Mary Anne

  She handed over the precious roll and watched him carefully as he skimmed over it. She saw him glance at the signature at the bottom.

  “Your father did this last night before he was taken sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s another loss, Mr. Hughes. Bob Farquhar takes copy home to correct. It saves paying wages to a second man.”

  “The copy must be corrected here, then, by one of the others doing extra. Give the child the money and get rid of her.”

  Mr. Day handed the money to Mary Anne. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Mary Anne took the money and left the room. She did not start back home. She went out of the building and stood a little way off, watching, until she saw Mr. Hughes leave and walk away up Fleet Street. Then she returned. She knocked once again on the door marked “Private” and was told to enter. The overseer was writing at his desk. He looked up, surprised.

  “You again?” he said. “I gave you the money.”

  Mary Anne shut the door behind her.

  “Was that copy all right?” she asked.

  “What do you mean, was it all right? It was clean enough. Had you dropped it in the street?”

  “No. I mean, was it correct?”

  “Yes. It’s gone through into the pressroom.”

  “No mistakes?”

  “No. Your father’s very thorough. That’s the reason I’m sorry to lose him. But Mr. Hughes is a hard master, as you saw.”

  “If one of the men corrects the copy here, it will keep him late, won’t it, and he will ask for extra money?”

  “Yes. But the extra he asks for won’t be as much as what we now pay your father for his full time.”

  “The extra would keep my sick father and the rest of us from starving until he’s himself again.”

  The overseer stared at the child.

  “Did your father tell you to say this?”

  “No. I thought of it myself. If I fetch the copy every evening here, and take it home for him to correct, and bring it back in the morning, that would suit you, wouldn’t it, and nothing need be said to Mr. Hughes?”

  Mr. Day smiled. The child also smiled. The red ribbon was certainly becoming.

  “Why didn’t you suggest this when Mr. Hughes was here?”

  “Mr. Hughes would have told me to get out.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Do you go to school?”

  “No. My father doesn’t earn enough to send us.”

  “You could go to the church school.”

  “My mother says the children there are common.”

  Mr. Day shook his head in reproof. “You’ll grow up very ignorant if you don’t go to school. Every child should learn to read and write.”

  “I can read and write. I taught myself. Can I go back and tell my father you will pay him for correcting copy until he is well again?”

  Mr. Day hesitated. His eye was caught again by the red ribbon, the large eyes, the strange self-assurance.

  “Very well,” he said, “we’ll try it for a week. But I don’t see how a sick man is going to correct copy. It’s not work to be skimped, you know.”

  “No, sir. I understand that, and so does my father.”

  “You think he will be well enough in himself to do it? He hasn’t got heatstroke, or fever, or anything like that?”

  “Oh no.”

  “What is it that’s wrong with him, then?”

  “He… he broke his leg. He fell off a ladder.”

  “I see. Well, if you come back this evening I’ll give you some copy to take to him. Good morning.”

  When Mary Anne returned home her stepfather was still in bed with the windows closed and the blinds drawn, to keep out the noise and the smells from the alley.

  “The doctor’s been,” said her mother. “He says there’s nothing for it but rest and quiet. Did you see Mr. Day?”

  “Yes, he said not to worry. He’ll pay five shillings a week while father is sick.”

  “Five shillings a week for no work? That was generous.”

  “He said father was one of their best men.”

  The child went upstairs and hid the scarlet ribbon.

  During the next three weeks Mary Anne corrected copy and took it backwards and forwards to the overseer without her family knowing. Then at the beginning of the fourth week, after she had been out in the streets with her brothers one afternoon, her stepfather called to her from his stuffy, airless bedroom, “Mr. Day was here just now.”

  “Oh.”

  “He seemed very astonished. He thought I had been laid up with a broken leg.”

  “I told him that. It sounded more hopeful than apoplexy.”

  “I didn’t have apoplexy either. I had heatstroke.”

  “Exactly.”

  Mary Anne was silent. Bob Farquhar had caught her out.

  “Mr. Day thanked me for correcting the copy. I told him there’d been no copy to correct. Then I guessed what you’d been up to. Did you think of the risk when you did it? Two, three faults might have slipped by, but not half a dozen.”

  “I went over it four times, and again in daylight, before I took it down to the printing house.”

  “No faults?”

  “No. Mr. Day would have told me if there had been.”

  “Well, he knows now that it was you.”

  “What did he say? What will he do to me? Will you lose the work?”

  “You’re to go down to the printing house and see him.”

  She changed into her Sunday frock and put the red ribbon in her hair. Charley, her shadow, watched her anxiously. “Mr. Day’s found out what you did. He’ll beat you.”

  “No, he won’t. I’m too old to be beaten.”

  “He’ll do something.”

  She did not answer. She ran out of the alley and down Chancery Lane into Fleet Street, her heart thumping. What if Mr. Hughes was there? Mr. Hughes would certainly order her to be beaten. He might even beat her himself.

  Mr. Hughes was not there. There was only Mr. Day, the overseer, in the room with the door marked “Private.”

  Mary Anne stood meekly, her hands behind her back. Mr. Day had rolls of discarded copy in his hand. Perhaps there had been mistakes after all.

  “Well, Mary Anne,” he said. “I see you’ve been trying to make fools of us here at the printing house.”

  “No, sir.”

  “What made you deceive me?”

  “We needed the money.”

  “Your father tells me you’d been correcting copy for some time, even before he was ill. Why did you do it?”

  “It was something to read.”

  “This stuff isn’t written for little girls.”

  “That’s why I like reading it.”

  Mr. Day coughed and laid aside the rolls of copy. Mary Anne wondered what he was going to do. Obviously he intended to punish her.

  “How much of it do you understand?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did we say about the Prime Minister last week, for instance?”

  “You said Billy Pitt held the reins too firmly to be shifted from the saddle, and Charlie Fox had better go play tennis in St. James’s Street with the Prince of Wales and Mr. Mucklow who keeps the court. I think that has two meanings, but I’m not sure.”

  Mr. Day looked more shocked and disapproving than ever.

  “At least you don’t understand the slang in the paper?” he said.

  “I know what it means to pick up a flat.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s really a term in tennis. But when you print it, it means to hoodwink a chap who doesn’t know his onions.”

  Mr. Day raised his eyebrows.

  “I have had a long talk with your father,” he said, “and I agreed we should like him back here when he is well. But you are not to correct copy anymore. At least, not for the present. You are going to school instead.”

  “To school?”
r />   “Yes. Not to your parish school, but to a boarding school for young ladies that I know about at Ham, in Essex.”

  Mary Anne stared at Mr. Day in bewilderment. Was he mad?

  “I can’t go there,” she said. “My father hasn’t the money to send me, and my mother won’t spare me from home.”

  Mr. Day stood up. He did not look disapproving any longer. He was smiling.

  “I have offered to pay for your schooling,” he said. “I think you are worth educating. I have a daughter your age at this school at Ham, and I’m sure you’ll be happy.”

  “Does Mr. Hughes know?”

  “This is a private matter. It has nothing to do with Mr. Hughes.”

  The overseer frowned. How peculiar that the child should think of that. He was certainly not going to tell Mr. Hughes because Mr. Hughes had an unpleasant mind, and would tell his overseer that he had been beguiled by a young baggage who looked more like fifteen than thirteen and wore a red ribbon in her hair with enchanting effect.

  “It’s very kind of you indeed,” said Mary Anne, “but what exactly do you expect to get out of it?”

  “We will talk about that in two years’ time,” he said. He took her to the door and shook her gravely by the hand.

  “If the boarding school in Ham is for young ladies,” she asked him, “does that mean I shall become a young lady too?”

  “Yes. If you learn what they teach you.”

  “Shall I learn to speak proper, not broad?”

  “By all means.”

  Excitement filled the child. This was the beginning of something, the start of adventure. Leave home, leave the alley, become a young lady, and all because she had done something that she was not supposed to do. She had deceived Mr. Day, and Mr. Day was going to educate her. It paid, then, to deceive.

  “I will call on your parents again in the course of the week,” he said. “And by the way, I understand Bob Farquhar is not your real father but your stepfather. Your real father was called Thompson. Which name do you prefer to go by when you are at school?”

  Mary Anne thought rapidly. The gentleman from Aberdeen. The gentleman attached to the Army. The gentleman who had given her mother better days. This could all be explained to the young ladies at Ham, if only the name were not Thompson. There were so many Thompsons. Mary Anne Thompson. Mary Anne Farquhar. Farquhar sounded better, while in the background loomed the clan Mackenzie.

  “Mary Anne Farquhar, if you please,” she said.

  4

  When Mary Anne was fifteen and a half the good woman who had charge of the young ladies’ boarding school at Ham told Mr. Day that his protégée had completed her education and there was nothing more they could teach her. She read well, she spoke well, she wrote a fair hand. She was proficient at history and English literature. She could sew and embroider, she could draw, she could play the harp.

  But she was mature for her years, and this had caused a certain amount of concern to those who were responsible for the young ladies. Miss Farquhar’s appearance was such as to draw attention outside the precincts of the school. She was stared at in church. Bold looks followed her in the street. Messages had been thrown to her over the wall. Someone, who should have known better, had signaled to her from a window in the house opposite, and it was said that Miss Farquhar had signaled back. These things made for anxiety in a scholastic establishment. No doubt Mr. Day would appreciate the fact and remove his protégée to the care of her parents, who could supervise her themselves.

  Mr. Day, who drove down to Ham by post chaise to fetch Mary Anne, was not surprised to hear that people stared at her in church. He found it hard not to stare at her himself. She was not a beauty, but there was something about the eyes, the expression continually changing, and the tilt of the nose that made for great liveliness and charm. Maidenly modesty was not one of her qualities. She rattled away to him in the post chaise without the slightest embarrassment, and pumped him as to his journalistic progress.

  “We were allowed to see the Morning Post,” she said, “but it was too dry for my liking. The Public Advertiser has all the news. I used to buy that, when we went into town, and hide it under my pillow. I missed your pamphlets, all the same, and the Court gossip. I hear the Duke of York is going to marry a German princess with flaxen hair. No more duels for him. And the King doesn’t like Mr. Pitt as much as he did, and the Tories are in a state of agitation about the French chopping so many heads off in case the habit is catching and we start doing it over here.”

  Mr. Day thought to himself that his protégée was going to find life very cramped at home, and he couldn’t possibly risk her coming to the printing house to read copy, or the press would stop working and the paper would never get printed at all. The best plan would be for the young woman—for really he could not call her a child any longer—to act as his housekeeper. He was a widower, and his own daughter still at the boarding school in Ham. Mary Anne would make a most presentable housekeeper, and possibly, as time went on, if his feelings became a little warmer, he would consider taking further steps. He would not rush her with any of these ideas at present. She must go home and see her parents first. But he was persuaded she would very soon become tired of life with them.

  Three years had seen changes in the Farquhar household. They had left the cramped old home in Bowling Inn Alley for a roomier house in Black Raven Passage, off Cursitor Street, owned by a Mr. Thomas Burnell, a well-known carver in stone and Master of the Masons’ Company, who kept a room on the ground floor as an office but let off the rest. The three boys were at school all day, and only Isobel remained with her mother, while her stepfather, Bob Farquhar, though still affectionate, easygoing and good-natured, was now fatter, coarser and lazier than ever, and very often the worse for drink.

  Mary Anne tried to discuss this with her mother, but her mother, proud and reserved, would not be drawn. “Men have their faults,” was all she would say. “If it’s not one thing, it’s the other.”

  The other, Mary Anne supposed, must be women. Her stepfather sometimes came home very late at night and when he did creep in, sheepish, tipsy, winking an eye at her as he had done when she was younger, she would feel like boxing his ears. Her mother wore a martyred look. She complained without words, and Mary Anne found herself divided between the two and sorry for both. She was young and gay and bursting with life, and she wanted everyone about her to be happy. Meanwhile the days had to be spent in dusting for her mother, and teaching Isobel multiplication, and walking up and down Holborn looking in the shops. Her fine education seemed to be wasted. Charley was still the companion, the favorite, but even he seemed young to her grown-up eye, and when he begged her for stories the romances of Ham in Essex took the place of the silver button and the “Forty-Five.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I didn’t answer his note, of course. I threw it away.”

  “Did you see him in church?”

  “Not him. The other one.”

  “Which did you like best?”

  “I didn’t fancy either. They were only boys.”

  Yet waving from a window had been amusing enough, and there was no one to wave to in Black Raven Passage.

  After Christmas Bob Farquhar, who had been coming home at three in the morning for several weeks, did not come home at all. Nobody had seen him. He had not turned up at the printing house, nor at the coffeehouse, nor at the taverns. An accident was feared, and enquiries were made, but without result. Finally, eight days afterwards, when his distraught wife was preparing to buy crêpe and a widow’s bonnet, a laconic note came from the culprit, saying that he had left home for good, and the printing house too, and had gone to live with a woman in Deptford.

  Mrs. Farquhar collapsed. She confessed that she had suspected something of the sort had been going on for years. She had scraped and saved to put aside a little sum that would help them in the eventuality that had now come. But the sum would not last many months. Something would have to be done.

/>   “But he has to support you,” said Mary Anne. “The law will make him.”

  “No law can make him do what he doesn’t want.”

  “Then the law should be changed,” said Mary Anne.

  Injustice—there was always injustice between men and women. Men made the laws to suit themselves. Men did as they pleased, and women suffered for it. There was only one way to beat them, and that was to match your wits against theirs and come out the winner. But when, and how, and where?

  “If I could find a rich man, I’d go to him tomorrow,” she told Mr. Day.

  Mr. Day did not answer. She looked very bewitching as she said it. It was tempting to make some sort of a proposal immediately, but he was cautious. He must feel his way. And he did not want Mrs. Farquhar and a great brood of unruly boys under his roof. That was not his intention at all.

  “Of course,” he said, “your mother, as a married woman, can plead her coverture when tradespeople press her for bills.”

  “What do you mean, plead her coverture?”

  “The husband is liable for all payments for goods, not the wife. No claim can be made against the wife.”

  This at least was something. But it did not help much, because as soon as tradespeople knew that her stepfather had deserted her mother they would no longer supply her with goods. If no rent was paid either, Mr. Burnell would turn them out. She must see Mr. Burnell. Something might be done with Mr. Burnell.

  “Meanwhile,” she pleaded, “will you let me correct copy for you again? I did it once. I can do it now.”

  She was very persuasive and Mr. Day agreed, but he made the stipulation that Charley should fetch and take back the copy. It was not pleasant for a young lady to hang about Fleet Street.

  Mary Anne’s next move was to ask Mr. Burnell if they might remain on in Black Raven Passage.

  Mr. Burnell possessed a good town house in another part of the city—he used the office because it was handy to his stone yard in Cursitor Street—and, having won renown for his fine carvings in several churches, he had just been appointed mason to the Inner Temple. This plum had long been his ambition, and he knew himself to be the envy of all his colleagues. Word had already got round of his appointment, and he was receiving congratulations from callers when Mary Anne descended the staircase from the floor above. A busy man, he had little time to notice the Farquhars. They seemed a good sort of people, and gave no trouble, and paid their rent, which was all that was necessary. He had nodded to the daughter home from boarding school when he had passed her in the entrance, but had never observed her closely. This must be she, then, joining in the congratulations and speaking so enthusiastically of his future appointment.