Unregulated Emotion is as Deadly as the Pox

Why I Stole Your Life

❤️ Please heart this post to show me you’ve been here ❤️

Three years after moving in with Mrs Read under the pretence of being her grandson, Mary has gained an education. But no amount of wealth or education can save Mary and Mrs Read from calamity.

Catch up with previous chapters here.

Unregulated Emotion is as Deadly as the Pox

Calamity arrives on Mrs Read’s doorstep in the shape of a man. By the state of him, vomited out by the sea. Such a rotten-looking man. Hair like a mop for ashes, and beard tatty as a rook’s nest, and half an arm gnawed off by something only half hungry. How it might have chewed through to his bone I cannot imagine, as his skin has the brown toughness of a pair of boots. His uneaten arm ends in tree root fingers gnarled around a cup of brandy. A cup, I note, and not one of Mrs Read’s fancy glasses, but a cup from the kitchen which I’m guessing Charles knew to be the right container from the barely detectable wideness of Mrs Read’s eyelid or from a tightness in her upper lip, which Charles well knows how to read as a silent instruction in matters of household deportment. I arrive to survey the scene through the crack of the door as Charles finishes pouring the liquid into that cup, with the man thanking him in a voice unnaturally loud, saying he had the shakes very bad and couldn’t do without it and that a whole succession of ships’ doctors had prescribed him brandy though he had generally only been able to find rum. He really does look like something about him is going off, and has a smell about him too, the way fish does when it’s been in the sun a few hours. Plenty of sailors came in and out of the harbour at Broxholme, and some of them were worn at the edges, if we were their first stop after a long voyage. But never have I seen any like this one. His trousers are half a pair of brown moleskins and half a pair of green pantaloons, though I can’t be sure he has chosen the better leg of each, since the moleskins have a hole at the knee, and the pantaloons, as I notice when he turns his cup hand to Charles, have a tear across the situpon.

Ten minutes earlier: Mister Rotard standing by the steps and a strange noise leaking through the window of the front parlour. Mister Rotard suggests with his eyes that we take the basement steps. We enter into the kitchen to find Mrs Fredericks standing dead still, floury hands crab-crouched on the edge of the table like Lady Upton about to play the harpsichord, and eyes raised to the ceiling to aid her ears. Seeing myself and Mister Rotard enter, she jolts into action, washes her hands at the tap, dries them on a cloth, and tells us to wait, heading upstairs towards the source of the noise. Mister Rotard does as he is told, sitting himself down at the kitchen table. I stay on my feet, obeying the same command for as long as five minutes, but finally am too curious to wait, and dodge his attempt to snatch my wrist, and head towards the noise.

The source of the noise is plainly Mrs Read. From the view afforded by the hinge-gap of the half-open door, she is prostrate on her long couch, half buried under a crooked arm and three of her cushions, making a sound like the wind through a crack in the world. The half-armed man drinking brandy out of a kitchen cup has brought her some great sorrow.

Mrs Fredericks has had the whole situation from Charles, who has several times gone in and out. She whispers what she knows. The sailor handed Mrs Read a letter written by your father several months ago. He served on Captain Read’s ship, and now he is finally returned to London with the letter he has come to deliver for the promise — for the letter offers this promise — that he will be rewarded for delivering the news. Mrs Read is in floods all over her cushions, weeping like she been hoarding her sobs for the day when they might be needed and now has the whole larder of tears to get rid of as quickly as possible, before they moulder away. But the reward has not yet surfaced, or the sailor would not be standing there waiting for the storm to subside, and a purse to rise out of it.

Had Mrs Read not been in spate she would have shouted him off her carpet, because even now one of his shoes (the one boasting a strange white toe peeking out of it like a mouse from a skirting board) is trespassing upon the Not To Be Trodden Upon, as though his feet long for something soft to nestle in, after so many months on the hard boards of a ship’s deck. Since she doesn’t look at him, I look on him very hard, reckoning him up: what looks to be a stolen Spanish jacket (a knife slit in its side), a squat veiny neck with the black smudge of a tattoo peeking out from his shirt. His lips scarfed white at the edges. He has the gulping habit of one who prefers his spirits by the tankard.

Too late, I am reminded of Mister Lampard’s words about deer. Not ‘what gentlemen may hunt, common men must poach,’ but how you must shoot your prey quickly, before they feel your eyes on their flank, and flee. I have looked at this sailor too hunter-like. He turns his head and his eyes look right at mine, or at least, at the crack, where he senses mine to be.

‘Come in!’ he says, though it is not his place to invite me into Mrs Read’s parlour, which is surely more mine than his. But I do not think to disobey him. Mrs Fredericks is vanished back down the stairs like a mouse meowed at, but I want to see him better. So in I go. But only a few inches, in case I need to get out. Charles is standing close by, his dark eyes on me like a weight.

The sailor says, ‘You are John’s son?’ (Correcting himself) ‘Captain Read’s son? I detect a likeness.’

This cannot be possible but people see what suits them.

‘And who are you?’ I ask, as boldly as if I am John son’s, and more boldly than I would dare were Mrs Read not wailing into her cushions.

‘Only a poor sailor,’ he says, ‘and not one you need ask after. Only come to deliver a letter from your father to your grandmother.’

At the mention of a letter, Mrs Read’s wail rises higher, the sailor takes a gulp of his brandy, and I now see the letter like a handkerchief on the floor. I say,

‘My father has been at sea so long that I have never known more of him than his name. The least I can ask of you is that you give me your own.’

The boldness in my voice is yours. I am as surprised by it as anyone. The sound coming out of Mrs Read drops a little.

‘Ezekiel Broom,’ he says, taking a gulp of brandy to wash down the awkwardness of those hard and soft sounds together.

Now I own his name like a woodsman owns the handle of his axe, and when he sees me staring at the sorry state of his clothes he apologises, saying he has been stranded for some time on an island in the Azores and has not taken the chance to repair himself, but rather came directly to deliver the message to Mrs Read so that he might have the means to repair himself. Which I understand, as we all do, to be a request for money.

‘Is my father returning?’ I ask.

A new noise from the sofa.

‘No, Master Read,’ says Ezekiel Broom. ‘He was carried off by the ague.’

‘And that’s not the worst of it,’ wails Mrs Read. ‘He lost his Letter of Marque! He lost his Letter of Marque!’

Why her son losing a letter is worse than his being carried off, which I know to mean dying, by the ague, by all accounts a fearsome disease, is a mystery to me. But it seems I am the only person in the entire household able to close this terrible business. Adisa and Mrs Fredericks, being servants, can do nothing unless instructed, and she who might instruct them can do nothing in this moment but water every flower on her cushions. I snatch up the letter and read the promised reward. Then take a careful diversion around the Not-to-be-Trodden-Upon, kneel, pick up Mrs Read’s damp hand, and squeeze it tightly, whispering my question in her ear.

‘In the armoire,’ she says weakly. ‘In a hatbox in the armoire.’

Not an ordinary opening, the opening of that hatbox. So many promissory notes in their denominations. So many coins. So much gold! I kneel before that hatbox as though it is a reliquary. Tears come like good friends to a funeral. I do not imagine I will ever get to my feet again. But then the thin smoke of wailing reaches me. Taking what is needed, I shut it all away. I will not think on it again, I tell myself, already knowing how it will itch me at night, the thought of such bounty so close, and how I might put handfuls in my pockets and walk out into the chill dark were it not for law and the threat of sisal around my throat.

Five golden sovereigns it costs to be rid of Ezekial Broom, and once he is gone, Mrs Fredericks and I help the stricken woman to her bed. I do not imagine Mister Rotard will be instructing me after all this, but he is entirely stuck on it. Presumably he is concerned his own paltry shilling might not be honoured if he abandons his duty, though the morning has been perfectly educational in its own way: how paralysed he was, and everyone else bar me, when there was action to be taken. He does not stir from the kitchen throughout the noise, and when he presumably hears the door open and close and sees the mismatched trouser legs of Ezekial Broom roil past the half-window, and he comes up to start our lesson, as he likes to call it, the one area of ignorance that I am troubled by, concerning the Letter of Marque, he waves away as being something that need not concern me.

Only later, in the kitchen, am I enlightened. Mrs Fredericks catches me reaching for a pinch of broken pie crust behind her back and says, ’You’ll be just like your father, then. A blooming pirate.’ A Letter of Marque, Adisa explains, is the piece of paper whose thickness measures the difference between gentleman and rogue. With this letter, authorised with the King’s signature and seal, a captain may call themselves a privateer, which is to say, a private adventurer licensed to capture and rob the ships of our enemies, which in any given year might be any number of countries, but for the last several years has been Spain and France. The booty is shared between captain, crew and crown, all of whom (most especially the crown) are exempt from hanging for piracy, on account of the signature and seal. Without a Letter of Marque? Be hanged for a pirate.

You would have something to say about that, how doing anything in the King’s name seems an excuse to slip under every one of the Ten Commandments, because God-something-or-others-the-King, so says the King, and he may instruct his citizens to do all the manner of unChristian things, and still call himself a Christian.

The question of how the precious letter was lost is a matter of considerable under-stairs gossip. Who would lose such a thing? Mrs Fredericks is certain your father turned pirate, losing it deliberately so as to keep all the plunder between himself and his men. The man who brought the letter, she observed, was a most unsavoury type, and exactly the sort to be crewing a pirate ship rather than a more respectable vessel. Our current housemaid, Sarah (Mrs Read is forever dismissing housemaids), confesses herself to have no opinion at all on the matter, probably because she imagines that young women aren’t expected or even desired to have an opinion, and that if she were to go so far as adopting an opinion, if word got about, it would quash all interest from the young men (delivery boys and footboys mostly) who court her with rough-picked flowers from the fields behind Liquor Pond Street, and other forms of treacled attention. Adisa is circumspect. He wraps his words in boxes within boxes until no-one can tell what he means. I detect that he does not wish to offend Mrs Fredericks (with whom he has to work most closely) by disagreeing with her, but does not wish to join her in slandering his employer’s dead son. Eventually he says,

‘He was never the thieving sort.’

‘The rich do nothing but profit from others,’ says Mrs Fredericks. ‘So he bought a licence to thieve and then he lost it.

Adisa, who has a tray of silver cutlery to occupy his fingers, says to me quietly, ‘He was a good young man.’

Mrs Fredericks tuts and turns her back.

‘Serve him right that he lost it and gets treated the same as anyone else,’ she says, before furiously putting some carrots to the knife. ‘Some people will do anything for money.’

Adisa knows this. Adisa’s father was captured in his home country and sent to work in the colonies. The negro men were treated worse than the livestock on the ship, and given almost no space to lie down in, and no clean water, and not enough food, and so many of them died on the journey that the profit of the expedition was badly affected, but that this was all that was considered, the loss of profit, and not the loss of life. He has grown quiet, absorbed in polishing his own face off the back of a spoon. When Mrs Fredericks leaves us and the boiling carrots to go upstairs, I ask,

‘But did Captain Read become a pirate, just because he lost his letter?’

He looks at me oddly. I realise I should have used the words ‘my father.’ To correct myself, I ask,

‘Am I the son of a pirate?’

‘If he has no Letter of Marque,’ he says, ‘then yes, you are. And I am the son of a slave. But what our fathers are called by other men should not reflect on us. And a pirate is not the most terrible thing to be called. Especially since the ague has him, and he cannot be hanged, God rest his soul.’

‘Why?’

He grins. ‘Because he is already dead, Master Read.’

‘No, why is a pirate not the most terrible thing to be called?’

He lays down the shiny spoon and picks up a duller implement. He tells me that he and his father were slaves on a plantation until he was six years old. Pirates had run of the island and the capital was built around their pleasure. Thought there was drunkenness and what he calls ‘looseness with ladies’, there was also generosity. The pirates would buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street, and say everyone who passed must drink from it. Gold was so bountiful with them it might have been feathers or seashells. Many pirates were so giddy with it they would to rid themselves of it however they could. His father, waiting for his master outside a store, was handed the price of his family’s freedom by a pirate merry with drink. To the pirate it was merely an amusement.

‘He insisted my father must tell his master as soon as he came out of the store, and put the money straight into his hand, so that he could see the man’s face,’ says Adisa. ‘He thought it a terrific jest. But by that jest I am standing before you now. Polishing forks. In a very handsome jacket. A pirate is free to do as he pleases.’

‘But was he not already?’ I ask. Thinking how Captain Reed was born into this house with its rugs and its drapes, and had dinner every night with his mother at the walnut table.

‘I remember your father when he was a boy,’ says Adisa. ‘His mother would have him always in his best clothes, and he was not allowed to climb or run about. But boys like to do these things. The more you stop them, the more they want to do them. Sea is the place that people run away to, no? If they have been denied adventure, and seek it?

‘Girls like to do these things too, sometimes,’ I say.

Adisa roars with laughter.

‘Girls? No. Girls don’t run away to sea. Girls run away to get married.’

He finishes with the cutlery. Every piece is in its correct place.

But my place has changed. My asking so boldly for the sailor’s name — Ezekiel Broom, a name not easily lost — clattered through Mrs Read’s grief some sense of the steel in me which she recognised, wrongly, as the blood of a Read. If she doubted my provenance before, my insistence on a formal introduction made me her grandson. She reached an arm out, tendril-like, and called for me to come into it, to be contained by her grasp and by her whisper that I was her boy now, I was her boy. If she had fantasies that her son hatched another family in the New World, and would be gifting her with grandchildren just as soon as he reappeared, Ezekial Broom swept them away. A hard broom he was for her, a broom that tips the husks and dust of things over the step and into the cold. And a soft broom for me, that cozens a little mouse out of where it was born and allows it to run freely about the house.

Our mother takes your father’s death badly. He was the one thing that kept her respectable, and now she is, she bemoans, in danger of becoming some ragtag hen. Why would he go and get himself dead of ague! As if he has deliberately slighted her by doing so. Within two weeks she has sold her wedding ring, which brings welcome income while leaving room for the opportunity of more. I sense she would be shot of me too, were I not so profitable. Without a child in her lodgings, she might be more appealing to those who might be appealed to, but at the same time the crown she earns by loaning me twice a week to Mrs Read is a precious thing she would feel the loss of. Nevertheless I feel myself, in both education and influence, slipping almost imperceptibly from one household to the other.

Mrs Read calls me to her side more often, pats at her cushions, has me sit beside her. I wonder if all those cushions aren’t only to project her brittle bones from the hard surfaces around her (for her bones are as thin as sticks) but to shield her more generally from the harshness of a life in which she only obliquely participates. She will have me be the part of her that goes out into the world. I sense I am to have all the advantages of a Read, and slip my mother’s influence. And soon she asks my mother if I may stay with her some evenings, sleep and wake here. She will pay my mother no less in maintenance. My mother is surprisingly agreeable. Is there not greater chance of my discovery? Neither of us seem to believe so. In Mrs Read’s eyes I am so firmly her grandson now, that were she to walk in upon me bathing she would probably not see what I am missing.

Adisa is instructed to show me my sleeping quarters. In the entrance hall he pauses, very serious, and says,

‘Is it the truth you are Mrs Read’s grandson?’

He stares at me with not the smallest bit of give in his eyes. It is all I can do to say,

‘Why — why would you ask such a thing?’

‘We do not pay for the company of our grandchildren. We expect it. And we also give them pleasant rooms to sleep in, and not the coal shed.’

‘I am sleeping in the coal shed?’

He winks.

‘That is only what we call it. It is really very nice. It doesn’t even have a rat anymore. Only beetles.’

I watch his face: it stays very still, very earnest, his eyes looking into mine as though he is most concerned to be of help. And then he crumples into laughter.

‘You are my favourite boy,’ he says. ‘My very favourite boy. You are sleeping in the attic. You will like it. It is hot at this time of year, but not too cold in winter, because the chimney runs through it. You will like it.’

I keep looking at him to see if he will change his mind again, and when he sees that is what I am doing, he laughs even more. ‘Come, follow me,’ he says, going up the stairs.

I do as I’m told. He pauses on the landing outside Mrs Read’s bedroom and opens the other door on the same landing.

‘My room is in the attic. This is your room. It was your father’s.’ He gleans much amusement from my face. ‘We are going to have a fine time, together,’ he says. ‘We are going to be friends.’

But a few days later, in a fit of apoplexy after seeing your father’s name mentioned in a broadsheet, Mrs Read ups and dies.

prev chapter ——— next chapter

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. One for the comments: what do you think Mary will do now?