A Taste for Nightshade Read Online Free PDF

…’
    â€˜I never reckoned to be remembered in song,’ hooted the woman they called Brinny. Were they halfwits? The whole country despised them; they were being swilled away like hogwash.
    Mary strode up to Jenks. ‘Here,’ she said, handing him a scrap of paper very beautifully scribed. ‘I want it done in that Lady’s Hand, good and clear, not those bodged capitals.’
    Though chains hold me fast,
    As the years pass away,
    I swear on this heart
    To find you one day.
    Beside it was the screed for the reverse, with a pattern of hearts, chains, and knives to be incised about the edge:
    MARY JEBB AGE 19
TRANSPORTED 7 YEARS
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
    â€˜Two the same? Double-dealing your sweethearts, eh?’ She shot him a glance like poison, and threw down two bob.
    Jenks didn’t do a bad job. Once she’d pawned her fine hat to the jailer, she had the money to see both the tokens safely parcelled up and posted. Seven years with no return, she thought. That might suit these common prigs, but she was going to engrave her destiny with the ink of Fate. She would never let Mary Jebb be forgotten.

    At first the voyage on the
Experiment
had seemed a pleasure jaunt after Newgate: the master had let the convicts exercise on deck, have their saucy games, and feast on perfumed fruits with curious names and colours. A few weeks into the voyage the first floggings took place. A bunch of sots had grabbed a cask of grog and, with less brains than guts, had drunk the lot and been discovered flat on the floor. All the convicts were mustered, as the captain droned on of forgiveness and such codswallop. Still, it had been as good as a church-gathering, to get a good eyeful of all the other lags.
    As yet, Mary had scant interest in the other women; she wanted no pals. They were either rivals to be battled with or trulls to be elbowed aside. She stood alone and watchful, the habitual stance of a fly-girl like her. It wasn’t women who would keep her alive but men – or to begin with, a strong, obedient, hard-knuckled man. She was still well togged in her striped taffety, and she kept her white skin clean. Already some of the flightier young girls had paired off with the crew, but she reckoned a sailor a poor investment, no sooner bedded than he’d abandon her and sail back to Blighty.
    The topmost lags swaggered by the rail, hard-bitten mobsmen scarred by murder and villainy. Their molls would be slaveys, cursed and beaten, and shared between mates. She would have to wager on a fellow from the lower orders.
    For sure she could always do worse than Jack Pierce. When he had given her the odd hopeful smile she had returned it sweetly. At first she’d thought him nothing but a flat – a sailor transported for claiming a mate’s prize money. But he was bonny, with his long fair locks and china-blue eyes. And he had a lucky shine to him; some Church Society had picked him off the streets and paid to have him trained up as a seaman. Though he was no more than twenty, he was well-liked by the crew and the redcoats. As for the navigation and such-like he had learned, she’d already calculated how useful that might prove. Within the day she had him snared. When he kissed her and told her she was his girl, she wondered if he was that square he thought her an innocent. Day by day she wound him in as tightly as she could, turning herself into a prim girl, in need of a sweetheart’s protection. Whatever it takes, she told herself, you’ve got to clamber to the top of this stinking heap.
    Then the wild South Seas had destroyed such pleasure-trip fancies and gawping at the men. For four months they were soaked in stinking green slime, while the vessel was shaken like a rat. ‘Damn you God, let me die,’ Ma Watson had groaned like a litany, and a chorus agreed. The drinking water swarmed with worms, the biscuits with weevils, the bilges stank with rancid rations and dead rats.