The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo (23 page)

Mary and Jacob exchanged looks.

‘Why not? Why not, Martha?' Jacob looked at Mary. ‘Martha thinks you made it up – she says you make everything up.'

‘They are only Mary's stories, Jacob, and when you start your lessons with Papa, as I have, you will understand that Princess Caraboo is only tales. Tappa Boo and Frederick of the South Seas are all pretend.' Martha turned on her heel, then ran out of the shop and up the stairs at the back.

‘Well, what does Miss Martha know?' Mary said, bending down to look at Jacob. ‘I don't think she would recognize a princess or a pirate even if she tripped over one, do you?'

Jacob shook his head.

The door jingled as it opened, and the post boy from the office round the corner in Liberty Street smiled as he stepped into the shop. ‘Delivery, miss!' He left the parcel on the counter top and winked at Jacob, and then at Mary.

After he'd gone, Jacob tugged at her apron. ‘Martha says he is sweet on you.'

‘He is not!' Mary scolded. ‘Martha scorns my tales but loves to spin her own!'

She straightened up. The shop looked perfect. She sighed, a half happy sigh: she loved New York City . . . if only Devon and the ones she loved were not so far away. But there were worse places. In New York City it was as if all the world had met in one place. It reminded her of London, if London had been put together with considerably more haste. She loved the fashions: whalers in skins in winter, traders from the north in dark sables, women from the East in such wonderful embroidery. Most of them on their way farther west or out to sea.

She'd seen pictures of farther west, the land where everyone went to seek their fortunes. The woman next door's husband was an artist – she had never set eyes on him, for he travelled all over the country, painting the native people, mostly. The house was full of his paintings. They made her think of Mrs Worrall, who would no doubt have redecorated her Chinese drawing room around one of those images. Perhaps when she had made her own fortune, out west somewhere, she would send one to Knole Park as a present, to make up for everything.

The pictures reminded her of Caraboo, and a short life lived half a world away.

She had not swum, or climbed, or eaten roasted pigeon, for close on a year, and the urge to live a wilder life had begun to rise in her.

Mr Degroot was a good man, a widower whose wife was dead, and who could not afford more than one extra pair of hands: Mary worked in the shop, cleaned and cooked, and looked after the children. She worried a little about what might happen if she did leave, but ever since Christmas, when he'd had one glass of advocaat too many and asked her to marry him, Mary thought it would be best to move on. She hadn't saved quite enough money yet, and in any case he had never mentioned it again. But still, she thought, some day soon she would go west, into the sun, with a party of travellers . . .

She sighed and began unwrapping the parcel. It would be trimmings of some kind – that new lace edging Mr Degroot was waiting for. The box was easy enough to open, but inside, the lace – it was handmade and the best quality – had been wrapped in layer upon layer of tissue. And oh! It was beautiful! She held some up to the light and gasped, it was so perfect. She laid it out flat. It was fit for the finest wedding dresses. She could imagine an East Side princess walking down the aisle in a dress dripping with this lace trim.

She was still absorbed in the material when the door tinkled again, and she almost didn't notice the new arrival until the man spoke.

‘Mary?' he said.

She knew him at once. Tall and, when he took off his hat, fair – no, golden haired, blue eyed. Someone she thought she'd never see again. She had to lean on the counter to stop her legs giving way.

‘Mr Worrall,' she said, trying to compose herself. ‘You are here?'

He put a hand out to touch her face, and she stood frozen for a moment before moving away.

‘I never did thank you. I wrote so many letters, but could not send them.' Mary looked away. ‘Is Mrs Worrall well? And Cassandra? I was thinking about her only this morning . . .'

He smiled. ‘All, eventually,' he said. ‘You made quite a stir when the papers printed your story, and Mama was inconsolable – until Christmas, when Cassandra announced a rather early wedding to Edmund Gresham.'

‘No! I thought he was travelling?'

‘His grand tour was somewhat curtailed after he came down with something nasty in Leghorn.'

Mary took a deep breath, and sat down. ‘I was worried, you know, about them all,' she said. ‘I know it was the wrong—'

‘Stop it.'

‘But you saved me from jail . . .'

He shook his head. ‘The papers were all on your side. They thought Princess Caraboo a phenomenon.' He paused. ‘They loved you. You had a score of imitators in every penny gaff in every city.'

At that moment Jacob Degroot came rushing downstairs, in floods of tears. ‘Martha says I am stupid!'

Mary scooped him up and dried his tears with the edge of her apron. ‘Well, you are not.' She turned him round to face Fred. ‘This is my friend, Mr Frederick Worrall.'

‘Frederick? Is he a pirate, like in stories?' Jacob said.

Mary blushed. ‘Absolutely not!'

‘Delighted to meet you.' Fred put out his hand for the boy to shake. ‘I've come all the way from England to see Mary.'

‘Across the sea? Did you find any pirates?'

‘Luckily no, not a one. But it seems I have found Mary, eventually.'

‘You shouldn't have,' she said. ‘You do not know me – I am nothing.'

‘You are not nothing!' Jacob said.

‘You are so right, young sir,' Fred said. ‘And in any case, I know someone who knew Mary very well, in England. And I never really understood, but that person made me so sad when she left that I could not live without her. I could not study, I could not think, I could not sleep,' he said.

‘Who was that?' Jacob said.

‘A princess,' said Fred.

‘A real one?'

‘No, Jacob, he's just playing,' Mary said.

‘I'm not. I do assure you, she was a real princess,' Fred said. ‘A beautiful, fearless warrior princess.'

‘Really?'

‘She spoke her own language – one nobody in the whole world had ever heard – and she could climb the tallest trees, and she was a crack shot too. She could bring a pigeon down with a bow and arrow.'

‘Like Princess Caraboo! She
was
real! Wait till I tell Martha!' Jacob's eyes were as wide as saucers. ‘So, what happened to her?'

‘I don't know,' said Fred. His eyes met Mary's and she couldn't look away; he was lovely, a million times better than the memory. ‘That's why I'm here in New York – to find her and ask her to make a new life. If we can . . .'

The true story of Princess Caraboo is completely unbelievable and utterly amazing. I have had to tweak and stuff her real life into a novel, but I'd like to add a note to give you a taste of the stuff I've had to leave out.

When the tale emerged in the summer of 1817, Princess Caraboo became a newspaper sensation; after all, who could resist a girl from the street who had managed to hoodwink professors and academics – who had outwitted the upper classes? There were poems and articles, and whole books about her were rushed out to cash in.

But Mary Wilcox was not really a con woman. She never attempted to make any money out of her stay at the Worralls'. In fact, as in the book, she tried to leave Knole Park. And Mrs Worrall obviously cared deeply for her: she paid for Mary's fare to America, and treasured the letters Mary sent back; she was the daughter Elizabeth Worrall never had (in reality she only had sons).

My account doesn't follow Mary's life in every respect. I've changed the date, and Mary's age; Cassandra never existed. But most of the bones of the story are firmly based in truth; even the language Caraboo uses in my book is the one Mary Wilcox made up herself.

The real Mary Wilcox was in her twenties and had suffered a great deal. She'd been married and abandoned; she had given birth alone, handing her baby over to the Foundling Hospital. She underwent an early form of surgery to her head, in the most horrific and brutal of London workhouses, and bore the scars.

She was also, it seems, an inveterate liar and teller of tales. She embroidered the truth when she had to, whether it was to secure a place for her child at the Foundling Hospital or a bed in a home for reformed prostitutes.

I relied on many books in researching her story, but it's clear that the story changed depending on who she was talking to – and when. If you're interested in as much of the truth as possible, the best source has to be
Princess Caraboo – Her True Story
by John Wells.

After her unmasking Mary Wilcox was described as follows:

. . . eyes and hair black; complexion a brunette; her cheeks faintly tinged with red; mouth rather wide; lips large and full.

This description is from a book rushed out a few weeks after she was revealed not to be a princess but a cobbler's daughter from Witheridge in Devon. The book,
Caraboo: A Narrative of a Singular Imposition
, was by John Mathew Gutch, a newspaper editor on the
Bristol Journal
. She seems to have been dark skinned, even though one of her portraits shows her as fair.

We know that she was born in a small Devon village, that she could read and write and worked for a while as a children's nanny, first in Exeter and then in London.

One of the families she worked for took her to France for a while; another family in London lived next door to Orthodox Jews, and Mary made friends. She loved the weddings and the ceremony and the chanting. In fact, she got the sack for attending a Jewish wedding.

She was married, then abandoned; but was her husband the father of her child? We can't say. She claimed first that he was a bricklayer; then that he was an educated man she met in a bookshop; then a Frenchman. Everyone Mary Wilcox spoke to was given a slightly different story. In one she was seduced, and delivered her baby on the road. In another she was with the father for nine months.

She had to give up her baby (called John Francis, then rechristened Edward King) to the Foundling Hospital in London (where no doubt she gave a version of her tale that would ensure he was accepted). The child was admitted on 1 July, and Mary went to visit him every week until he died in October.

She also spent time in the Magdalen Hospital in South London, a kind of refuge for girls who had been working as prostitutes. They wore old-fashioned clothes: broad-brimmed straw hats, white caps and long brown dresses. In order to be admitted, girls had to confess to their life of sin. However, it's unclear whether Mary worked on the streets – though it is not completely unlikely. John Wells says of her application to enter the Magdalen Hospital that ‘she had imagined the plot of an entire novel of betrayed love. As usual it probably contained strands of truth.' She herself said she'd applied to live there simply because she loved the clothes.

Mary loved dressing up. She came across Normandy lace-makers who wore intricate headdresses, and decided, for the purposes of begging, to pretend to be French. She told one interviewer that she had even travelled to Bombay.

When Mary was found in Almondsbury, wearing her turban, uttering not a word. As in my story, Mrs Worrall was American, and intelligent. Married to a banker and probably bored out of her mind, she must have looked on Caraboo as the most interesting person she had ever met.

But in reality, at first Mrs Worrall couldn't persuade her husband to let Caraboo stay; she was sent to the Bristol workhouse. Caraboo suffered dreadfully there – and still didn't speak a word of English – and when Mrs Worrall heard, she begged her husband to bring the girl home. A Portuguese traveller passing through Bristol visited Knole Park and declared that she was from the East Indies; he had spoken to her in her own language – the girl was a princess who had been kidnapped by pirates and swam ashore, he said.

The Worralls were convinced; I think they must have
wanted
to be convinced – her tale must have seemed so exciting. Dr Charles Wilkinson, a specialist in ‘Electrical Medicine', was one of the many academics and interested intellectuals who appeared at Knole to see the Princess. Mrs Worrall had the daughter she wanted, and such a fascinating one . . .

The Worralls' second son, Fred, home from Westminster School and on his way to a career in the Army, thought her a fraud, but the rest of the household was soon won over. The Worralls gave Caraboo the run of the house and she was very entertaining. She was pretty, she danced, she made exotic outfits for herself; she swam, she climbed trees and was expert with a bow and arrow.

Mrs Worrall had a library of books about exciting noble savages from all over world, including the wonderful
Pantagraphia
– a study of every language, along with examples of its script.

For a clever young woman like Caraboo, it was easy to please her hosts.

It was Charles Wilkinson who proved to be her undoing. He saw the opportunity of lecture tours, of fame and fortune, and encouraged the newspapers to report Caraboo's story. And it was on the eve of his first public lecture in Bath that the truth was revealed: one of Mary's old landladies recognized her description. The game was up.

With the backing of Mrs Worrall, Mary fled to America. A tour of city theatres was arranged for her, giving talks about her time as Caraboo, but she was not a success. Perhaps America was already too full of Europeans inventing new and exciting personas for themselves.

But the British newspapers couldn't get enough of Caraboo. One story even claimed that the ship taking Mary to America had stopped off at St Helena, the remote island where Napoleon had been exiled by the British. According to the newspapers, Caraboo had bewitched him; they even hinted at a possible romance.