A Taste for Nightshade (37 page)

‘She was up on the roof, hiding in the lines of laundry. I cornered her against a wall and she threw Peter's pound note at my feet. “Take it,” she said. “Now let me go.”'

I glanced at him, a hunched outline beside me.

‘I didn't want to let her go. The way she pressed herself against the wall; her head back, her throat open, her eyes penetrating mine. She knew me better than I knew myself.'

He fell silent, and I knew he relived the enchantment of that moment. ‘Go on,' I demanded, wanting to hear him, but also wanting to end this torture of not knowing, at last.

‘She lifted her skirt to her knees, laughing in that throaty way of hers. I grasped her skirts in my fists and lifted them higher. Then, from nowhere, a slap stung my face. I reeled back. She was laughing at me, at my discomposure. “You deserve a slap, you filthy devil,” she said. I was so angry I reached out to shake her, to pull her to me. This time she whispered in my ear, “I know a private place. I'll show you who is mistress.” And she grasped my hair, jerked my head back, and made me look into her face. She was as strong as an Amazon. “You may serve me only if you swear to obey me.” And there it was. She knew the clockwork of my soul– how to make it run faster, make it spin, make it stop dead and tremble.

‘However hard I battled against this – this vice, Peg understood me. I told you, it began with that monster at school. At first he protected me from other boys, from bullies, he let me make free in his apartments. Then he began to whisper of cruelties, of lewdness – no. I cannot speak of it. And never, ever, of what he did to me. I tried, truly I have tried to conquer it. But for solitary years I'd longed for such a fierce mistress as her. She hit me again, and I was hers.

‘“Where is this private place?” I asked.

‘“Where is it,
Mistress
,” she insisted.

‘Then, to my eternal frustration, we were interrupted by that magistrate and his constable. I was in an agony. And that damned magistrate wouldn't let up, goading me to charge her.'

‘And Peg?'

He muttered quietly, ‘It was not very pleasant, you know. She begged me. Said she would be hanged.' His voice grew strident. ‘I thought it would be better for the law to have her. At least that way I could save myself.'

‘Oh yes? You would have seen her hanged. Yet when she was reprieved you visited her? In that vile cell.' I was near to spitting with fury.

‘She begged to see me before she was transported. But when I saw her it was again like falling through that trapdoor into another world. I paid to be alone with her. I was helpless. Pain, pleasure – I lost all reason.

‘She had hopes of a retrial; there was some crooked lawyer involved. But it worried me, it would attract unwelcome attention if I suddenly changed my testimony. I realised that all I had to do was never go back to her. The law would pack her off to Botany Bay, and that would be the end of it. Seven years was such a long time that I persuaded myself she would never come back. So the day I was supposed to visit her, I found a tavern and got dead drunk instead. God help me, I paid for that.

‘A few weeks later I got that token in my post. Love token? It was a curse. Every day it pressed like an iron weight upon my mind. I fell into despondency, only my parents prevented me from taking my life. Still I hoped, I prayed, that she would never return – for no one ever did return from Botany Bay, did they? But three years later, she found me again and I knew it was the end. She hunted me down; lay in wait for me here, in the empty hall, at Delafosse. Those weeks before you came – I surrendered to my true nature. I'd have beggared myself for her. You do understand, I was in her hands; I wanted to be at her mercy, her willing servant. She wasn't a kind mistress. She told me about Moncrieff, she heard some servant gossip, laughed at my misery – until I had to destroy that room that taunted me with its hypocrisy.'

He looked over, towards me, his eyes huge and beseeching. ‘But Grace, I wouldn't let her hurt you. Once she'd got the key to your box and your money, I begged her to leave you unharmed. That charade at Christmas Eve – it was a favour to you, she thought it amusing to let you live, so long as you changed your name and never came back.' He pulled a dark bottle from his pocket and took a long draw.

‘What is that? A mind-fogging potion of hers? Don't you see how she has destroyed you?' I snatched the bottle from him and threw it hard onto the road where it smashed with a satisfying crock.

Michael glanced back at where it had landed and said plaintively, ‘I'll try, Grace. Now I've come to my senses again. Thank God you are home. We'll settle down again. I'll be respectable again, a good father to Henry.'

He smiled at me, a weak ridiculous smile; but at my shrivelling glance, his next words died on his tongue.

‘Once you have done what you need to do, Michael, I wish never to see your cowardly face again.'

The gate to Whitelow pastures hung from its post. The rain still fell across the ruined landscape, in quivering grey sheets. A quagmire of mud stretched before us. The pleasant green pastures of my land had been destroyed, first by the attempt to build the mill, and then by the arsonists' efforts to destroy it. The charred ruins of a few low walls were all that remained. Fearful of the gig's wheels sinking, I halted beneath a dripping tree and we both alighted.

Michael doggedly fetched Mrs Harper's ruined body, wrapped in a meagre blanket. Old and new wounds punctured her shrunken frame, and her once-modest gown hung in ribbons. For a moment her poor withered face hung upside down, and to my perplexity, I believed I recognised her.

‘Peg did give her a chance,' he mumbled sheepishly. ‘But the fool wouldn't do the sensible thing and leave. I asked Peg to make her go away, but the Harper woman was obstinate. And then she went in search of liquor in the basement …'

His voice trailed away. We set off, Michael swaying as he hauled Mrs Harper's corpse across the mire. A rectangular foundation pit, large enough for the engine's housing, came into view.

‘Ah,' I said, splashing behind him through drenching puddles, ‘the scene of our great fortune.'

A path ran around the pit, where workers had abandoned heaps of earth and tools, and even a rusting wheelbarrow. Ponds and rivulets glimmered in the ceaseless rain; the ground was as dark and sticky as pitch. Michael edged forward to the bank of mud. Some dozen feet below us, the pit contained a sump of filthy water. I stood behind him, as close as I dared, and uttered a prayer for the poor woman. Then Michael tied a large stone to her skirts and lifted her high, swung her back, and then cast her forth. She tumbled awkwardly, poor soul, into the coal-black waters beneath. There was barely a splash as her body sank. ‘That's good,' he muttered. ‘She's sinking at once.'

We returned together to the gig to fetch Peg's body. Both of us were drenched. Michael's hair dripped long with rainwater; his coat was sodden, his lean bones stood jagged, his eyes were huge. Halfway back to the pit he stumbled and dropped Peg in the mud, and the blanket that covered her fell away. The wound to her chest had left an oval stain across my gown where the knife was still embedded. He lifted her tenderly in his arms and trudged on.

At the lip of the pit he halted again, panting for breath. I took a last look at Peg as she lay ungainly in his arms. The false raven tresses were, of course, merely horsehair, and now hung clotted with mud. Her eyes stood open in a glazed resentful stare. She was a grotesque mannequin, no longer animated by whatever chameleon spirit had played at being Mary, or Peg, or whichever character most suited her purpose. I waited for Michael to cast her away, but instead, he lifted her in his arms and passionately kissed her open mouth. He was sweating, his skin oyster damp; the old handsome features bleary and raw-eyed. Then, turning to me, he glared with streaming eyes. ‘You! You have ruined everything. Why did you ever come back?'

I started back, shielding my face, my own hot tears blurring my vision.

He sank to his knees, cradling her lolling head; I felt he wanted to roll, swine-like, in filth. I had seen enough.

‘I am going,' I called, and began to step heedlessly back through the sucking ground, dully aware of Michael's eternal facility to crush me. I was already some thirty feet nearer to the gig when I looked backwards to see if he was following me. He was not. Still he knelt over Peg's corpse like a tragic lover, filthy and distraught.

Even those events we mark clearly with our own eyes can deceive us; I had learned that lesson well from Peg. If memory is, as the ancients say, a tablet of wax marked with a stylus, what happened next was gouged so deep that the wax itself was near destroyed. Propelled by disgust, I again set my head down and picked my way back to the gig through ankle-deep puddles. I started as a sound rang out, a wordless scream that split the air – anguished, terrified, miserable. In the moment in which I turned, I heard a long, splintery splash of water. I looked dimly about through the sheets of rain. The edge of the pit lay empty – both Michael and Peg had vanished from this earth. Stupefied, I scanned the landscape for them, convinced that my eyes betrayed me. Then I ran back to the pit through sucking mud, my lungs bursting. By the time I reached the rim I found nothing moving, save two conjoined rings, slowly dilating in the water. ‘Michael!' I screamed at the empty air, wondering if this was some final, cruel trick the pair had played on me. I grasped a stick and threw it feebly into the water. Nothing surfaced. I stood stunned as the rings of water expanded ever more slowly, until the black surface at last grew still. Had Michael leaped after his lover in a fit of despair? I did not know. I could no longer set one rational thought before another. I was alone, shaking and sobbing in that graveyard of dreams.

The dismal sounds of morning broke around me. A few birds awakened and uttered lonely calls. The horse shook a flurry of rain from his coat, jangling his harness. I was so wet and cold that I wondered how I might ever peel off the second skin of my bloodied mourning gown. Then, like a long-forgotten vision, I remembered Henry waiting in the kitchen with Nan, and that I could feed him in bed with a good hot fire before us. The rain was already washing away our footprints in the churned earth. The coming day would discover no sign of the night's events. I returned to the pony cart and turned it around for Delafosse.

 

 

I spent almost a month at Delafosse, in a state of exhausted half-life. I let Nan care for little Henry and me, all the time keeping the fire in my chamber banked up high, and the curtains drawn. Dear Nan brought me caudles of egg and brandy, game jellies, and herb-rich stews. Except to dismiss the sisters from the kitchen, I didn't leave my chamber at all.

I felt I must sleep for a hundred years, safe in some pocket of lost time, before I could wake and find the world alive again. And each time I woke to feed Henry, the memories that blazed in my mind – the glint of a knife-point in the darkness, Mrs Harper's icy handclasp in the larder, and Michael's wordless anguish as he vanished from this world – those images dissolved slowly away, like crimson scars fading to new pink skin. No constables or magistrates came knocking at my door with unanswerable questions. The new owner of Whitelow did not demand to search the foundation pit. I would have liked to hibernate there in my old chamber, in the blue tester bed beneath crewel-work tulips, with the bed curtains wrapped tightly around us.

‘He should be baptised, mistress,' Nan said, winding bands of linen tightly about Henry's wriggling form.

‘One day. In my religion he should wait until he chooses to be baptised himself.'

‘That's a shame. I never did get to showing you this.' Nan pulled a paper parcel from her apron and handed it to me. Inside was a miniature cradle, smaller than my hand, painted to look like wood. It contained a tiny peg-sized baby, swaddled in bands. At first I thought it was made of yellowing ivory, but it had a powdery texture.

‘Is it made of sugar?'

‘Aye. It's a device for a christening cake. I fancied the little one might 'ave it.'

I looked at it closely; it had the look of an antique from a bygone age. ‘It's very old. And beautiful.'

‘This come with it. You 'ave a look. I never did learn how to read me letters.'

I opened a fading, yellowed paper. As I read it out loud to Nan, my eyes stung with pity: poor Hannah Croxon had made such efforts to give Michael a good and free life.

Again I picked up the tiny figure of a baby; only this time it struck me as a crude depiction of a human being, like a tiny corpse in a shroud.

‘And now he's dead,' I said. ‘That beautiful baby she rescued.'

Nan's milky eyes looked up into my face, sagging mournfully in their great web of wrinkles. ‘Mr Michael?' She had never asked me why he hadn't returned.

‘Yes. He died with her. I think he chose to.' I held out the crib to her. ‘I can't take it, Nan. Even though he was Henry's father. I want to break the link now.'

Nan ran a mottled fingertip along the length of the sugar figure. ‘After I got this from Miss Hannah, I allus knew the bairn were safe,' she said. ‘I never even knew he come back here.'

I didn't tell her I guessed someone else had known and had used that knowledge cruelly. Tenderly she wrapped the sugar baby up again in its manger of dusty paper.

A letter arrived, giving Michael notice of the end of the twelve-month's tenancy at Delafosse. With it was enclosed an advertisement for the property's sale, stating that the land and house were expected to command £1,000. Michael's strongbox contained more than that sum; almost £3,000, or half of the £6,000 my land was worth.

I drew back the curtains on a window-rattling, wind-whipped autumn; the trees were shedding flurries of ochre leaves. Across a pearly sky, a flock of swallows crisscrossed in agitated arcs. I leaned forward on my elbows and wondered at myself. It was not only Michael that I was cured of; I had fallen out of my dream of living at Delafosse; with its untameable acres and incurable decay. I made plans to depart.

The only letter I wrote was to Mrs Barthwaite, informing her I was sorry I could not pursue our acquaintance as I was leaving Earlby for good. My health, I wrote, was not strong enough to withstand the damp northern winters. That one letter, I surmised, would inform the entire neighbourhood of my departure.

I burned Peg's things, and Michael's too. The monstrous hoard of food I found in the basement was given to the church to distribute to the poor. I took only my own goods, and what I thought would prove useful of the new furniture. Beyond that, I wanted nothing that carried the taint of my time at Delafosse Hall.

My house in London is newly built, upon land that was once an orchard. It has crisp rectangular walls, and stands hugger-mugger in the crowded heart of the square. I chose it for its high arched windows that flood my parlour with light from floor to ceiling. From here, I can watch a ceaseless cavalcade of passers-by, carriages, horses and wagons, that cheer me with their incessant reminder that life drives ever onwards. The house is modest and secure; only four narrow floors radiating from the elegant curlicue of a staircase. I want to hug the freshly-plastered walls tightly in my arms; it is a house I can never get lost in.

The captain is well-contented with his quarters, a modest suite of rooms overlooking the stables. I promised him a life of ease, but he will not hear of such idleness. He spends each morning overseeing the stables, and the management of our provisions, too. He has assisted me with matters of business, the deposit of my money at a bank at interest, and the purchase of our home; proving an altogether kindlier advisor than that bulldog, Mr Tully. Then, his duty done, my old friend sets off in his scarlet coat for his day's perambulations. He has never quite recovered from that savage blow to the head, his hearing is declining, and his back is not so straight, but he is the happiest of fellows, saluting passers-by smartly, and jesting with mop-twirling maids from the neighbouring houses.

Today I have the whole of a summer's afternoon before me; and down here in the kitchen, I am indulging a whim to learn to bake.

‘Why, it's what you'd call perfect, ma'am,' says Sal, my maid-of-all-work, as we unpack my first ever fruit cake from its brown-paper wrapping. It is of modest size, but well fed with brandy, covered with almond paste, and has a top layer of snowy sugar icing as smooth as white glass.

Sal is another welcome refugee from Mrs Huckle's. Nan would not come south with me, so I settled an annuity on my unlikely saviour. After expressing a hankering to return to her birthplace in Skipton, she lives there now in a doll-sized almshouse, where I hope she may happily end her days.

‘Mama, for me?' warbles Henry, toddling across the room, his stubby fingers reaching for the cake.

‘Tomorrow.' I playfully bat his fingers away. ‘Here. Try a sugar rose petal.' He chews tentatively on the sugar paste, then rolls his eyes in mimicry of bliss. In part I have learned to cook because I still cannot trust a stranger's food to pass Henry's lips. I do not suspect my servants of ill will, quite the contrary; it is only my belief that we sometimes give our trust too easily. And Henry is the gold-crowned sun of my universe, a giggling infant whose world is a bounty of small miracles. Now he tugs at Sal's sleeve, bursting to show her his peg-soldier, whittled and painted by the captain, standing guard at the gate to the yard. I nod at her to follow him, and return to the beautification of my cake.

There had been a method to bake fruit cake amongst the receipts I found in Peg's quarters at Delafosse; written inside that book of hers titled
Mother Eve's Secrets
. For an unthinking moment, I thought I'd found something of worth amongst Peg's hoard. She had always been a fine pastrycook, her puddings dripping with hot syrup, her desserts as light as sugared clouds, her tea-board a never-ending array of ratafias, cakes, and tarts. As for the rest of our roasts and savouries, Nan told me of those deceptions. Peg had made that frail woman little more than a whipped slave; I still chastise myself for my blindness.

I turned over a few of Peg's pages, and yes, there were her glorious desserts, scribed on grease-blotted pages. But there were others too:
A Nostrum for Eternal Youth
(one halfpenny to make, ask two shillings of each gull),
Mother Watson's Elixir
(to be hawked for any remedy), and
A Love Potion Generally Fobbed to the Lonely
. Over the page was a sinister diagram:
A Sure Mesmeric Method to Gain Influence Upon Another
, that contained crude drawings of eyes, staring at each other with dotted lines between them. And at the back were potions that made the hairs on the back of my neck rise –
A Narcotic for Natural-Seeming Sleep
,
Use of Sassafras to Confuse the Reason
,
An Usquebaugh to Provoke the Fever of Lust,
A Mighty Strong Venom to Procure a Rapid Death
. I dropped the book like a red-hot coal. Then lifting it nimbly in a cloth, for I did not want to touch it, I threw it in the fire. I watched the greasy papers ignite in wild flame, then shrivel to flakes of charcoal. I am indeed fortunate to be alive.

I blink as I look about my kitchen, driving away memories of the underground labyrinth of Delafosse. My smart iron cooking range throws out a steady, warming heat. Blue and white Willow Pattern china fills the wooden shelves. I have bought freshly printed cookery books, copper moulds, and iron pans, and every new-fangled whisk, mill and jigger.

Sal and Henry return with a gust of warm garden air and I settle down to create miniature roses from sugarpaste using tiny ivory spatulas and crimpers. I will have no antique tester bed crowning my cake, only a posy of flowers: symbols of beauty and growth, each year new-blossoming. I let Henry paint the broken pieces with spinach juice, while I tint my flowers with cochineal and yellow gum. As a pretty device I paint a ladybird on a rose, and think it finer than Sèvres porcelain.

At ten o'clock tomorrow, I will marry John Francis at St Mark's Church, across the square. As Sal and I rehearse our plans for the day, pleasurable anticipation bubbles inside me like fizzing wine. We will return from church for this bride cake in the parlour, then take a simple wedding breakfast of hot buttered rolls, ham, cold chicken, and fruit, on the silver in the dining room. Nan has sent me a Yorkshire Game Pie, so crusted with wedding figures of wheatsheafs and blossoms it truly looks too good to eat. We have invited few guests, for I want no great show, and instead will have bread and beef sent to feed the poor. And at two o'clock, we will leave with Henry for a much anticipated holiday by the sea, at Sandhills, on the southern coast. John Francis has promised Henry he may try sea-bathing, while I have bought stocks of cerulean blue and burnt umber to attempt to catch the sea and sky in watercolour. I have no vast trousseau, but have indulged myself in a robe of embroidered silk, and a Spanish hat, with the brim fashionably tipped and garnished with ribbons.

It is a year now since John Francis tapped my arm in a crowd at the Royal Academy Exhibition of Paintings. I was at first grateful merely to find a friend, being still mistrustful of strangers and spending every evening alone once Henry was in bed. On closer acquaintance, I found John was not at all romantically melancholic and is certainly no Renaissance angel in looks. Instead, his clear and honest eyes, his firm opinions and hidden ardour suit me just as well as when I was sixteen and we roamed the moors above Greaves. He is down-to-earth and sensible, a shrewd sea merchant in these embattled times, and a tender and eager lover. It took many weeks before I could confess to him that Michael had died. When I did, John reached for me and wrapped me so tightly in his arms that a great dam-burst of emotions overwhelmed me. I wept into his shirt as he stroked my hair and murmured that he loved me. Michael had trained me to tiptoe around his moods, as though my bare feet circled shards of glass. I am still astonished to speak freely and not be punished by sharp retorts; rather I am listened to with attention and respect.

John and I spoke often of marriage, for before God I am a widow and he a bachelor. There are crowded London parishes where our banns might be read by a careless clerk, who would never question the word of two respectable persons. But without proof of Michael's death I still dreaded the Croxons one day observing us on the street and demanding I give an account of Michael and his whereabouts.

‘I shall tell the Justices the truth, that Michael died,' I said. It was John who made myriad objections – that I might be held to account for concealing a murder, and that my life might be blighted by scandal. ‘And think of Henry,' he said soberly. ‘Spare him from one day learning of his father's transgressions.' There was a further reason too, one that I often repeated to myself. How could I allow Nan to be tried for murder? What, in fact, is justice? I had always believed that justice should follow the most rigid rules, but now I concede it is a cumbersome tool; it can destroy more than it protects.