With the waking up of the Bratchet your story, James, becomes hers as well.
But from here on, when I put down her thoughts and feelings as if I knew what they were, it’s because I do. I’ve tried to repeat the words she used when she told them to me much later, in a time we had together just before we said goodbye in another country…
The realization that it was safe to come out of the hard, dark chrysalis in which Bratchet had wrapped herself was gradual. Nobody was abusing her by telling she was worthless. She and Turnspit were being given enough to eat. She had warm clothes. She wasn’t required to work for any of these things.
Even stranger, after two clenched nights on the canals it became apparent that the men who shared the barge hold with her weren’t going to abuse her body either.
Blond, bare-legged, blue-smocked children shouted greetings from the towpath. She watched old women with their wrinkled faces framed in strange white bonnets drive black and white cattle along the dyke tops and wave at her.
On the third day, cautiously, she lifted a hand and waved back.
She had only a vague idea of where she was, where she was going, or why. In her mind, I was the Limping Man who’d taken over her ownership and who’d possibly tried to tell her things, but she’d had difficulty hearing them through the chrysalis casing.
Dizzying reflections of sky and water confused her. The wild duck flying across the canal in chevrons of blue and green, the storks standing in their untidy nests perched on the thatch of houses, these were familiar, though she could only name them in French. They connected her with the True Time, the memory in which she had cocooned herself against hideous things.
A woman singing a cramignon on a Walloon barge brought back a lullaby someone – she thought it must have been her grandmother – used to croon to her in the True Time. The smells of countryside, of cheeses and peat from the barge holds, brought whiffs of Normandy back across the stinking chasm that had been London.
So did the fairytales the Beautiful Man was teaching her to read.
She began listening to conversations. They tied up for the night and the men smoked their pipes, the bargemaster explaining in English learned from soldiers how he and his countrymen had thwarted the French in the time of William of Orange. ‘Cut fokking dykes, sploosh. All land under fokking water. Drown fokking Frogs. Goot, eh?’
When he retired, the Limping Man and the Beautiful Man sat on.
‘Good people, Lowlanders,’ the Limping Man was saying. ‘Never gave in, not to the Spanish or French. Nobody fought harder for religious freedom or paid more for it. The Spanish condemned every last Protestant to death, burning for men, burying alive for women. Alva boasted he executed eighteen thousand in the name of the Pope. But they won. In the end.’
It was another link with her French childhood. We are Huguenots, little one. King Louis has gone back on his word and is trying to force us into popery. We must go to England to be free.
To drown. To be on a shore where mouths shaped unintelligible questions. To a dreadful place. To Effie Sly.
The Beautiful Man rose and stretched, his arms black against the stars, rescuer’s arms. ‘I’ll away to me bed. Good night to ye, Martin.’
She saw him speaking low to me and knew it was about her. I called her over. ‘What’s your damn name, Bratchet?’
Aimée, she thought it was. But she wasn’t going to tell me; it belonged to True Time and nobody connected with Effie Sly was going to get hold of it. She latched on to a name she’d heard recently and which Anne Bonny and Mary Read had mentioned in their stories about King Arthur.
‘Morgan Le Fay,’ she said.
The barge that took us into Flanders was Kit Ross’s. Or rather, Kit Ross commandeered it.
Clogs followed by a balloon of sturdy petticoats descended the rungs of the Fort de Plasendaal lock. ‘What’s your name?’ the bargemaster was asked in a Dublin accent. ‘Joost, is it? Then joost cast your eye over my commission, not that you can read it, you poor ignorant butterbox, so I’ll tell whom it may concern – that’s you – that Sutler Mrs Christian Ross – that’s me – est empuissé par le capitaine-général, le duc de Marlborough – to commandeer ce bateau – that’s this fish-kettle here – pour le service de la reine Anne et sa grande armée should provisioning of said armée require it. So open that hold, me lad, before the bloody burghers catch up with us.’
Mrs Ross was using the army lingua franca known as Parlary, though her Irish ‘t’s were nearly ‘h’s and Bargemaster Joost responded, sighing. He knew a tidal wave when he met one.
He opened his hold and allowed a chain of soldiers to load barrels, sacks and crates of hens into it and store them to Mrs Ross’s liking. A cow that put up a protest against being lowered to the deck submitted when Mrs Ross punched it between its eyes. I didn’t blame it. There wasn’t much of her, discounting the petticoats, but you were glad she hadn’t joined the French. She could have requisitioned Europe. A scar split her upper lip, showing a tooth missing behind it. Her sleeves were rolled up and her hair was held in a scarf with a stiff, round, shiny, black hat, like a sailor’s, crammed on top of it.
‘Cloots,’ puffed Kilsyth as we stacked barrels in the hold, ‘How’d the army gain that bellows-lunged caillach?’
‘She was a soldier,’ I told him. Mother Ross’s fame had spread through the regiments. ‘Like Mary Read. Enlisted to be near her husband originally, then found she liked the life. They didn’t discover she was a woman until she was wounded at Ramillies.’
‘Were they sure?’
I grinned. ‘The duke appointed her official sutler. It means she must buy as much as she can and steal the rest.’
‘Is the English army entire made up of women? It’d not do for the Scots. Well, maybe she can tell us of Mary Read.’
Mrs Ross was berating her helpers on deck. ‘Lift, you idle buggers you. Lazy as Joe the trooper who laid down his rifle to sneeze, so y’are. A care for the apple-barrel now. Bruise ’em and ye’ll have me bayonet up your backside.’
‘I don’t think we’ll ask her just now,’ I said.
‘I warn you, Mrs Ross,’ came a different voice from the lock head, ‘When we arrive at winter quarters, I shall inform General Ingoldsby of your cursing and have you put in the whirligig.’
‘You do that, Colonel Blackader, darlin’. Loves me apple dumplings, the general. As for me cursing, didn’t he call for his own surgeon when I took a musket ball in me mouth to sew it up so that I could curse the rounder. And didn’t he nurse me himself. Now get your arse off that bridge and on this barge before the bloody Bruges burghers come and take back me booty.’
Ambushed by alliteration, Colonel Blackader did as he was told.
Mother Ross’s head appeared over the hold and gave us a gap-toothed grin. ‘Thinks an army can live on prayer,’ she said in what she seemed to think was a confidential whisper. ‘Cameronians. More a bloody congregation than a regiment.’
‘Canting conventiclers,’ agreed Kilsyth. He was a true Highlander in his contempt for the Presbyterian Lowlanders that made up the Cameronian regiment.
‘Wash your mouth out with you.’ Mother Ross’s smile disappeared. She might criticize sections of the British army but no civilian was permitted the liberty. ‘You should’ve seen the buggers at Blenheim.’
We cast off with speed. Coming along the dyke in the distance was an untidy group of men and women waving hoes and axes, shouting. Mrs Ross ordered the Cameronians into the traces to pull. ‘And bloody quick, gentlemen, if you’ll be so good. Civilians don’t always approve of me military methods.’ The barge set off down the canal like a skimming pebble. It wasn’t until the disapproving burghers had been left two miles behind that Mother Ross settled herself on a barrel top with stoop of ale to answer questions.
‘Mary Read is it? A fine, pretty Dragoon, she was. I met her once, afore Blenheim. I knew she was shemale, us ladies being recognizable to one another. Nobody else did, mind. Bleared the army’s eye, like me, so she did. Didn’t serve as long, though. Some fucker grumbled her, poor bitch.’
Her language brought a scandalized groan from Colonel Blackader who had sat himself and his men apart to read the bible he carried in a holster at his belt.
‘Cover your ears, Colonel,’ Mother Ross shouted at him amiably. She lowered her voice to what she seemed to think was a whisper. ‘A lemoncholy bastard, poor soul.’
‘Mary Read,’ I reminded her.
Mother Ross shook her head. ‘Never saw her again though I heard she joined giblets with another Dragoon.’
Sotto voce from the Scotsman: ‘Joined giblets?’
‘Married,’ I interpreted. ‘What was she like?’
I know what she was like. It was dawning on the Bratchet that she hadn’t been paying the world around her enough attention. She paid it now. They’re hunting Anne and Mary. They’re going to track them down. Mary and Anne, those amused, unafraid giantesses. Mary and Anne. She’d taken their names into her cocoon to repeat over and over like a spell. Shall I be Queen of England, Bratchet? Come and be queen with me.
They had lit up Effie Sly’s dark house like flares.
First it had been Mary, who’d been taken on at a time when Effie had more lodgers than usual. What her background was, nobody knew. If somebody’d told Bratchet that Mary was the goddess Athene who had sprung into the world fully armed, she’d have accepted it.
Effie thought she was on the run: ‘Mark my words, Bratchie, there’s a reward out for that bloss somewheres.’ The idea pleased Effie; she could threaten Mary with the law if she demanded her wages and tried to leave.
Mary didn’t try to leave but she did demand her wages. And got them. It was a battle royal, Effie summoning up her forces of darkness until Bratchet could have sworn she saw lightning bolts firing from Effie’s fingers and Mary deflecting them with an invisible shield – and her tongue: ‘You hell hag, Effie Sly, you don’t frighten me. Call the law? Call it then and see which they hang highest. What’ll you grumble me for? Nothing. But I can grumble you.’
‘You Athanasian bitch,’ Effie hissed, ‘I got powerful protection.’
‘You’re a Dark Lantern, I know it. But if I told ’em you was also a clipper, what then? You’d fry in your own grease.’
Bratchet, cowering in a corner, yelped with fear. Mary had penetrated in days the sources of Effie’s wealth that would have lain hidden from the Bratchet for years. Whoever the nobs were that winked at Effie’s many illegal activities, they wouldn’t be powerful enough to protect her from the wrath of the Exchequer if it was discovered that she ran a coin-clipping operation. Tampering with currency was too dreadful a crime; it threatened the country’s confidence at home and abroad.
Effie would kill her. She put her arms over her head and waited for the screams. Instead she heard Effie say calmly, ‘What did I say your wages was?’
And Mary Read: ‘Twenty-one shillings a month and all found.’
‘Shall we say thirty shilling a month?’
‘Twenty-one shilling will do, Mistress Sly, I thank you. I ain’t a blacker.’
Bratchet looked up to see the older woman and the young one regard each other in admiration. Greek, as Mary said later, had met Greek.
Which was the peculiar thing about Mary; she spoke local patter, what she called the ‘Boorish’, but she had the address of a lady when she wanted to use it. She could not only read, she read for pleasure in the little spare time Effie allowed her from making beds, dusting, polishing, ironing, helping Effie to prepare meals, serving them and clearing away. Most of her twenty-one shillings a month went on books.
Bratchet, the scullion, chamber- and cooking-pot scourer, scrubber, step-whitener, laundry maid and candle keeper, had even less spare time, and no wages at all, but just before bedtime Mary would read her extracts from Hakluyt’s Voyages, Raleigh’s History of the World, Malory’s Morte d‘Arthur, Virgil, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, opening windows that set vivid landscapes into the normal darkness of her dreams.
‘How’d you know this gammon?’ Bratchet had asked her.
Mary had smiled. ‘A father with an estate and a conscience.’
‘Why ain’t you a nob then?’
‘An Irish mother with no marriage lines.’
‘What’s that dark light thing you called Effie?’
‘A Dark Lantern,’ said Mary Read, ‘She’s an informer. You know when she puts on her best cap and shawl and goes off for the day?’
‘Business, she says.’
‘I followed her Wednesday. To see. She went to Gape’s Coffee House in Covent Garden and talked to a man as crossed her palm with silver, or it may’ve been gold if she was lucky. I followed him. And he went to St James’s. Straight through the gates. No challenge.’
‘She spies for King William?’
‘Not the king, birdwit. The government. How do you think they run the country without they know what goes on? They got spies all over. Old Eff’s main business is shipping out the country them as can’t go legal, ain’t it? Think the government don’t know what she’s up to? Of course they do. No, I reckon our Effie keeps ’em sweet by throwing them the odd mackerel so’s she can get the sprats through.’
Bratchet clutched at Mary’s arm in terror. ‘Suppose she grumbles you to ’em.’
‘She’s nothing on me she can grumble.’ Mary took Bratchet by her shoulders and shook her gently. ‘You got to stand up to her, Bratchie. She’s a belswagger, that’s all she is. She ain’t in touch with the Devil. That’s mumbo-jumbo to keep you cowed. Stand up to her. It’s like Shakespeare says, cowards die many times before their death, the valiant never taste of death but once.’
‘I die over and over, Mary.’
‘I know you do, Bratchie. I know. But I’m here now and when I go, you come with me. I feel there’s wonders ahead of me, Bratch. My day’s coming.’
‘When?’
‘When it comes.’
It came one night in February, just after King William’s horse had stumbled over a mole hill in Richmond Park and thrown him to his death, delivering the crown to his sister-in-law, Anne. The weather was exceptionally cold and even the Puddle Courters had abandoned their nightly prowling to huddle in their homes, which was perhaps why the well-dressed young woman who had just disembarked in England was allowed to wander from the dockside in a search for shelter without being molested or robbed or both.
Answering the knock, Bratchet saw a white face by the lantern Effie kept lit over her door and heard a well-modulated voice, ‘My name is Anne Bonny. I’ve missed my way. Your sign says “Lodgings”. I need a bed for the night.’ The neat sentences were managed before the young woman folded up like a fan in fatigue.
Effie wouldn’t have let her in, her rooms were full at the time, but Mary insisted, and helped the girl up to the attic she shared with Bratchet, while Bratchet picked up the travelling case the young woman had been carrying and started to follow. Effie barred her way, holding out her hand for the case. Bratchet hung on. ‘It’s hers, Eff.’
Effie won, as usual. ‘You give it here. Nobody enters my house without they can pay.’ She took out and examined the few clothes, all finely made, a silver hairbrush and matching mirror and drinking-cup, a purse with some gold foreign coins and a small brass-bound box with the letter B embossed into its top.
Effie shook the box, which rustled as if it contained only paper, tried its catch and found it locked. She told Bratchet to put back the rest of the things and take the case to its owner. ‘I’ll keep the box for her till she comes round, case some bugger dubs it.’
The lock wouldn’t hold long against Effie’s expertise with a hairpin, nor would it show trace of being forced. She caught Bratchet’s look. ‘Got to know who she is, don’t I?’ She nodded at the brush and mirror, ‘Could be she’s a clanker-napper for all I know.’
Wouldn’t be the first in this house, Bratchet thought, as she lugged the case upstairs. She knew, and Effie knew, Anne Bonny wasn’t a silver thief; she was quality. She wouldn’t stay long.
To everybody’s surprise she did. The reason was the instant friendship that sprang up between herself and Mary Read. It was as if long-lost halves were at last put together to become a whole; their inequality of class was negated by shared intelligence and daring. Even their looks were similar; both were tall, handsome and dark-haired, though Mary’s eyes were blue and Anne’s brown.
There were differences. Anne’s kindness to Bratchet was as great as Mary’s but it came less from fellow-feeling than from what Bratchet’s French past told her was noblesse oblige, the obligation of the high-bred to put everyone at ease. There was no doubt of Anne’s breeding; she had an excellence, not just in taste, dress and manners, but in the bone. With it all, she radiated gaiety, an almost febrile optimism that made even the Puddle Courters smile on her; it didn’t stop them calculating the value of her eyeteeth but they wished her well while she had them. They called her ‘Queen of the May’, as if she’d brought springtime with her, like some Persephone strayed into the underworld.
Astonishingly, even Effie Sly seemed bewitched. Anne was given – given – a room of her own when one fell vacant, the best linen, the tastiest cuts of meat, beeswax candles, not tallow.
When Anne confided to Mary one night that she had royal blood and showed her the papers in her box to prove it, it came as no surprise to Bratchet worshipping almost unnoticed in a corner of the room with the dog Turnspit in her arms. The genealogy escaped her – Bratchet had never heard of Prince Rupert of the Rhine – but here, in Anne, was the apotheosis of a fairytale, a lost princess fallen on hard times awaiting the inevitable discovery that would restore her rightful degree.
Her mother, said Anne, was of the Scottish aristocracy and her marriage to Dudley Bard had taken place in Austria shortly before his death fighting for the emperor against the Turks. She’d been the sort of woman who took as much thought for the future as a mayfly and Anne’s youth had been spent with her travelling the courts and great houses of Middle Europe, trading on their kinship with them through the Stuart connection and her own. Such stability as Anne had known was provided by her father’s old English nurse who’d travelled with them.
When the mother died Anne, though indigent, was no longer prepared to accept charity.
‘Why didn’t you go back to your mother’s people?’ Mary asked.
Anne gave an exaggerated shudder. ‘Scotland? I went there once when I was small. It was cold. And, my dear, the people. Animal-skinned, bare-legged eaters of raw meat. And that was just the women.’
The only thing she’d liked about the Scots had been the way they’d called her Bonny Anne. ‘I transposed the name for travelling purposes. It wouldn’t have been suitable for a Bard to be seen using the sort of transport I’ve been forced to stoop to. In any case, we had to pass through Germany and my mother had always warned me to steer clear of Great Aunt Sophia of Hanover. She’d said the Hanoverians might be jealous of the fact that my claim to the English throne was greater than theirs.’
The old nurse had died on the journey, in Hamburg. ‘I wish she could have seen England again,’ said Anne. ‘She used to tell me stories of the great days – she was my father’s nurse as well and went with him on Prince Rupert’s visits to Charles II’s court. I grew up thinking England was a perpetual round of masques, lavish balls, beautiful and naughty women, theatre, hunting, outdoor feasts – all the jollities.’
Mary, looking round the dingy attic, drawled, ‘Only have them in Puddle Court on Tuesdays.’
But Bratchet, as one who’d also been landed motherless and alone on the foreign shore of England, saw Anne’s loneliness and was moved. ‘We got to find your folks, we got to. They’ll be ever so pleased,’ she said.
‘Will they? Will they?’ Anne danced in a wild mazurka, catching up Bratchet and swinging her round. ‘Shall I be Queen of England, Bratchet? Come and be queen with me.’
It was her way. She had no more plan to take the throne than to be pope, though she and Mary wove amused and amusing fantasies around the effect of the crown on her dark hair. ‘There’s an estate owing to me, perhaps. That’s what I want, a niche, a comfortable marriage of my own choosing, my entitlement as Prince Rupert’s granddaughter. He settled here in his old age, so shall I.’
And not to be lonely any more, thought Bratchet. She herself was to share in this good fortune – housekeeper of the fantasy castle, with Mary as its major-domo. ‘Effie can be pig-keeper.’
Until then, Anne had to husband what little money she had from the sale of some of her jewellery. She had already sent letters to her cousin and namesake, the queen, to Rupert’s surviving family, announcing the arrival of their long-lost relative. ‘They’ll not refuse me my right,’ said Anne in her madness.
‘Right’ was a word she used often. If Mary’s romantic reading was the key which loosed Bratchet’s imagination, Anne’s turned the world, as she had understood it, upside down. In the varied, generally decaying, often warring castles in which Anne had spent her peripatetic childhood, there had been one point of agreement – condemnation of an Englishman called John Locke who’d just expounded a new philosophy. As soon as she came across a library which contained copies of the man’s writing, Anne had settled down to find out what he’d proposed that called forth such indignation from her high-born Middle European relatives. She’d found it in two books, Treatises of Government.
‘What he said,’ she told Mary and Bratchet, ‘as far as I can understand it, is that government is only a contract; that while it can tax people for certain purposes, there still remains in the people the supreme power to remove the king if he breaks the law.’
‘I thought we did that,’ said Mary, ‘I thought we cut off Charles I’s head because of it.’
Anne nodded with deliberate grandeur. ‘Locke and I agree with you. But, but, but, but, I go further…’ And into Effie Sly’s mean little room with its stained plaster was unloosed an idea sounding such trumpets as crumbled walls in Bratchet’s mind and allowed it a breadth of freedom which nobody, not even Effie, managed to shackle again.
Anne said that if a king, the father of his country, could be disobeyed when he was wrong, so could any father. ‘Is it right,’ she asked, ‘for a father to marry off his daughter against her will? Is it right that a woman loses all legal existence when she becomes a wife? Is it right that we have no say in the laws and government that rule us?’ Then she laughed. ‘Queen? How could I be a queen? I might have to rebel against myself.’
She left Bratchet breathless, but Mary caught fire. She and Anne kindled each other, their reasoning leaping higher and higher, shattering idols as it went, ridiculing the most ancient tenets of church and man until Bratchet looked at the door expecting some modem witchfinder-general to break in and drag them all off to the stake.
They lit a new perspective on everything. Who was St Paul to command women to be silent? A father of the church, so away with him and the rest of fathers. God the Father? Why not God the Mother? Might not Andromeda have rescued Perseus? Was it not St Georgina who slew the dragon? They were ridiculous, funny, splendid; nothing could withstand them.
Even when there was no answer to Anne’s letters, Bratchet thought, as did Anne and Mary, that they or their answers had gone astray. When they hired a coach so that Anne could present herself to the queen in person, Bratchet wanted to go with them and begged for what she’d never had: a day off. Almost compassionately, Effie had refused: ‘Better for you to stay here.’
Bratchet persisted. How could it be better than seeing a palace, perhaps a queen, close to?
‘They ain’t going to see no queen,’ said Effie as if she knew.
Bratchet gave in from a tiredness which, in fact, signalled the onset of smallpox. That night, when the two young women returned, she was too feeble to get up from her bed; she listened helplessly as Anne’s rage and frustration shook the house: ‘But how can they deny who I am? How can they? By God, I’ll be revenged, I swear it. I’ll go to the Scots. They’ll be glad enough of a new Stuart for the throne.’
Anne’s shouts infiltrated Bratchet’s nightmares and echoed on through the delirium and pain of the following days. She heard her own hoarse voice issuing from an obstructed throat calling for Anne, then for Mary. Neither came.
It was Effie Sly who nursed her with extreme kindness, fanning her, sponging, helping her drink, oiling her skin when the itching of its pustules became intolerable. Afterwards, she liked to point out that she had saved Bratchet’s life and Bratchet knew it was true, not just because of her care but because of a conversation that had taken place outside the bedroom door and had woven itself into her fever in which a voice, a well-spoken man’s voice, had told Effie that the women Mary Read and Anne Bonny should be ‘best sent to the colonies for their health’.
‘How much you paying?’ Effie’s agreement started Bratchet’s fight for life. She had to save them. She had to get better to warn them. She must to save her mother, who was drowning. Va l’aider. ‘Shall I be Queen of England, Bratchet? Come and be queen with me.’ Va les aider.
The quietness of the house when she was sensible again nearly extinguished the fluttering thing that was her will to live but she could not accept that even a colossus like Effie could have snuffed out two such spirits. Again and again she asked, ‘Where’ve they gone? What you do to them, Eff?’ refusing to accept Effie’s account that they had merely departed without saying goodbye.
At last Effie said, ‘Didn’t want to tell you, did I, you being so flash for ’em. They’re laid in the locker, dead and gone. Tap the Pedlar saw ’em struggling with a gang of Mohucks down the dock. Raped and chucked in the river, most like, if I know them Mohucks. Shame, two promising young buttercups like them.’ Her eyes met Bratchet’s with total calm.
‘You spirited ’em,’ screeched Bratchet, ‘You fucker, you cannibal, you spirited ’em. I heard you. You was paid.’
Effie blinked but remained composed. ‘When was this? When you was raving with the pox? Very likely. You was hearing the Last Trump and Long Lane clickers then as well.’
As soon as her legs would bear her, Bratchet went to Bully Watts, the parish beadle, and informed him that Effie Sly had been paid by an unknown nob, possibly a member of the court or government or both, to have Mary Read and Anne Bonny sold to the colonies.
She should have known better; even if her accusation had sounded plausible, Bully was too lazy and too beholden to Effie’s regular bribery to take any action. When Bratchet went to the magistrate with the same story, Bully accompanied her and undermined it to the point where the magistrate told her that she was a serpent’s tooth of a maid and to get back to the mistress who deserved better than her.
She did. There was nowhere else to go. No decent employer was likely to take on a girl from Puddle Court with or without a reference, even if Effie had been prepared to give her one. There was other employment, but having watched one such employee after another succumb to disease in Floss’s brothel next door, Bratchet wasn’t inclined to take it. She was in misery. All that kept her going was her faith in the wit and courage of her two friends to extricate themselves from their capture.
‘They’re dead and gone, Bratchie, so no more of it,’ Effie kept saying, but Bratchet had lit a mental beacon for Mary and Anne to come back to, and kept it burning. In the meantime she adopted a lolling outward indifference and inwardly retired to the True Time of her Huguenot childhood, speaking to herself in French and repeating its fairytales.
She was raped by one of the lodgers the following year and became pregnant. Effie, who’d begun to drink heavily, had been in too deep a stupor during the rape to hear Bratchet’s screams for help, and she responded to the pregnancy with, ‘Either you slip that calf, chucky, or my door’s closed agin you.’
Not knowing how she could support a child on the streets, the dazed and compliant Bratchet was taken to a woman in Cable Lane, much in local demand for her skills, who aborted her twelve-week embryo with a knitting needle.
After that came another illness from which she only just recovered, to discover that menstruation had ceased. Certain she could never bear a baby again, the future closed down with the thud of a coffin lid. Somewhere beyond it, in the world of the living, her two indomitable friends walked and talked and had their being but the beacon she kept for them collapsed into embers.
On the night she’d seen Effie’s body asplay on the floor, its face gorged blue, Bratchet had at once shrieked in triumph and felt bereft; Effie had bestridden her life so long she was without the volition to think for herself; she’d been turned to stone by a slow-acting gorgon.
With good food, gentler treatment and some education her body and mind regained some of their youth – she was, after all, only eighteen and more resilient than she knew. She fought the man who tried to assault her at The Hague with the ferocity not just of a woman who’d been raped before and would rather die than be raped again, but with healthy self-loving anger. How dare he? Her gratitude to the chivalrous Scotsman was doglike but in it was also an element of her first sexual stir.
Another anger galvanized her as she realized that she’d been dragged into a hunt for Anne Bonny and Mary Read.
It was Kit Ross who completed the process of bringing Bratchet back to life. The night after Mother Ross had come aboard we tied up by a bridge which led to a track lined with poplars, the nearest with their trunks deep in water. The breeze whisked bits of straw from packing cases into the thwarts, then dropped. The sky faded to a typical Flemish blue wash, outlining Mother Ross’s hat as she drank and talked. The light from the poop lantern softened her face from middle-age to a young woman’s.
She’d been in more battles than any of us. She spoke of gallantry and old, dead soldiers, and all of us, even Colonel Blackader, inched forward until we circled her. As she talked, she tidied us up, binding a Cameronian’s torn finger, taking Kilsyth’s jacket from him to sew on a button and telling him he needed a new coat. ‘If a louse lost its footing on this cloth, me son, it’d break its neck.’
She inspired a comfortable, wistful lust in every man there. She was no beauty, Mother Ross, but that night she was a combination of mother, sweetheart and comrade-in-arms, the only woman who’d been where we’d been. She held a bubble of balance, attracting but keeping us at bay, giving a sheen of femininity to the masculine business of war.
And Bratchet, watching us all from outside the circle, thought, That’s what I want. She longed for what Mother Ross had; for the Scotsman to regard her with the same admiration, unwilling though it was, with which he looked at this woman. Mother Ross had gained entry to the most powerful collegiate in the world and the Bratchet, with her new soul, wanted to join. She’s men’s equal. She’s like Anne and Mary.
That night, when everybody had bedded down, Bratchet crawled to where Mother Ross lay wrapped in her army cloak and knocked politely on one of her clogs.
‘Mrs Ross.’
‘What, then?’
‘Why’d you do it?’
Mother Ross didn’t ask what. ‘They took me husband, d’ye see, cushin. Got the bastard drunk as a fiddler’s bitch and shipped him to Flanders. I went after him.’
‘Did you find him?’
‘I did. In the arms of another woman, God rest him.’
‘But you stayed a soldier.’
There was a pause. ‘Woman’s life…’ Mother Ross’s voice was quiet with reflection, ‘It wasn’t big enough for me, girl. I wanted more.’
‘Did you find it?’ Bratchet thought of the scars, the loneliness of hiding one’s sex, the courage.
‘Men have got it, girl. And I shared it with them. Now clear off and let me sleep.’
As she crawled back to her palliasse, Bratchet understood that it wasn’t so much of Mary and Anne that Mother Ross reminded her. It was Effie Sly.
In the healthiest development of all, Bratchet was beginning to put Effie into perspective; she hadn’t been wholly bad, she’d been capricious. She’d shown true devotion in nursing Bratchet through illness; she’d regretted the rape on her maid and ever after, when a lodger tried to assault Bratchet, Effie kicked his arse for him and sent him packing. She’d become a monster because the society in which she found herself was monstrous, a sewer you either drowned in or climbed out of on a ladder of other people to keep your own head above the excrement.
Kit Ross and Effie were from the same oven, but where Mother Ross had turned her energy to wholesome account – as long as you weren’t one of the unfortunates she took supplies from – Effie had found outlet only in what was rotten.
As she lay in the barge hold, listening to the snores around her, Bratchet could have found it in her newly mended heart to forgive Effie Sly – if she hadn’t sold Mary Read and Anne Bonny to the press boat because a gentleman had paid her a good price to do it.
They’re dead and gone, Bratchet, so no more of it.
But they weren’t. She knew.