The Fraud Read Online Free PDF Page B

candleholders, past the Gin Lane and Beer Street prints on the walls. Somewhere in the house somebody snored violently: she heard the sound gladly, hoping it would cover the sound of the stairboards creaking. The front door of the house of Mrs Falls locked with a long thin iron key; Grace had quickly observed that the key was then placed in a drawer of a narrow chest in the small hallway. She felt for the long key, put it into the keyhole softly, it rattled as it turned, she pulled the door gently behind her, it creaked as it closed. Most of the night couples who had come together in the dark on Christmas Steps had gone now although one gentleman was still engaged noisily near the ironmonger’s house. Grace cared nothing for night couples and night noises, she had heard them all many times as she had followed her father, or led him home. Her flimsy shoes scuffed over the cobbles as the first light rose around her, she ran down and down the streets to the river. She would board the ship in the half-light: she would go with Philip.
    The wind had picked up in the last hour and the captain, waiting on the deck, had felt it: the Charity was already in half-sail and pulling away from the dock as the small girl ran towards it.
    ‘Philip!’ she cried out in great desperation, ‘Philip!’ But the noise of the wind in the sails flapped and roared.
    Philip Marshall looked back at Bristol to say farewell to his home, looked again, saw the small, indistinct figure beside the bargemen and the ship’s clerk and the coiled ropes: knew it was Grace.
    ‘I will come back for you!’ he called but the wind whipped at his words. He raised his hand as a salute and a promise as the day lightened and brightened and his new life began and to Grace he seemed to cry, ‘ God for Harry! England and St George! ’ and she was not included.

TWO
    Grace Marshall, left on the quayside, was not quite eleven years old.
     
    She haunted the Bristol docks for many months, like a small, hoop-skirted ghost. Grey stones of grief and abandonment and rage sat on the small thin shoulders, and colours gone, as she stared at the arriving and departing sailing ships, looking always for her brothers. If she was once a laughing girl who bowled through the Bristol streets like a spinning top, who cared for drawing, who made paint from golden marigolds or African coffee or from the red rose the boy had found - well, there was nobody else to remember.
    Mrs Falls’ assistants did not like Grace. She was smaller than they, and did not join in their whispers. They did not like the way she was so silent. At first they would trip her on the rickety wooden stairs but she scratched at them instantly, wildly, like an animal so they did not do that again, whispered about her instead, made her sleep on the end mattress, the smallest and the lumpiest. Mrs Falls’ assistants fell asleep to the sound of cries and shouts and footsteps: boots and shoes coming down Christmas Steps and on to the steep cobbled path that led down to the Bristol port, lovers or street-girls huddling in the dark corners. But when the other apprentices were asleep Grace stared out: to the shape of the old chapel at the top of Christmas Steps, to the same old cries and shadows in the streets in the night; or drunken voices would sing out everybody’s song, singing as a round, joining in, losing the tune and the words and then picking them up again amid raucous laughter:
    Three blind mice
See how they run
They all run after the farmer’s wife
She cut off their tails with a carving knife.
and Grace thought if she had a carving knife she would plunge it into the nearest person, to assuage her anger and her loneliness and her pain.
    Mrs Falls felt sorry for the girl, knew perfectly well the Bristol docks were no place for a wild young girl like Grace, but Mrs Falls had troubles of her own, what with her dropsy and her bunions and the water on her knee and her general protuberances. ‘I cannot be