The Fraud Read Online Free PDF

and would take Philip with him.
    ‘What about the Children?’ said the powerful Bristol businessmen, pulling at their white powdered wigs and looking at the thin boy and the odd, dark-eyed girl. For they were responsible fellows and the elder brother had painted them handsomely. The Wiltshire Marshalls were unbending, did not reply to an urgent enquiry for assistance for the orphaned children of their scandalous son.
    Solving Tobias was easy. ‘The boy to the docks!’ they cried. ‘We will place him on one of our Ships!’ And Tobias’s scrawny face lit up: he would see the World, he would travel the high seas, he would fight Pirates, he would become a Pirate!
    ‘I shall be a Pirate, Gracie!’ he called.
    ‘Indeed I do hope not,’ murmured one of the kind businessmen.
    ‘Goodbye, Gracie, I’ll bring you Gold and Colours!’ cried Tobias, and he waved to his brother Philip, and he was gone: a jaunty, thin thirteen-year-old boy with a small bundle on his shoulder (Grace had found him an old jacket and a bowl and one of their father’s worn, once elegant, waistcoats). It was only when it was too late, the ship disappearing down the channel, that one kind businessman saw that his empty watch-chain flowed free from his waistcoat.
    Grace stared wordlessly at the powerful Bristol men, refused to cry, clung to her beloved brother Philip, but he could not help her: the journey to Italy was his chance of survival and he must take it. Realistic tradesmen had realistic solutions: Grace should be put to a milliner. She would learn a trade after all, for was not this a city of traders? She would learn to make pretty hats that Bristol ladies wore (those straw hats with the rather large wax strawberries that Betty had worn, although Betty would have turned in her grave at the thought that her daughter might in any way be involved in their manufacture). In other circumstances Philip might have at least protested that Grace was a daughter of the gentry, but his own position - a son of the gentry but with no financial support of any kind - was too precarious: their father had owed money all over Bristol. By now not only the Wiltshire Marshalls but members of the Bristol nobility (such as they were) refused to have anything to do with this family, murmured of wildness and dishonesty.
    But Philip made his sister a promise: ‘I will come back for you,’ he said.
     
    The ship taking her brother Philip on his adventures sailed at first light; they forbad the girl to be there: she must begin her new life.
    The premises of Mrs Falls, the milliner, to whence the responsible businessmen led Grace, were tucked into a small corner behind the old Christmas Steps on the hill: a tiny, narrow house with the hat-making workroom in the basement. Rickety wooden steps, lit by candles in holders that flickered dangerously, led upwards from narrow floor to narrow floor, to the attic where Grace was to sleep with four other assistants in the tiny room with the low ceiling. The floorboards of the staircase creaked loudly. On the first landing, in the candlelight, could be ascertained two prints hanging on the wall: Gin Lane she spelled out (all the people looking terrible, deathly: one woman so inebriated that her baby fell from her bosom - because Gin was Evil) and Beer Street (all the people looking happy and well-fed, and children smiling - because Beer was Good). And at the top of the house five mattresses in a row, so close that they touched, and one tiny window: Grace’s new home. Grace was outraged beyond reason, stared out all night long at the noisy darkness from the small attic window while the other assistants slept: Philip was to go to study art in Rome, and she was to live in an attic and make horrible hats?
    I will not stay here.
    It was still dark when she drew her hooped petticoats about her with one hand and carried her small shoes in the other. She crept in her stockinged feet down and down the wooden staircase, past the dark