A Taste for Nightshade (2 page)

He inquired where the girl with the green-ribboned cap had gone, and a plump whore giggled. ‘Mary?' she said, and pointed up the stairs.

For a long while he explored silent corridors lined with doors: all very fine, but as gloomy as sin from a paucity of candles. He would have given up, only his boot struck what he fancied was a dog crouching on the stair. As he reached out he touched a mop of soft hair. A child in a nightgown, no more than eight years old, cringed back from him against the wall, whimpering like an infant. Just then the ceiling creaked. Footsteps sounded above his head; there was something so furtive about them that he knew they belonged to his quarry. The ceiling creaked again. Forgetting the child, he ran up the narrow stairs and through a door. Outside, he halted to breathe in the clean cold air of the night.

He was standing on a flat roof, where neglected washing hung as hard as boards across sagging lines. His feet slid unsteadily over twinkling frost as he searched behind ghostly laundry. With a clattering crack, he knocked over a stool. In response, he heard a sharp, female breath. He lifted a bed sheet that glittered and burned his fingers with cold. The girl stood against a high wall, unable to retreat any further.

‘Here. Take it.' Her voice was different, almost refined, a breathless whisper. She threw the pound note at him and it fluttered lazily to the ground. Her eyes were fixed upon him, very wide and bright. ‘Now let me go free.'

He picked up the note and stuck it in his waistcoat. ‘Why should I?' he asked. ‘You stole it.' His breath was still hot from the chase; his throat painful.

At first she didn't answer. Her cloak had fallen open and her skin looked icy white in the moonlight; she was panting like a hart at bay. Then her eyes met his, with a penetrating recognition that slashed through every layer of his earnest respectability.

‘Why should you?' she said slowly. ‘Because that pound is nothing to you. Because I know what you are after.'

Later, he understood she knew him better than he did himself. ‘If you let me go. No one need ever know about you,' she said very softly and the unspoken words thrilled him. Then, in the light of the frosty stars, he saw her smile. It was not such a sweet smile now. A fierce and wanton smile.

Her pale hand reached for her skirt edge and lifted it to her knees. A white stocking. It was impossible to prevent his manhood from rising at the prospect. Her face was entirely fixed upon his, entirely commanding. He strode to her and grasped her skirt in his fist, and the cloth felt fired up with an unearthly force, like an electric charge that galvanised his whole body. His sigh emerged as a groan.

She had discovered him. However courageously he battled to maintain his high moral manner to the world, this strumpet knew him better. Not for him the simpering misses whose coy glances Peter chased; he liked a bold woman best of all. Why, here in Manchester, if he had only managed to free himself of Peter, he had glimpsed some wild creatures that had thrilled his very being. Next time, he had vowed to himself, he would travel alone.

There followed an interval in which he scarcely believed his senses. Somewhere in the recesses of his mind he had comprehended what she was from the moment he saw her. Desire ignited inside him like gunpowder.

‘There they are!' came a cry from the doorway. ‘Catch her quick!'

Damn their eyes! It was the two gentlemen, with a constable. He sprang back and battled to recollect himself, then lifted the pound note, like a trophy.

‘Proof,' he said, his voice still thick. ‘I caught her red-handed.' The men rushed up and congratulated him; he felt himself to be a hero. But it was a poor sort of balm to his recent pitch of excitement, for he still felt queasy and itchy about the loins.

The constable took the girl roughly by the arm.

‘No, I beg you,' she wailed.

‘Sir,' the constable interrupted. ‘Will you bear witness in court that this young woman stole a pound note from you?'

‘From my brother,' he corrected.

‘I will hang for it, sir. Look to your conscience,' she cried. ‘Think of it. All on your word. And I gave it back at once,' she appealed to them all. ‘He knows it was an honest mistake!'

He couldn't look at her again without shame inflaming him. He violently wished the other men would disappear. He could have been indulged as he wished, and then he might have returned triumphantly to Peter with the pound note. It scarcely mattered that they had missed the coach. They could have travelled tomorrow and no one been the wiser.

Yet still he could save her from the gallows and agree he had made a mistake. Damn this crowd of onlookers. But the girl, was she not very wicked, would she not continue her tricks on other men? She was shameless. She had discovered him. He had been on the cusp of revealing his lewdest, most sinful self.

‘Please sir, don't be living with the murdering of me. Don't have it on your conscience!' She was struggling in the constable's grasp, trying to throw herself down on her knees before him.

He tucked the pound note back in his pocket. ‘I'll bear witness,' he said, and he let them congratulate him all the way down to the constable's office.

 

 

The black-capped judge gave Mary his verdict: she must return to Newgate and two days later, be taken ‘thence to a place of execution and there hanged by the neck until you are dead'. So this is it, girl, she told herself, she was going to go dance with the hempen collar about her throat. She put the boldest face she could upon it; not swooning or squeaking; to die hard was her creed. She had sworn to die game, the day she made her oath to follow The Life.

Her mobsman, Charlie Trebizond, came down to London and paid the garnish fee to the jailer to keep her in the best style, on the Master's Side of Newgate. ‘Anything you want, I'll pay, Mary,' he'd said, his monkey face grave, his lean figure garbed in black velvet and ruffles. And so he should be flash-handed with his coin, she thought. Charlie was the king of the fake-screeve racket, the false letter dodge, the high-flying game. It was said that not even the Lord High Chancellor himself could tell one of Charlie's fakes from the genuine article. A damned shame it had been Red the Forger who had faked that damned pound note, and not Charlie, she thought sourly.

Aunt Charlotte had raised her on tales of the Hangman's Supper. ‘Before you goes off to the next life, you sups with him who snaps your neck,' was how she put it, with her reptile's smile. ‘It's like a binding oath to forgive your murderer before he snuffs you out. It's so you won't be a phantom wandering this earth till the end of time.' The pluckiest lags always gave the executioner a fancy meal the night before they swung. So Mary set out to do it the proper way; ordering in a rump of beef and a dozen of claret. There were tarts and cakes and trifles too; it looked like a queen's feast arranged on fine pressed linen. Piggot, the hangman, was her guest of honour.

‘You'll make it quick?' Charlie asked the hangman.

Piggott halted a moment in guzzling the wine and tearing the beef with his gravestone teeth. His frog's eyes assessed Mary's throat. ‘No more'n two minutes, sir. I could snap a little neck like that in one hand.' Then, wheezing bawdily, he added, ‘I tell you what, I'll give 'er a pull on her pretty ankles, to bring 'er on the faster.'

‘That's enough,' Charlie snapped. ‘Just remember there's another guinea when you bring her straight to me for a decent burial. Not a hair out of place, mind.'

Piggott nodded, settling his gaze lower than her throat this time.

She would have liked to smash a bottle of wine in Piggott's leering face, but instead she poured him another glass. He was her journeyman to the next world, and she was relying on him for an easy passage.

She had heard that when you look death in the face, your entire past life springs before your eyes. So it did seem, that final night before she faced the gallows. Scenes played in her mind like a brightly-lit theatre. There sat Granny sleeping, a dark shape in the parlour chair. She'd groped to find her hand – and when the old woman's fingers didn't return her squeeze, she shook her arm. ‘Wake up,' she urged, but Granny's lips never moved again. Only a thread of dark blood slid down from her nose to her warty chin. When she touched her cheek, it was stone cold.

I'm all on me own now, she said to herself in the hush of the firelight. Alone seemed such a dreadful notion: an emptiness that swallowed the cottage, Granny, and everything she had ever known. She had few memories of her mother, who had kissed her one moment and knocked her flying the next. ‘Liza went wandering off with a fellow across Slaiden Bridge, and was swept away in the river,' Granny had said. She had never missed her slummock of a mother.

Taking a rushlight, she'd gone to look in Granny's chamber, where she'd always said she kept money set by. All was as neat as a pin: the picture of King George still pasted on the wall, the scrap of lace on the shelf, the mound of the bed covered in ancient patchwork.

Lifting the lid of the wooden trunk, she found all Granny's treasures: a lock of her grandfather's flame-red hair, a cracked china teacup, a few lines from a newspaper that told of Liza Jebb's death in a river accident. She rooted deeper and there it was; a leather money bag. But when she turned it upside-down, it was empty. She felt along the bottom of the trunk, but there was only a paper lying flat against the wood. She snatched it up and held it before the dripping rushlight.

It was written in a clear round hand, and though she spelled the words mighty slowly, her hours poring over the spelling book with Granny proved their worth.

How could Granny not have told her about her living kin – this cousin, or should that be aunt – Charlotte?

In the morning Granny's face had been as red as a plum. Whatever happened, the rent was due and there was no money left in the cottage. Taking the letter and what food she could find, she let herself out of the door and set off stealthily for the road, in search of a wagon headed Manchester-way.

Arriving at the Pen and Angel, footsore and hungry, she had needed to gather all the courage of her twelve short years to insist on speaking to Mrs Charlotte Spenlove. Behind the false shop, she'd been led through a ramble of rooms, down stone stairs to the greasy kitchen. Aunt Charlotte had not proved the flighty ginger piece she had expected her mother's cousin to be. Instead, a vast wheezing shape had waddled towards her. To her horror, the toad-faced woman asked, ‘So who might you be?' Then, snatching up the letter, she began to guffaw; a horrible sound like a broken bellows. She knew at once that she had made a very great fool of herself, but she did not understand how. Then the woman brandished the letter and cackled, ‘This don't signify nowt, sweetheart. I in't no more your kin than you're Uncle Tom's horse.

‘Come and sit by the fire, pet. Want a Little Devil?
Devilinos
, the Italians call 'em.' She pushed a dish of exquisite little brown globes, studded with comfits, towards her. Mary was as hungry as a hawk; when she put one in her mouth it was sweet yet bitter, melting but nutty; by far the most marvellous thing she had eaten in her life. She stared at the dish longingly.

‘Good, eh? Have another one. God sends meat but the Devil sends chocolate. I make 'em the Italian fashion.' They both took another and chewed in silence. Then Auntie fixed her black ferrety eyes on Mary and said, ‘So you have come, after all.'

‘What?'

‘I saw it in the cards last night. A carroty-haired girl trudging along the road. Look. The past.' She flipped over a card that showed a moon and road, plainly inked on card. ‘This is you. Run away, ain't you, lovey?'

Mary nodded, all agape.

‘Choose three cards. The past. The future. The answer.'

Reverently, Mary turned the three top cards and slid them towards the woman.

‘Here goes. The past.' The first was a walking skeleton with a leering grin.

‘Death,' Auntie wheezed and looked hard into Mary's face. ‘Looked Death square in the face, 'aven't you?'

Flabbergasted, Mary nodded. ‘Me granny.'

‘We must all give the crows a pudding, one day. What's this now?' The next card was a grand building with towers, and dozens of lighted windows. ‘The future looks grand, dearie. The house of money. A lucky one, in't you?'

‘Me?' Mary's palms itched with want.

‘Now for the answer.'

The last card showed a fancy lock and key. ‘What's that mean?' she asked.

‘Most momentous,' Aunt Charlotte rested her many chins on her sausage fingers and mused. ‘The key. To open all doors,' she said slowly, her rasping voice rich with knowing. Did Mary understand? She wasn't sure. It was good, Auntie said, but it wasn't yet clear.

Maybe it was Mary coming into a House of Money one day, but Auntie told her she could stay. In return for a pallet in the corner and plenty of kitchen leavings, Mary ground loaves of sugar, chopped and peeled food and scrubbed pots. And when she was finally allowed to go up the carpeted stairs into the Palace, she found the most remarkable place she had ever seen.

Fence End, where she'd lived with Granny, had been a dour, grey-and-mud sort of a place, but the Palace was as tawdry as a fairground and as wild as a circus. The girls at Ma Brimstone's wore pink paint and a rainbow of frilled petticoats, which they lifted up in saucy postures at the tall glass windows. As for the running of the establishment, Ma had not forgotten her days on the stage at Drury Lane. She ran it like a roaring great play, with a half-hour bell telling her cast to get in place before the lamps were lit down Jerusalem Passage. The stage was set with red and green lanterns, gauzy curtains, wafted perfumes, sofas, and a fountain that trickled with real – if very cheap – wine. Aunt Charlotte was everyone's Auntie, and provided the food: the ladies' sugared ratafias, plates of toasted cheese at four in the morning, and beef and eggs for the gentlemen's hearty breakfasts. But her pastrycook's heart was in the buffets that glittered under the coloured lamps: the sugarwork Pleasure Gardens, and Rocky Islands decorated with jellies, rock candies, and pyramids of sweetmeats. And best of all were the chocolate Little Devils, morsels of magic that all the gentlemen loved.

Ma Brimstone herself was a cadaverous old bawd with lead-white skin and a passion for chinking gold. ‘She were once famous for her marble complexion,' Aunt Charlotte whispered, ‘but it were all out of a bottle, a bottle of lead.' All her girls had to be extraordinary, in some advertisable way. So Miss Nancy was her French widow, very cold and pretend-genteel, and said to have mysterious arts never before seen in the north. Black Bess was mighty strong, as black as tar, and advertised as most welcoming at the front door, but requiring double payment for the rear. Miss Edwina was a Sapphist, for the ladies, if they didn't care for athletically-built Captain Locket. Or there was strapping Miss Dora, who wore a man's boots and had a case of whips and birches, or child-size Miss Lucy, who was rumoured to have sold her maidenhead twenty-five times over, under different names.

It was Aunt Charlotte who explained to her about The Life. There were two tribes in the world; those who knew The Life, studied the game, and profited accordingly; and there were the gulls and dupes who were their natural victims. Aunt Charlotte boasted that she was a born member of the Ancient Order of Rogues. Her ma had been a fator, selling fortunes at fairs, and her da a swell cracksman, head of a crew of locksmiths and sneaks. ‘Baubles and trinkets was 'is game,' she recalled with a fond look to her moony face. ‘'E 'ad an eye for the glim trade.' Mary was always on at her aunt to talk the odd backward lingo of rogues, until at last she'd round on her with a swipe to the head.

‘Bing avast, chitty-faced tib!' she'd cry. ‘There be caz and pannam to be snic.'

Mary begged to know the secret meaning, and shook with laughter when she heard it was only: ‘Be gone, baby face. There's bread and cheese to slice.'

‘Can't you teach me, Auntie?' she'd wheedled, until at last, when she was fourteen, Aunt Charlotte gave in. ‘It's not some jest, Mary, it's the most solemnest vow you can make. If you want to learn the lingo you 'as to join the Ancient Order.'

She gave it not a second thought, not even of Granny, who'd been duped by Auntie's racket. Every week the cook chased news of any likely funeral with letters purporting to be from respectable kin. Granny, it seemed, had been gulled into sending all her small savings to pay for empty promises. Nor did she give a tinker's curse for the slaveys who worked to give coin to the thieving class. One famous night they had got Mary deep cut on the gin they called Strip-Me-Naked. Giddy as a top, she had been held up by two of Ma Brimstone's girls and had a full pint of spirit emptied over her head.

Her hair had been sopping with sweet liquor as she heard Auntie pronounce, ‘I, Charlotte Spenlove, roguess of the nugging house known as the Palace, do 'stall thee, Mary Jebb, to the Society of Rogues, in the name of the Tawney Prince, the Black Spy, otherwise known as Old Harry. And from henceforth, it shall be lawful for thee to follow The Life and cant for thy living in all places.'