I received a note yesterday which sent me chasing to Wapping and the Bladebone. I shook Jem by his greasy jacket. ‘Is it true?’
‘Aye, seems so. Did thee know Hempen Moffatt from the old days? Sailed with Jennings? Took to whaling in Bahamas waters and found hisself a boulder of amber grease…’
I shook him again. ‘I’ll close your dead lights, you maggot. Just tell me.’
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘poor Captain Porritt. Drinking in Davy Jones’s tavern now, it do seem. Old Moffatt he sailed in Monday, fresh from the Windies to spend his fortune, the which he is doing to his loss and my profit, and he told me. He’d met up with the Holy Innocent in the Bahamas, only she’s called the Brilliana now. Crew’d mutinied, d’ye see, and turned pirate. No sign of Porritt nor the officers.’
‘And the Mark?’
He nodded. ‘She was there. Couldn’t be no one else. Only female aboard. Small, fair and pocks on her cheeks.’ He poured me a tot and I drank it.
‘They’d made her purser, the mutineers. She’s another such as you was, I reckon. Ah, there’s more lady pirates on the account these days than you can shake a stick at.’ He squinnied at me. ‘Makes it awkward, like. Her being one of the Brotherhood now. Do ee still want her marked?’
I drank another tot while I thought about it, then told him no. I think I was right. Where’s the point? Dangle that girl in shit and she’ll come up coated in sugar. She’s far enough away, in any case. And besides, if she’s joined the Brotherhood she’s put herself out of court. Who’d take the evidence of a woman pirate against a woman of the royal bedchamber? She can live.
I don’t remember getting home, though, and it wasn’t the rum. I was only conscious of her. She was visible, I swear; the alleys shook with her screams at being thwarted yet again. She still wants the Bratchet dead.
The creature’s new device of bleeding affects my eyes so that sometimes I can see nothing but blood. By day, it drips out of Carrots’ hair and spurts out of Queen Ant’s feet as I rub them. Abigail’s slippers send wavelets of it against the skirting board of the room.
It must be the atmosphere around town that affects her; the air is full of violence. Yet, officially, we are at peace. At last. On Good Friday, about two o’clock in the afternoon a post-chaise came rattling down Whitehall and stopped at the Cockpit. Out jumped St John’s half-brother, George, with the Treaty of Utrecht in his hand. The peace with France and Spain had finally been ratified. Queen Ant fell on her knees in thankfulness.
But if there is peace between countries there is none between men. Everyone is trying to murder everyone else. With the Tories in control, the Whigs are become desperate. Before he could be replaced, our Whig ambassador in Paris, the Earl of Stair, engaged men to assassinate the Pretender. He failed, but it shows the lengths to which Whigs will go to try and ensure the accession of George I.
Indeed, Harley uncovered a plot by the more desperate Whigs to draw their swords in the House of Commons itself and fall upon such ministers as oppose the Hanovers. That too was nipped in the bud.
It is said that the Mohocks who terrorize the streets by night are really Whigs in disguise seeking to devour Tories. By day the streets are nearly as violent as by night; men and women quarrel over the tracts pouring off the presses, Tory and Whig, attacking the other’s cause. The writers of them hire gangs to protect themselves and these rowdies fight when they meet. Even the court women go armed and avoid dark alleys.
The Duke of Hamilton, a Jacobite Tory, was to be sent to Paris to replace Stair as British ambassador, but before he could go, he was challenged to a duel in Hyde Park by the Whig Earl of Mohun. Each fool managed to kill the other.
The only one who stops the country from ripping apart is our fat, humdrum queen. Without the respect both Whigs and Tories have for her there would be civil war. There will be civil war when she dies. Everyone knows it. And she is increasingly unwell.
She could be better if her ministers were not trying to tear her in two. The jealousy between Robert Harley and St John sickens her. She had to grant St John a title because he has been the author of the peace between herself and King Louis. She didn’t want to do it; St John is flagrantly unfaithful to his wife and Queen Ant disapproves. So she created him merely Viscount Bolingbroke where she had made Harley Earl of Oxford.
St John fell into a rage with mortification. ‘The people lionize me, even the French lionize me – and instead of rewarding, the great mare has punished me.’
He is not lionized by our Dutch allies; the treaty he made with Louis as good as throws them to the wolves. In this, I think, he has been short-sighted, for the Hanoverians have been great friends to the Dutch and they to the Hanoverians. The peace has placed George of Hanover firmly in the camp of the Whigs. The Tories, he feels, have betrayed him. If St John, therefore, is to continue his rise to power under the next reign, he must see to it that it is the reign of James III and not George I.
The one person missing from all this is the Duke of Marlborough, the man who brought Louis to his knees in the first place. The Tories vilified him to Queen Ant until you might have thought he was responsible for every crime since the Gunpowder Plot. Had Sarah not offended Her Majesty past bearing, he might have survived politically. As it was, Queen Ant dismissed her former friend and greatest general with a letter so curt that he is said to have thrown it into the fire. Sarah has joined her husband in his exile and the court is quieter, but poorer, for her absence.
I think it has all broken the queen’s heart. She was taken so ill at Windsor this Christmas she nearly did die and I feared you and I, my darling, had lost our race. It was a violent ague followed by gout of the stomach. We are still at Windsor, waiting for her recovery. It is obvious that her time – and ours – grows short.
Undoubtedly she could halt at least some of the mayhem if she named which, out of James Stuart and George of Hanover, she wishes to succeed her, but she won’t. She is a democratic queen. Parliament took steps at the beginning of the reign to safeguard the succession for a Protestant heir and she had set herself to abide by that. But she is still haunted by her father for her defection in the Glorious Revolution, demanding that she pay for that betrayal by bringing back his son. I know he does, because last night she saw him; she was overtaken by a horror, sat up, rigid, eyes staring. Perhaps, like the creature, the phantom bled.
The macaw could see it and shrieked continually. Danvers ran for the doctors, while Carrots and I soothed her. It was a long night and by the time the morning came we were all four exhausted.
The creature had set herself up on a curtain with the cord round her neck so that her head hung askew. Blood gushed from her mouth like rain out of a gargoyle’s. The dawn light from the window came through its fall, tainting furniture and women with scarlet. I proffered the chocolate to a queen that was massacred.
Abigail came in, all solicitude. ‘My poor, dear Majesty, why did you not call me? What ails that bird? Let me take it away.’
Her Majesty didn’t call Abigail, nor would she allow her to remove the macaw, because she is displeased with her for being seduced by St John. (When I say ‘seduced’ I talk of the mind only; even St John wouldn’t bed with that broomstick.) Undaunted, the woman who used to press Harley’s cause now presses St John’s in a monotone. It is no wonder the screams of a fowl are preferable. At last she finished droning, and went.
The queen indicated I draw the curtain and I lifted the pot out of the close stool but she waved it away and instead produced the box from under her pillows. I pressed my nails harder into my hands to keep sensible a while longer. Hold, hold.
‘I am haunted, my dear. I cannot rest for thinking that there may be another Stuart in need… my mind would be settled about this poor girl before I die.’
Despite the shouts of the macaw and the creature, I pretended to think. ‘I wonder, madam, Anne Bard had a close friend called Mary Read… I remember that before she disappeared she went away on a visit to Mary Read’s parents. They might have some knowledge of the matter.’
‘Oh, excellent,’ she said. ‘But can they be found?’
I tapped my hand on my lips, amazed she could not see the blood from it flow down my chin. Hold, steersman. Hold. Hold. Not long now. ‘I think they were country folk. Mary once mentioned they lived Suffolk way. Ipswich, was it?’
She huffed with determination and I smelled the cold tea which is now an open secret she drinks so much of it. ‘Go you to Ipswich, my dear. Find them. The sea air will revive you; you are pale. You are too devoted and I have been remiss in working you over hard.’ She told Carrots to bring the purse and gave me thirty pounds out of it. I kissed her hand a dozen times and waded out of the room.
I did not, of course, go to Ipswich, nor even to Highgate, but, in disguise and making sure I was not followed, to a certain house in Southwark where I collapsed. Rachel took away my knife and locked me in a room while I kicked and frothed.
An interesting woman, Rachel. A negress who was brought to England by her master, Lord Gosse. When he tired of her, he gave her passage money to return to Africa. Instead, she set up in business. She did so well out of those white men who are attracted to black women and their arts that she now owns one of the largest brothels in Southwark. She specializes in the orgy trade and has had built a Greek temple in her back garden beneath the trees for her girls and clients to cavort in the nude with grapes, but there are rooms for other tastes and my shouts and swearing went unremarked for being regarded as coming from one of those.
Like Asantewa in Jamaica, Rachel is an Ashanti and practises obeah. When the worst of the fits was over, she unlocked the door and began the magic to rid me of the creature. She cannot do the dances because she has become immensely fat – indeed, were it not for her colour she would closely resemble Her Majesty – but has trained one of her girls to perform them while she attends to the rattles and chanting and the sacrifice of the cockerels.
At first the creature merely giggled. I nearly did myself. However, as the night wore on she became afraid as, again, so did I. Remember Nannytown, my dear? Of course you do. It was like that.
Into the little London room came the scent of orchids and rotting plants and palm thatch and the sweat off black skin. The walls expanded to become mountains where cataracts fell down the ravines like twirling white ribbon. I was walking again through moonlight to the flat rock where no men are allowed and where there is the cauldron that bubbles without fire and where women are possessed by the sacred insanity and where you and I swore to the Great Mother to take our revenge, and Asantewa’s, on English enslavers. We owed it to Asantewa for our rescue. We owed it to ourselves. It was like that.
After I don’t know how many hours, the dancer fell down, the rattles and chanting became a whisper and Jamaica faded into a small, Southwark room.
It cannot be said the creature had been exorcized, but she was cowered in a corner, a third of the size she had been. She had stopped bleeding. I slept for two days without waking or dreaming. When I got up I gave Rachel twenty-five of the thirty pounds and went back to the palace, ready for the last stage of the plan.
Though the creature does not like it, I am proud of Bratchet. Proud and envious. She has known it, then; felt the tilt of the deck under her feet, shared that comradeship, seen the Caribbean dawn, watched the turquoise flash of its sunset splinter across the sea. Whatever they do to you, Bratchet, whatever she forces me to do to you, you have shared the doomed, wild freedom that we knew, forbidden to all women but the bravest.
Live on it, Bratchet. You will pay for it. They will take it away from you. Remember.