I stopped.
I hung in the air on an invisible step, and it was then I heard Cook scream. I landed with a bump. Cook hit me with her wooden spoon.
‘What are you about?’
‘I’m learning to fly,’ I said.
‘Well don’t. You can’t. So there.’
Strange to say that after that I never could do it again. Perhaps I had never done it at all. I wonder what would have happened if Cook had told me that my other notions were impossible, but she didn’t and I came to believe that everyone must see the world as I did.
Once a week, Mrs Inglis would call on Cook. Mrs Inglis was a large lady with a face so folded with jowly flesh that it resembled an unmade bed. She always seated herself in the chair near the stove where she would pull up her petticoats and rest her feet on a stool. Her legs were blotched and itchy. Sighing, she would say what a trial it was to be old and who would have thought it would have come to this pretty pass. Cook would sit opposite and they would chinwag away the woes of the world into a bottle of gin.
Mrs Inglis always brought with her a sickly child of about thirteen. She would stand beside Mrs Inglis’s chair but not once did Mrs Inglis talk to her.
‘Back in the days…’ as Mrs Inglis loved to say. ‘Back in the days, I ran a good school, I did. I had good girls, such good girls. I never let anything untoward befall them – could have done, earned a little extra on the side. It would’ve been legal, but I never. Was it my fault, what happened?’
‘No, Mrs Inglis,’ Cook would say. ‘Let’s think on something merrier.’
Then they would start on the gossip.
If I thought it odd that the girl should be so ignored I said nothing as long as she stayed by the chair and didn’t come near me.
One day, while Mrs Inglis blabbered fifty to the dozen about nothing, or nothing I understood, the girl joined me under the table.
‘How old are you?’ she asked.
I was five at the time.
‘Are you hiding from the gentlemen?’
‘What gentlemen?’ I said.
‘The gentlemen who take you on their laps and ask to see what shouldn’t be shown. Pretty Poppet they call me.’
I didn’t like the way Pretty Poppet spoke and asked Cook why Pretty Poppet came all the time.
‘Because some griefs you never rise above,’ she said.
Mrs Inglis continued to visit and while time passed Pretty Poppet didn’t age. I decided it would be pointless to say anything more to Cook, for surely both she and Mrs Inglis could see her just as well as me.
So it was that out of the rubble of neglect I slowly grew with a head full of recipes and ghosts.
Three events stand out in the sea of sameness and have become magnified in my memory. Each in their way forecast the future and, although I didn’t know it, gave me a glimpse of what my life might hold.
At eight years I was employed to clean the downstairs parlour – a gloomy, wood-panelled chamber that appeared to vanish into the darkness. Mr Truegood and his friends would meet there in what my father loosely called the Hawks’ Club. Its members were gunpowder-blasted mumpers, broken-limbed soldiers, sham seamen and scaly fish, all of whom had long left the shores of sobriety. Here they sang their bawdy songs, gambled and drank well into the night until they could see the silver of their dreams in the bottom of a pewter mug.
The following morning it would be my job to bring a semblance of order to the chaos. I would find the chamber shuttered and through the shutters urgent pinpricks of light would show a yellow, wheezy fog that hung mournfully in the middle of the room, smelling of stale tobacco and defeat. I would polish the round wooden table, sweep the floor and lay the fire. This chamber in its various states of debauchery was my storybook. The main character the table itself, the empty plates and broken wine glasses spoke the lines and gave away the players of last night’s revelry. Among all the clutter lay treasure forgotten by these fuddled-headed gentlemen. A button, a snuffbox, a pipe in the shape of a man’s head: I would stash them away, pirates’ gold waiting to be reclaimed.
One wintry morning I opened the shutters and saw, propped upright by the side of a chair, a wooden leg with a scuffed shoe attached to it. The leg was so finely carved and painted that for a moment I thought it to be made out of flesh and bone. I didn’t fancy touching it, so left it where it was and set about my work. My heart as good as stopped when I discovered a dead man sitting in the chair by the fireplace. He had his eyes wide open and was staring at me, his face whiter than Cook’s flour. I was about to call for help when his hand shot out and took hold of my arm. My cry was swallowed back down upon itself.
‘Who are you?’ asked the dead man.
‘Tully Truegood,’ I replied, feeling my legs to be made of marrow jelly.
All his features were delicately rendered, each with a point to them. His hooked nose ended in a point, his chin jutted, even his ears appeared more pointed than the few ears I had seen before. I had no idea what an elf might look like but from the stories that Cook had told me I imagined that the dead man’s face couldn’t be so dissimilar from those of fairy folk. His eyes were set back into his face, his lip but a thin bow, his tongue the arrow. I saw now why I had thought him dead for his face was painted white and his almond-shaped eyelids had another set of eyes painted on them so that when they were closed they appeared open. The whole effect was most disconcerting.
‘Captain Truegood has a daughter,’ said the man. ‘Then you are the answer to the riddle. How old?’
‘Eight.’
‘Is there any more wine in that bowl, Miss Truegood?’ he said.
‘I think so.’
‘Then fetch me a glass and my leg, if you would be so kind, before the devil takes it to dance a jig.’
The moment he spoke, all my fear of him dissolved into excitement. Having concluded that he was a character from a fairy tale, I was no longer afraid. Up to then most of my days had been humdrum to say the least; so much so that I was scarcely conscious of which month it was. I had lately in my childish wisdom fallen into a gloom at the thought that time might have forgotten me altogether, that I would never be pulled into the adult world. Perhaps the dead man was here to do just that.
Once he had his painted leg back, he rolled up his breeches and I watched, fascinated, as he attached and strapped the wooden limb to his stump. When he stood and dusted himself down I was surprised by how tall he was, and that his clothes were colourful, his coat being striped. He squared his wig in the mirror.
‘You are no hen-hearted girl,’ he said, and whistled.
I could not for the life of me see why he needed to whistle, but then, from the darkest part of the parlour, appeared a little white dog.
The dead man watched me as he clicked his fingers. The dog, obeying his master’s command, danced on his hind legs. Thrilled, I knelt, clapping my hands as the little white dog came to me and I held him in my arms as he licked my face. It made me laugh, and I closed my eyes and relished the feel of that soft tongue. When I opened my eyes again the dead man and his dog had gone. For a long while I wondered if I had conjured them up and if I had conjured the boy in the grandfather clock for there was no other explanation for the appearance of any of them. Perhaps everyone could do it and it was nothing to wonder at. I thought to ask Pretty Poppet next time she came with Mrs Inglis, but Mrs Inglis didn’t come again; she had been taken to the Fleet Prison for unpaid bills.
I