I had no idea what that meant and Mrs Truegood would not elaborate on the subject except to say it was essential that I was brought on if I was to amount to anything. She had used the word ‘essential’ about the spit-roast dog, telling Cook that a spit-roast dog was essential if her cooking was to amount to anything half decent.
Mrs Coker, my elocution tutor, was a fine lady, exceptionally tall and made taller still by her wig. She floated, or so it seemed to me, rather than walked through the house. Her skin was remarkably smooth and she told me she kept wrinkles at bay by pulling certain threads of her hair tight and pinning them to her scalp before she put on her wig. She wore many patches on her white face and Mercy said she looked like a ghost.
When I told Mrs Coker that I had never been out of the house and barely knew how Milk Street connected with the rest of London, she was genuinely shocked. She questioned me about my life and how I had retained my humour when confined to the house. She concluded that the only way I had managed was by the gift of a vivid imagination. Every word she used was an island in its own sound; her words never ran carelessly into another, each was protected by a moat of silence.
‘Language is music,’ she declared.
I was lucky then to have a good ear for a tune.
The turnabout in my fortune was so sudden and so giddying that I could not fathom what my stepmother must have said to my father that he had become generous in his care of me.
Hodgepodge of All Sorts of Meat
Take an earthen pot, well scalded, and put into it four pounds of the loin of mutton, two pounds of filleted veal, one partridge, two large onions, two heads of cloves, one carrot and a quart of water; put a paste made of flour and water round the cover to keep in the steam; place this pot within another somewhat larger, and fill up the vacancies between the two pots with water; let them simmer or stew for seven or eight hours, taking care to supply the outer pot with boiling water so that the meat in the inner pot may be constantly stewing; when done, sift the broth through a sieve, let it settle, and then sift a second time through a napkin; serve the meat and the broth together in a terrine.
My other tutor, Mr Smollett, was an earthbound weasel of a man whose nose caused him no end of trouble, as did his pious beliefs, all being equally irksome. He arrived every morning clutching a prayer book to his pinched-in body. No doubt, as a boy, he had been told how tall a man should grow and when finding himself beyond the mark, felt obliged to shrink the difference into his shoulders.
He seemed to be only concerned with the vices that were to be discovered at the theatre and the coffee house, so that as well as being pinched in body, he was pinched in mind. By degrees it became clear to me that Mr Smollett was nothing more than a hypocrite, for, behind all his condemnation of the city of sin, I could tell the level of excitement the subject brought him to by the dribbles that fell from the end of his troublesome nose.
After a while I could read fluently. Books I liked, but I was bored with all that dull Mr Smollett had to say and I wasn’t paying much heed when one day he announced he was going to talk on the cause of all evil in the world. I think this may have been brought about by my exceedingly low-cut bodice. Mrs Truegood had told the dressmaker to accentuate my natural assets and the effect of my assets on Mr Smollett resulted in a lecture on the electrical influence of the female root on the male root. For the first time Mr Smollett had my undivided attention.
‘I will endeavour to explain,’ he said, ‘but I am sure it is beyond your comprehension.’ Seeing that his speech wasn’t received with the usual posy of yawns he carried on. ‘The male root can grow to between seven and twelve inches long. The top is carnation in colour, softer than a petal to touch. At the base there are two globes, bound to the stem of the root. The outside of the bags is wrinkly and covered with a kind of down, much resembling the hair on a beard of corn.’ He paused, then with his chest puffed out, said, ‘But as soon as this magnificent root is under the influence of the female root, it rises itself to become as stiff as a poker and remains so until the electrical fire is spent, which is known by a plentiful eruption of glutinous matter.’
‘What about the female… root?’ I asked.
Sweat salted his forehead and his cheeks went claret. He took out his kerchief and blew his nose so hard that his wig became somewhat lopsided.
‘The mouth and the whole appearance of the female root is often covered with a bushy kind of hair,’ he said, his eyes never leaving my assets. ‘It is a broad root within which a hole is perforated. The hole contracts or dilates like the mouth of a purse. To look at it you would never imagine that you could put anything into it at all, let alone a male root. But upon travail, it will dilate so much as to receive a rolling pin.’
After this pretty speech, Mr Smollett suddenly excused himself from the chamber. He came back adjusting his breeches, somewhat calmer.
I hoped he might talk further on the matter. He didn’t, though henceforth his attitude towards me became more familiar. He would insist that I sat on his lap while I read to him. That way, he said, it would be easier for us both to see the words. Being a good girl I did as I was told. I could feel the root of him go poker hard. I didn’t find it without interest and would have been more engaged if its owner hadn’t repulsed me quite as much Mr Smollett did.
There had been many sea changes in the house since my father had remarried, and he grew to doubt that he was still the captain of his ship. Mrs Truegood insisted that new linen mattresses were bought and the old, moth-worn, flea-ridden mattresses be burned. My father almost choked at the very notion, but one look from my stepmother shipwrecked any complaints he might have harboured. She also stated that wives and husbands who slept in separate beds had healthier nerves and stronger spirits than those who slept together. My father roared like bedlam and fell to swearing, but all for naught. His new wife remained unmoved and, deaf to his pleas, ordered a drink be made for him of sage, rosemary and sarsaparilla, which she said was good for a troubled temperament.
So it was that Mrs Truegood kept to her own set of rooms and my father reluctantly to his, and never the two did meet so it seemed to me, for I would have heard the floorboards creak and I never did.
My lessons with Mr Smollett continued and my curiosity – nay, I will call it hunger – to know more about roots would have led me into ruin if Mercy hadn’t taken it upon herself to save me.
I had slept so long with Cook, and was so used to her snores and farts and the smell of the sheets, that I found my new bed a little cold and was delighted when Mercy asked me to share hers. She said it was too wide, and Hope had her own bedchamber as she was to be married and consequently needed time alone.
The first night, I found her half undressed while her maid folded her clothes. Mercy’s bedchamber smelled of oranges and had a bookcase full of novels. She was not in the least bit shy to be seen half naked. She had next to no bubbies at all on her boyish figure.
‘I sleep on the right,’ she said, ‘with a pistol under my pillow.’ I must have looked truly alarmed, for she burst out laughing. ‘No, no, of course I don’t, you noodle.’
She kissed me on the cheek and said she was pleased to have my company. In the nights that followed we often talked, or she would read to me. Before she blew out the candle she would turn and kiss me goodnight.
No one had ever shown such tenderness to me before and, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, with each of her kisses not so much an ache but more a curious itch began to trouble me. I lay in the dark and wished my body wasn’t such a riddle to me. One night everything changed.
I remember waking from a nightmare. I dreamed that a man whose face I couldn’t see was trying to push me into a chamber. He threw the door open and inside were three women, tied by their hair to three metal rings that hung from the ceiling. I pulled away from him