The Penny Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    ‘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—’
    ‘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:
     
‘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 . . .’
     
    ‘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
     
    ‘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.