An Almond for a Parrot: the gripping and decadent historical page turner. Wray Delaney

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      Is it breeding that makes us what we are, or the muck we are born into, be that of a stable or a palace? Perhaps it is a smattering of both – and in my case, mingled with a sprinkle of magic. My father – if he really be my father – was one Captain Truegood, who gave up the Seven Seas to become a merchant in bricks. Finding that, like bread, bricks cannot be done without and like bread they are needed daily, soon he possessed more money than his feeble senses knew what to do with. His wealth enabled him to purchase an accomplished wife from a noble family, whose fortune had dwindled to little more than a title. My mother was seventeen when the contract was signed, and I can only imagine the disappointment of the marriage bed. Captain Truegood, no doubt drunk as was his way, made a hasty pudding of me. My mother’s sentiments upon such pitiless passion I will never know, for no sooner had she seen my face, than she decided very sensibly to depart this world. If there was misfortune in my life it was, I suppose, not to have had the sense to follow her, but once I made my arrival there was little I could do but grab life by the dairies and live it to my best advantage.

      What philosophical thought my father had about his nine months of marriage and subsequent widowhood, he never said. But Captain Truegood was a man of few words and those that came to him came through the grape and the grain, only to be distilled into ill-thought-out mumblings and ill-thought-out doings.

      My father had no interest in me other than to see me at first as a great nuisance and later as little more than a chambermaid. I will skip-hop over the inconvenience of my infancy for it is the general belief that nothing of value is to be remarked upon in the early stages of a female’s life, unlike that of the male. Several writers have deemed the early years of a young man to be of such momentous importance that they have even recounted the circumstances pertaining to the time before the sperm meets the egg. All I will say is that my father begat me and my father promptly forgot me.

      My first conscious memory is of the large wooden table in the kitchen. I spent most of my younger days hidden under it, keeping out of sight. That table was the centre of my world, the only solid thing in a house built on sand. I imagined its legs turning into roots that burrowed deep into the earth. No matter what else might befall me, the table would remain unmoved by fortune’s wheel, a constant, like Cook.

      Cook as good as brought me up; half-baked me, as she would say. Having no children of her own and little understanding as to what infants might need, for guidance she relied on her cookbook as if she hoped to find the method for the growing of children, just as there were recipes for every other kind of slaughtered meat. I’m not certain that she fully understood the recipes for she told me she believed reading was nothing to do with letters. Recipes, she said, were weighed in words and words were weighed in time. As with so much that Cook said, this meant little or nothing to my green ears, but I would often fall asleep to the rhythm of Cook kneading bread, rolling pastry, cutting meat.

      Did I long for my mother? Yes. Of a need for love, all children who haven’t known one put the absent parent into a cabinet of angels – or fairies, as in my case. The only place I felt close to my mother was the blue chamber. I knew her spirit had long escaped the house in Milk Street but the walls of her room held tight to her memory. I would talk to her about my many frustrations and ask why it was that my father had so little regard for me. She she was wise enough never to answer, but I would always find solace knowing her to be listening like a benign angel.

      I much preferred the company of servants to that of my father’s chuckle-headed friends whose delights mainly seemed to be pinned on wine, peppered by the gaming tables. СКАЧАТЬ