On learning that her son, Captain Read, has become a pirate, Mary’s benefactor, Mrs Read, suffers a stroke and dies. Mary, who has been posing as Mrs Read’s grandson, believes herself the sole heir.
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A Footboy is Not So Lowly as He Sounds
In my innocence, I think the house mine. That fine stone house, with its slow-ticking parlour clock and its grand walnut table. For am I not Mrs Read’s grandson? Am I not her only heir? The old woman did not consider she might be about to get into bed for eternity. Though she had thought us muddy sorts, my Ma fit only for scrubbing, and me too much my mother’s son, in her last weeks she had come to calling me dearest, to pinching my cheek and ruffling my hair. In short, she had changed her mind, but not her will.
Shortly before the funeral, distant cousins arrive from Northumberland. There are pests in the house, they say, and might I vacate the premises while it is cleaned? Young as I am, I understand them.
So along with my clothes, I take one tiny book from Captain Read’s library that will hardly be missed, about the West Indies, which is where I place you, brother, because it is so much more heartening to imagine than your skeleton clattering about the pebbles on the seabed of the English Channel. The day after I move out, my mother meets with a solicitor in his offices, who makes it plain to us that her late husband, and therefore her son — he says this so markedly that I wonder whether he really believes the word — were, and are, disinherited.
How quickly money runs away, when needed. Soon we are reduced to stale ha’penny loaves and the cheapest tallow candles. Ma says there is nothing for it but to go into service. Not her, because she is sure she doesn’t have the temperament for it, but I am young, which they will take to mean biddable, and grand folk prefer the more affordable wage that youth allows. I am to ‘live in’, she says. She has her own plan for herself, she says. What plan, she says not, but I know she will not be returning to needle and thread, on account of her eyes and fingers. I am to help her out until she is on her feet again.
Mrs Fredericks has often mentioned which big house is hiring (always with an opinion) and is not unhappy to receive me on her doorstep and offer advice. Poor thing, she says, cooing me in, giving me a biscuit. It’s a shame, she says, that some people have no morals when it comes to money, because these people were not so quick to come to the house when the old lady was alive, but being in service is a respectable calling, and boys from good families do well in livery. She tells me that an unmarried French lady in Mayfair, name of Demoiselle de Vaucresson, is looking for a footboy, her last having run away to join the army. This being the war that may be about to begin any day now between England and France, and all manner of other countries, which is exciting footboys all over London, who fancy themselves for soldiers, thinking they might come back from war with a scar to impress the ladies, and a full belly on the King’s provisions, and a fat purse, and perhaps a medal or two. And maybe some part of themselves lopped off, although she does not suppose they are imagining that. The Grand Alliance has been reformed, armies all over Europe are recruiting young men, and it will not take very much to set them all at each other’s throats, for the fun of it as much as anything, but I mustn’t think of joining them. I asked after Adisa and she says Charles? Charles has been dismissed for taking off a glove. She herself is only there by the grace of God.
Footboys earn two shillings a week. My duties are all sorts of things that are not meet for women and too lowly for butlers, but I am given a fine blue coat for greeting guests in, or serving at table, and another for everyday wear, the whole uniform including undergarments, as Demoiselle de Vaucresson does not like her servants to be tatty on any level, including those levels she cannot see. I am given the room that I was jokingly promised only a few weeks ago by Adisa, an attic room with a chimney running through it, which at the time I take up the position is unbearably hot, being as it is June and there being only the smallest window in the gable end, and the cook, who is known throughout the household only as Cook, is given to cooking from dawn until dusk, preparing not only meals but all kinds of fancy pastries, meaning that the chimney barely cools down before it is heated up again.
Nevertheless I am glad to have a roof over my head, and a bed of my own, since I am getting too large to share with my mother. Though I had so recently had a much wider bed with a counterpane with burning birds embroidered upon it, which meant something to Mrs Read, in the between times I have been shoved up with my mother again, in lodgings that are crawling black on their inside walls and home to all manner of insects. Thus, I am glad to havw something dry and warm (even if somewhat too warm) that houses, besides myself, only a few spiders.
The butler of the household is a Mister Thomas, who is a man born in the marshes. He has a thick accent and a crude laugh, though he squashes it all when he is butlering. Even though Demoiselle de Vaucresson has more than once caught him in his real voice, she is too French to notice the difference between the two Mister Thomases, only noting that one of them she can easily translate and the other one makes her question the functioning of her ears. Mister Thomas is the only person that Cook will recognise as being above her. By her reckoning she is above everyone else, including all other Cooks, and secretly including Demoiselle de Vaucresson, who after all by Cook’s tongue is one of the Filthy French, and not to be thought superior just because she has a deep purse.
Cook is a mean woman, given to lashing out with a wooden spoon as I go by. The minute she learned I was the late Mrs Read’s grandson she began calling me Lord and Master, as though Lords and Masters get sent out into the road to collect horse dung for the herb garden, or are made to scrub pans until their hands go the colour of peonies. Only on the second week do I understand from Mister Thomas that these are not my duties at all, and that I am something like an under-butler, who must sometimes move furniture for Kate to clean behind, and sometimes carry things too heavy for Cook, but am not what Mister Thomas calls a General Dogsbody. When I’m fully grown I will be a Footman, and that is no inconsiderable thing. As a footboy I must run messages, and assist Mister Thomas to serve meals, and I must accompany my mistress’s coach when she is visiting. On all occasions I may accept vails, which are coins pressed into my hand by Demoiselle de Vaucresson’s wealthy friends, and these alone have tripled my wages.
Nevertheless Cook continues to try it on. She takes special delight in giving me jobs that take me down into the cellar, because she knows it is full of rats. It is not only me she is mean to. She calls the housemaid, whose name is Kate, Miss Mustard, which leaden words (though I don’t understand them) have the effect of casting Kate’s eyes to the floor. She likes very much to talk about people’s body parts, so long as she is certain there will be no penalty. She would never dare say that Demoiselle de Vaucresson, whom she calls The Lady of the House, has a scraggy little arse (which she says to Kate), or any kind of arse at all. She would never comment on a gentleman’s legs but she is happy to comment on mine. She has tried more than once to pull my pizzle (as she likes to put it), but each time I dodge out of her way and she laughs. When she has put supper in the oven, she sits by the range on a three-legged stool, brings out a pouch of tobacco and a pipe from her skirts, holds a lit taper to the end and sucks, making big smacking noises with her froggy lips. She says it is good for her lungs. One time she blows smoke in my face as I go past and I see her on her deathbed, the sheets grey with yellow stains, and Cook coughing blood into a flannel and crying for the daughter she had who died as a baby. The vision so arrests me that I stop dead in front of her, and I suppose I must be looking at her strangely, for she startles and says ‘Get away from me now!’
Demoiselle de Vaucresson does not know me to be the grandchild of Mrs Read, since my mother told me to say nothing. Not because she knows it to be a lie — she has spread the tale so widely in London that I suspect she now believes it herself — but because she feared the Demoiselle, armed with this knowledge, would be unlikely to hire me for the reason that I might be ‘above myself’, though it is surely as impossible for me to be ‘above myself’ as it is for me to be on two floors of the house at once. But though Demoiselle de Vaucresson is ignorant of my thwarted prospects, Cook knows, because Mrs Fredericks told her. Cook is delighted to know, and in playful moods refers to me as Master Less, so that one time Kate said ‘Master Less?’ she said ‘Master Less-Than-He-Was!’ followed by a cackle of laughter.
Ma calls at the kitchen door every Saturday for my wages. I wonder when she will ever get back on her feet. Or whether she has, since her clothes are getting fancier. Silk bodices can’t be had from a footboy’s wages, and no-one can dress like a lady on six pounds a year. But I know she is resourceful.
I say as much to Mister Thomas, and tell him about sleeping under the gentleman’s bed in Exeter when I was a child, and he roars himself hoarse with laughter and says, yes indeed, those gentlemen’s beds can be very bouncy, yes indeed, and I feel heat come to my cheeks even though I am not at all sure what he thinks is so funny. When I say he must have been a very kind gentleman, because he gave my mother three sovereigns, Mister Thomas says he must have been a very sorry gentleman, to wake up and find himself so light in the purse, because that wasn’t at all what you would pay for a cuddle with a woman you met in a hostelry. That is when I understand him. I tell Mister Thomas that my mother is not a whore, and his smile collapses into something more serious and he says of course not, she is a woman without recourse, which makes me hope he thinks better of her. But the next time she calls, I compare her clothes to the clothes of the women that walk up and down Marybone with nowhere to go.
Whatever Ma is doing to put herself in fine dresses, she is doing it very well. When she sees me now, she pats me on the head, as though I am an animal she is very fond of, but she does not ask me how I am keeping, or whether I like running messages and serving pastries so that she can take away my earnings to put a feather in her hat.
Then I get a fleabite. Fleabite, I am sure it is, except for it stays, making a great lump of itself. Then another comes up on the other side to match it. Now I know these are not fleabites at all, but the end of my being a footboy unless I am careful. Until this time it has been easy to be a boy. Never do I empty myself in a public place. Never am I bathed by anyone but myself, so it’s simple enough to conceal what isn’t there. In looks I have always been enough like a boy to be mistaken for one, and in manner I have learned to adopt more fully the spirit of the name I go by. You, I think, wouldn’t cower in the attic and wait to be called: you would be dressed and downstairs as soon as you were woken, seeing who was about, and what, if anything, you could pilfer. And you, I think, would not accept that Cook could smack you on the legs with a wooden spoon as you passed, but would, for revenge, toy with her condiments, and put a little mustard powder in her morning restorative, not so much to make her sick, but enough to ensure that it never tasted right on any day she had made free with her utensils. You wouldn’t think twice about stealing a plum from the table when Cook was in the larder getting flour to make a pie, and popping it straight into your mouth, and using only nods and shakes of the head until you could slip out of the room and birth it from your mouth like a hairless purple puppy, and bite into it with relish for the sheer taste of liberty.
Living the name that everyone calls me has made it easy to have a boy’s ways, a boy’s wiles, a boy’s boldness with things that don’t belong to him. So when those two fleabites that aren’t fleabites come calling a chill runs through me that could freeze the great wide bounty of the Thames. I flatten the bumps with my hands, but can hardly walk around all day holding on to myself like a woman caught bathing. I have no wish to be discovered.
Fortunately my uniform includes a waistcoat. I note by experiment that the fabric is so firm that my bumps are perfectly flattened when the waistcoat is buttoned. I only hope I will not grow so bosomy that it will not disguise me. The simple reason being this. The more I see of the relative freedoms of girls and boys, of women and men, the more I knew I must turn from boy to man, and be a man all of my days.
For example. Only girls and women have babies, and by all accounts that is a fearsome thing, worse than getting a lead bullet shot into your belly by a musket, worse than being entirely run over by a dray cart, and in the same manner, as often as not, fatal. But all women must bear it, because thousands of years ago a woman bit into an apple. Why Eve’s sin should be visited on all of us I do not know, and it makes as good a reason as any to go to church with my ears blocked with lint. I have heard from the men that sometimes visit Kate and smoke outside the back door when I am chopping kindling that having babies, and the thing that leads to having babies, is all that women are good for. As a rule girls are not trained in a trade, or in writing (to be clerks), or in investing (to be bankers), because all that matters about them are their body parts, and especially their womb, and how many children it will make their husband. Easily one time in ten, having a baby will make you die, which is a sorry end to a sorry beginning. So many men have three or four wives because they have killed the first two or three by putting a baby in them.
Second example. As noted before, men make the world. They make all the things in the world that have use and will last, and the women, if they make anything at all, make things of no consequence. Every utensil I use, every chair that I sit on, every carriage in the streets, every sword, every ship, every house, every castle, was made by men. Women make food, which is digested into dung. They make clothes, which are worn into rags. Higher class women embroider pointless patterns on cushions — see Mrs Read and her crocuses — or worse, they make ‘samplers’ which demonstrate various stitches to no great purpose, since they will never be employed as a seamstress. No wonder men consider women to be useless except in the matter of making babies. Babies is the one thing women make that lasts for a lifetime (though some babies’ lifetimes are short), and have some utility in the world, if they are boy babies — but this is nothing due to the prowess of women, since the ability is natural and not in their control. Female dogs and rats and spiders are as good as spawning young as women are, better, mostly, because (I think) they do not so often die of it. Where everything that men make sets them apart from the animals, the one lasting thing made by women puts us squarely among them.
Third example. Men may have adventures. A man who has adventures, no matter what their nature, is a hero. If any woman dares to have an adventure, even so small an adventure as an unaccompanied excursion to the wrong part of the city, she is deemed either a ‘fallen woman’ or a disgrace, whose adventure must never be mentioned. If her adventure involves consorting with a man to whom she isn’t married, so much the worse. Whereas a man may sail across the ocean, may murder people in the name of his country, may steal gold in the name of his queen, and he will be called a hero, and may be given a medal, a knighthood, or a seat in the parliament making laws to his own advantage. A man’s smallest adventure will be celebrated in a tavern, enlarged upon and told a dozen times, and no-one will think any worse of him for doing so. A woman’s largest adventure must be kept under her tongue, and sit there like a sugared almond she fears to suck upon. It seems that shopping is as much of an adventure as a good woman will admit to herself, or to polite company. Mrs Read called going to her milliner’s ‘an expedition’.
For all these reasons, I am determined to keep the advantage of being male. Even if it is not so much advantage as I would have being the son of a vicar, or a clerk, or a gentleman, it is far more advantage than the daughter of any of those, to find I can move freely around the world, and make my mark upon it in some lasting fashion. And not to be thought less than anyone of my size and upbringing, or to be considered simple in the head, or weak in the arms, for the lack of some extra flesh between the legs. For this reason I will swallow the small restriction of wearing a waistcoat, regardless of the weather, to make my chest look more like Adam’s and less like Eve’s.
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Here's a fun fact: Substack's algorithm thinks silence means indifference. So if you've been quietly enjoying Mary's sass, a comment does more for this novel's future than a thousand silent reads. One for the comments: is Mary still right about the advantages of being male? Have we made enough progress in the last 300 years?
This is a most engaging read, Ros. I am hooked!
While I celebrate having the great good fortune to have been born female in Scotland, I am increasingly aware of an undercurrent of deep anti-women attitudes that run beneath the veneer of civility we profess to celebrate as a nation. Scratch at that surface and an old hatred, fear and ‘othering’ is evident. We are nothing like as removed from the experience of your footboy as we would like to believe.