An Almond for a Parrot: the gripping and decadent historical page turner. Wray Delaney
in the black arts.’
‘Madam, do you want me to ask him a question?’ I asked for surely they were making jest of me.
‘No!’ She paused and stared at me as if I was a stranger, then said, ‘Yes.’
‘When will Mrs Sitton agree to the marriage?’ I asked.
Shadow spelled out ‘NEVER’.
Mrs Truegood put her hand over her mouth. ‘Where is Mr Sitton?’ she said slowly to the dog.
‘AT SEA,’ he spelled out.
The door opened, Hope entered and saw Shadow. She let out a most terrible scream and the little dog hid under a chair, while Mr Crease picked up my cards and handed them back to me.
‘Go to your chamber, Tully,’ said Mrs Truegood. ‘Stay there until I call for you.’
She ushered me from the room. I felt wretched for I hadn’t meant to displease her in any way. Whatever I had done, I knew it was serious. That night, Mercy did not come into our bed and I felt I was being punished. Prue brought me a tisane, I drank it, and the bedroom door, for the first time, was locked.
I woke the following morning with a throbbing head and knew even before I was fully conscious that something was wrong. The house had a quietness to it, the bricks holding themselves tight together, bracing for the storm within and the rain without.
I went to dress, only to find that all my fine clothes had vanished right down to the last stocking and pin. All that was left was the rag of a dress I had been wearing when Mrs Truegood first came to the house. All calmness left me. I tried to open the door but found it still locked.
It was noon by St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside when Cook opened the bedchamber door. The silence was broken by my father bellowing at the top of his voice in the way he had before matrimony had tamed him.
‘Cook! More wine, woman!’ he shouted. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Where’s Mercy? Where is everyone?’ I all but screamed.
‘Gone,’ was all she would say. ‘Gone.’
Tarts, The Common, or Country Fashion
Take a fresh cream cheese, made the preceding day, or only made five or six hours before; mix a bit of butter and a few eggs with a little salt; make the paste pretty thick, and the top the same; bake it without glazing the top crust or border.
I could not make head or tail of what had happened and why my stepmother and stepsisters had vanished. Surely Mercy wouldn’t have left me behind?
Only three of Mrs Truegood’s servants remained and I begged them to tell me where she had gone, but they ignored my pleas. I asked for my clothes back but one of the footmen said my things had not been touched.
‘Then where are they?’ I asked and to that there came no answer.
They gathered together all that belonged to their mistress and departed, taking the yellow canaries too. I decided I would follow them but my father took the precaution of locking all the doors after they’d left.
‘Don’t think that you have any sympathy from me,’ he bellowed. ‘You have brought this on yourself.’
‘How? Please tell me how?’ I said, but he would not.
Perhaps, I thought, Mrs Truegood had spied on Mercy and me and been so horrified by what she had seen that she had taken her daughters away.
I hoped that Cook might have some inkling as to what had passed but she seemed to know nothing.
‘And my clothes are gone,’ I said.
‘The master had me sell them this morning,’ she said. ‘All hope is gone.’
‘And Mercy, too,’ said I.
‘Butter and salt,’ she said. ‘Butter and salt.’
‘What does that mean? You always say it and it means nothing.’
‘Butter and salt in the right proportion means a good life. Too much salt and all is ruined.’
Like so much of what Cook said, this only possessed a pepper grain of sense and brought little comfort.
Until Mrs Truegood had arrived, my life had been filled with nothing more than half-formed dreams, but never had I felt as desolate as I did then. The memory of the handsome stranger was now but a patch of blue sky vanishing among thunderous clouds. And the thought that I would never see Mercy again near broke my heart.
It was not long before the house went to rack and my father to ruin. Cook fell back upon her grubby apron and untidy ways. Even the spit-roast dog had vanished along with all the other conveniences and Cook whiled away the hours turning the spit, roasting and burning the meat in equal measure. Thirsty work, she said, that was only eased by gin.
Many times I thought of running away but my father took to being my jailer with more vigour than he had ever shown when a merchant in bricks.
I once read that when Vikings faced defeat in battle they set their ships ablaze. Mr Truegood must have read that too for he seemed determined to cast himself upon the bonfire of bankruptcy. Never one to miss out on pleasures he reinstated the Hawks’ Club. His wayward, sea-salty friends reappeared to help him light the fuse to his inevitable ruin. Like it or not, and I can assure you, sir, I liked it not, I was dragged down into the ashes with him.
The taste for such luxury as Mrs Truegood had shown me had spoiled me for all else. I had lived less than three months in the light and the rest of my days rolled out before me in a never-ending line of chamber pots filled with my father’s shit.
Summer crept along, heating up the streets, heating up the house. Everything was stagnant apart from the hornets’ nest in the attic where I had been ordered to sleep with Cook as before. What, I asked myself, would happen if I stood very still in the blue chamber? Would life pass me by altogether until I turned to dust? I missed Mercy. What hurt the most was the thought that I had meant nothing to her. That alone was a splinter in my heart.
There was no money for meat and vittles, there was no money for wine. There was no money for the removal of the hornets’ nest. Cook and me had to move out of the attic. It had become unusable, filled with the incessant angry whirling of hornets’ wings. It came to symbolise everything that was rotten in our house.
The merchants soon refused to give my father any more credit. He only minded about the wine merchant. It was in want of alcohol that he sent Cook to hire some clothes for me so that we might see the wine merchant together. The thought of being out of the house raised my spirits no end and I saw it as a chance of escape. Before leaving I had had the wit to snatch up the book my dancing master had given me. But Mr Truegood kept his hand on my arm with the ferocity of a crab. There being a customer with the wine merchant, we walked back and forth outside shop until Mr Truegood was certain there was no one else inside but the wine merchant.
‘Tell him…’ he said as he pushed me at the door, ‘tell him to deliver the wine and you will be the payment.’
My only hope was that the dancing master’s book might have some currency. The wine merchant sat behind his counter, an owl in an ivy bush, so woolly was his wig. He had the startled look that owls have when light is shone upon them.
‘Not another bottle until my bills are paid,’ he said. ‘One way, or another.’
He eyed my assets, which the ill-fitting gown showed immodestly well. I had a nasty feeling that ‘another’ would have a Mr Smollett approach attached to it, and I put the book on the counter and asked if it would pay a part of the bill. The wine merchant sighed.
‘I