The Fraud (4 page)

 

Philip Marshall began
earning
money, the first of the languishing Wiltshire Marshalls ever to do so: he could draw people’s faces and he began to be paid for his portraits. But their father borrowed even more money for the card-table from the Jew money-lender at very high interest, in a kind of last defiance.

Then one afternoon the invisible Aunt Joy, in her dark gown and her white cap, expired. Had she not drawn her last breath in the dining-room it is unlikely her absence would have been noted. Betty complained bitterly about the expense of a funeral and Grace stared at the coffin as it lay in a hole in the churchyard and wondered if Aunt Joy, whom she had hardly noticed, lay in the box in the dark gown and the white cap, just as usual.

Aunt Joy was missed, however, after all; the household ran amok, it might be said, from the time of her demise: often now there was not food on the table, and voices shouted all over the house as it seemed to dis-integrate.

 

Slowly Philip’s portraits started to be praised in the city: he began painting the newly-rich, those successful tradesmen who sold the iron and the black men. Rough paintings yet perhaps, but the tradesmen had never been painted by anyone at all before and paid him well; he painted a cloth-merchant, the cloth-merchant’s wife, an alderman, a minister of the church, and - to his mother’s delight - several daughters of real gentlemen.

‘At last, my darling boy!’ cried Betty, ‘You will find a Wife worthy of your Ancestors, and we will all be saved!’ But it was not the Bristolian gentry who would save Philip. The rough, hard-working Bristol traders aimed to be real gentlemen themselves, or their sons at least, and their portraits already made them feel like gentlemen. They encouraged Philip’s talent, were soon suggesting he travel to see the Great Old Masters, that he journey to Florence and Rome and Venice and Amsterdam with their own sons: add to his Artistic Education.

‘I will come! I must come!’ cried Grace, ‘for
my
Artistic Education.’ But nobody heard.

Philip for the first time in his life worked hard, experimented with colours, painted day and night: powerful businessmen and young ladies and gentlemen from the town. He too now talked of his Grand Tour but the financial and domestic situation of the family had become so embarrassing that, to his wild frustration, the money he was earning for his portraits had to be used simply to hold off the creditors, for Marmaduke had finally used the Queen’s Square house as collateral in the gambling dens in the dark Bristol alleys.

 

And then the plague came.

It came particularly to Bristol: the ships perhaps, or the sewers, or the black men. The sun shone on, the pestilence flew over the land; whole families died in a city so crowded, so wedded to trade and ships (in the night rats ran from the ships, burrowed into the dark corners of the city). The plague was no respecter of class, made no special dispensation for the Marshall family, people were dying all over Bristol, whole families in some areas: hundreds and hundreds of people died. Juno, the oldest girl who nearly married the son of an iron exporter, succumbed early; at her funeral the mother wept loudly and sang ‘How Great Thou Art’ in a trembling soprano. Then Ezekiel died. Then Venus got her wish and died, to her own surprise, and the vintner’s son did, after all, pay his respects. Finally the life ended of Betty, the fair-haired pretty young bride, who had wanted nobility and whose idea it had been to move to the filthy, stinking city that she thought had held such promise of fashion and of future.

Philip and Grace and Tobias huddled in disbelief with their father as hurried, smaller funerals were arranged and as more and more creditors called. Betty’s mahogany furniture was taken away. Beloved the poodle disappeared and was never seen again. ‘I hope somebody boiled it up for stew,’ said Philip blankly, and Marmaduke almost smiled. But within a week Marmaduke stared listlessly at his paints and lay upon his bed: his lips took on the faint blue colour that was the sign, the sign that death was near. After only three more days Philip and Grace and Tobias were the only members of the Marshall family in Bristol still alive and they clung together, shocked, dis-oriented, as their father was taken away in a cart piled with bodies and Grace’s tears fell upon her shabby skirt as she sat on the roadway, like any street child, long after the cart had disappeared.

 

Bristol’s population was shockingly lessened. One of the newly-rich young men of the city, a trader’s son, decided to leave Bristol at once: for Italy, for his Artistic Education, 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?

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 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.

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:
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 expected’, she would say, huffing and puffing to anyone who might be listening, ‘to run after my Girls and lock them up so that they won’t get In The Pits,’ (her odd turn of phrase was understood) ‘she looks for her Brothers, poor jade, as if they will ever return for her!’

There was, if truth be told, something vulgar about Mrs Falls’ hats - the strawberries were a little hefty, the ribbons were a little bright, there were upon some of them many large, multi-coloured butterflies or even small feathered birds. Mrs Falls’ hats were made for the Bristol ladies, wives of trade, who loved them and paid well, and Mrs Falls, nightly, bent over her financial affairs, often counting on her fat fingers as her girls worked late, late into the night, bending over their sewing in the candlelight.

Mrs Falls, however, was not an early riser, owing to her dropsy, and her gout, and her chest, and was never known to be ready before nine of the clock so her young ladies took their freedom when they could; at least one of them often nipped into the basement workroom in the mornings smelling of nights and flaunting money easily earned, but Mrs Falls never noticed. Grace would often let herself out of the old, snoring house before first light, that time when the ships sometimes left and the ships sometimes came home, and the girl waiting there beside the quays.

Just once she drew a face with some charcoal she had bought with her first earned pennies and a piece of card she had found. She drew the remembered face of Tobias: a thin face, she saw that the eyes she had drawn from inside her head were evasive, looked away slightly. Yet it looked like him. She took the piece of card with her down to the quays and sometimes she asked other sailors if they knew this sailor. But they shook their heads.