The Potato Factory Read Free Page A

position in society befitting her role as a wealthy widow with two beautiful daughters and four handsome sons, all eligible to be married into the best local families. It had always been quite clear in Hannah's mind that Ikey would not be a witness to her eventual triumph over the ugly scars which had so cruelly spoiled her face and with it, her fortune.
    In the intervening period, Hannah felt that she had sound control of her husband. Her sharp and poisonous tongue kept him defensive and it was as much in her natural demeanour to act the bully as it was for Ikey to be a coward. She prodded him with insults and stung him with rude remarks as to his appearance. Ikey was constantly shamed in her presence. He knew he possessed no useful outside disguise to fool his fellow man and he greatly admired this propensity in her, who added further to his infatuation by giving him six children and proving his miserable, worthless and reluctant seed accountable.
    Moreover, Hannah had gratified him still further, for none of his children had inherited any onerous part of his physiognomy and all took their looks strongly from her. She claimed that Ikey's puerile seed had been overwhelmed by her own splendid fecundity and, as he had no confident reason to doubt that this was true, he was grateful that she brought an end to his line of unfortunate looks. Hannah, who so clearly held Ikey in her thrall, had no cause whatsoever to suspect him capable of dalliance with another. The thought of a Mary or any other such female coming into Ikey's life was beyond even Hannah's considerable imagination or lack of trust in her husband.
     
Chapter Two
     
    Temper and charm, it was these two contradictions in Mary's personality which were the cause of constant problems in her life. She showed the world a disarming and lovely smile until crossed. Then she could become a spitting tiger with anger enough to conquer any fear she might have or regard to her own prudent behaviour. In a servant girl, where mildness of manner and meek acceptance were the characteristics of a good domestic, Mary's often fiery disposition and sense of injustice were ill suited. However, without her temper - the pepper and vinegar in her soul - it is unlikely that she would have captured Ikey's unprepossessing heart.
    Mary was the child of a silkweaver mother and a sometimes employed Dutch shipping clerk. She grew up in Spitalfields in pious poverty brought about by the decline in the silk and shipping trades in the years following Waterloo. Mary's consumptive mother was dying a slow death from overwork. Her despairing and defeated father sought solace in too frequent attention to the bottle. At the tender age of five Mary had learned to hawk her mother's meagre wares in nearby  Rosemary  Lane  and  to   defend  them  from stock buzzers and the like. She quickly learned that a child faced with danger who screams, kicks, bites and scratches survives better than one given over to tears, though it should be noted that she was of a naturally sunny disposition and her temper was spent as quickly as it arrived.
    Mary was also the possessor of a most curious gift. Although she could take to the task of reading and writing no better than a ten-year-old from the more tutored classes, she could calculate numbers and work columns of figures with a most astonishing rapidity and accuracy well beyond the ability of the most skilled bookkeeping clerk.
    This ability had come about in a curious manner. Her father, Johannes Klerk, a name he'd amended simply to John Klerk when he'd come to England, had wanted Mary to be a boy and so instead of learning the art of silkweaving, as would have been the expected thing for a girl child to do, he had taught her the ways of figuring on an abacus. He learned this skill as a young man when he'd spent time as a shipping agent's clerk in the Dutch East Indies.
    He had first come across the rapid clack-clack-clacking of beads sliding on elegant slender