A Taste for Nightshade Read Online Free PDF Page A

gift. Like a pigeon he hopped and fluttered towards her until she held him tightly in her snare. Within a week the cove agreed to sign the retraction.
    Charlie’s paper was drawn up ready, and the gull was to visit her at three o’clock the next Saturday. At first it seemed the fellow was only late, or perhaps there had been an accident? The bell struck four, and five, then six, and seven. When the gates were locked she saw it, as clear as a gypsy’s crystal. The gull had flown away, leaving her to pay her dues on the far side of the world. The biggest sting of her life – that should have saved her from the pits of hell – had failed. She cursed him as a turncoat and a black-hearted dog, but all the oaths in the world couldn’t save her from Botany Bay.
    A week later she shuffled out into the prison yard, her legs in irons. Charlie had not shown his face again. Overnight she was dead cargo, no longer worth a swell cove’s notice. The yard was a foul place; half-naked wretches loitered in the stink, many as thin as wraiths. Bony children played at an open drain, their eyes huge in dirt-caked faces. Gin was the Newgate Master’s best trade, and those with a few pence chose oblivion on the stony ground. A racket broke out across the way; it was the other women from the Hanging Day, also bound for Botany Bay. The prisoner she later knew as Ma Watson was squawking at a fellow crouched over a workbench.
    â€˜What’s it to you if I want a dog picture?’ she wailed, shaking her skinny fist. The rest of the women were spurring her on, laughing like old mares. Mary sauntered over and all fell silent, for she still had the style of a mobsman’s Poll, in her striped taffety and feathered hat. The man looked up. ‘Want a love token for your sweetheart, my pretty?’ He lifted one up for her to inspect, a sparkling disc of copper. ‘Jenks is the name. Only a bob each, best workmanship you’ll find.’
    The crone grasped her sleeve and opened her toothless mouth, ready to start up again.
    â€˜Stow it, you old moaner,’ Jenks barked. ‘Let the lady look. Here’s the ones waiting to be hammered out.’
    Mary inspected the designs inked on paper, waiting to be engraved. Ma Watson’s was crude enough; an outline of a house with
My Cotage of Peace ∗ Took From Me
on the front, and a stick-limbed dog on the reverse above the words
FOR∗GET∗ME∗NOT
.
    She flicked through the rest. Most were sentimental rhymes, the usual sailor’s farewells of the ‘when this you see, remember me,’ variety.
    She lingered over an image of a man and woman, hand in hand, circled with chains:
My Dear Son, Absent But Not Forgot, Your Sorry Mother
.
    Too late to be sorry, now, she thought. Next, that whore Janey had commissioned seven identical tokens. Mary smiled at the picture of a man and woman coupling and the verse:
    Though My Fair Flesh Transported Be, My Blissful O still longs for thee
.
    Who did Mary have to remember her? She watched as Jenks hammered the disc with a nail tip, every blow confirming the rotten truth of it. Charlie had dropped her. Any day soon she would be shipped off with these filthy slummocks to the ends of the earth. Her whole existence would be forgotten.
    Ma Watson clawed at her sleeve again. ‘He’s got no one to look after him. Bobby’s his name—’
    â€˜Get off me, you crack-pate!’ Shaking off the crone she marched back to her own comfortable quarters on the Master’s Side. How had it come to this, that she had no truelove, not even a child or a mongrel dog?
    Next day when she returned to the yard she hung back while the prison guard sang the latest ballad to the band of ragtag women:
    â€˜There’s whores, pimps and bastards, a large costly crew,
    Maintained by the sweat of a labouring few,
    They should have no commission, place, pension or pay,
    Such locusts should all go to Botany Bay