The Penny Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

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? In the hopeless darkness, secrets poured forth from those who had spent a lifetime turning tricks and picking pockets. Their talk turned to stranger receipts: the cure-alls and quackeries that transformed a few pennies into a bag of sovereigns. Janey giggled about the nostrum she had once hawked to keep the face eternally young that was mere water and ashes. Mother Watson’s cure-all elixir was mostly stinking lye from piss-pots. As for love potions, they were the easiest to fob off on simpletons. A pretty-coloured water and a few magic words – it was astonishing how fast a fool was parted from his purse. Death potions, too – Brinny told them everything she had learned from her lover the apothecary, before she tired of him, too, and dosed him with his own poison.
    All the while, Mary picked out the chief threads of their notions: that a body wanted pleasure in this life and not the next, and eternally longed for youth and health, and would risk a fortune for beauty. The purchase of love was irresistible, and the procurement of murder more common than even she had guessed. The best of it, the essence, she scratched so deeply in her memory that it left an enduring trace, like the ghosts of letters on a well-worn slate.
     

 
     
    Five years later

3
    Greaves, Lancashire
     
    Summer 1792

~ To Make Knotted Biscuits of Apricots ~
     
Take ripe Apricots, pare, stone and beat them small, then boil them till they are thick. Take them off the fire and beat them up with sifted Sugar and Aniseeds to make a pretty fine paste. Make into little rolls the thickness of straw and tye them in little Knots in what form you please; dry them in the Stove or in the Sun.
     
The best receipt of Mrs Jonah Moore, given to her by her