A Taste for Nightshade (4 page)

Then the wild South Seas had destroyed such pleasure-trip fancies and gawping at the men. For four months they were soaked in stinking green slime, while the vessel was shaken like a rat. ‘Damn you God, let me die,' Ma Watson had groaned like a litany, and a chorus agreed. The drinking water swarmed with worms, the biscuits with weevils, the bilges stank with rancid rations and dead rats. Rumours raged that the Navy Office had given orders they all must be drowned on a certain day, so long as it was far from England. Battened down in a waterlogged rolling coffin, they would believe anything. Almost eight months from England, an island was sighted with a name that sounded like Demon's Land, but a black squall hit them like a battering ram and there was no safe landing. To a chorus of miserable wailing, a young wife gave birth to a baby girl, as dead as a doorpost, which was cast overboard the following day. Next, a feeble-minded pedlar woman managed to bang her head and drown herself in the filthy swill. She lay dead for three days in chains before the stink of her persuaded them to report it, so fierce was the clamour for her ration. The food had dwindled to a cup of gruel each day, with a speck of fish swimming in it. That was their lot, all they had to keep body and soul together.

It could have been day or night in the pitch-black hold, when old Ma Watson started up her wailing. ‘Is that all there is? How'm I to live on that slip-slop? I'd give me two eyes for a slice of apple pie.' She was brain-cracked, but spoke for them all.

Then Tabby Jones joined in, holding forth on the making of the best apple pie: the particular apples, whether reinettes or pippins, the bettermost flavourings: cinnamon, cloves, or a syrup made from the peelings. Slowly, groans of vexation turned to appreciative mumblings. Someone else favoured quince, another lemon. Apples, they all agreed, though the most commonplace of fruit, did produce an uncommon variety of delights: pies and puddings, creams and custards, jellies and junkets, ciders and syllabubs. The time passed a deal quicker and merrier than before.

Janey, the whore who had once been famed in Harris's
List of Covent Garden Ladies
, told them, in her child's voice, that the best dish she ever tasted was a Desert Island of Flummery, at a mansion in Grosvenor Square. ‘It was all over jellies and candies and dainty figures, and a hut of real gold-leaf. Like eating money, it were. I fancied meself a proper duchess.'

She knew what Janey meant. When she had first met Aunt Charlotte she had gorged herself until her fingers were gummy with syrup and cream. There was one cake she never forgot; a puffed conceit of cream, pastry, and pink sugar comfits. She bit her knuckles hungrily and sucked the blood. It came to her then that they were starving, slowly and surely, to death.

They all hushed as Brinny, the one murderess of their crew, told them of the making of her bride cake, with primrose yellow butter and raisins of the sun, fattened on smuggled brandy. The further they sailed from England, the fonder they grew of the pleasures of home: plum trees with bowed branches, brambles in the hedge, cream from a beloved cow. Someone asked if Brinny's bridegroom was as fine as her cake. ‘Sadly he were not,' she said dolefully. ‘Why else d'ye think I be sitting here, transported for the murdering of the old dog with a dose of his own ratsbane?' Everyone laughed rustily at that, like machines grinding back to life.

The women's talk interested Mary mightily; for it stripped bare their hearts' desires: Janey's for luxury, Brinny's for her wedding day's pride, all of them for secret pleasures. And the stuff of hearts' desires was always of interest to an out-and-out racket-girl like her. She mulled it all over, as they picked at sores and cursed every battering of the ocean against the ship's timbers. Finally she asked a question: ‘Do you reckon a man might be snared by food?'

Why, it was easy as pie they said – a man was not so much led by his tail as his belly. For he must eat three times a day, which was twice more than most could raise the other appetite. Surely all men longed for their mother's milk, for a life of ease, to sprawl in a cradle of wifely care? In the hopeless darkness, secrets poured forth from those who had spent a lifetime turning tricks and picking pockets. Their talk turned to stranger receipts: the cure-alls and quackeries that transformed a few pennies into a bag of sovereigns. Janey giggled about the nostrum she had once hawked to keep the face eternally young that was mere water and ashes. Mother Watson's cure-all elixir was mostly stinking lye from piss-pots. As for love potions, they were the easiest to fob off on simpletons. A pretty-coloured water and a few magic words – it was astonishing how fast a fool was parted from his purse. Death potions, too – Brinny told them everything she had learned from her lover the apothecary, before she tired of him, too, and dosed him with his own poison.

All the while, Mary picked out the chief threads of their notions: that a body wanted pleasure in this life and not the next, and eternally longed for youth and health, and would risk a fortune for beauty. The purchase of love was irresistible, and the procurement of murder more common than even she had guessed. The best of it, the essence, she scratched so deeply in her memory that it left an enduring trace, like the ghosts of letters on a well-worn slate.

 

Five years later

 

 

I fancy you think little of who makes the food you eat. Thrice a day it appears. Do you truly know whose fingers touched it? Do you give a moment's attention to the mind that devised your dish, its method and ingredients? Of course you do not. That would drag you out of your comfortable chair, along the corridor, down narrow rickety stairs, along a greasy stone floor to the under-regions of your home. There work a pair of quick but red-scabbed hands, a pair of eyes that judge and shape your food upon its platter. A mind entirely unknown to you directs these preparations – yet you allow it to choose each morsel that will enter your mouth. You are not a menial, a scullion. Your thoughts are occupied with higher matters.

It is a notion of mine that we distract ourselves with false fears, turning our eyes from the true horrors stalking this world. When I was young I had many foolish terrors: a dread of speaking in large company, or having to dance or sing or exhibit some other accomplishment. My name is Grace, but I was never as graceful as my name promised. I envied those girls who were bright and glib, for I was left much alone, and developed a habit of watchful silence.

When I was a child we were as good as anyone else who lived in Greaves. Mother's dowry had bought Palatine House, the largest house on Wood Street. My father decreed I must not be indulged by learning of any kind, it being sure to spoil a female. He especially forbade any education in the Fine Arts, though my mother had been a painter of some talent when they first met.

My mother rebelled, cautiously and craftily, as thwarted women will. She gave me lessons in the stolen time while Father was away at business. I remember her standing before me in a bluebell-striped dress, her tired face suddenly shining as she opened
A Ladies Instructor For Painting Diverse Delights
, so we might copy its hand-coloured plates. ‘Grace, you have a fine eye,' Mother said. I wanted to dissect the heart of my subjects, to catch the shadow of the wilting rose in cadmium red, and conjure the snow tumbling like thistledown outside the window in washes of cerulean blue. One day, when painting the gleaming sphere of an apple, a black wriggling creature punctured the skin from the inside. Mother was bemused that I carried on painting, recording the creature's ugly pointed head and shiny segments. ‘That is the truth,' I insisted, proud of my picture.

In turn, my mother portrayed me in delicate shadowy pencil: a serious, thin-featured child; long limbed and shy. Even when alone with brushes in hand we spoke softly, alert to heavy footsteps on the drive. My mother's high-strung nerves had trained my own. ‘He is here,' I would whisper, my heart stirring as if an ogre crossed the threshold, and not my own father. Our work was rapidly hidden away in the seat of an oak settle. There must have been other lessons too, for I wrote with an elegant looped hand, and borrowed every new novel from the town's paltry Circulating Library. Genteel crumbs of knowledge I think them now, remnants of a gentler age, like the biscuits Mother once twisted in Elizabethan knots.

I have Mother's paints still, in a chipped ebony box fitted out with palette, brushes, and jewel-like watercolour blocks. I still paint every day, just as fiercely, but now my spirit ranges further, and also – I have learned this lesson well – I look about myself with greater vigilance. A daydreamer, my father called me, but I wonder now if I have been a sleepwalker. I have not attended to my own affairs as I should. I have dozed with the bedstraw smoking, as Peg Blissett might have said.

In those days, Father was a towering bear of a man, a master printer with a workshop of ten men. It was a high-ceilinged, racketing building, filled with trestles and mysterious machines, with printed papers strung across the ceiling. On a rare visit he showed me his work, lifting a new plate of copper that rippled like a blushing gold mirror.

‘It is metal with a memory,' he said, stroking the surface with hands stained goblin-black. His method was to trace a figure onto onion paper, then scrape that outline onto waxed copper. Next came the master's meticulous work; the etching into metal with the sharp steel called a burin, sending curls like ginger ringlets arcing up from the copper. Once acid had bitten out the pattern, the plate was inked and laid on the press. First a few, then a dozen, then a score of prints were squeezed into life between the rollers, like a single white butterfly multiplied into a swarm.

My father kept his best work pasted in his sample book:

Inside the book lay all Father's outpourings, ever since he was the golden apprentice who later inherited his childless master's business: illustrations of gods and men, warriors and angels, as good as any Italian master.

‘And now I scrape these tawdry penny-catchers,' he growled. He was making a crude sketch of a half-undressed woman to crown a staymaker's tradecard. ‘The metal mirror reflects my fall,' he muttered.

Thus I learned from him that the parable is true: that golden talents buried in the dark earth are a curse and not a blessing.

We had few close acquaintances in Greaves, save the Brabantists, a society of dissenters who gathered about the preacher Caleb Brabant. Brabant himself was an eloquent old weaver with diamond bright eyes and white whiskers, who had once had a miraculous dream. ‘I saw Caesar hung upon the cross,' he pronounced with his hands raised in celebration, ‘and all the land rejoiced to be free of the poison of the laurel crown. For when all crowns are dust, all will be equal.'

Many hours were spent in meditation upon dreams. All agreed that the Devil appeared as a red beast, or a black dog, or leaping fire. Bread and blood, water and weeds were much discussed as omens. Amongst our congregation there was great hope of the Second Coming, bringing with it relief from poverty and pain. When bread was dear, or work was scarce, the society's funds kept many members from the workhouse. And from Sabbath to Sabbath the belief in dreams and visitations kept everyone's hopes alight.

With no dame school in the town, there were at least hornbooks and scripture classes at our meeting house, where I could glean a little more learning. When I escaped from my parents I played with my only friends: Anne Dobson and John Francis Rawdon. As infants, our games were of ghosts that fluttered behind the woollen curtains, or messages scratched in the dust that set us giggling and shrieking. If the congregation stood up to share their dreams, we were banished to the back room, where we chattered of portents. If a person dreamed they died, could they ever wake? And when the Select rose at the Second Coming, would flesh grow back on their bones?

Coaxed by Anne's warmth and good humour, she and I grew to be dear friends. Though her homely face recalled a mournful spaniel, by the time she was fifteen, Anne was courted by Mr Greenbeck, curate of St Stephen's, who had dealings with her father's grocery shop. Once her betrothal was known, the Greenbecks were at once expelled from our gatherings, for Anglicans were reviled as peddlers of miracles and hocus-pocus. But Anne cared not a jot, so long as Mr Greenbeck would still take her.

As for John Francis, he soon grew too big for us, his petticoat companions. For many years we were strangers, until one warm summer's day he came upon me as I sketched out on the moors. Having just walked five miles across country, my old friend took a rest beside me on the grassy bank where my paints and paper were spread. The air was scented with wild flowers, the valley dropped green and lush below us to a glittering stream where cattle lazily drank. My former mischievous playfellow had grown into a well-made country lad, with red cheeks brightening his round face, and clear and intelligent blue-grey eyes. His accent was that of the country folk about Greaves: flat and coarse, but his confiding humour made me laugh. I shared my basket of Mother's biscuits, lovers' knots, aromatic with aniseed and sticky apricot. We talked all afternoon, of his family's farm and his desire to leave the small minds of Greaves, of the modern world and its astonishing progress, and of how the young might make the world a better place.

It grew late, and the first low stars glittered above us in the inky blue sky. We strolled home, falling comfortably into step. When we said our farewells by my gate, I welcomed his gentle touch on my arm and his suggestion that we meet again.

I began to see John Francis almost every day, putting to use my long practice in subterfuge. When necessary, we communicated by exchanging letters in an empty bird's nest in the branches of our garden's lilac tree. Only Anne noticed the change in me. When I confided in her, she agreed to keep my secret only with the greatest reluctance.

‘John Francis is a good sort of fellow, but is he not rather humble for you, Grace?' We were sauntering through the town, scrutinising him from under our bonnet brims. John Francis was larking about with his brothers, tossing his cap in the air for his new puppy to catch. The sight of him brought a smile to my face. He was certainly not as stiff and old-mannish as Jacob Greenbeck.

‘You are only fifteen, Grace, and rather young even for that age.' Anne was cultivating a voice I fancied was how she thought the wife of a curate should speak. ‘And when the time comes, you can make a better match than him.'

I paid no heed to Anne, just as I avoided Mother's weary questions about where I disappeared all day. I craved freedom; to walk out of doors, to meet John and speak unguardedly, to hold hands, and finally to kiss sweetly, wrapped in each other's arms. We both knew it was wrong to succumb to sin, and we withstood the worst of the Devil's temptations. Yet what did Anne and Jacob know of the fever of such pleasure? If they longed for each other as we did, how could they forever delay their marriage?

One black day Father ordered me into his study and stood over me, crimson-faced, a vein like a worm burrowing at his temple.

‘What is this?' he roared. In his hand was a pencil portrait of John Francis, carelessly left beneath my bed. ‘Well?'

‘It is a picture, Father.'

‘That Rawdon lad. Think you have an admirer, do you?' he mocked, in the voice of a stupid girl. ‘I'll not have it! My daughter will not be thrown away on a Rawdon. He's got a sniff of your prospects, that is all.'

I stared mutely at the rug. It was the first time I had heard of my ‘prospects', but knew better than to make a sound.

‘You drew it?'

I nodded, brimming with tears.

‘Pitiful.' He crumpled up the portrait in a ball and threw it in the corner. In anger, he pushed his huge flat hand against my shoulder. I stumbled backwards against the wall.

At his growl of dismissal I ran up to my mother, who lay resting in her room with the curtains drawn, suffering from that mysterious affliction I fancied prevented her from bearing Father's long-awaited son.

‘What does he mean – my prospects?' I whispered.

She passed a bony hand across her eyes. ‘No pray, not all that, Grace. It will only agitate him. For my sake not a word, my dear.'

Yet one small matter did cheer me: for all his scorn, my father had recognised John Francis at once, so my portraiture was not so pitiful.

I know now that my father was frustrated in his occupation. If he had been born in different circumstances, he may have been a remarkable artist. From observing him, I grew to love the Schools of Florence, the Flemish Masters, and our fine English painters. His idol was the Italian engraver, Piranesi, and one evening, having just returned from the tavern, he beckoned me to look inside a vast leather binder. At first I saw only black cross-hatchings, then gradually pieced together gigantic dungeons strung with hanging stairways, coiling chains, and grotesque lightless lamps.

‘The famed
Carceri
,' he murmured. ‘The prisons of the mind that men try to impose upon us. A trap for our dreams. If we can only break out, child, the light is all about us.'

I stared at the monstrous vision – more ghastly even than Beelzebub's Castle in
The Pilgrim's Progress
– of men dwarfed like ants on colossal stairs, of figures chained to walls beside spoke-wheeled apparatus. I backed away, but Father grasped my arm and said through beer-sour breath, ‘It is not a real prison. It is a fancy, a
capriccio
is the proper word.' I took a step back to him and looked again. ‘A great artist has the courage to reveal the soul's suffering. Not etch catch-penny advertisements, debasing everything he learned.'

‘The prisons of the mind,' I repeated softly, and thought my father had spoken some great truth, but what it was I didn't yet understand.

Later I recalled his words, and those dungeons of forgotten captives. Sometimes, what we believe is trapped in the metal mirror can quicken and jump out from the frame; our dreams can bite back as savagely as any mythical Hydra. At times it is wise to feel fear.