The Penny Heart (8 page)

No, her book would hold a dark mirror to such conceits. Since Mother Eve’s day, women had whispered of herblore and crafty potions, the wise woman’s weapons against the injustices of life; a life of ill treatment, the life of a dog. If women were to be kicked into the kitchen they might play it to their advantage, for what was a kitchen but a witch’s brewhouse? Men had no notion of what women whispered to each other, hugger-mugger by the chimney corner; of treaclish syrups and bitter pods, of fat black berries and bulbous roots. Such remedies were rarely scribbled on paper; they were carried in noses, fingertips and stealthy tongues. Methods were shared in secret, of how to make a body hot with lust or shiver with fever, or to doze for a stretch or to sleep for eternity.

Like a chorus the hungry ghosts started up around her: voices that croaked and cackled and damned their captors headlong into hell. Her ghosts were the women who had sailed out beside her to Botany Bay, nearly five years back on the convict ship
Experiment
. She made a start with that most innocent of dishes: Brinny’s best receipt for Apple Pie. For there was magic in even that – the taking of uneatables: sour apples, claggy fat, dusty flour - and their abradabrification into a crisp-lidded, syrupy miracle.
Mother Eve’s Secrets
, she titled her book, a collection of best receipts and treacherous remedies. As her pen conjured the convict women’s talk, she reckoned it one of the few good things to have come to her from those last terrible years. Well, there had been Jack Pierce of course, but— she suffocated any further memory of Jack fast, before it shattered her to pieces.

As she wrote, the means to accomplish her revenge formed in her mind, so boldly that she laughed out loud, and clapped her hand across her mouth. She would be a cook! The very word delighted her. She would make herself busy in the downstairs of the household, butchering and baking, and doling out whatever was deserved. As she recalled incomparable dishes and counterfeit cures, she imagined herself the mistress of a great store of food. As big as a house, she dreamed it, a palace made of sugarplums, or a castle baked of cake. The serpent that would be a dragon must dine well. But could any store ever be vast enough, to sate her hunger for all she had lost?

5

Greaves, Lancashire

Summer 1792

~ Pease Pudding ~

Take your pease and wash and boil them in a cloth, take off the scum and put in a piece of bacon and whatsoever herbs you have. Boil it not too thick, serve with the bacon and pour on the broth. Next day, whatsoever you have left over, slice it and fry it.

Grace Moore, her cheapest dish

It was a dream that heralded the day my life changed: a dream of John Francis aged seventeen again, a long-limbed, smooth-faced youth. He had been invited to dine at Palatine House. My mother, bless her soul, was alive again and smiling, and even Father was agreeable. I too was young again, sixteen years old, overflowing with feelings since quite lost to me.

We sat about the table and picked at Mother’s genteel sweetmeats: apricot biscuits, quince paste, and sugared walnuts. John caught my eye whenever he could; there was a teasing mischief to his looks that banished my usual awkwardness. When my parents left us alone, John’s large hand, very warm, slipped under the table and took hold of mine. Then he kissed me, very tenderly and moist, on the lips. He held my face in his big-knuckled hands and something passed between us; something so powerful that my girlish hopes burst into life. I was like a scrawny chick comprehending its marvellous change into a dove. I was young and giddy with pleasure, struck with wonder that this was how my life would be.

Instead I woke to a muzzy July dawn. My feet poked out from the end of my childhood bed. I idled for a while, picking those strips around my nails that they call ‘mother’s blessings’, rehearsing my dream to extend its pitiful life. Then, as the Brabantists do, I asked myself what portents it contained. Food was generally deemed to be God’s bounty, unless it was a monarch’s banquet, when it signified the sin of gluttony. Was that slow kiss the Devil’s work? I could not believe wickedness could feel so thrilling.

I got up, for my nail began to bleed from an ugly wound. Perhaps the dream was only a cruel figment sent to torture me? Above me hung John’s portrait; all I had left of him since he’d sailed away. And I remembered events as they truly had been, my father lying drunken on the ground, and John Francis looking at me in a sort of agony. After that, any lad who even smiled at me got short shrift from my father. Then Father made his decision. ‘You must bide with me now, Grace,’ he said. ‘I’ll not take a servant, for no free soul should slave for another. But as my daughter it’s your duty to keep house for me, now your mother has gone.’

And it had not escaped my notice that I did not even cost a servant’s wages.

The thump made my bedroom door shake. ‘Grace! Fetch my breakfast, you lazybones.’

‘Father, please! A moment.’ I scrabbled about, bundling on my clothes as he hammered again. I feared the lock might break from its housing – I worried, too, that anyone passing might hear him. But when I finally unlocked my door and swung it open, the landing was empty. I found him downstairs in the parlour, lying twisted on the ground, drunk and helpless. I held my hand out to him, but he stared at it suspiciously, as if he didn’t know me, his only daughter.

‘Away, you useless creature. Look at yourself, you scarecrow!’ It shamed me to see him like that, with the spittle on his lips and his breath foul from liquor. At some time in the night, after staggering home drunk, he had thrown last night’s supper against the wall. The remnants of my pease pudding had grown a brown crust and the bacon looked like rusty leather. It was no feast, but still, a morning’s labour had been spent to turn a few pennyworth of stony peas into a palatable dish. That’s how much you care for me, I thought.

‘Come along, Father,’ I said gently. ‘Let me help you up.’

He let me hoist him upright, his bulk pressing heavy on my shoulders, till he staggered on his own two feet. Then, with no warning, he swung out with his fist and hit me hard on the side of my head. I cried out and recoiled, dizzy from the blow. With lips pressed tightly, so he might not hear me whimper, I stumbled back upstairs to my chamber. There, a wet cloth against my thumping head, I surrendered to self-pity. I turned to my dear mother’s portrait, recollecting that happy season when she had sat for me each afternoon.

No sooner had I wiped my face dry than a smart knock rapped at the front door. Passing downstairs to the parlour, I was grateful that Father had at least hauled himself up into a chair, from which he eyed me fiercely, as if I were to blame for all his troubles.

‘Mr Croxon,’ I said, dismayed to see our landlord on the doorstep. ‘I hope all is in order?’

Mr Croxon hesitated, then gave me a tight nod. He too had high-coloured cheeks; I wondered if he had come directly from the Quince and Salver.

‘All could be put in order, yes, Miss Moore. With a little plain dealing.’

Our landlord had once been a carpenter, before shrewd use of his small capital had allowed him to buy and put to rent a number of properties in the town. Once he had been Father’s customer too, and it was a credit to the man that he still tipped his hat in greeting, where many now cut him dead. I had not forgotten that it was thanks to Mr Croxon that we stayed on at Palatine House, for without his having made an arrangement with Father, we might have been turned out by bailiffs.

He strolled past me and pulled up a chair beside my father. I listened at the door as they talked of news from France. Some dreadful machine had been invented to decapitate the French nobility, Mr Croxon recalled with some glee. ‘Had enough of French Liberty yet, eh, Moore?’ My father mumbled in reply; the fire for reform was dying within him. Like many Britons we had rejoiced at the Bastille’s fall, but now read each news despatch with horror.

There could not have been a greater contrast between the two men: Mr Croxon smooth-faced and lively in his brass-buttoned coat and boots polished like glass, while Father looked a slovenly wreck, and no credit to my hours of laundering. As to the house – I did my best to keep up the old grandeur, but the tell-tale signs of a drunkard abounded, in stains on the carpet and a high smell of spirits.

‘Right, to business. You back to your full senses yet, Moore?’

‘Fetch some ale,’ Father barked. I brought it in, muttering an apology to Mr Croxon, and retreated. The two men grimaced as they supped. Well, I could not brew a miracle from stale alewort, which was all Father would pay for. But soon curiosity drew me back to the kitchen door.

‘What her grandmother were thinking, to settle it on our Grace, the Lord only knows,’ Father grumbled. ‘I should have taken that will to law, I should. The old woman must have been crazed to leave it to her and not me, her own son-in-law. As for the terms of her damned will, what’s the use of land you cannot sell? She be laughing from her grave, I reckon.’

‘Aye, she be that.’ Mr Croxon’s wry amusement was lost on my father.

I recollected that a letter, bearing a beautiful black seal, had arrived some days earlier; but my father had hidden it from me. So here was news – my grandmother was dead. She and my father had been at loggerheads all my life, forcing an estrangement from my mother and me.

‘The tight-fisted bitch must have been crack-headed.’

‘Maybe, maybe not.’ Mr Croxon paused, collecting his thoughts. ‘I could barely make sense of your jabbering last night. So what do the terms say precisely?’

‘It’s Grace’s land to keep. I cannot even build on it. I could have got a thousand pound—’

I held my breath. The truth was, I knew nothing of the details of my mysterious prospects. Though sneering hints of it had haunted my youth, until that day I had only the haziest notion of what it comprised. I listened hard and understood it was a thousand acres beside a river in Whitelow, in Yorkshire’s West Riding. It had been my grandmother’s from when she was widowed, since which time she had only collected rents from the farmers who lived on it and loosed their cattle on its pastures.

‘Aye, but what can Grace do with it? Can she build on it?’

‘Grace can. But I’m forbid from being a partner. It’s a pig in a poke.’

‘So who can Grace be partner to?’

‘I cannot partner her. Nor any person “of my association”,’ Father said in a mocking, gentrified tone. ‘Tully, her pettifogging lawyer, threatened me. Said if I tried to fangle it he’d find me out soon enough. Damn his lawyer’s tongue!’

‘Grace’s husband, perhaps?’

‘Well, you can’t marry her. Your missus wouldn’t let you.’

‘Not me, you daft lummocks. But I’ve got sons – a son. Michael. My elder lad.’

As I listened, the room seemed to move like water around me. A son? A Croxon son? I racked my brain to recall him. He did not frequent the High Street where I shopped, nor drink with my father at the Bush tavern. Michael Croxon. I had a slight recollection of a well-looking, fashionable man, riding an elegant hunter on the lane that led to the Croxon’s new villa. My impressions were favourable; but that in itself filled me with misgivings. As I sat in my threadbare gown with a bruise throbbing at my hairline, Michael Croxon seemed an altogether different manner of person from me. Yet he is a chance, I thought. A chance to escape from Father.

‘Eh, but what about me? Who’ll look after me?’ At the sound of Father’s voice my fingernails dug painfully into my palms. I knew it – he was going to destroy my chance of freedom. Scarcely knowing what I did, I walked into the parlour.

‘Mr Croxon,’ I nodded, praying he would not send me away. ‘Father,’ I added, quailing to see his livid face. ‘I believe I should be present.’

‘Yes – yes, Grace.’ Mr Croxon was quicker-witted than my father. ‘This concerns you very much. Come, sit with us.’

As I sat, my legs were as weak as a lamb’s. Mr Croxon continued speaking, and I tried to follow, but some of it was legal talk, too complex for me. However, the import was quite comprehensible. The Croxon family wished to found a business. The elder son, Michael, was especially enthusiastic, having long held the ambition to make his fortune using the modern means of manufacturing cotton. An arrangement between our two families would bring profit to us all.

‘Michael has had his troubles and now needs a steady wife,’ he said. It was not said in jest, that was clear from his manner. ‘I speak plain, for that’s the best way.’