The Fraud Read Free Page B

although Grace and the vicar applauded appreciatively, the words quite took away Philip’s good humour and he longed again to be fighting the French, to be serving in His Majesty’s Navy in a bright blue uniform, not languishing around Bristol with an eight-year-old, and he dragged his little sister back out to King Street, marched into one of the new coffee houses where he would find other bored young men like himself, and Grace was brusquely sent home. It was dusk, pink clouds drifted there above the cobbled streets and the lines of masts. And unhappy Queen’s Square with its dreams of fading glory. And a lone child, dragging a shawl.
    It was her brother Tobias who first noticed how Grace instinctively copied the looks on other people’s faces around her as she watched them.
    ‘Be Venus, Gracie!’ he would encourage her, ‘Be Venus!’ Venus was the most haughty of the Marshall family; she emitted little sighs of exasperation at the vulgarity that surrounded her even in her own home. Grace would sigh very softly in unison as she watched her sister, hardly knowing she did so, and then encouraged by her naughty brothers she would wrinkle her nose in a disdainful manner as Venus did, and her brothers Tobias and Ezekiel would snigger behind their hands as Venus, oblivious, suffered nobly from the vulgar trials of her Bristolian life.
    Grace learned something important from Tobias. Ezekiel shouted and banged but Tobias could move without making a sound. Grace learned this skill from Tobias. He could be in a dim corner of a room and nobody would know, for nobody ever cared enough about him to say Where is Tobias? The family was too fractured to notice where small boys might be; he could be under a table, hidden by a long tablecloth, for hours, listening to the women talk of Nobility and Tribulation and Marriage. Why he should want to listen to such things was not known, but in broken families perhaps children try to belong when they can: often he would be there in the shadows. His mother was quite disconcerted if she suddenly understood he was near: ‘It is like having a French spy in the Family!’ she would cry, but Tobias had already disappeared.
     
    Marmaduke’s wilder and wilder card-playing became a real danger: money was owed, perilous shame loomed in the shadows of the dark, damp Bristol streets where honourable men paid on the nail (gold exchanged on the huge tables shaped like nails outside the Corn Exchange). It became urgently imperative for the older children to make successful marriages before disgrace destroyed them all: already there had been whispers about dishonest antecedents and financial difficulties.
    Quickly, O Lord, quickly, whispered Betty to herself as she poured sweet wine, Marriage, dear Lord, before we are entirely Doomed , as she took very large and urgent gulps. But there was no dowry, their good name was long gone: who would have them? Finally through Betty’s more and more desperate machinations Juno became betrothed to the short-statured son of an iron exporter, and Venus to a vintner: it was, alas, not what was hoped for but it was something at least. Betty then put all her energies into looking for a rich wife in Bristol society (‘Such as it is,’ she was heard to say bitterly, her expectations not having been reached) for her son and heir, the charming, dark-eyed Philip Marshall. But Marriage, not the Navy , she whispered to herself: he would be away too long, the Navy could not make him rich enough despite the rumoured prize money that some received. He must be rich now: he must find a rich Wife now and support us all . So Betty, a squire’s daughter, was to be seen looking over the vulgar daughters of Bristolian ship-owners in a now panic-stricken manner - and what young Grace Marshall was doing now nobody knew or cared.
    What Grace Marshall was doing now, aged eight, was following her father Marmaduke around Bristol, for she loved him and she thought to save him when he became