Thrown out of her benefactress Mrs Read's house, Mary takes a position as footboy in the household of Demoiselle de Vaucresson. But staying disguised as a boy through puberty may be her hardest test yet.
Smoking Maketh the Man
Ma stops calling. At Christmas, she sends me a small gift, a ribbon, which is a poor gift for me, who cannot wear a ribbon. I give it to Kate, who is very taken with it. The message of its impersonal delivery I understand quite plainly. She was never the kindest mother to me, but to be disowned entirely is something hard to bear. Still, I bear it. I suppose there are many who are orphaned before thirteen, but fewer who are orphaned while their mother still lives.
But the past keeps tipping its hat to us, and doesn’t mind what we do with our calendar, or how much 1702 should be sliced like a fish’s fleshy body away from the eyeless head of 1701. The new year is never so far from the old. Only a few weeks later, I am taking a message to the Strand, going through Covent Garden for no good reason except that I like to see what is being traded, and I spy my mother across the market. Straight away I understand why she has stopped calling. Her belly’s blown up like there’s a whole theatre inside it. I watch her cross the cobbles cautiously, as though she might fall over at any minute, which I suppose she might with that enormous belly balanced over such a tiny pair of shoes. So, I think, we are to have another brother or sister, who will probably never meet either one of us, or even know that we came before. I don’t show myself to her. From the shape of her, she is carrying an entire orphanage.
Whereas from the shape of me, I am not a woman at all. However, Nature may yet give me away. A waistcoat may flatten my breasts, but it cannot flatten the female note of my voice. Fred the butcher’s boy is barely a year older than I am, and by no means as tall, yet his pipes are cracking between boyhood and manhood like a door that’s half kicked in. The bad music of two of him present at once in the same sentence — boy Fred and man Fred — has Kate stifling a smile with a hand. And when he has left, Mister Thomas says that’ll be me, too, before too long. And it must be, if I am to keep my warm bed. The taller I grow, the more folk will think it peculiar if I am still singing descant and not getting the words from a more gravelling place. But how to make it so?
Putting my mind to the problem for several days yields nothing. The thought keeps me awake for hours, and what sleep I have is disturbed by dreams of being cast out and made a vagabond. But on the morning I declare a deeper voice impossible and surrender myself to the natural outcome of losing my job and shelter, the answer presents itself. Leaning up against the doorframe, I am breathing out a sigh, watching a thrush bash a snail out of its shell in the kitchen garden and thinking of my inevitable un-shelling, when a deep voice growls from behind me to get my skinny arse inside and get the breakfast things on the table. I turn to see Cook’s munched-up mouth and the idea floods into me. I will take up tobacco! For isn’t it so that Cook, who always takes a pipe by the stove whenever she can, has a voice almost as deep as Mister Thomas’s? And isn’t it true that one of the fishwives back in Broxholme, Mrs Planter, whose voice could scrape barnacles off any ship’s hull, was also fond of tobacco? In an instant, I make it my mission to smoke.
This is harder than I would hope. Not because it is difficult to purloin the means: I filch a simple clay pipe from the back pocket of a gentleman at church, and Cook keeps her tobacco in a preserves jar on a high shelf that is easily climbed to. No, the difficulty is rather that I have no instruction, and sense I am doing it wrong. Without asking Cook, which is unwise at best, I have no means of learning how to do it correctly. I light the tobacco with a spill, sucking at the pipe to pull the flame down onto the tamped leaves. I smoke leaning out of the attic window when there is no one of consequence on the street below, sucking smoke into my mouth and releasing it in little puffs. But having observed Cook often enough, I am at a loss to know how she blows it through her nostrils, or holds it inside her lungs while she spouts some poisonous homily about young people’s morals. And despite two weeks of daily smoking, I know it is not reaching my voice at all.
Fortunately for me, Demoiselle de Vaucresson is exchanging messages with a tediously entitled man who lives at the Inns of Court. The man believes she will make him a very good wife, without considering whether he would make her a very good husband, and she must constantly rebuff his messages in order to prevent him embarrassing her. Unfortunately for Demoiselle de Vaucresson, he considers this a form of courtship, presumably having noted that women, like granite and other unyielding substances, can sometimes be worn down by persistent drips. Thus I am regularly required to take small unperfumed envelopes to Middle Temple, and often detained at that end for a cloying letter to be written in response, meaning that the time needed for my errand can be unpredictable. The quickest route takes me in both directions through Covent Garden, where the barrow boys, alongside calling out their wares in amusing ways, are sometimes given to smoking. It occurs to me that if I run the first and second legs of my errand, I can tarry in the market without seeming to have taken inordinately long, and perhaps gain some information that will be of some advantage to me in terms of forcing my voice to a deeper octave.
So it is that one somewhat frosty October morning, I sprint like a thing pursued to Covent Garden, then slow my steps and regain my breath as I turn the corner into it, so as not to draw too much attention. Before long I spy a group of boys smoking from a stubby pipe. I am afraid to approach so large a group, as they might pack-dog upon me. Instead I wander between the stalls, glancing at them from time to time until I see an older man break them up, and the friendliest looking one come back my way, a now empty pipe in one hand, and a couple of oranges — oranges! — juggled in the other. I marvel that a boy can be so free with something I have never so much as tasted, giving no thought to the chance that he might drop one of the fruits on the ground and spoil it. He sees me watching him and says,
‘What’s your game, eh?’
And when I don’t know how to answer,
‘What you looking at?’
‘The oranges,’ I say. He throws me one, and I surprise myself by catching it, but only clumsily and accidentally, squashing it with my wrist against my chest.
‘Have it,’ he says.
I put the orange in my pocket.
‘Nah, don’t be silly, give it back,’ he says. ‘My uncle’d kill me if I started giving em away.’
I hand it back to him.
He laughs. ‘Some kind of country idiot, are you? When someone gives you something, just scarper with it!’
‘Scarper with it?’
‘Of course. Take off. Show em your heels. Yes?’
None of his words are quite working in my head. I nod a half yes, and he mimes running with the top half of his body only, pumping his arms.
‘Well then,’ he says.
‘You want me to take off?’
‘Isn’t that what your kind do?’ he asks. My livery marks me out as a footboy, of course.
‘Not with other people’s property,’ I say, regaining some ground on the basis of the words ‘your kind’.
‘It’s your property now,’ he says. ‘Put it in your pocket. It’s a sample. Does your master or mistress want oranges? ‘
‘No,’ I say, putting the orange in my pocket, where it makes a rude bulge.
‘What’s your game then?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why did you say you were interested in my oranges?’
It is time for honesty, though I am afraid he is going to laugh at me.
‘I would like you to teach me to smoke,’ I say.
I am not wrong about the laugh, but he recovers himself quickly.
‘I see,’ he says. ‘I see. You got anything to do it with?’
I bring out the pouch of tobacco and hand it over.
‘All right then,’ he says, sniffing it. ‘This is not the best, but it will do.’ He feeds the white mouth of his pipe like it hasn’t been fed in an age, though I saw him smoking not a few minutes ago. He goes over to a friend of his who is selling roasted chestnuts, and uses a pair of ember tongs to set a tiny coal on the tobacco, sucking and puffing before putting the ember, and the tongs, back where he found them and returning to me. He sucks and puffs, then he offers it over, and I do the same. Only I know it’s not the same, and I suspect he is the kind of boy who will point that out to me, and sure enough he does, laughing himself onto his haunches.
‘Look at you, like a little kettle or something. You must suck it in,’ he says, taking the pipe out of my hands. ‘Breathe in! Suck it right down into your lungs, like this.’
He demonstrates, and the smoke disappears. He holds his breath for a few minutes, his eyes saying see? — and then he releases it in a long and satisfied stream. He passes the pipe back over.
‘Breathe in! Like it’s a big lungful of sea air or something. Breathe it right down inside you!’
I do as he says, and start coughing straight away.
‘That’s the bones of it,’ he says. ‘Try again!’
I try again, and cough again.
‘Takes practice,’ he says. I hand it back to him, thinking it better that I practice when he isn’t around to laugh at me. Yet I feel a little light-headed from the smoke, and warmed by his company. I start asking him about his business, and how long he’s been a barrow boy, and whether he likes it, and he tells me all about his uncle, whose barrow it is, and how the oranges never tally with the takings whether he takes them or not, and he gets beaten regardless, so he might as well give them to any person he likes the look of, but never a grown up. His uncle works in a slaughterhouse. His job is bringing death to the cows and sheep and pigs that are herded into London from the villages round abouts. He says he takes great pleasure in it. He doesn’t always like to do it fast. Sometimes he likes a slow cut, and watching the animal bleed very slowly, its eyes white and widening. And then he comes home, tallies up the takings from the orange barrow, and beats his nephew.
‘Do you not hate him for beating you?’ I ask, because I’ve never seen anyone talk about their beatings so cheerfully.
‘Pith and peel,’ he says. And then looking at my puzzled face he says, ‘You know, like an orange.’ (Though I don’t know, because I’ve never opened an orange: the one he gave me is getting hot in my pocket.) ‘Pith and peel on the outside, throw it away, means nothing. It’s not the fruit, is it. The fruit is inside. Now,’ he says, as if being reminded. ‘You might need a lemon. Do you have the money for a lemon?’
‘I do,’ I say, ‘but why would I need a lemon?’
‘Girls don’t like smoke on your breath if you’re trying to kiss them. Sucking on a lemon will do the trick. Or gargling salt water if you can’t abide lemons. Both, if you want to be sure of that kiss.’
He laughs, and I thank him. I ask him more questions and he answers them all. He tells me I’m the most interesting person he’s met in many a long day, though when I think about it he has done most all of the talking and doesn’t know a single thing about me, excepting that I am a footboy who cannot smoke.
The thought must occur to him at just the same time.
‘I’m Jim Coker,’ he says, and I tell him ‘Mark Read,’ and we shake on it like proper gentleman. And then I run off to the Inns of Court, deliver my mistress’s letter, collect her unwanted suitor’s reply, and run home again by a parallel route.
After meeting Jim Coker I practice smoking every evening, hanging out of the attic window in the bitter night air, until I can smoke like he does. Even though it makes my fingers brown and my spit bitter, I promise myself I will do it every day, to make my voice a more manly thing. Soon I don’t have to promise myself at all, because it’s something I need to do, quite as much as I need to eat or relieve myself.
My next question is how to be stronger. If I were to be a gentleman, in his powdered wig and waistcoat and box of snuff, I would likely not need to think about such a thing. But those in the trades or in service must use their bodies more, and here the men and women differ more greatly in what they can carry and lift. Though women have the strength to lift children and baskets full of laundry, they just as often puff and struggle, where men will lift whole hods of stone onto their shoulders, and one time I saw four men lift the corpse of a dead dray horse, on a tarpaulin, onto the back of a cart. I wouldn’t want there to be a time where a womanly weakness of arm might give me away. So I make it my business to offer as much lifting and carrying as the household needs. Even though it is not strictly my duty, and I must be careful not to make myself dirty, I fill the coal bucket as high as I can, hold it at arm’s length away from me, and take it unnecessarily up and down the stairs.
The months go on in this manner. I smoke and I carry the heaviest things I can manage, and on trips to and from Middle Temple, you will find me for at least a short time at Jim Coker’s barrow, so that in the gaps between customers I might listen to all he has to say on the world, and especially on girls, so I know better what a boy of my age should be thinking. I would take all of this from you, were you still in England. I would learn by your example as I always did. But Jim talks easily, and though he would never sense my thoughts as you did, I look to him as a kind of brother.
One afternoon late in the year, when Demoiselle de Vaucresson has gone to Norwich for the week without requiring me to accompany her, I tell him about the maps I studied in Captain Read’s library. About the names of those islands far to the west of us, and those things Mister Lampard said about the birds bright as fruit, and the summer all year long, and the whole barrels of sugar and spices, more precious than gold. And also what I have read about in Captain Read’s library about islands inhabited by men that have a second head growing out of their chests. And the diseases like sprue, and King’s Evil, which only come to sailors in hot climes, and no-one knows how or why.
‘I do not fancy going to sea,’ he says, and I feel sorry to have mentioned all the strange head-in-your-chest people or the diseases, because he might have been happy enough to think about the fruit-coloured birds and the all-year summer. He is juggling oranges as always in the hope of catching somebody’s eye to sell them to, and I am leaning against one of the uprights under the market awning, hands in my pockets, because the rain is coming down something fierce. Against the early-dark afternoon sky, the oranges look like balls of flame.
‘I expect those diseases are very rare,’ I say.
‘Maybe,’ he says, ‘but I do not like to be on the water.’
He drops an orange and it goes rolling under the cart. He bends to retrieve it, saying,
‘Ships can sink. And where would I be when they do but at the bottom of the ocean, where there are no oranges or pretty girls?’
As he straightens himself, he is eyeing a couple of those same pretty girls who were walking with a chaperone on the other side of the square, but are now sheltering under a large canopy.
‘You cannot swim,’ I ask?
‘For sure I cannot swim, and wouldn’t want to. Swimming’s for fishes.’
‘My brother and I learned for sport,’ I say. ‘To see what fell out of the sailor’s purses in the harbour. And keeping cool in the dew ponds. If there were ever a day when neither of us was working, I could teach you.’
‘I wouldn’t want to go to sea,’ he says again, looking me hard in the eye.
‘I’m not asking,’ I say, although he knows that I was, in a fashion.
‘You shouldn’t go either,’ he says, starting his juggling again. ‘Sailors are a rough lot, and unless you were as rough as the rest of them, or an officer, you’d get knocked about worse than I get from my uncle.’
‘Maybe I will be an officer,’ I say. ‘I have an education. My father was a captain.’
He catches all three oranges and squints me rotten.
‘I do believe, friend, that your father was a pirate.’ This much of my adopted story, I have told him.
I unpeel my spine from the upright and put my cupped hand a little way out into the torrent. Water is pouring off the edge of the awning and it fills quickly. He is jawing on about my villainous father, and how badness must run in my blood, being only halfway through a categorising of my low-born characteristics when I splash it in his direction.
‘Beefhead!’ he says, laughing. He spies a bucket by the flowerstall, nothing in it now but water, and as he darts the short distance to get it, I shout ‘Faster than any beefhead you’ve ever befriended!’ and sprint in the other direction, weaving through the covered stalls, looking for some way to outwit him, but knowing I won’t escape him unless I run all the way back to Albemarle Street. And that, of course, is not the game.
And here he comes, in a zig-zag line after me, hopping from this foot to that and only slightly disadvantaged by the bucket that he has in both hands, like a great big present he wants to give me, slopping itself out very slightly side to side. Both of us annoying stall-holders and customers in equal measure, I circle back and he circles back after me, all the time getting closer. Finally he has me cornered almost back where we began, and there’s only a table of vegetables between us and behind me only the street and the rain. So just as I see he’s ready to soak me, I leap back into the rain and soak myself, head to toe.
‘Damn you, beefhead,’ he says, ‘you take all the fun out of the chase!’ And chucks the bucket hard at me. I’m meant to catch it, but I’m looking at something else. Someone else, sheltering in a doorway. Ma. In a garish pink-and-green confection, so open at the neck that her breasts are more out than in. The bucket hits me hard in the belly and I fold to the ground, the breath knocked out of me.
‘Damn me!’ he says. ‘What sort of catching is that? You alright?’
It takes a couple of goes before the breath fills my lungs again. He comes out into the rain, puts out his hand to me where I lie.
‘Come on now, it’s nothing,’ he says. ‘Pith and peel!’
I nod, taking his hand, and he pulls me onto my feet and in under the awning. He follows my gaze. A gentleman approaches Ma in the doorway. He takes his coat off and makes a canopy of it, over his head. She joins him beneath it and off they go, down the street. ‘Not like you to be eyeing up the ladies,’ says Jim.
‘Not a lady,’ I say.
‘No, I can see that,’ he says, ‘lady of the night, not a lady —‘
‘My mother,’ I say, finishing the sentence before he holes the ship any further.
‘Blimey,’ he says.
‘I know what you’re thinking.’
‘What?’
‘Father a pirate, mother a whore.’
‘No such thing.’
‘I was respectable once. She was a seamstress, and he was a sea captain with a letter of marque.’ (Skipping the pebble of truth over the cold waters of the real story, where my father was a common sailor, of the kind that likes to clonk women on the head.)
‘Then the lesson is watch your step,’ says Jim. ‘How are the mighty fallen, and other good bible verses I’ll wager.’
He sees that I’m shivering.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We can’t stand here wet through. No-one’s buying in this rain. I’ll ask Alf to keep an eye on the barrow. Let’s nip into the Three Tuns for a half. Dry out a bit. They have a good fire there.’
But even with the good fire, something doesn’t feel right in me. That half of ale sits wrong in my belly, as if the hops were off. Or as if that bucket bruised me more than I realised.
‘Hey chin up,’ says Jim, ‘she’s not your mother anymore, is she, she’s given you away for a servant.’
But his cheeriness doesn’t get to the insides of me, where it might do me some good. The ache in my belly gets wider and deeper, and I don’t tell him, because he will feel bad about throwing the bucket at me, even though it was my fault for not catching it.
When I let myself in through the scullery door, Cook is scowling at herself in the back of the ladle. She startles as I enter and hangs it on its hook with a motion and look that suggests it’s been badly behaved.
‘What is wrong with you, sneaking in so?’
‘Nothing is wrong with me,’ I say.
‘You are wrong there,’ she says. ‘And you can wipe that smile off your face, too.’
‘I’m not smiling,’ I say. Whatever’s been painted on my face by this belly pain that has grown deeper since the bucket and the bad ale cannot be a smile.
‘You might have fooled Mrs Fredericks, but you can’t fool me. You’re no kind of gentleman.’ She says this with a flourish, and fear pricks my heart for the seconds it takes me to realise that she is casting aspersions on my class, not my pretended sex. She places a cleaned cooking pot back on its shelf. ‘Don’t you know the King is Dead?’
‘How dead?’
‘How dead?’ she says. ‘Very dead, I should say. Dead enough for a funeral.’
‘From being thrown off his horse two weeks ago,’ says Mister Thomas, coming in for his supper.
‘Yes,’ says Cook, ‘who knew you could die from a broken collarbone? All from the horse stumbling on a molehill, too. Killed by a mole! To think a blind rat could manage what all those awful Jacobite assassins couldn’t.’
‘Who is to be king now then?’ I ask.
‘That’s the very worst of it,’ says Cook.
‘Another Dutchman?’ I ask.
‘Worse than a Dutchman. A woman.’
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Quick truth: Substack's algorithm can't tell "loved it" from "skipped it" unless you comment. So — one for the comments: pith and peel, or in over his head? Is Jim Coker the brother Mary needs, or is she about to drag him somewhere he swore he'd never go?
This is brilliant Ros, loved that pebble of truth skipping and also the fish head at the end of the year. But really loving all of it. Thank you.
OK, so I was 71 before it dawned on me what the derivation of mademoiselle, madam and damsel was. But at least I'm still 71 with this crucial new knowledge.