“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.
The Gift May Be the Wrapping
Saturday wakes me up with the sound of carts taking fish to market. Up past the Cowtown toll they meet other carts carrying all God’s living things, and dead ones too. Turkeys and chickens, turnips and onions, mackerels and cockles: anything you can kill and put in a pot is going off to get sold so that someone can eat it. I shove your shoulder a couple of times but you’re worn out from scouting so I’m first down to breakfast, except there isn’t any, because of Ma’s fright at the harbour. Ma sends me to Clowter’s for brisket. I hate John Clowter’s and she knows, but she never minds how I feel about anything. All those dead animal bodies hanging from Clowter’s ceiling, the rabbits stretched out like they were leaping away before they got bloody, the half pigs showing the side of their ribs no-one was meant to see, the chickens all naked and their white fishy eyes staring pure deadness, right into my heart like its own winter. I start upstairs to wake you, but she snatches my wrist, tells me to leave you sleeping.
There’s nothing for it but to clatter down the steps to the harbour. Grace Foxwill’s da is sitting on his steps mending a net and says, ‘Watch yer feet, Tyke,’ as I go by. There’s two more ships stocking up in the harbour beside my father’s, and some fishing boats too, and gulls are making a racket around somebody throwing out fish guts. I don’t look up at the deck of the Dutch ship. It’s moored there like a hill of trouble, but my eyes don’t need to climb it. I go past like I’m being whistled somewhere, half running.
John Clowter is blowing smoke outside his shop, with the big pipe he got from a whaler. For a minute I think this saves me from looking at all the dead things but the minute he sees me he says, ‘Ah, young Mark,’ knocks out his pipe and steps back into his shop, like I should follow. I don’t tell him he’s wrong on the name. I am wearing your last year’s breeches and maybe his eyes are not so good. And maybe wearing your name I can be braver, not shivered up my spine by the beasts and half-beasts dangling in the window. In he goes, and I go after.
There’s a shuffle at the back of the shop, and Peter Moxy vanishes like a wish. You remember one time we were playing Spit-Split with Peter in Tinkers Wood and he took an eyeball from his pocket and popped it into his mouth? Deep brown stare-ball in the centre of whiteness still carrying the fright of the cow that looked out of it when a man cut its throat. Peter kept his lips open for the eye to stare out. You ran away laughing, ran halfway along the path to Great Wishings, but I got stuck on the deadness of that great big eye staring out of Peter Moxy’s mouth. I stared down the hole of it and saw Peter Moxy himself, taller and thinner, laid out on a winding sheet, his face like chalk and his head cracked open.
‘Death’s coming for you too,’ I said. He stared at me, his face blown empty like a handful of flour in the wind. He spat the eye out on the ground.
‘Ma wants some brisket,’ I say, working hard not to meet the death stare of two hares that have twirled towards me, tied up like newlyweds.
‘That so?’ says John Clowter. ‘Your Ma happen to give you any money?’
I say nothing, because nothing is the answer, and those two naked bunnies are closer to each other than Jesus to his own cross.
‘On the slate is it?’
I nod, trying to place my eyes in safety, but there’s death hanging behind him, death twizzling in the window, death in the back room where Peter Moxy rinses pig guts for sausages and drops entrails onto pink sawdust.
John Clowter sighs, hefts a part-carcass onto his board and picks up a cleaver. He doesn’t bring the blade down. He just holds it, slicing sunlight into my eye as accidentally as his apprentice, in a few weeks, will hack off the end of his finger.
‘Your Ma’s a fine woman. Tell her I want to see her, won’t you? This will be the last bit of brisket, or anything else, until I see her.’
Nod. Down comes the cleaver.
Making my way home I get another fright, almost as bad as that pair of bald bunnies dancing in the window. Sitting on a mooring post, reading a book, is Reverend Ashburner. He’s not speaking a word, but his voice sounds in my head like the church bell. ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ he intones, though he hasn’t so much as snuck a glimpse at me, and his lips are pursed together like a oyster’s. ‘Honour thy father and mother.’
I stop like a steer snagged in a halter. A queasy feeling rising. We’d be breaking two commandments at once. He feels me there and his big cow head starts moving around to speak at me, but I pick up my knees and start running, fast as I can, running up the long steps, leaping over the half-mended net and the legs of Mister Foxwill — ‘Tyke!’ — all the way home. You’re at the door waiting for me. You catch me by my shoulders, turn me around and put my back against the wall, though I’m breathing so hard I have to bend double for a bit.
‘Best not,’ you say.
‘But the meat —’
‘She’s blazing. Listen.’
Through the door I can hear Ma arguing with someone, telling them they’re no good, a stupid dummon, a dawcake. And then the person she’s shouting at shouts back, and it’s Ma again.
‘You’ll catch the back of her hand,’ you say. ‘Or worse.’ You touch your hand against your ear, split at the top by a nail in a shoe, when you told her the truth one time. ‘Best wait till she’s done,’ you say. ‘Come on.’
You snag my fingers and we’re off up the hill, past the last of Fishtown’s doors and into the meadows. We’d stop at Guzzle Down but Old Peaty is there talking to the cows so we go further up to Great Wishings, where the witch elms take the meadow under their skirts and the sun isn’t so fearsome. I’m out of breath, not so much because of the hill or the distance, but the scare of the near-smack, which sticks in my windpipe like a fishbone.
‘Let’s sit,’ you say, and we slide our backs down the trunk of the middle elm.
‘What did Clowter give you today, then?’
You don’t mean the brisket. John Clowter wraps his joints and sausages in old broadsides. You unroll the outer layer, leaving the brisket in its pinkish inner layer on the grass, and start trying to make out the words. Mister Lampard’s been schooling you. He says boys go further if they can read themselves out of trouble. After wrestling broke him, he took the King’s sixpence in Plymouth. While he was at sea, he met a schoolmaster who’d been pressed into service to get out of debtor’s prison and that man taught him his letters. The navy was worse than slavery, Mister Lampard said, and he never would have joined if he could read. So he’s saving you from slavery with the alphabet. And now you’re hungry for scrawl and type, and the meat wrappers with their old news.
‘Hey, it’s a hanging one, and there’s a ballad! To the tune of Digby’s Farewell, it says.’
‘Who’s hanged?’ I say. ‘What did he do?’
‘Not he! A woman! A woman!’ More excited to think of someone getting hoisted out of her skirts — just for the difference — you read jerkily: ‘The Trial and Execution of Mary Caistor, Who Suffered Death This Morning at the County Jail, Horsemonger Lane, Southwark, for the murder of her husband. Shall I sing the ballad?’
Most often I say yes to your singing, but today there’s a chill in me at the thought of it and I put my hand on your arm and pull it down so the broadside lowers out of your eye line and the only thing you can read is my face.
‘What’s the matter, Tyke?’
‘It’s a sin,’ I say. ‘It’s against two commandments. Thou shalt not kill is one, and honour thy father and mother the other. The man is my father whether he meant to be or not, and we will be sinning whether we’re caught or not, and if we’re caught we’ll be hanged, and if we’re hanged we’ll go to Hell.’
You laugh. You say, ‘None of that will happen.’
But I keep my eyes on yours the way a dog looks at a man’s dinner.
‘All right,’ you say. ‘You’re scared. You don’t have to do it. I’ll do it alone.’
‘But then you’ll sin and get caught and hanged and go to Hell, and if that happens —‘
I am already crying just from making that happen in my head.
‘Shush now, I won’t be caught.’
‘And then you’ll be in a ballad, but I’ll not be able to read it.’
‘They’ll never make a ballad out of me. Not a hanging ballad, anyway.’
I grip onto you very tightly, like you’re already dead. I cry the tears that will wake you up again, like a fairy story. You laugh and shuck me off.
‘Get away with you!’
You put the broadside down and an arm around me. You take me through it: the rope pulled taut by the harbour wall, a sploosh in the dark, and another drunken sailor drowns a few feet from land, like three others already that I can remember. For having the cast of an accident I like the plan well enough, but I don’t know how you’ll get my father on his own, when sailors go around so much together, especially when they are swaying drunk and singing their way home.
‘He likes a woman, don’t he?’ you say. ‘Likes to get a woman alone and knock her lights out and put a baby in her? When he’s properly in his cups, I’ll get a note to him that there’s a woman wants to see him.’
‘Does he know English?’
‘I’ll show him,’ you say, and you strip your arm out from me to show me the mime, which needs both hands.
‘Looks like you’re selling apples.’
‘Shut your tatie trap!’
You leap up to do it better, swinging hips side to side too, and I suppose it wouldn’t take too much thinking to make your mime into a woman.
‘What about the commandments?’
You slide your back down onto the tree trunk again, right next to me.
‘It’s still sinning,’ I say, ‘even if you don’t get caught.’
You put your head against the tree and your knee starts jiggling. You say,
‘Don’t our soldiers kill every day in the name of the king? Are they told they are sinners and will go to Hell? No, they’re given eight ounces of dried beef and a pound loaf and quart of beer daily, a blanket for their beds and the king’s face in their purses.’
‘But they kill our enemies.’
‘Where in the Bible does it say “Thou shalt not kill, except if they’re your enemies”? Who decides who are the friends and who are the enemies? Not long ago, Mister Lampard says, we were killing the Dutch. The Dutch were the enemy. Now we have a Dutch king and fight shoulder to shoulder with the butter-bags.’
I take a big breath, wanting to speak, but the words don’t come straight away. There’s a wind stirring the tree above us. You start up again.
‘The way they give us these rules, and say they are God’s rules, but go by whatever rules they like, I say this is all stories, all nonsense, to keep us in our place and them in theirs. Lady Upton travels all ways and none in her coach and horses. But Peter Moxy’s feet grew out of his one pair of shoes when he was ten and he had no more until he was twelve and Mister Clowter give him some so he don’t have to stand in pig guts. Lady Upton gets a tenth of all the harvest for doing nothing at all, and old Albert Downey, who fought for King and country as boy and man, laboured in the fields until he dropped dead in a hedge. Reverend Ashburner schools us against sin before tucking into his roasted fowl every Sunday, but Millicent Peeler, thin as a willow, gets hanged for a stolen henny.’
Millicent Peeler’s name is an oath between us. Her ghost has been seen six times on Marshy Lane, white as a winding sheet. Just the thought of her chills me, but you haven’t noticed. You’re rattling on.
‘It’s one rule for the rich and another for the poor. You know how the Uptons ended up with the fat house on the hill? How they come to own all the land around here so every farmer must lease it, and give Lady Upton a measure of their grain when harvest comes?’
I try to shake the ignorance out of my head.
‘They stole it from us. From us, Tyke. This land used to be common land, belonging to every one of us, and we were free, and then the Normans invaded and took it from us.’
‘The Uptons aren’t Norman.’
‘They all are. Mister Lampard says they Englished their names, so we would think they were the same as us, and forget about them stealing our land. Them that can remember die, and new ones are born who think that’s just how it is, as if it’s God’s own order and has always been that way. They get the priests to say that it’s God’s will, too.’
‘Is it not God’s will?’
‘“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” Mister Lampard’s been all over this world, by sail and shoe-leather. He says he don’t want me walking into it with my eyes closed like he did. He says we should know that even if we don’t have a pair of boots between us, that we’re as good a human as anyone we’re supposed to bow to.’
I pluck up a piece of grass so I’ve got somewhere to put my eyes that’s not your face. I strip that piece of grass down to its core, the part that’s white and you can crunch flat between your teeth.
‘That man dishonoured our mother. Did he not covet another man’s wife? Did he not mean to kill her with that clonk to the head? And don’t those who tell us to obey the commandments break them themselves?’
That little stem of grass can’t hold me safe from you any longer. I look into your face and it’s as fierce and bright as the sun itself, burning the truth into me: the truth about who we are, and what we could be. And like a spark leaping from a tinderbox onto a field of high August wheat, you set a blaze in me. A blaze that might burn down the whole field of my life.
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