Mary Read’s half-brother, Mark, is missing. With their mother on a mission to extract money from Mark’s grandmother, the wealthy widow Mrs. Read, Mary and her Ma set off for London.
A Gentleman is Not Necessarily
We are walking to London. The shirt money buys food to save on lodgings, with the weather still fine, we sleep by the roadside. Ma says this is not shameful. Many good people fall on hard times and must do the same on their way to a new life. On the road we meet people our mother calls itinerants. An Irish tinker, who won’t stop talking to us, because when Ma pretends she is deaf, he turns to me, saying things that make our mother wince. A man with a travelling puppet show, which he has been wheeling about on a handcart. When we see him there is no show, unless we are meant to give a farthing to watch him sitting under a tree and crying. Many itinerants are men back from the wars, with their uniforms worn through, and missing pieces of their bodies. Ma says don’t look at them, the itinerants, we don’t want to mix with the likes of them. Doesn’t sleeping in the ditches make us itinerants too? Ma says no, we are honest travellers, a different thing entirely. Pressed further: because we have somewhere to go. Where? Never you mind, she says, you are always full of questions, and questions get a person into trouble. So I shut my mouth, thinking that I am a person today, and glad of that.
In Exeter, Ma diverts us to the river, where she dips her handkerchief into the water and scrubs at her face until it comes up pink and the handkerchief grey. She rinses it in the Exe and then dabs and scrubs at the tell-tale places on her dress, a dress that says here and there it has spent two nights kissing ditches.
She lets that dress dry, with her in it, on Cathedral Green. The Cathedral sits very wide at its front, like a broody hen hatching something under the earth. From the side it looks like a whole lot of smaller churches all squeezed together. The grass around it is well trimmed by sheep but the verger or someone has cleared up their doings. We don’t say much. Ma doesn’t want grass stains on her skirts, so she walks about. But the grass won’t make a stain on your old moleskin trousers, which were made to be the colour of dirt. So I lie back on the grass letting the sun soak into me, like our afternoons on Guzzle Down or at Great Wishings, when the whole sky would sail over us and you’d talk about adventures you’d have, when you were old enough.
When the light fades, we go to an inn with a picture of a white hart, and Ma tells me to wait outside. Swifts are screeching around the eaves, and there’s still heat in the air, and the smell of dinner, which makes me hungry. We had pasties on the Cathedral Green, from a woman who came out of her house with a basket, and Ma wrapped four for the journey, but they are with her and not me. And I am not journeying. The stars come peeping out, and one or two coaches clatter over the cobbles into the courtyard, empty themselves of people and baggage, shed their horses into the stables, and still I wait. Crouch down with my back against the wall, listening to the laughter inside as the ale grows it. Think of that night. I see you put the note in his hand and I see myself running in and snatching it out again, no harm done, and the Dutch sailors laughing at these silly littluns playing a game they don’t understand, a game that would have kept you in Fishtown, with both your shoes, and Mister Lampard with our mother, and me in the straw bed in the eaves next to you, where I would give anything to be.
Ma is gone for so long that I wonder if she has slipped away without me seeing. People come out, laughing and half-falling on the cobbles. The moon has risen until it is high over the Cathedral, silvering the roofs of the houses. Clunker-clunk, the inn door bolted from the inside. I go and relieve myself behind the stables. Then return to my spot, lay my hands down on the cobbles, and my head down on my hands, and pretend that your arms are around me.
I am shaken awake. Two bare feet. Ma’s feet. She straightens herself to standing, clutching a blanket around her shoulders. Underneath, the creamy shock of undergarments. She motions me up.
My bones are so chilled that it’s hard to move, but I follow to the back of the inn, clumsy on my not-woken legs. She signals quiet, then opens the door. A servants’ passage, a narrow staircase. No candle, but I can make out the stairs from the light that leaks through an upstairs window. She creeps along the passageway with me as her shadow. She stops at the third door.
‘Get under the bed,’ she whispers. ‘I’ve put a blanket there. Don’t make a sound and don’t come out until I tell you.’
She opens the door. The bedchamber is flooded with moonlight. The bed is entirely unmade and something — someone — is snoring there. An invisible gentleman is draped over the corner chair: breeches, shirt, waistcoat, hat. Nothing but clothes without any gentleman to puff them up, and her dress beside those things, and a tall pair of riding boots standing by the chair like a soldier on duty. She points me towards the dark space under the bed. I slide under, quiet as I can be. There’s the creak of her getting into the bed above me. So the gentleman has let her share his bed, but there is no room for me. Or it would not be right for me to share with him too. Or he does not know about me. Whatever the truth may be, the only truth that matters to me is that I am not abandoned, and the hard floor is better than the hard ground, and the air inside the inn is warmer than the air without, and I have a blanket to boot, which is not only beneath me but wrapped around me.
For the first few minutes of the morning, there is a great to-do. The whole bed is creaking and squeaking, as though Ma and the gentleman can’t get comfortable, and are wrestling with each other. I think they must be about to get out of bed, but neither Ma’s feet nor the gentleman’s feet land on the floor, and I wonder that they are having such difficulty getting up, except that this is one of the best rooms of the inn, and the mattress is probably filled with feathers, like Lady Upton’s at the big house, and maybe too squashy to make getting out of it very easy. But at last the commotion subsides, with the gentleman crying out like he has hurt himself, and I hear Ma making shushing noises, meaning maybe he has, and then all is quiet again. I am aching to relieve myself, and the chamber pot is right next to my face, but can’t be used without me getting out from underneath. One of them used it in the night, and it is a poor stench for my nose to have for breakfast, but I am determined to be good after being left outside for so long.
Then the gentleman is snoring again. Blessedly, a pair of feet appear — Ma’s — and she makes the smallest of rustles as she gathers up her clothes. She signals me out to the open door and we are away down the stairs. In the rear courtyard she pulls on the rest of her clothes and I help her with her stays and ties. We use the jakes before we leave the premises. We’re walking very fast, faster than usual, getting ourselves back on the road to London. The light is cold and grey, the sun only just coming up.
She says, ‘If we get ourselves to the Black Swan by half past the hour, we can ride the stagecoach to London.’ Seeing my confusion, she reaches into her purse and shows me three golden sovereigns before dropping them back inside.
‘You got them from the gentleman?’ I ask, though I can think of no other place where a woman like our mother would get anything gold.
‘He had plenty,’ she says. ‘We can ride for a hundred miles with one of these. Two of them will get us to London. Come on!’
She picks up her heels, and I do the same.
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This book sounds great! Just fascinsting. I am captivated by what I’ve read so far, and can’t wait for the book to come out so I can really get stuck in!