and pillows stuffed with feathers. And he was her old Charlie again, familiar to every inch of her; the same crooked teeth, same narrow body as lean as a boy’s, the same hard manhood, rising at the flick of a petticoat. Coupling with him was as easy as falling backwards into that younger Mary, when they followed The Life, and delights were all for the light-fingered taking.

  Afterwards, when Charlie snored beside her, she couldn’t sleep, for it was only three in the afternoon. Getting up to use the pot she took a prowl about the room. It was then that she noticed the girl’s garters hanging on the back of the looking glass. So someone had taken her place as Charlie’s girl after all. Lovely blue silken things, they were, to be tied above white silk stockings. Soft-hearted tears welled in her eyes. It took her a moment to swallow hard and get her bearings. Even after all these years it cut deep to know that Charlie had a new girl.

  Years back, Charlie had been another of Aunt Charlotte’s strays, a man of eighteen to Mary’s ripening fourteen years. Auntie had brought Charlie up to the fake-letter dodge; she would slap her wobbling knees to hear him read his screeves out loud, for it was clever stuff. His game was newspaper advertisements for unclaimed legacies, crooked loans, and lottery rackets. And when the money rolled in from the dupes, he’d always come down to the Palace to throw a heap of chink on the kitchen table, brighter than any coin earned the honest way. And then would come a flurry of new shoes and frocks, and porcelain and paints. All of it bright to the eye and so lovely, lovely, lovely.

  At first Mary had only watched Charlie from a distance; the young prince holding court amongst the women. She made cupboard-love treats for him, the crunchy Little Devils that he loved, and it had worked too, that night she had chased after him down Jerusalem Passage. She didn’t speak, only offered him a paper twist of chocolate almonds. He laughed at her, shaking his head in a kindly, resigned manner. ‘Come here then, Mary,’ he said, and they had kissed, hard and greedy, against the wall.

  At sixteen she moved into Charlie’s ken above a tavern. After leaving his job as clerk to a man of law, Charlie lost no time becoming a swell mobsman. He liked it that Mary was as close to family as could be; for none of them wasted trust on strangers. While he was at his business, she made a few bob for herself, hawking eatables on the streets, a cover for palming coins and the short-change racket. When Charlie needed her, she personated a caller at a sham agency, or acted a weeping witness in the law court. One day they would feast at a chop house, and the next day work the horse-racing crowds. ‘A heavy purse is always in fashion,’ was their favourite quip. They drank like thirsty fish, and rutted the nights away. Charlie called his crew the Snakeskin gang: there was Humbug Joe the personator, a decayed gentleman who acted any character as well as Mr Garrick. Then Sal and Cog, the finest pocket-divers in the north, lifting dozens of pocket watches and purses every day. Aggy was their watcher, a nondescript crone with a pair of hawk’s eyes. And then there was Red, a crag-faced wheedler who had the secret of forging notes. Life on the high-fly had been one long lark: thrilling to the nerves, a harum-scarum sort of life.

  ‘Supper time,’ Charlie said, stretching himself awake. She had dozed a little and now rolled lazily over to him. ‘I’ve a boy waiting out in the hall. Order what you will, there’s an excellent cook shop around the corner.’ Her stomach rumbled as she tried to recall every foodstuff she’d ever longed for.

  ‘I‘d give my eye tooth for a hot meat pie. Just like I used to sell ’em, all yellow crust and the gravy oozing out. Wait, I’ll have two pies. And some buttered rolls and some chops and a jug of beer. And one of them hot puddings sprinkled with sugar, the ones with the currants.’

  When the boy brought the feast in to them, she ate it at the table, unwrapping the greasy parcels as if they were Christmas boxes.

  ‘Still got your scribings, I see.’ Charlie was lying naked across the bed, bird-bright eyes watching her from low lids. She turned to the looking glass to inspect the blue tattoo pricked into the narrow flesh of her back: Adam and Eve, naked beneath a tree, through which the serpent wound his coils. Below was inked the motto of the Snakeskin gang: ‘The Serpent Tempted Me and I Did Eat’.

  Before boarding the convict ship, she’d had to strip naked before the surgeon, who had prodded her with a ruler and asked her to give an account of her scarification.

  ‘I m
ade a start to screeving the entire Bible,’ she’d replied. ‘But that’s as far as I got. Genesis, in’t it?’

  She’d got a slap for that, but the surgeon had copied the picture down in his book nonetheless. There were other prisoners’ patterns drawn there: teardrops and handcuffs, helmeted Britannias, and Irish harps aplenty. Hers was the grandest of the lot.

  As she looked in Charlie’s mirror, her eyes shifted back to the other girl’s garters. She took a long breath so her voice wouldn’t betray her hurt. ‘And how’s business?’ she asked in a jovial fashion. Lord, he had come into chink, there was no doubt of that. When he’d paid the cookshop boy, she had glimpsed a purse thick with coin.

  ‘Good, good.’ He nodded, self-satisfied. ‘The populace is flooding here for work. Everyone’s chasing a share of the cotton trade; and that’s brought a great deal of business to the screeving game.’ He half-shut his eyes, for he still loved the sound of his own voice. ‘Here no one knows his neighbour and no one cares a jot. I made a biggish sum on an inheritance racket last year. The judge sent a People Finder to track down the relatives, but I got my claim in fast. You remember Humbug Joe? He played a long-lost beneficiary, and we got the whole pay-out. I can find you something right away. I need a woman for a job. I’ve not forgotten your talents.’

  ‘What about a crib?’ She had to know how things stood.

  He lit a pipe with a great deal of unnecessary fiddling about. When he looked up again, he was watching her through curling smoke. ‘Cat’s Castle needs an experienced woman at the helm. Look after the girls and keep them out of the Justices’ way. ’

  So that was all the rotten deal – to be a poxy bawd. And all the time some younger trull would be bouncing on Charlie’s feather bed.

  ‘Aunt Charlotte,’ she asked spitefully. ‘You ever think of her? It broke me heart, her snuffing it while I was doing a stretch.’

  ‘How could I forget?’ he said with a big shrug that she thought rather hollow. He owed everything to Aunt Charlotte. The consumption had killed her and most of the other women at the Palace, all in a few plaguey months. Auntie had loved Charlie like a son. Aye, eaten cake is soon forgotten, that was a true saying if ever there was.

  ‘And the few that was left? When the Palace closed – where’d they all go?’

  He shrugged. ‘Miss Dora, she’s still about, she runs a House of Correction down Chandler Lane. And that Frenchie one has a set of rooms on King Street paid for by a lord. The rest have gone where all the old whores go. Dead or poxed or playing the strumpet down twopenny lane.’

  She was struck by a fit of the dumps to think of them all gone. And Charlie, had he truly done his best to free her? Charlie and all his appeals and reprieves, his promises that broke as easily as pie crusts.

  ‘Mary – remember this?’

  He reached under the bed, and from a silver case, drew out the Penny Heart she’d sent him. She hid a shiver at the sight of it. It had been back in the yard at Newgate she had last seen it. Now here it was again; turning up like a bad penny, a disc of mellowed copper strung on a green ribbon. In his beautiful voice Charlie read the verse she’d penned herself:

  ‘Though chains hold me fast,

  As the years pass away,

  I swear on this heart

  To find you one day.’

  He lifted his brows. ‘Well, Mary, your day has come. You always were true to old Charlie, weren’t you? I won’t forget that.’ He patted the sheet beside him, and she climbed back into the warm spot. As he turned the coin over, silently, they both read:

  MARY JEBB AGE 19

  TRANSPORTED 7 YEARS

  TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

  She touched it with her fingertips, and it was uncanny; the rough metal seemed to pierce her like a needle, striking back through time, a talisman joining past and present.

  ‘Very touched I was, sweetheart, when I got that,’ Charlie was saying, as if from a long way away. ‘I’ll see you right, Mary. Get you settled at Cat’s Castle.’

  She blinked herself back to the present. Perhaps his bedding her earlier had been a kind of sop to her dignity? Soon, no doubt, his blue-gartered chicken would be back. By then she must be long gone.

  Still, he had no notion there were two Penny Hearts, both identical. That other heart. Where was it now? Where was that other poxy cove she’d sent it to? She had to pick his ample brain.

  ‘What was that you was saying about the inheritance racket earlier? Something about a People Finder. That’s a new one, Charlie. How does that work?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve done a bit of that myself,’ he boasted. ‘The authorities have printed up some most helpful registers, detailing everyone of property. I’ve my own set in there.’ He nodded towards his office next door. ‘Damned useful to a letter-writing man.’

  ‘I’ll wager it is. So is everyone written down in such a register? They can’t be, can they? Not such as me?’

  ‘No, just men of property. Name, address, rank, occupation, all scribed out and ready for the plucking. But the likes of me and you? That’s the last thing we want, to be inked down in the records.’ He frowned. ‘Though, naturally, you’ve got the judgement against you at the Bailey. Just need a new moniker now, eh, Mary?’

  She nodded mutely. Keep your trap shut, she told herself. Especially around Charlie.

  ‘I need to sleep now, Charlie.’ She slipped down beside him, into the crook of his body. After he’d kissed the top of her head, she let herself fall into the dream that she’d lullabied herself with on countless nights. Only this time, she truly was in Charlie’s feather bed, not on some hellish, rocky shore.

  At dawn, she wanted nothing more than to carry on sleeping beside Charlie’s warm body. Yet a stronger leash yanked her up from the warmth, a compulsion she couldn’t fight. Leave me be, she protested silently, but it was no good. All her life she’d had to obey these devils of urges, prodding her like toasting forks. Pulling on her gown, she looked down at his placid face. In a moment she had the contents of his wallet weighing nicely in her pocket. Then, silently as a cat, she crept up close beside him, and scarcely breathing, slid out the silver case from under the bed. Taking it to the glimmer of light at the door, she removed the Penny Heart. Pulling it over her head, she tucked it down into her bodice. Again she felt that jolt, as if the metal disc joined past with future. She would keep it there by her beating heart. She would never take it off again, she vowed, until her revenge was complete.

  Charlie’s study might have passed for that of any man of law. The tall stool and copying desk were surrounded by impressive ledgers and cubbyholes. Paper, in different weights and colours, was stacked in piles, along with every hue of bottled of ink. Mary knew the manner of his work: anything from an attestation of an injury in a coal-mining disaster, to a false warrant from a bank. He had a very fine hand; or rather, he had a dozen fine hands, and hundreds of signatures filed away, to be copied out with a flourish.

  Helping herself to papers, pens, and inks, she stuffed them inside her bundle. It took a frustratingly long time to find the first item she needed, the register he had spoken of. At last she saw it on a top shelf. It was all written out in parishes, not for the ease of someone like herself. Finally, she found it – a certain name, and beside it the address and occupation, just as Charlie had said. Hurriedly, she scribbled it down, sliding the scrap of paper deep inside her bodice. A groan from the bedroom made her freeze like a statue. Then, as Charlie’s snoring started up again, she finished her task as fast as she might.

  Now for the false Characters he was famed for. They were still filed by occupation: Able Seaman, Accomptant, Barber, Clerk – ah, here was what she wanted: a false Character for a Cook. Written by a ‘Mistress Humphries’, it told of five years’ service to an alderman, with never a dinner spoiled, nor a day taken sick. She pocketed the paper and made her way out by the back stairs. Peg Blissett was the name on the Character. She rehearsed it to herself as she set off in the early light. Fare thee well, Mary Jebb, I’v
e had it with you and all your sorrows. Good day, Peg Blissett, she mouthed, eager to find that estimable cook a grand position up in the north country.

  9

  Greaves, Lancashire

  Summer 1792

  ∼ Gingerbread for Fairings ∼

  Weigh eight pounds of flour mixed with as much brickdust or clay as it will take and rub a pound and a half of used fat into it; put a pound and a half of raw sugar and spice with it, hot cayenne is cheaper bought than ginger, and wet up with treacle and water into a tight dough; let it lie a while. Then take your fancy mould; dust out with flour; press the dough well upon it, then take off, and bake in a cool oven. When cooked and cooled, gild it as you please: Dutch copper is best, being a counterfeit of gold of much less expense, though it does rub away pretty quickly. A small block might be sold for 6d but more fantastical shapes and gilding will command a most substantial profit.

  Mother Eve’s Secrets

  Secretly, I was glad that my wedding was to be a quiet affair, performed by special licence at a church near Huxley House. It was with some relief that I learned Anne and Jacob could not attend, being summoned to a Mission meeting at Bradford that same week. Just before she left, Anne called at Palatine House to give me her wedding gift. In her precious free hours she had embroidered a wedding sampler, bearing Michael’s and my own name, above our wedding date. It was the finest piece of embroidery she had ever made; the patterns of lover’s knots, flower baskets, and wreaths all sewn in the most exquisite tiny stitches. Yet it was the verse she had embroidered that gave me the greatest pang: