The 6th day of November 1752

Saint Leonard the Confessor

Luminary: New Moon at 2 in the morning.

Observation: Eclipse of the Sun at 1 in the morning.

Prognostication: Diverse and unexpected changes at hand.

 

Tabitha stewed miserably in her bed. So now she knew it: Nat was not only a deceiver, he was just as worthless as every other man she had ever known. When she had first arrived in London she had been hopeful of meeting a fine man to be hers alone. But soon each face grew mazy, merging one into the next. And every one of them abandoned her, or ran out of money, or used her ill. Damn it, how had she been duped by a handsome face again?

As it darkened to afternoon, Jennet brought a sweet posset to warm her.

‘I am sorry you did not reach the tavern in time.’

Tabitha gave a sad little shake of her head in reply.

Jennet watched her. ‘He is in Chester Castle now. No one has visited him.’

‘Do you think I care? It is what he deserves.’ Tabitha squirmed away towards the wall.

Jennet sat down on the bed beside her. ‘You loved him, Tabitha. I never saw a man and woman happier together. You can still go to him now.’

‘Stop it.’ She held the girl’s wrist, not wanting to hear any more. ‘Perhaps I loved him, Jennet, but I never even knew him.’

‘Oh.’ Jennet looked at her with her clear, guileless expression. ‘Can we never truly know a man, Tabitha?’

‘Only when it is too late. I could tell you some stories; my best friend, Poll Shepherd, for a start. She came home one day, bursting with news. A proposal of marriage. Mr Hartford Betts, the figure of a respectable bachelor, and well-connected, too. The wedding cost twenty pounds in gowns, white ribbons and bride cake. Then off she went to live in Mr Betts’ new villa across town.

‘It was all over in a twinkling. Hoping to improve his situation, that blockhead Betts lost his money on a speculation. His true character was then revealed: he was a despondent, miserable drunk. There was nothing for Poll to do but go back on the town. I did my best, I lent her five pounds – but Betts took it off her for drink. “Keep your pride and your purse to yourself,” Poll told me. “Marriage is a rattrap – poxed easy to enter, but impossible to escape.”

‘And what is she now? A year later, I was leaving the Playhouse when I heard my name whispered. There was my dear, sweet Poll clutching the wall, half-cut on gin, half her teeth broken and her lovely yellow hair turned to grey. That jewel of London had been ground underfoot by that lazy dog, her husband. These days, he is no more than her drunken pimp – and there is a child now, a thin ragged creature lucky to get a bowl of milk. So you see, Jennet, we can never know a man.’

‘But that is not always true. My mother was well content with Joshua as a husband. She, at least, died well loved. Poor man, I think he’ll never find again what they once had.’

Tabitha rolled over and watched her narrowly. ‘Truly?’

All these years, she had fancied it was herself whom Joshua wanted, and that he had merely married Mary as second-best. Now, she discovered, Mary had been his great love, and those long looks and kisses were nothing but a widower’s loneliness.

Once Jennet had left Tabitha turned matters over and over, churning like butter that wouldn’t come. For the first time in her life, she had let her bold husk be split, lain weak and exposed within cradling arms. She had believed she had found a true love; her own miraculous echoing heart, foretold in the stars to be hers alone.

The next day, while dressing, she paid attention to her costume and hair. At Eglantine Hall she found the door unlocked. She wandered the empty apartment, feeling the rawness of his absence, and picking up objects he had touched: a glass that bore the impress of his lips, a single chestnut hair, a linen stock. She buried her face in the linen’s rumpled softness and smelled the traces of his body. Just a week earlier she had untied it from his throat and discarded it on the floor; then he had lifted his shirt from his naked shoulders. Venus save her, the memory made her body ache.

Nat’s papers were cast over the desk, in heaps of ink-spattered scrawl. She picked up the pamphlet; the crude story that had so infuriated her and made sport of them all for any kitchen maid or street boy.

It was vulgar and crude – but now, viewing it from a little distance, she could comprehend its cleverness. If she did not know Netherlea, if she were reading about some other town – why, she would have sat down with a cup of sugared tea and devoured it with all the relish of a currant bun. And if the bag of guineas he had been paid was any guide, so would hundreds of other ordinary folk. In the city, no one cared now for the folktales of their grandsires; only for new legends of glamorous highwaymen, barbaric gangs and bloody outrages. They were tales of this new invention called a metropolis, where thousands of people lived crowded against their neighbours, all of them strangers, and many of them strange.

His bed was still unmade; he had left a paper under his pillow. She read it with slowly growing comprehension:

O future reader, in my glass I see,

Two shining eyes and eager beating heart;

And from an eerie distance back in Time,

Shoot you a message with this poet’s dart:

Within our reach lies great transforming power,

A partner soul to whom our soul is bound,

Pray don’t be cowardly, but grasp this hour –

And know the bliss that I with T have found.

Her heart thumped suddenly against her ribs. She forgave him all; his secret, the pamphlet, his drunkenness, and dallying with Zusanna. This verse was not written by a deceiver. No, here in his private moments was Nat’s true and lovable self. She missed him so much, the damned rogue. Swiftly, she raised the stone where she knew he hid his money, counting what remained. There were still two pounds and sixteen shillings left. Whatever comforts she could buy for him in Chester gaol, he should have.