The Fourth Queen Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Part Two

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Part Three

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Afterword

  Further Reading

  A Reader's Guide

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to

  Gillian Allnutt, Andrea Badenoch,

  Julia Darling, Peter Day,

  Elizabeth Fairbairn, Kitty Fitzgerald,

  Maggie Gee, Chrissie Glazebrook,

  Penny Smith, and Margaret Wilkinson

  for comments on early drafts of the manuscript;

  to my agent, Judith Murray, and

  my editor, Harriet Evans,

  for their input in the final stages;

  and to my partner,

  Bill Herbert,

  who was involved at every stage.

  The Fourth Queen

  was supported by a

  Northern Arts Writers' Award.

  “At a place called Mill of Steps stood a cottage, which was once the residence of the Empress of Morocco. She was the daughter of a cottager, who discorded with her parents and left them, taking nothing but what she had on.

  “While crossing the Atlantic for America her vessel was captured by an African pirate and carried into Morocco. Her beauty having captivated the affections of the Emperor, she soon became Empress.

  “The maiden name of the Empress was Gloag, of which several persons of that name are still living in the parish.”

  Antiquities of Strathearn, with Historical and Traditionary Tales and Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Individuals belonging to the District, by John Shearer, 1836. Mill of Steps is a hamlet just outside the village of Muthill in Perthshire, Scotland.

  Chapter 1

  HELEN LOWERED THE BUNDLE SHE WAS CARRYING onto the floor and stared around the ship's passenger cabin. It was crammed with people, blundering about in the semidarkness, tripping over one another's belongings, laying claim to the strange cloth beds that hung like strings of onions from the walls.

  She sank back against the wall. She'd imagined little round windows, splashed with saltwater; perhaps a few neat partitions to separate family groups. Not this creaking barn, with its slimy, swaying floor.

  To stop herself from crying, she closed her hands into fists and forced her nails into the flesh of her palms. She'd no one to blame but herself. If she hadn't run away, what's the worst that could have happened? Meg couldn't have stayed angry with her forever. She thought of her old box bed at home, the blankets smelling of sweet hay and woodsmoke. If she left now she'd be back at Muthill in less than a fortnight.

  Below water level the only daylight came from two trapdoors with ladders leading up to the main deck. She could smell rancid butter and rotting fish, and a midden stink was already seeping from the close-stools behind the screen in the corner. Vomit nudged at the back of her throat. She had to spend the next twelve weeks in this place, buried with a hundred other souls like worms in a coffin.

  She squeezed her fists tighter and her nails bit deeper. Why did she never think before she did things? Going to John Bayne's house in the middle of the night, barefoot, like a hussy. Did she expect to be treated like a lady? No wonder he'd taken her to his servants' quarters. Retching into her shawl, she blundered toward a ladder and scrambled back up toward the light.

  Outside there was shouting everywhere. Men were rolling barrels toward holes in the deck or spidering high overhead in a web of ropes and poles. Others leaned over the side hauling sacks up from the skiffs bobbing far below in the water. A man with porridge skin spied her standing there, young and dazed and pretty, and started toward her grinning like a dog. Stumbling over a coil of rope, she turned and fled toward the side of the ship.

  There was still time. She could persuade one of the skiffs to take her back to the Greenock quay. Leaning over the railings, she looked down at the unruly flotilla nudging at the ship's belly like puppies. She thought of hailing one and scrambling down a rope ladder. Then what? She'd no money for the stagecoach to Perth, and no one to go with. Her traveling companions, Betty and Dougie, were still in the cabin; they'd never go back with her. There was nothing back at Muthill for them but digging neeps for a pittance for the rest of their lives: this journey to the Colonies was their only hope.

  Pressed against the ship's railings, Helen felt cornered. She thought of the sturdy, well-ordered cottage she'd left behind; of her father, Muthill's blacksmith, his big kind hands and leather apron; of the gray kirk school; of the river skipping over clean pebbles by the mill. How could she have run away from all that? And the weans; and Meg, her stepmother, for all her fierceness. Meg was right to be angry with her, sneaking home with bruised lips at five in the morning. But she'd have calmed down eventually—if Helen hadn't slammed out of the cottage. And seen Betty and Dougie in the distance, setting off on the first stage of their journey to America. Now it was too late. Now she was trapped on this ship and there was no going back. Her chest tightened and panic clogged her throat.

  She needed somewhere to cry; somewhere no one could see her. Climbing over a pile of lumpy sacks, she squeezed behind a stack of hen coops and crouched down out of sight. The hens jostled and pecked at one another in their cramped quarters. Helen watched a smashed egg ooze slowly out between the bars and began to feel calmer.

  After a while she knelt up and peered cautiously out. Soon she noticed a small group of people boarding the ship. They must have come on a special boat because they were far too well dressed to have been ferried out with the pea sacks and cheese barrels like the other passengers. She counted five men; but it was the one woman, in a vivid green cloak, that caught her attention.

  The woman was swaying slightly, as if she were going to swoon, holding onto one of the men's arms with a lace-gloved hand. The other men clustered anxiously around her and one ba
rked an order to a passing sailor, who ran off to fetch a small folding chair.

  The woman hesitated, looking down at the chair. It was a rickety little thing, with thongs strung through it for a seat. Even at this distance, Helen could tell she'd never sat on such a crude thing in her life. The woman laughed and shook her head, clearly protesting that she felt much better. Then, in a sudden change of mood, she was tugging on her husband's arm and pointing, urging him to check on the sailors who were lugging their bags onto the ship.

  Kneeling in her filthy skirt, Helen watched transfixed as grown men scurried to serve the pale-haired woman in her emerald-green cloak. What must it be like to be cared for like that? After a while, the man who'd ordered the chair bowed to the group and gestured toward the upper part of the ship, clearly offering to conduct them to their quarters. Quite forgetting her distress, Helen slipped out of her hiding place and hurried across the deck after them.

  “Helen! Thank God! We were afeared you'd gone over the side!” It was Betty, red-cheeked and breathless, running toward her. “Listen, we've to go down the stores with our tickets. One of the sailors said we've to get our names set down on a list before we can get our food. He said the food's not that good, but if we talk sweet to the steward, he'll maybe let us have some of what they keep for the captain's guests.”

  Helen started, as though jolted from sleep. She looked at Betty's scabby chin and rabbit teeth, her stained armpits and stringy hair. With a wee thump of shame, she saw the two of them on the deck together: a pair of flea-bitten peasant girls plotting for rich folks' tidbits.

  Letting herself be dragged back to the rear of the ship, she ducked in through a low doorway and followed Betty along a narrow corridor and down two ladders into the very belly of the ship. It gurgled like intestines at this depth, creaking and rocking, lit here and there by lanterns that spilled unsteady stains of yellow light on the dank boards.

  “Phew! It smells worse than a tinker's knob down here.” Betty wrinkled her nose and squinted down the passage. “Look, down the end where those folks are waiting. That must be the steward. Here, you're the bonny one. Take these tickets and show him a bit of titty—” And she thrust three wooden tickets into Helen's hand and gave her a shove.

  The steward was sitting in a pool of lamplight, unshaven and grunting. He licked a stubby forefinger and riffled through a ledger on a small table wedged between his fat knees. His wig perched on a barrel beside him and a few long, gray hairs clung to his greasy scalp. His small eyes flicked across the faces in the queue.

  A few minutes later Helen was standing in front of him, holding out the tickets. At Betty's urging, she'd loosened the front of her blouse and shaken her copper curls around her face.

  “Name,” he grunted, dipping his quill.

  “There are three of us,” she said and spelled out their names while he printed them laboriously on his ledger. A fly landed on his head and staggered over the shiny skin as he wrote.

  “Two lassies and a lad, eh?” He looked up and his eyes narrowed. “And is Master Douglas your sweetheart, Miss Helen?” His eyes were level with her crotch. For a split second Helen saw herself running headlong down the passageway, running and climbing into the sunlight, running and diving into clean, bright water.

  “I haven't got a sweetheart.” She forced her lips into a smile and swayed her hips. “I'm still looking for the right man.”

  “And what kind of man would that be?” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “We-e-ell,” she pretended to consider. “It'd have to be a generous kind of man, one who'd take care of me and my friends. Do you know anyone like that?”

  Now he was grinning broadly up at her. She could smell raw onion on his breath, see tufts of hair bristling from his nostrils. “Well, Miss Helen, I may know someone exactly fitting that description. Why don't you come back later this evening, so I can introduce you to him?”

  “YOU DON'T HAVE TO RADGE HIM,” whispered Betty excitedly on the way back to the cabin. “Just let him squeeze your arse, and suck on your paps a wee bit.”

  Helen shuddered. “I can't, Betty. Did you see his teeth? I couldn't bear to let him kiss me with that mouth of rotten pebbles.”

  “It won't kill you.” Betty rounded on Helen. “You owe us at least that much for bringing you with us. I don't know what you're moaning on about anyway. It's only a wee cuddle.”

  “But I've never done anything like that before—”

  “Well, aren't you the lucky one, Helen Gloag? Maybe it's about time you learned what it's like. Maybe it's about time you had to waggle your arse like the rest of us for a bit of something decent to eat!”

  “I'm not whoring for anybody's vittles.”

  “So, I'm a whore now, am I? And what makes you think you're any better? Do you think you're the only lass as ever canoodled with John Bayne?”

  “What do you mean?” Helen's forehead felt clammy.

  “I mean I've seen him giving money to a lassie in Crieff—and he wasn't paying for conversation. What's the matter? Did you let him have it for nothing?”

  But Helen didn't wait to hear any more. She was running down dark passages and up ladders, elbowing past people, not caring where she was going. She saw a door half-open to her left and rushed through it, slamming it behind her. And suddenly she was in a different part of the ship—quieter, cleaner—and she was standing, panting, facing three narrow doors with polished brass handles. As she stood there, one of the doors opened and a tall man stepped out.

  She recognized him immediately. It was the husband of the elegant woman on the deck. “I knew I'd heard something!” he said. Then, over his shoulder to his wife: “It's just some lassie—lost her way by the looks of it. I thought you were the cabin boy with our tea,” he explained to Helen with a smile.

  Then a thought struck him and he took a coin from his waistcoat. “Could you go and hurry him up? My wife claims she's dying of thirst.” And he put the coin into her hand and closed the door in her face.

  BETTY FOUND HER, HOURS LATER, shivering, wedged again behind the hen coops on the deck. A sea mist had risen and the timbers were dark and wet.

  “They've pulled up the anchor,” said Betty, taking her hand. “D'ye want to say good-bye to Scotland?”

  Chapter 2

  Marrakech, May 23, 1769

  BEING UGLY, I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN INTERESTED IN Beauty. Not out of envy, vous comprenez. I have never felt the luxury of mere envy—for what is envy but the fantasy of possessing what one envies? No, my brand of Ugliness is so far removed from your ordinary Comeliness that I cannot image the series of approximations that might take me from where I am to where Beauty stands.

  It does interest me, however. Indeed you could say that Beauty has become my profession. For am I not Chief Custodian of the Harem of the Emperor of Morocco? A thousand beauteous lasses, a fleshy rainbow of hues from every corner of Africa, all gathered here for the delectation of His Majesty Sidi Mohammed the Seventeenth: God may be their Creator but I am their Curator.

  Ah, but Beauty comes in strange guises in this land of camels and couscous. You'll find no plucked eyebrows or boned bodices here; no waxed kiss-curls or bobbing ringlets frame the faces of these concubines.

  Au contraire, many of my charges have their heads shaved, for nothing else displays a fine skull and cheek scars so well. Others' native hair is a bush of such dense corkscrews that you would think the skills of a gardener were required to clip it to shape. As to eyebrows: your Moor claims a muckle thick caterpillar is required to lend definition to the eye. For the best effect, the brows should be joined in the middle, and lasses who have not been thus blessed by their God will paint in a dark bridge betwixt the two with kohl.

  Yet all other vestiges of hair on a woman are abhorred with a loathing that borders on terror, which I trace to that apoplexy that assails the Moor at any hint of Masculinity in his mates. So a woman must remove even the gossamer down from her cheek, and those sweet furrings on forearm and
finger.

  It is this fear of the Masculine in his women that accounts for your Moor's partiality to portliness. Believe me, I am not referring to any ordinary plumpness here. No, Beauty in Barbary must ripple and judder. She must cascade like candle grease; wobble like a blanc-manger; quiver like oysters in aspic. There should be such a yielding softness about her, that makes the most flaccid of homunculi seem hard by comparison.

  Yet she must not be so large as to seem smothering. For the intent, if I have understood it correctly, is to give the man back his mother in a form he can command. Thus the desire for the big woman is a kind of revenge: on the ogress who overwhelmed the wee laddie. Hence it is your placid Pantagrella who is in demand in this land, who combines Bigness with a beguiling Biddability.

  But my pen is running away with me. Reader, let me introduce you to the Author of these pages. In the Land of the Dwarves, I would be considered a fine specimen. My teeth are straight, my skin good, and my eyes (though I say so myself) are a perfectly enchanting shade of gray. But set on this Earth to live among Giants as I am, my finer attributes are, literally, overlooked. And it's my legs that define me, being somewhat truncated and bowed out at the knee; and my brow, which balloons forth above my eyes. In this Land of Giants I am the runt pup escaped from the drowning sack.

  In my darker hours I muse on the motives of our Good Shepherd for hauling my sack, and others like it, from the river. Far from culling His misshapen ewes and two-headed lambs, He would seem to desire a world teeming with every manner of Deformity. And I ponder how this penchant for the Crooked might have impinged on His early career as Carpenter. How could He ever have discarded His squint posts and skewed dovetails? His favorite chairs would have rocked like coracles on their uneven legs, while heaped plates slithered inexorably from His slant tables.

  But should you question His apparent scarcity of Skill, I wager that He would simply take you by the hand and conduct you around the humbler bothies of Bethlehem. And there directed your eyes to protruding rocks and sloping floors, bulging walls and crumbling rafters, and in each irregular niche, triumphantly apt, would be one of His cockeyed creations.

  So perhaps I have finally found my true niche: sitting cross-legged here on my cushion with my pen in my hand. The whole Harem is snoring, drugged by the heat, and sweat gathers in the creases of my elbows and causes my fingers to slip on the quill.