It became apparent that in inheriting Aunt Effie’s house I had also inherited the Bratchet.
I didn’t want either; the house was up for sale, Effie’s goods were being converted into cash. Along with the rest of her estate, it turned out that she had left me an astounding £2,429. 4s. 7d. By my standards, I was now a rich man and could indulge my long-held wish to buy a farm and find peace.
I offered a sizeable sum to Bratchet to secure her future for her. ‘You can go back to your parents. Where d’you come from?’
‘Dunno.’
‘You must know.’
‘Don’t remember.’ It was her answer to practically everything. What did the man look like she’d seen coming out of the house when Effie was murdered? Didn’t remember. What sort of person had Anne Bonny been? Didn’t remember. Why had she accused Effie of having Anne and Mary Read spirited? Didn’t remember.
The only person who offered to take her off my hands was Floss, who said she’d find the girl a place in her establishment next door. ‘Set her up as a virgin. Good trade in virgins. She looks like one even if she ain’t.’
She was certainly young and small enough to tempt some of Floss’s clients into thinking they were violating an innocent, but how virginal she looked under the dirt it was difficult to say.
‘You sellin’ me for a whore?’ she asked, when Floss had gone.
‘No.’
‘Keepin’ me for yourself?’
‘You?’
But she was afraid enough of my supposed designs on her skinny person to run upstairs to the room I’d given to her and lock the door. The dog, Turnspit, who followed her everywhere, went with her.
‘Aunt Effie,’ I thought, ‘you’ve got a lot to answer for.’
I hoped the wench was reassured by my absence at nights which, at that time, I was spending with a pleasant widow who ran a school for girls in her cottage in Chelsea. I’d met her at Chelsea Hospital when I went to visit Sergeant Smith. He’d taken a French bullet in the chest as the Third advanced across the Offuz marshes during the battle for Ramillies. You could hear it whistling when he breathed. I’d gone to see him because, two years before, he’d been in charge of the troop Mary Read served in at Blenheim.
I still doubted whether the Anne Bonny/Mary Read business had anything to do with Aunt Effie’s murder, but I wasn’t getting very far in my efforts to discover whether she’d been killed by a chance thief. Floss maintained her frightened silence, the Bratchet maintained hers for whatever reason she had. The offer of a reward had brought in enough information to occupy the assizes for a month, but most of it came from locals indulging in their favourite pastime of settling old scores; mothers of unhappy wives accusing their sons-in-law – or, as in one case, the other way round – neighbour accusing neighbour. One man who’d bought a short-weight loaf said the baker’d done it. The popular candidate for murderer was the area’s most rapacious landlord but, since he was a wizened old man who’d have had to get up on a ladder to strangle Aunt Effie, I’d discounted him.
So it seemed worthwhile to follow another thread and try to find out whether Aunt Effie’s Mary was the same one who later turned up in Flanders as a Dragoon.
As far as getting information out of Sergeant Smith was concerned, I could have saved the walk to Chelsea; he was dying by inches and too short of breath to do much talking. In any case, over the years he’d been ribbed so hard by his fellow sergeants for not recognizing that one of his troop was a female that he’d become defensive. ‘Tell you… this much,’ he wheezed, ‘she… one… best bloody troopers ever saddled a horse. And the bravest. More balls than most… carry their courage in their cocks.’
‘When did she join you?’
He thought back, gasping. ‘Came out as a recruit… in time for Bonn.’
Marlborough had taken Bonn in 1703, the year after he’d been made Captain General of the allies and begun the long fight back against France’s occupation of Europe.
‘Where’d she come from?’
‘Never asked.’
I’d never asked any of my men either; if they’d been in happy circumstances they wouldn’t have taken the queen’s shilling in the first place. Unless they were dolts. Or drunk.
‘What happened to her?’
‘Married Trooper Johnson and took a tavern for a bit. He died, I heard. Don’t know… where she went after that.’
‘What’d she look like, Sergeant?’
But he’d run out of breath and patience. ‘Think I’m a faggot… go looking… at troopers? Enough trouble… training the bastards.’
I saluted, gave him the tobacco I’d brought for him and left, not much wiser than when I came. In the grounds I met other old comrades, one of them being visited by his daughter, the school-teaching widow.
I’m no Belvidere, I don’t rivet women’s attention at first glance, but by the time I’d walked this one home to her cottage and she’d told me the pump in her backyard was broken and I’d taken off my coat to mend it for her, she was looking on me as kindly as I was on her. Her father had been an infantry quartermaster sergeant – a species that does itself well – and he’d spent some of his loot on his girl’s education. She’d also followed her husband to Flanders and had a good command of French. She had an even better figure, being one of those full-breasted ladies the army calls ‘crummy’.
We suited each other. I guarded her reputation by arriving at her cottage after dark and leaving before dawn. At first I made the journey on foot but its effect on my leg meant that by the time I arrived I was hard put to suit anybody, so I hired a horse from a livery stable.
I still remember those rides. Nowadays wealthier London reaches out as far as Chelsea in plain parapeted mansions. But in those days the market gardens and orchards of Westminster’s suburbs gave way to meadowland which, in that long, dry summer, was passable by paths along the river and led in the distance to fields ripening barley for the London breweries.
I used to water the horse at Millbank and watch the horse-ferry go back and forth to Lambeth against the sunset, the water’s surface reflecting it so exactly that it seemed to travel on an upside-down reproduction of itself in an ambered laziness. There’s talk of building a bridge there now in order that the mansion-owners don’t have to travel all the way to the City to cross into Kent and Surrey. The watermen and City interests have put up a fight against it, but I doubt if they’ll win.
Once in Chelsea, the smell of herbs from the apothecaries’ physick garden would tell me I’d nearly reached the widow’s cottage. I might have offered for her, pleasant woman that she was; whether she’d have accepted, I don’t know. Anyway it came to nothing because somebody began trying to murder the Bratchet.
At first, when I came home in the early hours of one day and saw a figure clambering through a downstairs window, I assumed it was a thief – theft being the area’s main source of income. By the time I’d hobbled across the court, the figure had wriggled to the ground and run off. Just in case it had been leaving, rather than entering, I knocked on the Bratchet’s door. Her squawk told me she’d been asleep and still suspected me of having designs on her person.
There wasn’t much point in informing the Watch of the incident, though I did; night watchmen have better regard for their health than to patrol Puddle Court. I boarded up the ground floor windows from the inside and forgot the matter.
I was busy just then. The house was proving difficult to sell; well built though it was, most prospective customers lost interest when they discovered its locality. There were the arrangements for the auction of Aunt Effie’s bric-a-brac, interviews with informants applying for the reward, the search for a farm – I was considering the Chelsea area – and visits to the widow.
Also, nearly every day Effie’s lawyer was demanding my signature on some document or other; my aunt, it appeared, had deposited her money in not one bank but several and, though my inheritance was mounting (to near £3,000), so was the paperwork. Saving time, I took to using the Bratchet as a messenger to carry the documents back to the lawyer’s office in the City once I’d considered and signed them.
Until, that is, the day when Bratchet came back bleeding from a cut on her forehead. ‘Fuck of a flowerpot,’ she said when I asked how it had happened. The pot had missed her by inches when it fell from a roof in Caper Alley but as it crashed on the cobbles a shard had bounced up and sliced through a bit of skin. Falling flowerpots and rusted-through shop signs take as high a toll of London pedestrians as hackney carriages – and one of those, Bratchet grumbled, had nearly run her down the day before.
She took a gloomy view of life, did the Bratchet, and assumed these near-misses as natural to her attendant bad luck. They might have been, but I was uneasy, and when Floss came to tell me that Bratchet had been marked, it was obvious something had to be done. In the army and navy a mark is a target for firing practice. In underworld parley it’s much the same thing, except that the target is human. Word had gone out, said Floss, that Bratchet’s short life wasn’t to get any longer.
‘Who’s marked her, Floss?’ I didn’t doubt the woman’s information; whores know more about what’s happening on the streets than any parish beadle – they’re closer to them.
‘The Brotherhood.’
‘Pirates?’
It’s a wide term, the Brotherhood, and takes in not only the men who seize entire ships on the high seas but Thames water rats who’ll plunder a bale of taffeta from a vessel as she goes upriver. It’s accurate, though. The fact that they take other people’s livings, sometimes their lives, by boat makes a bond of co-operation between men who otherwise can’t be trusted with their own mother’s savings. Perhaps they’re welded together by their mutual skill on water, or by maritime language. Whatever it is, some current informs them all. If they’d marked the Bratchet, she was as good as dead unless I took avoiding action very quickly.
‘Who told you, Floss?’
She wouldn’t say; there’s a code even among harlots. ‘Just get her away. Inland for choice.’
After she’d gone I went into the kitchen where Bratchet was preparing a meal for herself and Turnspit. She was a vile cook. I never ate at home; I wasn’t even sure the dog should. ‘What is it you know, Bratchet? Somebody’s trying to mutton you for it.’
She pretended a gape.
‘Don’t act the lurk with me,’ I told her, ‘They done Aunt Effie and they’ll do you.’
‘Not me, they won’t.’ There were the little teeth again; she was absolutely sure of it.
There was so little she could be certain of in her miserable life that there was no point in frightening her, so I didn’t tell her about the Brotherhood; she wouldn’t have believed it in any case. I wasn’t sure that I did. What threat could she be to the pirate trade?
On the other hand, Floss hadn’t invented the intruder I’d seen, nor the flowerpot, nor Bratchet’s near escape from a runaway hackney. ‘What am I going to do with you, Bratchet?’
After consideration, I sent a letter to the Chelsea widow asking her to provide a temporary refuge for the child. She replied immediately, agreeing. The next thing was to make Bratchet fit to stay in decent company. I made her come with me to Mary Defoe, wife to Daniel, who’d been a mother to me in the absence of my own. She took one look at the Bratchet and said, ‘Bath.’
As Daniel was absent I read a book in the parlour while sounds of splashing and slaughter came from the kitchen where Mrs Defoe had prepared a washtub and was forced to call on her older daughters in order to quell Bratchet’s resistance against getting in it. Cleanliness, if not godliness – she was still spitting and cursing when she emerged – prevailed. Mrs Defoe led her into the parlour with the air of a tired but victorious general parading a defeated queen into Rome.
She was wearing a blue dress they’d found for her. The hair was flax. The skin, apart from slight pockmarks on the cheeks of the face, was ivory overlaid on thin bones.
‘I washed the dog an’ all,’ said Mrs Defoe, ‘She won’t go nowhere without it.’
As I thanked her and said goodbye, she tapped my arm and whispered, ‘Dan’l says, will you meet him tonight.’
‘The Beggar Maker’s,’ I said, ‘Late.’
After it was dark, I took Bratchet to the widow’s in Chelsea and left her there. I was looking forward to a talk with Daniel Defoe. Thinking over our last one, I still couldn’t see Major Howe as Aunt Effie’s killer nor as the man who, four years before, had paid her to spirit Miss Bard-cum-Bonny to the colonies. There was no proof either way, of course, but my bones told me my old major, incompetent, lying coward as he was, didn’t have the viciousness to kill. Besides, the discovery that the missing girl was a contender for the throne of England put the business on a different plane.
From what I could make out, Anne Bonny had stayed with Aunt Effie for a few months in the spring and summer of 1702 trying to contact her father’s and grandfather’s relatives. Mary Read had jibed to Floss that in that time they’d been to London to see the queen. Suppose they had? If Anne Bonny/Bard was Rupert’s granddaughter, then Queen Anne was her relative. A cousin.
But if the girl had presented herself at court, she’d chosen the wrong time for her arrival. At that point England was needing every ally she possessed in the war against Louis XIV. And one of those allies, a very valuable ally, was the Electorate of Hanover from which it had been ordained the next heir to the English throne would come if Queen Anne failed to produce one of her own. An heir with a better claim, such as Anne Bonny/Bard could produce, would have been an embarrassment just then, almost a disaster. Better to have her out of the way and avoid complications.
I didn’t suspect the queen of eliminating her young cousin, but I knew enough of government, and know even more now, to believe that it can stoop to any crime in the name of what someone in it regards as patriotism.
The Beggar Maker’s habitués are conservative in their taste and the tavern resembles in every particular the predecessor which stood on the site before the Great Fire, except that its roof is slate rather than thatch. Dirty oiled paper does the duty of window glass, mist from the river is rotting its timbers, and dust has eased back on to its jutting frontage to help its regulars feel at home. A potted bay bush outside, which contributed to the flames of London in 1666, has been replaced by one equally dead.
An uneasy Defoe was waiting for me outside. ‘Could we not meet somewhere more private? And salubrious?’ His hat was pulled down low and he’d wrapped himself to the ears in a cloak. In view of the weather – the hot summer was giving way to a hot autumn – he looked as inconspicuous as St Paul’s.
‘Prefer Aunt Effie’s, do you?’ I knew the house gave him the horrors. I didn’t find it too pleasant myself and had lowered the price to be rid of it. In any case, I liked the Beggar Maker’s. Inside, the great, dark, tallow-lit, elm-floored, ale-scented be-barrelled room extended the welcome of all good taverns.
Not so the regulars. As Daniel walked in, conversation ceased. Customers froze in the attitude of tigers disturbed at dinner. A stranger might be the Law, and the Beggar Maker’s clientele don’t enjoy legal scrutiny. But when I followed Daniel in, the atmosphere relaxed; as Effie Sly’s nephew I had the right credentials.
Daniel looked round for somewhere to talk out of all earshot, but that was impossible. We sat on two stools either side of a barrel and hoped the noise would cover our conversation.
‘Another line from the old author?’ asked Defoe.
I declined and ordered ale – it had taken me a day to recover from our session on Westminster brandy.
‘Have you decided what you will do with your life now?’ he asked when it came.
‘Not yet.’
He paused; he was approaching something carefully. ‘I have formed an interest in this Anne Bonny creature, Martin,’ he said casually. ‘I wondered if I might use you while you are yet unemployed to find her, always supposing she is still alive.’
I nodded. ‘I wondered if you might.’
He looked disconcerted, but pressed on. ‘I am prepared to pay you one hundred pounds and any subsequent expenses if you will return to the Low Countries to locate this Mary Read you told me of.’
He waited for me to say something and, when I didn’t, added, ‘She may know to which ship the press boat that captured her and Mistress Bard was bound.’ He cleared his throat. ‘It may even be that she is Anne Bard.’
‘How do you work that out?’
‘Just consider,’ he said, ‘Two young women are dragged aboard a press smack. One escapes, or bribes her release, and later turns up in disguise across the Channel – as you pointed out, it is unlikely to be coincidence that another, completely different, Mary Read should appear at that time.’ He leaned forward. ‘Let us suppose it is Anne Bonny/Bard who escapes. Anne Bonny, who has already proved herself of adventurous spirit, is forced to yet more desperate measures. As we know, she had already found it necessary to adopt an alias, so let us suppose she now discards one that has proved useless and instead takes the identity of her unfortunate companion.’
I nodded. This was devious thinking, and I didn’t think it was Daniel’s. Daniel Defoe, apparently as open as a church, inquisitive about everything in order to instruct and pass on what he learns, has a deep vault to him and somebody had found it. He was carrying secrets, half appalled at them, half excited. He was a man in a romance, but he wasn’t writing this one; somebody else was.
‘Suppose she did,’ I said, ‘And let’s suppose, Master Defoe, you’re taking me for a clinchpoop. What’s made you suddenly decide the woman that joined the Dragoons as Mary Read was one of the women who lodged at Aunt Effie’s?’
He was dignified. ‘I have seen her army papers, that’s what. She volunteered just after the two women were reported missing.’
‘Let me get this clear,’ I said, ‘You now believe that when the two girls were spirited, one of them escaped from the press boat. It could have been Mary Read who got away while Anne Bonny was carried off to the colonies. It could be the other way round. You believe that the girl who escaped then joined the army.’ I sat back and surveyed him. ‘Why? Why didn’t she go hot-foot to the nearest magistrate and say that some bastard had kidnapped her friend and bloody near kidnapped her too? Why didn’t she alert the authorities?’
He didn’t answer.
I leaned forward and poked a finger at his gaudy waistcoat. ‘I’ll tell you why she didn’t, Daniel, shall I? Because she had a damn good idea it was the authorities who’d done it. That’s why.’
He opened his mouth to reply, but I hadn’t finished: ‘Inconvenient, was she, this Anne Bonny/Bard? A bit too near the throne? Might cause concern for those who wanted the Hanovers to succeed to the crown?’
He became indignant. ‘This is nonsense you’re talking, Martin. War has hardened you. Even Mrs Defoe has noticed it. I’m sorry to say it, but you’ve become a cynic. Her Majesty’s ministers are honourable men.’
He believed it. Daniel’s older in age than me by twenty years and younger in innocence by thirty.
‘Which minister are you acting for?’ I asked him. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not. Daniel, the day before I got back from Flanders you were in the pillory and facing debtors’ prison. Word on the street is you got sprung by high-placed gentlemen, some very high-placed gentlemen. Next thing you turn up in Puddle Court asking after a girl nobody’s ever heard of. Now you’ve suddenly got access to army papers and are offering me a hundred pounds. Daniel, you haven’t got a hundred pounds. Whose money is it?’
He thought for a bit, then said, guardedly, ‘I may be permitted to tell you that I am acting for quarters close to the throne. By finding the woman called Mary Read and learning what she knows you will be serving your country.’
‘I served it,’ I told him. ‘And what quarters close to the throne may they be? Godolphin? Harley?’ I could see I wasn’t far off the mark. I went on, ‘If she’s Rupert’s granddaughter she’s got royal blood, morganatic or not. What do they want with her? Put her on the throne? Is that it? Or keep her quiet. Is that it?’
Daniel said, ‘Martin, I’ll put the case to you as it was put to me. That into this country, in the year of 1702, arrives a young woman. She is penniless but well educated, for a female. She says her name is Anne Bard, though she travels under the pseudonym of Anne Bonny because, it appears, she has passed through Germany and been afraid of being spirited or even killed by the Hanoverians.’
Daniel acknowledged my surprise at the thought of old Electress Sophia as a killer by pouring me out another beaker of ale. ‘I merely put her case, Martin. If her existence could displace Sophia of Hanover as heir to the English throne she might feel that Sophia had no reason to love her. This young woman says she has papers to prove her claim. She takes a coach to Kensington Palace and begs an audience. She is refused, naturally; Her Majesty’s ministers don’t wish to have Her Majesty’s kindness distressed by a female who may at best be deranged, at worst a scheming impostor.’
‘So they don’t tell Her Majesty about the female who begs an audience.’
‘No.’
‘True power lies behind the throne, eh? Not on it.’
He shrugged.
‘So they got rid of her, is that it?’ I said, ‘And now they’re not sure they succeeded in getting rid of her permanently, so they want to get rid of her again. I’m not finding her for you, Daniel. Send an assassin. Cut out the middle man.’
‘They did not get rid of her,’ he shouted. To do him justice he really did believe it. He saw heads turning towards him and lowered his voice. ‘They don’t know who paid your aunt to spirit her. I have received assurances that Her Majesty’s government now wishes to extend its aid to this most unfortunate of Her Majesty’s subjects.’
I could see that they might. The situation had changed. Young George of Hanover was proving an embarrassing ally, especially to the Tories. He looked as if he might prove an equally embarrassing King of England. ‘They want Anne Bard in their hand, a queen as it were, to trump any others – if the situation arises.’
He opened his mouth for the other phrases Godolphin or Harley or whoever-it-was had fed him, then shrugged again. ‘Yes.’
‘I see.’ At least, I thought I did. ‘And what’s the bloody Scotsman doing in all this?’
‘Livingstone of Kilsyth is related to Anne Bard through her mother. She was a Cassilis. How she met Dudley Bard, I don’t know. She went abroad after some quarrel with the clan. Kilsyth is also a Jacobite, an upholder of James II’s right to the crown and, now that James is dead, an upholder of his son, the Pretender.’
‘I know what a Jacobite is,’ I told him, shortly.
‘Yes, well. Remember that not all Jacobites are Roman Catholics. Claverhouse, for instance, who led the rebellion to put James II back on the throne when England ousted him, belonged to the Scottish equivalent of the Church of England. He was an Episcopalian.’
I nodded.
‘And the Episcopalian Jacobites are nearing despair at the Pretender’s refusal to change his religion, knowing he has no chance of succeeding to the throne of Scotland and England if he remains a Papist.’
I squinted. ‘And our Anne Bonny isn’t a Papist?’
‘No. It is believed she is a Protestant, like her father and grandfather. If the Pretender persists in remaining Catholic, these same Jacobites may transfer allegiance to the cause of a more suitable Stuart.’
‘Anne Bonny?’
‘Anne Bonny.’
It was too deep for me. If Defoe’s employers wanted Anne because she was a Stuart and a Protestant, and the Scotsman’s employers wanted Anne because she was a Stuart and a Protestant, why couldn’t they stop spying on each other and get together over a dram? I supposed it was a matter of who controlled the girl once she was found. God save me from matters of state. I said, ‘It didn’t occur to them she might just have come to England because she was lonely?’
He smiled for the first time. ‘No. It wouldn’t.’ He went off to order more ale, the tapsters having become involved in a rowdy game of shove-ha’penny which was being rivalled by a fight in the far corner and by Floss, who was lifting her skirts to dance in another, refusing to be dissuaded from it by her male companion’s fists. A normal night at the Beggar Maker’s.
I considered. There were good reasons for refusing Daniel. My memories of Flanders weren’t such that I wanted to see it again. Anyway, I’m a man who likes to look at a horse’s teeth before I buy it whereas Daniel was trying to sell me this one without, as far as I could tell, even having opened its mouth. He might be excited by being the confidant of Her Majesty’s ministers and receiving their assurances, but too many soldiers have been waved off to war with government assurances only to end up begging on the streets. Or dead.
On the other hand, it looked likely that Aunt Effie was killed for the papers Anne Bonny/Bard had brought to England four years before to prove her legitimacy. While I didn’t care if Bonny Anne was heir to the Great Chan of China, I cared about finding Effie’s killer. If I went, it would be for that. And to oblige Daniel. Not the government or the queen but Daniel Defoe. I owed him a great deal. And I owed Mrs Defoe more.
Every Sabbath of my early childhood that I can remember, I was held above my father’s head at meetings while he led the congregation in prayer that the Lord might punish my mother for deserting me and him, her lawful husband.
‘Let her carcase be as dung upon the face of the fields. Let the dogs eat her by the wall, as they did Jezebel. Scourge, we beseech thee, the whoredoms of his mother from the body and soul of this child.’ And mostly, in case the Lord hadn’t heard him, he’d scourge me himself when we got home.
Afterwards I’d go next door to Mrs Defoe’s lap where my stripes were dressed with salve. ‘It ain’t so, Martin,’ she’d say. ‘He’s a righteous man, your pa, and a powerful preacher, but it ain’t so and don’t thee believe it. She left, ’tis true, but she took you along with her. It was thy pa followed her and took you back.’
‘I’ll find her, won’t I?’ I always asked, ‘She ain’t dead, is she? When I’m grown, I’ll find her, won’t I?’
Mrs Defoe would wipe her tears on my head, ‘In the next life if you don’t in this. When you get to heaven your poor ma’ll be waiting for you. The Lord loves all and forgives all, praise His name.’
Two tankards of ale were put on the barrel top in front of me. ‘Do I order your passport for the Low Countries?’ asked Daniel.
‘Two passports,’ I said, ‘I’m taking Bratchet with me.’ I saw his look. ‘Give me credit, Daniel, for God’s sake. I like ’em older. And plumper. But I’m responsible for her. No friends, no family. Leave her behind and she’ll be on the streets quicker than ninepence.’
I didn’t tell him about the Brotherhood. It was hot, I was tired and I couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t his employers who’d set the Brotherhood on to mark the Bratchet, afraid she could identify the agent who’d killed Aunt Effie and stolen the box containing Anne Bonny’s papers. It was no more fantastic than anything else in this world of plot and counter-plot I’d stepped into.
‘Besides,’ I said, ‘suppose I meet up with Mary Read. Who’s to tell me whether she’s Mary Read or Anne Bonny? There’s only the Bratchet knows.’
‘Floss would know, my dear boy.’ He was delighted. ‘But I suppose that even the Bratchet is a more suitable travelling companion than Floss. Very well. Two passports.’
‘And a hundred pounds,’ I said, ‘and expenses.’ I might be rich now, but his employers were a damn sight richer.
‘You shall have it, my boy. I need expenses myself, for my journey to Scotland.’
He bent towards me, full of importance. ‘I am to employ my pen over the Pennines to persuade our Scottish brethren of the value of the proposed union of their country with England.’
‘Are you taking Livingstone of Kilsyth with you?’
‘Certainly not. He and his kind oppose the Union. Mine is as secret a mission as your own.’
I pointed across the room. ‘What’s he doing over there then?’ I’d only just spotted the Highlander through the tobacco smoke that filled the air like fog; he was in a corner, as swathed in a cloak as Daniel and, with his bare legs, about as incognito. He was listening to a man who’d been sitting on a settle behind us.
Daniel, not usually a man to swear, looked where I was pointing and said, ‘Oh, bugger.’
Since I wasn’t prepared to go anywhere until Aunt Effie’s house was sold, it was over a year before the Bratchet and I set out.
Occasionally, notes urging me to be on my way would arrive from Daniel in Scotland, but I ignored them. I could see even then that my lameness would get worse rather than better with age and I was going to make damn sure that every penny Aunt Effie left me would be safeguarded for my return. Daniel’s notes usually included suggestions that I invest in one or other of his ‘projects’, but I ignored those too. Love him as I did, I wasn’t going to take financial advice from a man who spent as much time as he did avoiding the bum bailiffs. Here was one veteran who wouldn’t end up begging on the streets.
My friend in Chelsea employed the time in teaching her new charge to read and write, for which I paid her. When I thanked her for a thankless task, she said Bratchet was a more rewarding pupil than most. ‘She’s quick and grateful to learn.’
It wasn’t a description of the Bratchet I knew. ‘No,’ said the widow, when I said so, ‘she bears you a grudge, Martin, I don’t understand why. Do you know she can speak French?’
‘I’d teach her to speak English first,’ I said.
‘She speaks French, Martin,’ said the widow patiently, ‘because she is French. I’m sure of it. It’s her native tongue.’
‘Are you certain?’ It seemed extraordinary.
My friend nodded. ‘Her vocabulary in French is wider than mine, wider than in English.’
From what I’d heard of Bratchet’s English vocabulary, I hoped it was also cleaner. I said, ‘She’s an orphan. Aunt Effie got her from a poorhouse.’ I tried to recall the last time I’d seen Effie, which was soon after she’d acquired Bratchet. ‘I think she said she got the girl cheap because she was dumb.’
‘Yes. She can remember the poorhouse but little before that. There must have been some tragic mishap that stopped her mouth for a while. She may be a Huguenot. When the subject of Louis XIV came up in class the other day, she denounced him in immediate French, as if quoting her parents.’ My friend pursed her lips. ‘She then lapsed into English in terms which obliged me to send her from the room.’
It was possible. There had been and still were Huguenots arriving in England by the thousand to escape Louis XIV’s persecution of his French Protestants.
When, at last, the widow and I bade each other goodbye, I said, ‘I hope to be back in six months at most.’
She said, ‘Perhaps, while you’re over there in Europe, you may get some word of Bratchet’s people.’
We never did, of course. Whoever they were, or had been, they were lost to Bratchet. I never saw the widow again either. By the time I was able to look for her, she’d remarried, this time to a parson, and was living with their four children in Hertfordshire. I know because I made careful enquiries, in case she’d got into any difficulty.
I hope she was happy. She was a very nice woman.