Gulliver's Wife Read online

  ‘Bold, evocative and brave – Gulliver’s Wife is a revelation in story-telling. I am in awe of Lauren Chater’s talent. Gulliver’s Wife had my heart from the opening line and didn’t let go until long after I finished the final page. An exquisitely told tale of love, loss and the magic of life.’

  TESS WOODS, AUTHOR OF LOVE AT FIRST FLIGHT

  ‘Wise, tender and heartening… Chater shows a deft hand in authentically recreating the challenges and injustices faced by the spirited women in her novel so that their setbacks and triumphs felt like my own.’

  SALLY PIPER, AUTHOR OF THE GEOGRAPHY OF FRIENDSHIP

  ‘Filled with evocative details of life in early 1700s London, Gulliver’s Wife is an enthralling reimagining of the lives of the women around Lemuel Gulliver, and an invitation to consider the untold stories of women throughout the history of literature.’

  SARAH ARMSTRONG, AUTHOR OF HIS OTHER HOUSE

  ‘A beautifully written novel that maintains a page-turning pace, heightened suspense and literal wonder on every page.’

  CASS MORIARTY, AUTHOR OF THE PROMISE SEED

  ‘Gulliver’s Wife is exquisite, empathetic and engrossing storytelling from an extraordinarily gifted writer.’

  WENDY J. DUNN

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  For my mother, who taught me

  about the wonders of life and death

  and everything in between

  ‘It is an inexpressible pleasure for travellers, when after many traverses and tossings too and again, they return quietly home to their studies and rememorates all the unexpected pleasure that they encountered with upon the one coast, and the horrible vexations and confusions that they had upon another.’

  The Ten Pleasures of Marriage, Aphra Behn, 1682

  ‘…a wife should be always a reasonable and agreeable companion, because she cannot always be young.’

  Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift, 1726

  Prologue

  The sea has given birth to a man.

  He dreams on a bed of sand and his dreams are slippery. They beat a gentle cadence: the soft whisper of plumage, teasing his mind with tokens of the past. His first fight as a student at the local grammar school, the fizz of blood in his veins, the taste of copper. His opponent’s face – he cannot recall the boy’s name – crumpling beneath his fist, features vanishing in a glossy oil painting of skin and teeth. He sees his mother’s thin body hunched over the writing desk, begging Uncle John for funds to send him to Cambridge college. Most of all, he dreams of the river, its start in Trewsbury Mead and then its course through the centre of London. He remembers a poem once read to him by his tutor, a few paragraphs of shambling script the man wrote himself. The work was badly formed, but one phrase stuck, one image: the Thames was the river of time, his tutor said. Between its currents we were born and within its muddy borders we must expect to expire.

  The water of this Indian Ocean is so different from the Thames, though.

  He lifts himself, or tries to, first one leg and then the other. They will not turn to account; his legs appear stuck fast, bonded to the sand with ropes of kelp. His guts cramp. He jerks his head upwards. A patch of hair near his forehead rips free of its moorings and beneath the searing pain, he feels blood pool in the cradle of his ear.

  God save me.

  Gulls wheel overhead, pale wraiths against the fading light. Their raucous cries split the air and raise goose pimples on his bare skin. When he set out from Bristol with the rest of the crew – a lifetime ago, it seems – two crows tore each other to shreds in the sky above the mast and a maelstrom of feathers and guts rained down across the deck.

  ‘An omen,’ someone said, and the others laughed. Did he laugh with them? He cannot remember, but the shrill noise of the gulls now fills him with a sickening dread and he can see himself as they see him, looking down from a great height. There is his hair, the colour of wet sand, fanned out against the shore and there his arms, hands clenched by his sides.

  Struggle as he might, he is caught, fastened like some ancient sacrifice. It’s useless to fight. He would do better to rest and conserve his energy for the struggle ahead, for whoever has him ensnared will surely return. There is no magic, after all. He, Lemuel Gulliver, is a man of logic and science. No room for pagan belief, omens or imaginings. When his opponent returns, he will take his chances and then, somehow, he will find his way home.

  The sun is beginning to sink on the horizon, just visible if he gazes down past the bridge of his nose. Water tickles his feet. The incoming tide.

  Each surge brings a spate of foam rushing up his legs, the sound muffled through the blood clogging his ear. Although he should be tense, he finds his muscles relaxing. He allows his head to fall back until he is floating, weightless. The water is warm. This is the end, he thinks, and the thought no longer seems troubling. There are worse ways to go. Laid out on an operating table beside his organs, or waiting for his guts to strangle him to death like Jimsy and the others whose bodies now rest at the bottom of the sea. It proved beyond him to help those men, but perhaps he can help himself. He can free his mind of its bonds, help cut away the extraneous fetters that tie him to this life. One by one, he sets them loose: his daughter, his son, his maps. His wife.

  A blast echoes, like the bugle cry of a horn, and his eyes fly open. Darkness. Water is everywhere, waves splashing up his cheeks. He is pulled in every direction, rolled into the surf. His mouth opens wide in surprise, allowing a glut of seawater to surge in. Unable to surface, he drinks, and as the water fills his lungs, imagines he is drinking the ocean dry. There will be nothing left but brittle coral and the pearly bones of dead men.

  Dizziness spins his head. He spits out a mouthful of bitter brine. Now seemingly unbound, he claws the current with his hands, legs kicking. Exhilaration swoops through his body, inflating his limbs as he breaks the surface. Water slaps his chest, his toes grip the sea bed. Each breath is a bellows, a furnace sparking fire in his chest.

  The shore within grasp, he lunges out and falls headfirst, flailing, into the wash. Spent, he lets the small waves caress his face.

  Only then does he hear the voices.

  1

  Wapping, London

  April, 1702

  ‘Widow Gulliver, is it true your husband once saw a monster?’

  Everybody turns and Mary’s cheeks grow hot under the hawkish scrutiny of a dozen pairs of eyes. The confinement room above Stewart’s bakery seethes with gossips. Some are Sal Stewart’s neighbours, but others hail from further afield – Sal’s sister, for instance, who has travelled from Dorset on the coach. Ranged about on sofas and chairs, they are waiting, expectant, wine glasses half-raised to parted lips.

  Mary frowns at the bed where she is knuckle-deep in Sal’s privities. The presence of gossips is an unfortunate necessity. Should Sal’s infant die, their testimony will protect her from whispers of murder and witchcraft. Mary is so used to performing her tasks in front of an audience that the intrusion of voices doesn’t often bother her. Today she wonders if the benefit is worth the fuss.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she mutters. ‘I cannot say. I wasn’t there.’

  The gossips explode, all of them talking at once, reminding her of a fire that broke out six months ago at the builders’ yard. How swiftly that single column of flame multiplied, flaring over and over, until every man was hacking at the burning rigs in
their timber cradles to save the ships before they burned. The women toss questions at her: How big was the monster? What did it look like? How did he fight it off?

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says, or, ‘I can’t presume.’

  When they tire of the subject, talk turns to other things: Queen Anne’s impending coronation, the Spanish war, the treacherous French, the soaring cost of sugar. Poor Sal, sweltering on the bed, is all but forgotten.

  ‘How are you faring?’ Mary says. Beneath her hands, Sal’s body shudders. Sweat slicks her face and neck. She wears a man’s knee-length cotton shirt, her breasts splayed beneath the thin fabric, nudged aside by her belly’s heaving swell. ‘Not long now.’ Mary smears the blood and mucus from her fingers onto a clean clout.

  Sal struggles onto her elbows. ‘You felt it? The child?’

  ‘Yes, he’s a good head of hair on him. I hope you’ve trimmed enough bonnets.’

  Sal’s face breaks open in a smile before the pain begins to build and she must succumb to the spasmodic urges of her body. Mary tracks her movements with a sharp eye. This is the second child Mary has helped Sal birth; she remembers the first, a white-skinned poppet who, despite Mary’s fervent ministrations, never opened her eyes in this life. Sal’s grief-struck keening haunted her for weeks afterwards. She couldn’t help thinking of her own lost souls back in the early days of her marriage, their clotted endings in the chamber pot after a night of cramps. Many physicians (and even some midwives) consider a lifeless child a gross aberration, but Mary has never thought it so. Each child, however tiny, however imperfectly formed, is human in her eyes; each worthy of its mother’s love.

  Sal’s groans intensify. ‘Lord help me,’ she mutters, bunching her husband’s shirt in her hand. From downstairs comes the rhythmic thump of fists pummelling dough and the yeasty smell of bread loaves rising in a hot oven. The gossips have quietened. Someone passes sweetmeats, but the platter of candied fruits and marchpane revolves twice before returning to the table, untouched. Everyone has lost their appetite for both conjecture and comestibles; their attention is riveted, at last, on the struggle taking place at the edge of the bed, where Mary has propped the baker’s wife on her knees. The close air in the room is charged. All the women feel it, though they won’t admit the truth even to themselves: low-down tugging, the sympathetic contraction and stretch of uterine walls.

  With much encouragement, the baby’s crown appears, an ellipsis of dark matted hair, vanishing and reappearing. Each surge brings Sal’s infant closer to the moment of separation, the slippage between two existences. Mary dangles the eaglestone near Sal’s buttocks. The small geode belonged to her mother, who used it to tempt little imps out of their cosy wombs.

  On the cusp of this precipice, Sal’s body flags.

  ‘I can’t!’ she wails, after another half an hour of pushing has passed. ‘I’m done!’ She pounds the mattress with her fists and writhes, possessed. The women step back; even Kat, a ruddy country wife who birthed six of her own, looks sorrowful and cannot summon the right words to help.

  Mary leans down, whispering encouragement, pleading, promising, until Sal’s spirit reignites and she roars.

  The child slips out into Mary’s hands: greasy, shivery blue, sprouting black hairs on his head as soft as thistledown. Apoplectic cries tremble his body; his legs jerk like a frog’s. Mary cuts the navel cord and hands him to his mother, who collapses back on the bed, pulling him to her chest. The room fills with the sound of contented suckling. Kat opens the shutters, warm sunlight flooding in as mother and infant observe each other, the baby’s lids already at half-mast.

  Mary, bundling up the afterbirth, notes the tender way Sal cradles her dimpled deity. In all the years she’s been helping women birth their babies, this first meeting between mother and child still strikes her as nothing short of sacred. Life is hard for Mary’s clients, not just its inception but its continuity. A bout of illness, a lean winter, wars fought in distant lands: any one of these things can tip the balance. She knows, better than most, how fortunes can tumble, how luck, good or ill, can mean the difference between plenty and poverty. Infants under her care are always expiring because their very grasp on this life is fragile as the roots of a primula. When Mary was a girl, she used to pester her mother, demanding to know why death claimed some and spared others. Over many years, she’s come to accept that there are no answers, no talismans or potions which can halt death in its tracks, but knowing she has played her part in the triumph of these living births is its own reward.

  George Stewart appears in the doorway, twisting his apron nervously, his dark hair floured winter-white. Mary shows him how to make a cradle with his arms.

  ‘Why, he weighs no more than a loaf of rye,’ he says, blinking down in wonder. The infant purses his cupid lips, dreaming of milk, milk and more milk. George’s forehead creases, no doubt thinking of the little girl, resting under the grassy hump in Bonehill. Mary blows gently over the newborn’s face until he crinkles his nose and flutters his dark lashes.

  ‘He’s beautiful, George,’ she says, her smile full and warm. ‘A healthy boy. He intends to stay.’

  ‘Aye,’ George says, bestowing clumsy kisses upon the small fingers welded tight to his own. ‘Aye, Mary, you’re right.’

  * * *

  On the step of Stewart’s bakery, Mary swelters in the afternoon heat, clasping an enormous basket of loaves and cakes. A warm breeze teases the folds of her red midwife’s cloak and billows the loose stomacher and wide grey sleeves; the flexible fabric allows her to catch slippery babies with ease or wield a mattock into the hard earth of the garden. Around her, women depart the bakery in groups of twos and threes, complaining of the heat.

  ‘Farewell, Missus Gulliver!’ calls Elsie Burr.

  ‘Good luck,’ Mary calls back. ‘God be with you!’

  Elsie grins and pats her belly. Only a few weeks stand between this day and her own confinement, although since she lives upriver, she falls under Midwife Hopkins’s care. Her hatless hair gleams as she strides away, arm in arm with her mother. They pass a hog rooting through a pile of steaming refuse; alerted, it lifts its head and charges. The older woman screams but Elsie, clutching her stomach, chases after it. For a woman approaching confinement, she is remarkably spry, but then Mary has known pregnant women threatened by danger to summon the combined strength of four or five men. She’s seen one mother face down a rabid dog and yet another mount a burning staircase to drag her children to safety.

  The frightened hog veers left and Elsie pursues it all the way to the corner, shouting obscenities. When it disappears, she returns, red-faced, and the two women resume their slow perambulation.

  ‘That one will have no trouble in the confinement room.’

  Mary turns to find one of Sal’s many cousins standing nearby, clutching a worn travelling case. The woman’s face is tanned and freckled under the broad brim of her hat. Even here in Wapping – an East London melting pot of impoverished dockland families, nomadic sailors and enterprising businessmen – the woman’s old-fashioned dress and way of speaking marks her as other. She is, perhaps, the wife of a farmer who works the fields beyond greater London.

  ‘I’m bound for Bell’s Inn,’ the woman says. ‘There’s no room here at Sal’s. Kat has crammed everyone in the parlour, sleeping head to toe. She is bossier than a shepherdess with a wayward flock and I would rather spend the night with a stranger than listen to her scold.’ She peers into the basket George has filled with loaves and cakes. ‘Will you need help eating all those?’

  Mary smiles. ‘My daughter Bess is always hungry.’

  The woman clucks. ‘I hope you will enjoy some yourself. You deserve it. I’ve no babies of my own, but if I did I would pray for a midwife like you. It was your encouragement made the difference to her today. I noticed, even if others didn’t.’

  Mary flushes. ‘Sal would have done it herself,’ she says. ‘With or without my encouragement. Women sometimes do not know what they are capa
ble of.’

  The woman eyes her, curious. ‘How long you been a midwife?’

  ‘Forever, it feels like. It’s a long story. Too long for me to go into now… My mother taught me the trade, but she died when I was young. I didn’t practise again for years, until my late husband went to sea.’

  Sal’s cousin nods, taking in her words. ‘Your husband, the storyteller?’

  ‘Late husband.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I’m mighty sorry for your loss.’

  She shrugs off the woman’s polite platitude. It’s been three years now since Lemuel left on the Antelope, two and a half since a lad from the dry docks came to tell her that his ship had sunk off the coast of Sumatra. The funeral was held in Nottingham. She’d watched the men carry his empty coffin into the family crypt, expecting at any moment to see him spring out of the congregation and announce it was all a hoax. When the last of the mourners left, she approached the coffin to say her final goodbyes, a chill creeping up through the dank earth to numb her legs.

  Her grief was complex, a mystery even to herself. Letters had begun to arrive before they’d left London for the funeral – invoices demanding payment for credit accounts held in her husband’s name. One missive contained a sum so staggeringly large the shock sent her, trembling, to her knees. Flicking through the invoices was like perusing a directory of London’s most popular amusement halls. Names swam before her eyes – the Green Grasshopper, the Cheshire Cheese, the Rose and Lamb. Places she’d never even heard of, much less set foot in. Domestic mysteries unravelled as she remembered how each time Lemuel had returned from sea, he’d handed over a paltry amount of coins ‘for your keeping and that of the children’ and then the next day begged money from her purse, which she forfeited to keep the peace. All along, he’d been racking up more debts, out of her sight. In the crypt, there was no body to direct her anger towards, only an empty timber casket. She remembers leaving without a backwards glance, thinking that although the debts would need to be paid, there was some relief in knowing he would never again walk into their lives, bringing trouble with him like a swarm of fleas.