A Taste for Nightshade Read Online Free PDF Page B

Rumours raged that the Navy Office had given orders they all must be drowned on a certain day, so long as it was far from England. Battened down in a waterlogged rolling coffin, they would believe anything. Almost eight months from England, an island was sighted with a name that sounded like Demon’s Land, but a black squall hit them like a battering ram and there was no safe landing. To a chorus of miserable wailing, a young wife gave birth to a baby girl, as dead as a doorpost, which was cast overboard the following day. Next, a feeble-minded pedlar woman managed to bang her head and drown herself in the filthy swill. She lay dead for three days in chains before the stink of her persuaded them to report it, so fierce was the clamour for her ration. The food had dwindled to a cup of gruel each day, with a speck of fish swimming in it. That was their lot, all they had to keep body and soul together.
    It could have been day or night in the pitch-black hold, when old Ma Watson started up her wailing. ‘Is that all there is? How’m I to live on that slip-slop? I’d give me two eyes for a slice of apple pie.’ She was brain-cracked, but spoke for them all.
    Then Tabby Jones joined in, holding forth on the making of the best apple pie: the particular apples, whether reinettes or pippins, the bettermost flavourings: cinnamon, cloves, or a syrup made from the peelings. Slowly, groans of vexation turned to appreciative mumblings. Someone else favoured quince, another lemon. Apples, they all agreed, though the most commonplace of fruit, did produce an uncommon variety of delights: pies and puddings, creams and custards, jellies and junkets, ciders and syllabubs. The time passed a deal quicker and merrier than before.
    Janey, the whore who had once been famed in Harris’s
List of Covent Garden Ladies
, told them, in her child’s voice, that the best dish she ever tasted was a Desert Island of Flummery, at a mansion in Grosvenor Square. ‘It was all over jellies and candies and dainty figures, and a hut of real gold-leaf. Like eating money, it were. I fancied meself a proper duchess.’
    She knew what Janey meant. When she had first met Aunt Charlotte she had gorged herself until her fingers were gummy with syrup and cream. There was one cake she never forgot; a puffed conceit of cream, pastry, and pink sugar comfits. She bit her knuckles hungrily and sucked the blood. It came to her then that they were starving, slowly and surely, to death.
    They all hushed as Brinny, the one murderess of their crew, told them of the making of her bride cake, with primrose yellow butter and raisins of the sun, fattened on smuggled brandy. The further they sailed from England, the fonder they grew of the pleasures of home: plum trees with bowed branches, brambles in the hedge, cream from a beloved cow. Someone asked if Brinny’s bridegroom was as fine as her cake. ‘Sadly he were not,’ she said dolefully. ‘Why else d’ye think I be sitting here, transported for the murdering of the old dog with a dose of his own ratsbane?’ Everyone laughed rustily at that, like machines grinding back to life.
    The women’s talk interested Mary mightily; for it stripped bare their hearts’ desires: Janey’s for luxury, Brinny’s for her wedding day’s pride, all of them for secret pleasures. And the stuff of hearts’ desires was always of interest to an out-and-out racket-girl like her. She mulled it all over, as they picked at sores and cursed every battering of the ocean against the ship’s timbers. Finally she asked a question: ‘Do you reckon a man might be snared by food?’
    Why, it was easy as pie they said – a man was not so much led by his tail as his belly. For he must eat three times a day, which was twice more than most could raise the other appetite. Surely all men longed for their mother’s milk, for a life of ease, to sprawl in a cradle of wifely care?