A Taste for Nightshade (3 page)

She had been as sick as a dog that night, but even when she woke next day, light-headed and feeble, she knew she was born again, sworn to a new family as a roguess for the rest of her days.

The sallow gloom that passed for daylight in Newgate roused her. After taking great care with her rig-out, she shivered through a sermon with the other condemned wretches. Time seemed both to race and drag until she was shoved through the door into Old Bailey lane. The noise was near deafening: St Sepulchre's church was tolling the execution bell, and the crowd was roaring in a frenzy. All the pluck in the world couldn't stop Mary's first sight of the gallows giving her a damnable punch to the guts. There was Piggott up on the platform, strangling a whole line of fellows, chorused by the deafening groans and hoots from the crowd. Her chains were removed and she was tied in a line with three other women: to her left was a whimpering old dame, who trembled like she had a palsy. On her other side was a woman like a brawny fishwife, famed as a murderess, who seemed not to care a jot for the proceedings. Last was a weeping young whore, who had quarrelled with her fancy man and been nabbed for thieving a snuffbox. A posy of flowers landed at Mary's feet, and though her bonds made it difficult, she succeeded in picking it up and holding it as tightly as a prayer book. Dark ruby rosebuds they were, signifying mourning. Make it easy, make it quick, she recited silently.

At a signal she stepped towards the platform to a roaring cheer. The crowd was a sea of upturned faces, waving handkerchiefs and hats. Charlie had fetched her a white gown, and she'd let her red hair down to her thighs and wound it with white ribbons. Guards stepped up to hold the mob back; fingers struggled to touch her. She hoped Charlie could see her; he wasn't in the grandstand, but had said he'd hire a window at a house in the lane. Briefly, she wondered if that gentry cove had come to crow at her, the one who had put her here, the two-faced dog. Above her loomed the wooden platform, as high as a stage at a theatre. She was thrust towards another turnkey and a grubby hemp noose pulled over her head. Neatly, she pulled aside her hair, though the vile tickle of the hempen necklace made her legs weak. Even amidst the shoving and roaring she kept her chin up and her brain sharp. She had learned the Hanging Psalm by heart, to recite to the mob. ‘Let the bones which thou has broken rejoice …' That was it. Then she would cast the posy at the handsomest buck she could spy. The crowd would raise a roar at that; soon the ballad singers would be busy composing new lines. Her memorial was sure to be printed in The Newgate Calendar: Mary Jebb, the Newgate Blossom, lost to the world while still in lovely youth; careless and trim to the end.

Ahead, something of a palaver had broken out, but she had no inclination to look too hard towards the beams where the corpses dangled. A heavy hand fell on her shoulder.

‘Mary Jebb?' She nodded at the turnkey. The other three women were being shoulder-clapped, too.

A legal-looking fellow pushed before them and started to shout from a paper. In the midst of shrieks and boos and the rushing in her ears, it was hard to understand his meaning at first. A few words reached her: ‘His Majesty … Mercy … seven years.' Crazily, her first thought was that the bloody king had stolen her moment of glory.

Back in her old room at Newgate she contemplated her new fate. Seven years' transportation to some godless place no one had ever been to, or scarcely even heard of. Lags were no longer sent to America, which at least had people and cities and regular trade. Botany Bay was some freakish wilderness across the world, spied out by that tosspot, Captain Cook.

‘I should rather have snuffed it with honour,' she told Charlie.

‘Come now, Mary. It gives us time to get you out of here and home for good. A whole long month,' he said in his lawyer's voice. Charlie's plan was to file a writ of error, after getting the cully to withdraw all charges. ‘You'll walk free, Mary. It's just like any sting we've pulled off in the past. I'll make it easy, I'll write the screeve saying he's mighty sorry but he nabbed the wrong woman. It's as easy as kiss my hand. You get the fellow to sign, and you'll walk from here a free woman.'

With no more than paper and ink and her own coaxing words, she persuaded the cully to come down to London. She was saved from the gallows, she said, so she wanted to forgive him, in the flesh, as a farewell gift. Like a pigeon he hopped and fluttered towards her until she held him tightly in her snare. Within a week the cove agreed to sign the retraction.

Charlie's paper was drawn up ready, and the gull was to visit her at three o'clock the next Saturday. At first it seemed the fellow was only late, or perhaps there had been an accident? The bell struck four, and five, then six, and seven. When the gates were locked she saw it, as clear as a gypsy's crystal. The gull had flown away, leaving her to pay her dues on the far side of the world. The biggest sting of her life – that should have saved her from the pits of hell – had failed. She cursed him as a turncoat and a black-hearted dog, but all the oaths in the world couldn't save her from Botany Bay.

A week later she shuffled out into the prison yard, her legs in irons. Charlie had not shown his face again. Overnight she was dead cargo, no longer worth a swell cove's notice. The yard was a foul place; half-naked wretches loitered in the stink, many as thin as wraiths. Bony children played at an open drain, their eyes huge in dirt-caked faces. Gin was the Newgate Master's best trade, and those with a few pence chose oblivion on the stony ground. A racket broke out across the way; it was the other women from the Hanging Day, also bound for Botany Bay. The prisoner she later knew as Ma Watson was squawking at a fellow crouched over a workbench.

‘What's it to you if I want a dog picture?' she wailed, shaking her skinny fist. The rest of the women were spurring her on, laughing like old mares. Mary sauntered over and all fell silent, for she still had the style of a mobsman's Poll, in her striped taffety and feathered hat. The man looked up. ‘Want a love token for your sweetheart, my pretty?' He lifted one up for her to inspect, a sparkling disc of copper. ‘Jenks is the name. Only a bob each, best workmanship you'll find.'

The crone grasped her sleeve and opened her toothless mouth, ready to start up again.

‘Stow it, you old moaner,' Jenks barked. ‘Let the lady look. Here's the ones waiting to be hammered out.'

Mary inspected the designs inked on paper, waiting to be engraved. Ma Watson's was crude enough; an outline of a house with
My Cotage of Peace ∗ Took From Me
on the front, and a stick-limbed dog on the reverse above the words
FOR∗GET∗ME∗NOT
.

She flicked through the rest. Most were sentimental rhymes, the usual sailor's farewells of the ‘when this you see, remember me,' variety.

She lingered over an image of a man and woman, hand in hand, circled with chains:
My Dear Son, Absent But Not Forgot, Your Sorry Mother
.

Too late to be sorry, now, she thought. Next, that whore Janey had commissioned seven identical tokens. Mary smiled at the picture of a man and woman coupling and the verse:

Though My Fair Flesh Transported Be, My Blissful O still longs for thee
.

Who did Mary have to remember her? She watched as Jenks hammered the disc with a nail tip, every blow confirming the rotten truth of it. Charlie had dropped her. Any day soon she would be shipped off with these filthy slummocks to the ends of the earth. Her whole existence would be forgotten.

Ma Watson clawed at her sleeve again. ‘He's got no one to look after him. Bobby's his name—'

‘Get off me, you crack-pate!' Shaking off the crone she marched back to her own comfortable quarters on the Master's Side. How had it come to this, that she had no truelove, not even a child or a mongrel dog?

Next day when she returned to the yard she hung back while the prison guard sang the latest ballad to the band of ragtag women:

‘I never reckoned to be remembered in song,' hooted the woman they called Brinny. Were they halfwits? The whole country despised them; they were being swilled away like hogwash.

Mary strode up to Jenks. ‘Here,' she said, handing him a scrap of paper very beautifully scribed. ‘I want it done in that Lady's Hand, good and clear, not those bodged capitals.'

Beside it was the screed for the reverse, with a pattern of hearts, chains, and knives to be incised about the edge:

MARY JEBB AGE 19
TRANSPORTED 7 YEARS
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

‘Two the same? Double-dealing your sweethearts, eh?' She shot him a glance like poison, and threw down two bob.

Jenks didn't do a bad job. Once she'd pawned her fine hat to the jailer, she had the money to see both the tokens safely parcelled up and posted. Seven years with no return, she thought. That might suit these common prigs, but she was going to engrave her destiny with the ink of Fate. She would never let Mary Jebb be forgotten.

At first the voyage on the
Experiment
had seemed a pleasure jaunt after Newgate: the master had let the convicts exercise on deck, have their saucy games, and feast on perfumed fruits with curious names and colours. A few weeks into the voyage the first floggings took place. A bunch of sots had grabbed a cask of grog and, with less brains than guts, had drunk the lot and been discovered flat on the floor. All the convicts were mustered, as the captain droned on of forgiveness and such codswallop. Still, it had been as good as a church-gathering, to get a good eyeful of all the other lags.

As yet, Mary had scant interest in the other women; she wanted no pals. They were either rivals to be battled with or trulls to be elbowed aside. She stood alone and watchful, the habitual stance of a fly-girl like her. It wasn't women who would keep her alive but men – or to begin with, a strong, obedient, hard-knuckled man. She was still well togged in her striped taffety, and she kept her white skin clean. Already some of the flightier young girls had paired off with the crew, but she reckoned a sailor a poor investment, no sooner bedded than he'd abandon her and sail back to Blighty.

The topmost lags swaggered by the rail, hard-bitten mobsmen scarred by murder and villainy. Their molls would be slaveys, cursed and beaten, and shared between mates. She would have to wager on a fellow from the lower orders.

For sure she could always do worse than Jack Pierce. When he had given her the odd hopeful smile she had returned it sweetly. At first she'd thought him nothing but a flat – a sailor transported for claiming a mate's prize money. But he was bonny, with his long fair locks and china-blue eyes. And he had a lucky shine to him; some Church Society had picked him off the streets and paid to have him trained up as a seaman. Though he was no more than twenty, he was well-liked by the crew and the redcoats. As for the navigation and such-like he had learned, she'd already calculated how useful that might prove. Within the day she had him snared. When he kissed her and told her she was his girl, she wondered if he was that square he thought her an innocent. Day by day she wound him in as tightly as she could, turning herself into a prim girl, in need of a sweetheart's protection. Whatever it takes, she told herself, you've got to clamber to the top of this stinking heap.