“We are the Tadpole Kings of Guzzle Down, Rat Masters of the Pantry, Grand Under-Tablers of the Blue Anchor.”
Mary and her brother Mark are worried about their mother. They’re eight and nine, and they are preparing for murder. It doesn’t go to plan.
When Mark vanishes, and their mother’s survival demands it, Mary steps into his breeches, his name, and his life. A girl who wants to stay free must look like a boy. A boy, it turns out, can go anywhere.
From the docks of Plymouth to the battlefields of Flanders to the pirate republic of Nassau, Mary Read moves through a man’s world on borrowed identity — soldier, sailor, outlaw — guarding her secret at knife-point. The closer anyone gets, the more it costs her. And the noose doesn’t care what you’re wearing.
In a world built to break women, Mary Read steals the life she wants. The question is whether she can keep it.
Chapter 1
The Reckon-Pence is Not Money
We are the Tadpole Kings of Guzzle Down, Rat Masters of the Pantry, Grand Under-Tablers of the Blue Anchor, and we are preparing for murder.
My father is rolling a barrel of salt-beef towards the loading area. We are making ourselves small behind Mister Lampard’s whelk stall. Mister Lampard is on the dockside letting shouts rain on his head. The shouting man — a captain from his hat — is so red he could burst into flames. He is my father’s captain. Though his words are loud they mean nothing to us.
‘Dutch,’ you whisper.
‘How can you tell?’
‘Look at his shoes.’
There is only one shoe I can see, perched on the rail of the ship like a leather bird. A leather bird with a stockinged leg growing out of it. To me it looks no different than the shoes English captains wear, but because you are a year older than me and many beatings wiser, I trust your eye and begin to see a certain Dutchness in the way the toe curls.
Mister Lampard is pointing at my father and saying something not very polite. I ask you what it means. You know everything, is what I think about you then. That is why I trust you when you say we will have to kill the man who has finished rolling the salt-beef barrel along the dockside: has turned it onto its end.
‘Couldn’t Mister Lampard kill him for us?’ I ask.
His belly hangs over his belt like two loaves-worth of dough, but Mister Lampard used to wrestle for money.
‘It’s not for Mister Lampard to take revenge for Ma,’ you say. ‘If he wasn’t clever about it, he would be hanged.’
‘Won’t we be hanged?’ A boy our age was hanged at the Heavitree gallows for setting fire to a hayrick.
‘We will be clever about it,’ you say. ‘We will make it an accident.’
This is how we will erase the fear on our mother’s face. This is how we will cancel the sin of my making. I always knew I was born out of sin, because sometimes drink would make Ma say so. But I never knew how until yesterday, when she came back from buying the leftover catch tearful, with an empty basket. She said nothing to us, but everything to Mister Lampard, which is the same as to us when we have our ears to the boards. Forced in a dark stairwell, she said. Mister Lampard said there there, not asking for details, but she told him anyway, though what she said wasn’t much: the smell of rum and a knock to the head.
‘How do you know it’s him?’ Mister Lampard asked.
‘The tally tattoo on his arm,’ she said.
That inky five-bar gate we catch a flash of as he stands there, wiping his brow. A tally of ladies knocked on the head, maybe.
‘Will we kill him now?’ I ask.
A laugh huffs from your nostrils.
‘That wouldn’t be clever.’
We watch the man waddle back onto the boat. He has the long-time sailors’ walk, side to side, as if he is still at sea. Mister Lampard stomps back towards us. The Dutch captain is still shouting, throwing his words to land like spit on Mister Lampard’s head. Mister Lampard says,
‘Miserable old ______!’
Whatever the last word means, I am eager to learn it. He follows up with a string of oaths. Then our ears fill with gull-caw and boat-creak, waves slapping the wooden jetty, because Mister Lampard’s got all his anger out.
Later, he’s having supper with us. Whelks in gravy, and the bread Ma baked yesterday, which sticks to the top part of my mouth like a lie. They are talking about reckon-pence. Which is money you pay someone to atone for a sin. Ma is crying.
‘My languages ain’t good enough, Margret,’ says Mister Lampard. ‘I told the Cap-n he should pay for the littlun. I say to him, your man, your man, but he thinks I mean him. So I point at the man who - forgive me, Margret, we all know what he done - and I do a mime.’
It’s true. We saw the mime. Mister Lampard standing on the dockside wobbling his tarriwags like a dog on the butcher’s leg. A laugh burst out of me, I couldn’t stop it, and you might have told me off except one burst out of you too. But then, because Mister Lampard’s mime wasn’t silly enough to stop it being wrong that a sailor hit Ma over the head to make a baby, and we were supposed to be hiding, you made your face serious and nodded at me to be cross again, so I was. Now I check across the table to see if you’re remembering the mime. But you’re scraping a piece of bread around your plate, pushing the gravy into the middle, which means you’re listening very hard and pretending not to. Mister Lampard has Ma’s hand and is filling her ears with words.
‘So I says, keep the blunderbuss on the ship. So he don’t go off on some other woman. But the Cap-n says “All men must drink.” That’s all he says, Margret. “All men must drink.”’
Ma’s tears are falling silently into her lap. She’s looking at her hand in Mister Lampard’s. A mouse in a trap. Curled up soft, like it’s dying in Mister Lampard’s big bed of a hand, his fingers closed over hers.
‘I did what I could,’ he says.
When you’ve mopped up all the gravy, and shoved me your last bit of bread beneath the table, Ma shoos us into the rafters. It’s hot, as if all Ma’s fuss has nested up there like a fluster of pigeons. The mattress feels extra itchy under my shoulder, like some of the straw is poking through but when I complain you say it’s my thoughts that are itchy. You always know my thoughts, as if we really were the twins that strangers take us to be.
‘Does he look like me?’ I say. ‘Do I look like him?’
‘Maybe when he was a scrap he looked like you.’
If he was ever a scrap, he was a bruising scrap, the kind who fights out of his swaddling and punches his Ma on the nose.
‘Do you look like your Da?’ I say, and then I’m sorry, because he’s been a long time at sea and we’re not supposed to talk about him.
‘Ma says so,’ you say with armour in your voice, and I’m doubly sorry. It’s so long since he last went to sea that all we have of him is his name, Read, which all of us wear like a brand of belonging, even if he’s shaken us off, or the sea has shaken him out of his skin. I’ve wondered whether he’s looking down on us all from sailor heaven, which Mister Lampard says is blue skies, a fair wind, and an ocean of rum. But the new story is gnawing at me like a crab on bacon rind.
‘Maybe he didn’t come back because he didn’t believe Ma about the stairwell and the knock on the head,’ I say. ‘He’s at sea, you say,’ in a flat voice that means Don’t you even think anything else.
For a while after that you don’t speak and I wonder if you’ve fallen asleep, though your breathing is noiseless. A shanty starts up in the tavern across the street. I wonder if Mister Lampard is leading it because it’s Maid of Amsterdam but that would be unkind to Ma and anyway I hear him grunting downstairs, like he’s lifting something heavy. More likely it’s down to the Dutch ship being in harbour. When the song gets to the bit where the Great Big Dutchman Rammed My Bow you say,
‘We can’t do anything about my dad, but we can do something about yours.’ You don’t need my nodding in the dark, which is only to soothe the prickly thoughts my head, like a kind of rocking. You are talking more to yourself than anything when you say, ‘I have a plan.’
Only half of me wants to hear this plan of yours. The other half wants to hide under the blanket and muffle you out. But you’re my brother, so I ask you,
‘What?’
There’s a big pause like you didn’t have a plan at all and are thinking it up right on the spot. There’s moonlight coming through the gap in the eaves and I can just see the edge of your face, drawn in silver. You eyes close, and open.
‘We will kill him when he’s drunk.’
You wait as if I am meant to ask how but I am worried about the ‘we’. I have never killed so much as a beetle. I don’t know how not to be part of your ‘we’ because we do mostly everything together, so I ask,
‘What about the reckon-pence?’
You sit up in the dark, like your hair was pulled. You say death is reckon-pence enough. You say everyone who dies gets their reckoning, because of Judgement Day, and best my father gets in line for his sooner before he knocks any more women over the head and makes babies on them. Your plan has made you all twitchy and now you’re out of bed and pulling on your breeches. It looks like I might be excused from your ‘we’ because you’re not asking me to get dressed as well, but I’m still worried about the money. Ma told Mister Lampard to get money off him, because it’s hard to feed two littluns on what she makes from sewing. I’m thinking if she only feeds one it won’t be the one whose father smacked her on the mazzard.
‘But the money,’ I say.
‘She won’t be afraid to walk around Fishtown.’ Tying the cord around your waist. ‘And that’s worth a few bob.’
So it’s decided. You, or maybe we, will kill my father when he’s drunk, and leave God to sort out the reckon-pence.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Scouting. You get some sleep.’
I lie awake for a long time waiting for you to come back but all I hear is mouse-scritch. Outside, the tavern roars and then quiets, roars and then quiets, in waves like the sea itself. In the quiet I hear, high on St Mary’s hill, the murdered-woman shriek of a fox. Voices leave the tavern in clusters of holler and laughter. The fox is done with its horror and quiet gets thick as soup. A lonely song wobbles itself up the street.
So awesome. I’m hooked. Thank you