Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  When Ikey, who at the age of twenty-one was already coming on as a notorious magsman and was thought not without spare silver jiggling in his pockets, came along, his very repulsiveness made him attractive to her. True, he was not elderly nor yet rich, but young, clever and careful, his dark eyes always darting. Appearing suddenly at the door of the Blue Anchor, he scanned the patrons, his eyes sucking in the human contents of the room before he entered. Hannah could sense that he was greedy, secretive, a coward and moreover he made no advances of a sexual nature during his pathetic attempt at courtship. What she had expected to find in an older man she now found in Ikey. Ikey would be her ticket to glory, the means by which she would achieve the remnants of her earlier ambition.

  They were married in London in 1807 in the Great Synagogue at Duke’s Place with all the trappings and regalia of the Jewish faith. It was a bitterly cold January morning, but it was well known that a morning ceremony was less costly and Hannah’s father, a coachmaster, was not inclined to waste a farthing even on his family. If, by a little thought and negotiation, a small extra sum could be saved for ratting, the sport on which he chose to gamble most of his earnings, so much the better.

  Hannah and Ikey were a well-suited couple in some respects and they shared a thousand crimes and ten thousand ill-gotten gains in their subsequent life together. As a consequence they became very wealthy, though Hannah had not achieved her ambition to mix with the male members of the best of society and be seen in the gilded boxes of the opera and theatre. Instead her bawdy houses were frequented by lascars and Chinese and black seamen from North Africa, the Indies and the Cape of Good Hope, and of course all the scum from the English dangerous classes. Panders, crimps, bullies, petty touts, bimbos, perverts, sharpers, catamites, sodomites and unspecified riff-raff, as well as the famine Irish with their emaciated looks and long thick swollen dicks. They were more in need of a feed than a broken-down tart, robbing their families of what little they had to boast of fornication with a poxy English whore.

  Ikey counted himself fortunate to have found a wife as avaricious and morally corrupt as himself, yet one who could play the prim and proper lady when called upon to do so. Upon their marriage Hannah had adopted the demeanour in public of a woman of the highest moral rectitude with the strait-laced, scrubbed and honest appearance of a Methodist preacher’s wife. This was only when she was in the presence of her betters and as practice for a time to come when, she told herself, she would run the most exclusive brothel in London Town.

  Ikey’s success as a fence had precluded such an establishment, designed, as it would be, to cater for the amorous needs of the better classes. It would be too public and draw too much attention. Hannah had reluctantly and temporarily put her ambitions aside. Instead, by working at the lowest end of the sex market, she often proved to be a useful adjunct to Ikey’s fencing business.

  This subjugation to her husband’s needs did not come about from loyalty to him, but rather from simple greed. Ikey had been successful beyond her wildest expectations. Hannah began to see how she might one day escape to America or Australia, where she could set up as a woman of means and attain a position in society befitting her role as a wealthy widow with two beautiful daughters and four handsome sons, all eligible to be married into the best local families. It had always been quite clear in Hannah’s mind that Ikey would not be a witness to her eventual triumph over the ugly scars which had so cruelly spoiled her face and with it, her fortune.

  In the intervening period, Hannah felt that she had sound control of her husband. Her sharp and poisonous tongue kept him defensive and it was as much in her natural demeanour to act the bully as it was for Ikey to be a coward. She prodded him with insults and stung him with rude remarks as to his appearance. Ikey was constantly shamed in her presence. He knew he possessed no useful outside disguise to fool his fellow man and he greatly admired this propensity in her, who added further to his infatuation by giving him six children and proving his miserable, worthless and reluctant seed accountable.

  Moreover, Hannah had gratified him still further, for none of his children had inherited any onerous part of his physiognomy and all took their looks strongly from her. She claimed that Ikey’s puerile seed had been overwhelmed by her own splendid fecundity and, as he had no confident reason to doubt that this was true, he was grateful that she brought an end to his line of unfortunate looks. Hannah, who so clearly held Ikey in her thrall, had no cause whatsoever to suspect him capable of dalliance with another. The thought of a Mary or any other such female coming into Ikey’s life was beyond even Hannah’s considerable imagination or lack of trust in her husband.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Temper and charm, it was these two contradictions in Mary’s personality which were the cause of constant problems in her life. She showed the world a disarming and lovely smile until crossed. Then she could become a spitting tiger with anger enough to conquer any fear she might have or regard to her own prudent behaviour. In a servant girl, where mildness of manner and meek acceptance were the characteristics of a good domestic, Mary’s often fiery disposition and sense of injustice were ill suited. However, without her temper - the pepper and vinegar in her soul - it is unlikely that she would have captured Ikey’s unprepossessing heart.

  Mary was the child of a silkweaver mother and a sometimes employed Dutch shipping clerk. She grew up in Spitalfields in pious poverty brought about by the decline in the silk and shipping trades in the years following Waterloo. Mary’s consumptive mother was dying a slow death from overwork. Her despairing and defeated father sought solace in too frequent attention to the bottle. At the tender age of five Mary had learned to hawk her mother’s meagre wares in nearby Rosemary Lane and to defend them from stock buzzers and the like. She quickly learned that a child faced with danger who screams, kicks, bites and scratches survives better than one given over to tears, though it should be noted that she was of a naturally sunny disposition and her temper was spent as quickly as it arrived.

  Mary was also the possessor of a most curious gift. Although she could take to the task of reading and writing no better than a ten-year-old from the more tutored classes, she could calculate numbers and work columns of figures with a most astonishing rapidity and accuracy well beyond the ability of the most skilled bookkeeping clerk.

  This ability had come about in a curious manner. Her father, Johannes Klerk, a name he’d amended simply to John Klerk when he’d come to England, had wanted Mary to be a boy and so instead of learning the art of silkweaving, as would have been the expected thing for a girl child to do, he had taught her the ways of figuring on an abacus. He learned this skill as a young man when he’d spent time as a shipping agent’s clerk in the Dutch East Indies.

  He had first come across the rapid clack-clack-clacking of beads sliding on elegant slender wire runners in Batavia. To his mortification, the framed contraption being used by the Chinee clerks in the spice warehouses soon proved superior in making calculations to his most ardent application by means of quill and blacking. Johannes Klerk soon learned that he could never hope to defeat the speed of their heathen calculations and so he determined to learn for himself the ancient art of the Chinese abacus. This curious skill, never developed to a very high aptitude in John Klerk, together with a few elementary lessons in reading and writing, was his sole inheritance to his daughter.

  As an infant, the bright red and black beads had enchanted Mary and by the age of six she had grasped the true purpose of the colourful grid of wooden counters. By ten she had developed a propensity for calculation that left the shipping clerks at her father’s sometime places of employment slack-jawed at her proficiency with numbers.

  Alas, it was a skill which her family’s poverty seldom required. But this did not discourage Mary, who practised until her fingers flew in a blur and her mind raced ahead of the brilliant lacquered beads. Despite her father’s attempts to obtain a position for her as an apprentice clerk in one of the merchant warehouses on the dock
s, no such establishment would countenance a child who played with heathen beads. Added to this indignity, God had clearly indicated in his holy scriptures that those of her sex were not possessed of brain sufficient to work with numbers, and her ability to do so just as clearly indicated a madness within her.

  When Mary was eleven, she was entered into domestic service by her father, her consumptive mother having died two years previously. John Klerk passed away not long after he’d secured employment for his daughter; he was a victim of a minor cholera epidemic which struck in the East India Docks.

  Mary found herself quite alone in the world as a junior scullery maid in a large house where she was to begin what became a career, the outcome of which was determined more often by her fiery disposition than her maidenly demeanour.

  Mary was popular among the below-stairs servants, well liked for her cheery disposition and bold intelligence, but her quick temper at some injustice shown to those unable to come to their own defence got her into constant hot water. She would inevitably alienate the cook or under-butler or coachman, those most terrible senior snobs in most households, who would thereafter wait for an opportunity to bring her undone. As a consequence Mary’s career as a domestic servant was always somewhat tenuous.

  At fifteen Mary was promoted above stairs, where she was a bedroom maid who would sometimes assist as lady’s maid to her mistress. Her lively intelligence made her popular with her mistress, who felt she showed great promise as a future lady’s maid. That is, until an incident occurred with a lady of grand title from Dorset, a weekend guest to the London house of her mistress to whom Mary was assigned as lady’s maid.

  Mary was most surprised when the very large duchess took her by the wrist after she had delivered her breakfast tray to her bed.

  ‘Come into bed with me, m’dear. You will be well rewarded, now there’s a dear. Come, my little cherub, and I promise you will learn one or two useful little things in the process!’

  Whereupon the duchess, visibly panting with excitement, had pulled Mary off her feet so that she fell onto the bed across her large bosom.

  ‘Oh I do hope you are a virgin, a nice little virgin for mummy!’ the duchess exclaimed, planting several kisses on top of Mary’s head.

  Mary, a product of the Spitalfields rookery, wasn’t easily given over to panic. She simply attempted to pull away from the fat duchess. Whereupon the huge woman, thinking this most coquettish, locked her arms about her and smothered her in further wet kisses. At this point Mary lost her temper. ‘Lemme go, you old cow!’ she gasped, still not taken to panicking at the mixture of sweet-smelling rouge and foul, dyspeptic breath which assailed her senses.

  The duchess, much larger and stronger than the young servant girl, clasped her tighter so that Mary found her face smothered in heaving breasts and thought she might at any moment suffocate. She was no match for the strength of the duchess even though she fought like a tiger to break free.

  ‘Such a silver tongue! Oh, you are a fiery little maidikins! A plump little partridge and all of it for mummy!’

  With one huge arm the duchess continued to pin Mary down and with the other attempted to remove her bodice.

  ‘Come now, darling,’ she panted, ‘be nice to mummikins!’

  Mary, pushing away with her arms, momentarily managed to get her head free from the giant canyon of heaving flesh.

  ‘You fat bitch!’ she yelled. ‘You keep your soddin’ ‘ands off me!’

  It was to this last remark that her mistress, hearing the commotion, had entered the room. As a consequence, Mary lost her job, though her mistress was careful to furnish her with a good reference. It was well known in all the better houses that the duchess preferred her own sex to the wizened Duke of Dorset. She had, after all, come from poor stock, an ex-Drury Lane actress who had married the elderly and heirless duke and given him two sons in an amazingly short time, whereupon she had converted her stylish figure and good looks into lard and her taste from male to her own sex, with a decided preference for plump young servant girls.

  In those late-Georgian times there remained in some London households a little of an earlier tolerance for the sexual proclivities, preferments and foibles of the nobility, and Mary’s mistress was not as scandalised over the incident as might have been the case a little further into the century when the young Victoria ascended to the throne. Her parting words to Mary had proved most instructive to the young maidservant.

  ‘You are a good worker, Mary, and quite a bright little creature, though you really must learn to respect the wishes of your betters and to control your peppery tongue. Have you not been instructed in your childhood in the manners required of your kind? Were you not taught by Mr Bothwaite the butler by heart the verse of the noble Dr Watts when you came into our employment?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘And what does it say? Repeat it, if you please!’

  Mary scratched around in her mind for the words to the catechism which every young domestic was expected to know upon commencement of employment in a big house. In a voice barely above a whisper she now recited the words to the verse:

  Though I am but poor and mean,

  I will move the rich to love me.

  If I’m modest, neat and clean,

  And submit when they reprove me.

  ‘There you are, so very neatly put in a single verse by the great hymnist, you would do well to remember it in the future.’

  Whereupon Mary’s mistress gave her a not unkindly smile.

  ‘Now you will not mention this unfortunate incident at your next position, will you? I have given you an excellent reference,’ she paused, ‘though it can always be withdrawn if it comes to my ears that there has been some idle tittle-tattle below stairs.’ She placed her hand on Mary’s arm. ‘You do understand what I’m saying, don’t you, my dear?’

  Mary understood perfectly well. From the incident with the duchess she had derived several lessons; the first being not to resist the advances made to her, but instead to profit from them. The next, that a scandal, should she be caught with a member of the family or guest, gave her power to negotiate and so to leave her place of employment with her reputation intact.

  Mary also understood the different standards which prevailed for promiscuous behaviour below stairs. Similar comportment involving a male member of the household staff would leave her without references, on the street, without the least prospect of obtaining a job in any respectable London house.

  Mary even understood that she could learn to keep her big mouth shut. Though in this last endeavour she was never to prove very successful and she would privately, and to the secret delight of the junior maids below stairs, declare the verse by the great Dr Watts to be a load of utter shit.

  Before her ultimate undoing she had served in two further households. In the first, the master of the house had left her several gold sovereigns richer, and in the second she had been promoted to the position of abigail, that is, lady’s maid, and the youngest son in the family had been inducted by her into the delights of Aphrodite in return for lessons in reading and writing.

  When two years later this scion of the family went up to Oxford, Mary was promptly, though discreetly, dismissed, again with an excellent reference and, as a result of her lover’s tuition, a small knowledge of Latin and a facility at writing which was contained in a good copperplate hand studiously learned from a copybook he had bought for her. On return from the Michaelmas term her boy lover was said to have wept openly at the discovery that his dearest mumsy was now attended by a flaccid and cheerless personal maid in her late forties.

  Mary’s next billet was to prove her final undoing. Appointed as upstairs maid she soon found herself at odds with the family nanny, a middle-aged lady of imperious manner known as Nanny Smith. Well established in the family, the old woman exercised considerable power over all the other servants. She soon took a dislike to the new young maid, who seemed much too forward and confident around the male servants in t
he house and was not in the least afraid to speak before she was spoken to.

  For her part Mary accepted Nanny Smith’s carping instructions and held her tongue. But one day the old girl accused her of poisoning her cat, an aged tabby named Waterloo Smith who coughed up fur balls on the Persian rugs and stumbled about with a constant wheeze and permanently dripping nose. Mary had made no attempt to conceal her dislike for this creature, who returned the compliment by arching its back and hissing at her whenever they met along a corridor or in one of the many upstairs rooms.

  ‘You ought to be dead and buried, you miserable moggy!’ Mary would hiss back. Her abhorrence for Nanny Smith’s cat was soon the joke of the below stairs staff and no doubt her dislike was soon communicated to Waterloo Smith’s ill-tempered owner.

  Then one morning Waterloo Smith went missing. Nanny Smith had placed him as usual on a broad upstairs window ledge to catch the morning sun and upon her return an hour later he was nowhere to be seen.

  Mary, together with the second upstairs maid, was made to search every cupboard, nook and cranny and under each bed and, in the unlikely event that the disabled creature had somehow managed to negotiate the stairs, each of the four levels of the downstairs area of the house.

  Bishop, the butler, had ordered the footman, the stable boy and Old Jacob the gardener to inspect the lavender bushes which grew forty feet below the window ledge where Waterloo Smith had been sunning himself. When this yielded nothing the speculation that foul play was involved started to grow. While nothing was said, Mary’s well-known dislike for the cat made her the prime suspect.

  By evening it became apparent that Waterloo Smith had disappeared quite into thin air, and his distraught owner retired to her bedroom, where her unconstrained weeping could be heard by all who worked above stairs.