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 arrives in London, disguised as her brother.
Impostors Run in the Family
London seems the finest place in the world. The road, having hardened, begins to clatter beneath the wheels, signalling that the great city has begun. From the top of the coach, where we sit as outsides (at half the price of insides) we can admire to my side a great park full of deer, and to Ma’s, handsome palaces set back from the road. All the noblemen and noblewomen have town dwellings as well as country ones, the coach driver explains, and they are gathered together here, each showing off with grand entrances and ornamental frontages how very favoured they are. Brother, you would laugh the scorn off your boot laces to see the nonsense they get up to with their lions on gateposts and their fancy curlicue railings. Then the deer park gives way to more fine houses, closer to the carriageway but still very grand and tall. From these first impressions, I imagine we are going to live in the highest manner. We turn into another fine road but soon it gives way, as high morals give way to corruption, to something of a meaner character, and soon I am convinced this is a devilish kind of place, somewhere so far from the sea that nothing fresh or fully alive can dwell in it. There are beggars by the side of the road with all kinds of hideous deformities, and elderly vegetables on the market stalls, and fish that have been dead for so long that they are blind and half-stinking. Though even their death-stink can hardly compete with the stench of human dung from open gutters. I see a woman hitch up her skirts and relieve herself in by the side of the road in broad daylight. Though she is wobbling, so might be drunk. Everybody seems to be drunk. It is only mid-afternoon as we are arriving, but I have never seen so many drunken people all in one place, and I very quickly surmise it is because one will need to be drunk all the time to live in a place as foul as London.
Then it grows finer again. Then more foul. Loud men and sharp women and grubby children, and gentlemen on horseback, and traders with their goods carts, and dray horses pulling beer in all directions, as though the place is made entirely of public houses. A man making music out of a contraption strung around his neck and another man juggling for money. Then clothes grow smarter and the buildings straighter, and huge domed cathedral rises out of the city’s stone heart. And all around it, trading and hawking and market stalls. This is a city that will not make up its mind, and I have no sense of where I might belong in it.
When we are finally disgorged from the coach, Ma tells me we are headed for Mrs Read’s house in Hatton Street. Mrs Read’s house is not like the houses I am used to, and I am not to touch anything, and I am not gawp at anything, and I am not to speak unless spoken to, and I am not to answer to any name except yours. Ma spittles my cheek with her handkerchief to unsmudge it, though her handkerchief is surely fouler than my face.
She pulls on the bell cord.
The door swings wide, answered by a negro servant wearing a dress coat and white gloves. He stares at us and I stare right back. Ma makes her spine stiff and explains she is Mrs Margret Read, come to see Mrs Ada Read about her grandson Mark. How she can call herself Mrs I do not know. I suppose it is in the same spirit that she is calling me Mark. Mrs is only for wealthy and respectable ladies and we both know she is a Goodwife if she is anything, and in truth not even that. The negro allows us in and tells us to wait in the hall, which is a room bigger than our whole downstairs room and with its own fireplace too. I marvel at the walls, which are made of carved wooden panels. It is not quite as grand as Lady Upton’s house, but I find it hard to believe that our mother married a man of such class and means. Our mother bends down towards my ear and whispers with considerable force,
‘This is a fine house, Mark, is it not? Your father grew up here.’
She has been preparing for days, but for me, it is very itchy to wear your name. Before I can object that no one is listening, the servant returns to usher us into the parlour.
Mrs Read is a tiny bird lady sitting on a velvet seat in a nest of cushions. Every cushion is embroidered with a flower, either purple or orange. The kind that grew in the vicarage garden, crocuses. Because of the cushions, her feet are not touching the floor, and sway a little as though blown by the breeze coming in at the window. A fierce face, and though this is your grandmother, I recognise nothing of you in it. There is much more of you in the handsome fellow painted in his waistcoat who hangs above the mantlepiece. Mrs Read purses her lips together as if she has nothing to say to us, but she sees that our mother is about to speak and determines to be first. Her voice seems to come from very far away, as though it is the voice of a person she has swallowed.
‘Margret. What a surprise to see you. You might have sent a message.’
Ma cannot write, as Mrs Read must surely know.
‘It has been a long time,’ our mother agrees.
‘Many years,’ says Mrs Read. ‘Many years. And this is young Mark? The last time I saw him, he was only a babe in arms.’
‘This is he,’ says Ma.
‘Let me look at you boy,’ says Mrs Read, and beckons me towards her until, seeing my shoes about to reach the colourful carpet in front of her, cries ‘Stop! Never on the Turkish. We go round. Stay there. I can see you well enough.’
From the twitch in her nostrils, I think she can smell me, too. She leans back a little.
‘He’s a sorry state, Margret, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘It has been a long time since your son sent any money,’ Ma says.
‘It has been a long time since he sent anyone anything,’ says Mrs Read.
Ma nods. If they thought him drowned, neither woman will say it. As I later discover, their tight lips on this matter conceal quite different conclusions. Ma thinks everyone dead at the smallest opportunity. But Mrs Read will not believe the sea has swallowed her son until it coughs up bones.
‘As a consequence,’ says Ma, trying to pick her way past the silence, ‘we have fallen on hard times.’
‘Clearly,’ says Mrs Read. ‘And now you have come to see if I might soften those times, is that it?’
Ma casts her eyes down to the floor. ‘Not for me,’ she says. ‘But for your grandson. For the boy.’
Mrs Read tinkles a little bell that is sitting on the circular table at her elbow, and the negro servant appears.
‘Charles,’ she said, ‘would you bring us some tea? And some lemonade for the boy? Do sit down,’ she says to our mother, pointing towards a nervy-looking chair. And to me, ‘You’d better stand.’ I must be grubbier than I imagined. ‘Have you ever tasted lemonade?’ she asks me.
‘No, Ma’am,’ I answer, and she seems pleased to be addressed so. It came out of my mouth without thinking, because of how she reminds me of Lady Upton: her chest puffed up, and lace upon it, and servants to do her bidding.
‘It’s quite the sensation in London now,’ she says. ‘Made of lemons and sugar. You’ve had sugar?’
‘Yes, once.’ Only remembering as I say it that I stole a dab of it at the big house. But Ma is already speaking over me.
‘We’ve not had many luxuries since my husband went to sea. Mark was only a baby then.’
There is a glare in our mother, as though it is Mrs Read’s fault that he went to sea, and not her fault at all for marrying a sea captain, who would likely do such a thing. She carries on, her arm towards me as though she is a market trader come to sell a troublesome colt.
‘He is ever so thin, as you see, but he is a good boy, and he does not deserve to suffer when there is —’ she gazes mock-absently about the room, its drapes and hangings, its not-to-be-trodden-on carpet, its painting over the mantelpiece — ‘when there is the means to mend it.’
Mrs Read looks as though she is going to puff her feathers up, but then some thought deflates her, and she becomes tinier again. It is me she is looking at. Perhaps she imagines she sees something of her son in me, though there is not so much as the smallest scrap of Captain Read in my body.
‘It’s true,’ she says, ‘that my son would not want to see his own flesh and blood in such a sorry state. I can offer —’
Charles returns with a tray of tea things: an ornate silver pot, two bone china cups on saucers, a tiny sieve sitting on a tiny bowl, and a cloudy glass of what can only be my lemonade. With his precise white-gloved hands, Charles sets the tea things on the round table, next to the bell. He balances the tiny sieve over a cup, and pours the tea through it, catching a miniature slurry of dead leaves. A splash of tea hits his gloved fingers, and I wonder if he wears the gloves to protect his hands from tea, or to protect the tea from his hands. I feel sure he would not wear gloves at all, except that Mrs Read makes him. When he has gone, she stirs one lump of sugar into her tea, and continues where she left off.
‘I can offer to take the child in.’
I take a sip of the lemonade. It is nice and nasty all at once.
‘That is very kind of you,’ says to Ma, ‘but I could not be without the child.’ She puts several lumps of sugar into her cup, and from Mrs Read’s face, more than I believe is polite. Mrs Read speaks as if our mother hasn’t.
‘I will look after him and raise him as my own. Breed him up to be of good standing. He will want for nothing.’
This sounds good to me. Knowing how Ma despises me, I cannot think that she would say no.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It would break my heart to part with the child.’ I think this very well done. Her cup almost trembles on its saucer.
Mrs Read considers her. Considers me.
‘You would be welcome to visit him from time to time.’
‘Excuse me for appearing ungracious,’ our mother replies, seeming anything but. ‘The child is all I have left of my husband.’
Mrs Read to consider this statement, with spaces between those sips. Eventually she says,
‘You might visit him once a week. Would that be tolerable to you?’
‘It would be tolerable to me,’ I say, and Ma glares at me before turning to the older woman.
‘Mrs Read, we are speaking of my only child.’
‘And my only grandchild. I would like to be better acquainted.’
‘I might bring the child to you once a week.’
Negotiations continue in this manner for long enough for the tea to be drunk to its dregs. It is finally agreed that Mrs Read will provide a crown a week for my maintenance, and in return I will be brought to her every Wednesday, to be educated, and every Sunday to have dinner with her, Ma not to be present at either occasion. Our mother is given a crown in her hand as down-payment. We leave under a veil of politeness and gentility until the door is closed and we are halfway down the street and Ma cuffs me round the head.
‘I told you not to speak. You nearly cost me thirteen pounds a year! “It would be tolerable to me.” And I suppose you want me to starve while you live like a gentleman! Not that it would last long. The old woman is a fool, but not a complete fool. How long do you think you could deceive her, living under her roof? She would find you out, and then we would both be derelict!’
In the days that follow she says nothing more about the deception. We take lodgings not far from Mary-Bone. She refers to me as Mark and he and him in company, and Mark when we’re alone. The best lies, she says, are like the best dogs: kept both inside and out. Never again do I hear my name from her mouth.
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