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The wealthy Mrs Read has been tricked into thinking that Mary is her legitimate grandson, Mark. Now installed in Mrs Read’s London household, she must maintain her disguise.
You Will Learn Nothing Good From Mister Dryden
I am not the only one not going by their name. Charles, the negro servant, corrects me the very first time we are alone. I have a question about the gloves but have no sooner begun with ‘Charles,’ then he stops me with a finger.
‘My name is not Charles,’ he says. ‘My name is Adisa.’
I might say my name is not Mark, to show him we are not so different, but if I told him my real name he would know we’re as different as cat and dog.
‘Adisa,’ he says again, as though my thinking was a kind of not listening.
I say it back to him, and though it is not a complicated name, I step over it uncertainly like an unlit path. He laughs.
‘Adisa,’ he repeats. ‘Remember it. Charles is my English name. Mrs Read gave it to me. There were two kings of that name I’m told, though I’m also told that the first had his head chopped off and the second was a fool who was thrown off the throne. So perhaps it is not a good name.’
‘I think it’s a good name,’ I say.
‘Adisa is a better name,’ he says. ‘It means One Who Makes His Meaning Clear. But you must call me Charles in front of Mrs Read.’
Is he a slave? Oh no, he says, he is a free man. He was a slave as a boy, but not now. He earns a wage with Mrs Read. He is saving, he says, tapping the side of his nose in a tradesman’s gesture. Saving, yes, in the hope he might one day afford a wife.
‘You would buy a wife?’
He barks a laugh. ‘No! No, you strange boy. Women must be kept though, they must be kept.’
Like horses? Like chickens? Wide eyed staring at him, I suppose, from the way he laughs again.
‘They have babies, you know. Wives will have babies when you marry them. They can’t be working then. So you have to work enough to keep all of you. You, you wife, and your babies too. That is how women cost, even when they have no price on them.’
Me thinking: that is how I would be enslaved.
But already I belong to Mrs Read.
She is conscious of how I reflect on her, with my country speech and common ways. Her son married down, and nothing to be done about that: many a clever young man’s made stupid by the tug of his loins. But no grandson of mine, she says, no grandson of mine, as though the person who grubbed about in Broxholme for eight years was another creature, and I have just now been born, entire, out of a flower, like a fairy boy in a story. No grandson of mine, knocking at my ears over and over with new rules that please or perplex me. No grandson of mine will be torn-trousered, or go unbreakfasted, no grandson of mine will ask for the sugar bowl in that manner. She is writing my future, too. No grandson of mine will go off fighting other people’s wars, no matter how noble it might be to fight for king and country. No grandson of mine will do anything that wastes their mind. They will find an occupation that keeps them safely in London. No grandson of mine will go uneducated.
These are the words that conjure Mister Cedric Rotard. Mister Rotard has the appearance of a spindle that has lost the best part of its wool. The strain of being a tutor has rubbed him threadbare ever since he left what he calls ‘my alma mater’, which he told me curtly is not his mother but something called a university, which he speaks of in a crushed voice, as though it really were his mother, and had loved him the way mothers are meant to do, but had unexpectedly turned on him and thrown him out on his bare arse-bones. I have the strongest feeling he would have stayed there had he been able, so he didn’t have to teach little toe rags (which I heard him call me to Adisa) their alphabets. After a year of Wednesdays, we are well beyond the alphabet, and he is trying to do what he calls extending my vocabulary, perhaps so that I can understand better what he is saying to me, because many of his words are a lot longer than the words I have been used to, and have their roots in Latin, which he also says he will teach me. I ask him where they speak Latin, and he says ‘Nowhere but where gentlemen mingle’ which he seems to think a very fine quality. I ask him if there are no countries where they speak Latin and he answers, ‘Not one,’ looking as pleased if Mrs Frederick the housekeeper has brought him a slice of her honey cake, and I say, then I won’t learn it, but might he please learn me French, and he says ‘will you’ and ‘teach me’ and ‘No’. He is confusing to me and confused himself, more often than is safe for someone somewhere as busy as London, and is more likely to remember a line of poetry from a man in a powdered wig than he is to remember where he is in a sentence, or where his spectacles are, or that a respectable man is required to tuck his shirt into his trousers.
He is fond of switching me with his rule whenever I fail to meet his measure of me. One time, when I am making an error, he swats the back of my hand so hard that I am surprised into the moment of his death. Crossing a road with his eyes concerned in a letter, he mis-steps on a wet cobble and all his long body collapses like a pile of soft fruit, under the iron-rimmed wheels of a dray cart. I see his pince-nez — the same set he peers through at me daily — crushed into bitter jewels on the cobbles, the purple snake of his blood, the half-read letter released from a stricken hand. Not so many years away, from his uncreased brow and his same-style jacket. Returning to the sunlit dust of the room, the pine desk, and my stinging hand paralysed on the paper, I hold my eyes to his very firmly, as though I can stick him to the present moment. A moment in which — I observe — he sighs a breath out of his nose and tsks his tongue against his teeth. His eyes grow aghast to be gazed upon.
‘What, boy?’
‘Never read out of doors,’ I say.
To which he says nothing, but turns and walks to the window, shivering across his shoulders.
Mister Rotard thinks very fondly of Mister Dryden, our national poet, and will quote him at the smallest provocation. The sight of a polished apple in a bowl on the dining table, for example, provokes him to stand very still, as though afraid to lose his balance, and then throw his arm towards the curtain as though it were about to draw back to reveal an audience, and recite a small verse. So compelling is his action that I look to the curtain for a hidden listener, but there is nothing there but a dead bumblebee lying below, which must have given up on the French windows ever being opened again because Mrs Read has been reading about the dangers of breathing in fog. It has been foggy for three days. But Mister Rotard cares not a fig about fog. Mister Rotard only cares about the mother university and Mister Dryden. I think Mister Dryden a horrible prig but cannot say so, for the certainty that it would lead Mister Rotard to cuff me round the ear. He is in the habit of cuffing me round the ear whenever he imagines I am not listening or have not heard him. Which is often, because rarely do I understand what he is saying when he recites poetry, and when I do understand, I do not like it. This is the verse which the apple prompted him to perform to the curtain:
‘A woman’s counsel brought us first to woe,
And made her man his paradise forego,
Where at heart’s ease he liv’d; and might have been
As free from sorrow as he was from sin.’
It is from a poem called ‘The Cock and the Fox’. He tells me Mister Dryden claims the words to be those of the cock Chanticleer, which is a fine trick when it gives licence to other cocks to crow them across English parlours. Mister Rotard has said this verse at me half a dozen times now, as if expecting me to agree heartily, because I am a young man, and therefore should imagine that women are to blame for everything. Whereas being a girl, and knowing what I know about my own making, and how that drove Ma to gin, and her husband to flee back to the sea, I might be inclined to throw some blame the other way. But wickedness does not reside only in one sex, and goodness does not choose its host by their reproductive organs. You schooled me early on that what the Church preaches to us is lies, and there to keep us bent low, scrubbing steps and hauling coal, or bowing and curtseying to their lord and ladyships. Eve’s ruin of Adam, for which womankind are punished forever with the curse of monthly pain and deathly childbearing, is one of the worst of those lies.
Mister Rotard likes to pronounce things about Man, and Man is meant to mean all of us, though clearly it only means men. Man has direction and purpose whereas woman has none, and not even a capital letter. Man must make things in the world — strides, his mark, waves — but woman can only make things in the house and only things of no consequence.
Yet the knowledge that Mister Rotard bestows upon me is a gift. The means by which I may sign my name, and read what I am signing it to, and read almost any book in Mrs Read’s dead husband’s study, is a gift usually given only to those with extra meat between the legs. The small bulge where my pizzle should be is only a balled up stocking. But with this simple trick and a face that might be either sex or none, I am now equipped to read what the world has to tell me.
Education takes up the whole of Wednesdays, but your grandfather’s library is mine on Sundays, so long as I have been well-behaved at the dinner table. Your grandfather was a merchant trader. His study is filled with the accounts of travellers and seafarers. And there are maps. I stare at them: the strange names, the inky outlines of shorelines. I feel for a sense of you in any of them: the quickening of knowledge, this old kind of knowledge that has always been mine without trying. I ask which bay, which island, which port contains you. But I cannot empty myself to receive the answer. It is only questions, more questions, a fury of questions, filling up my head like brine in drowning lungs.
Three summers go by. My thumb and two fingers are stained black at their tips, as though rotten with writing. When first I began my twice-weekly visits, Mrs Read was concerned that I was not tall enough. She said I must eat more chard, because ‘chard makes long bones’. So I ate more chard. Always chard on Sundays when she could get hold of it. After three years she is concerned I am too tall. Far too tall for my age, surely. No more chard, and less sunlight. She barters an extra day a week out of my mother. The country is fevered with talk of war and this worries her. Boys have such a tendency to be romantic about war, and what of their mothers and what of their grandmothers, and what of the poor dear girls who might have had husbands. I am not to imagine she will ever buy me a commission.
‘That is a thing that will not happen,’ she says. ‘There will be no more calamities.’
But no amount of money gives a person freedom from that.
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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. Two for the comments: can Mrs Read actually keep Mary out of the war she's so afraid of? And is Mary’s foresight a curse or a blessing?