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ship
Experiment
. She made a start with that most innocent of dishes: Brinny’s best receipt for Apple Pie. For there was magic in even that – the taking of uneatables: sour apples, claggy fat, dusty flour - and their abradabrification into a crisp-lidded, syrupy miracle.
Mother Eve’s Secrets
, she titled her book, a collection of best receipts and treacherous remedies. As her pen conjured the convict women’s talk, she reckoned it one of the few good things to have come to her from those last terrible years. Well, there had been Jack Pierce of course, but— she suffocated any further memory of Jack fast, before it shattered her to pieces.
    As she wrote, the means to accomplish her revenge formed in her mind, so boldly that she laughed out loud, and clapped her hand across her mouth. She would be a cook! The very word delighted her. She would make herself busy in the downstairs of the household, butchering and baking, and doling out whatever was deserved. As she recalled incomparable dishes and counterfeit cures, she imagined herself the mistress of a great store of food. As big as a house, she dreamed it, a palace made of sugarplums, or a castle baked of cake. The serpent that would be a dragon must dine well. But could any store ever be vast enough, to sate her hunger for all she had lost?

5
Greaves, Lancashire
Summer 1792
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    âˆ¼ Pease Pudding ∼
    Take your pease and wash and boil them in a cloth, take off the scum and put in a piece of bacon and whatsoever herbs you have. Boil it not too thick, serve with the bacon and pour on the broth. Next day, whatsoever you have left over, slice it and fry it.
    Grace Moore, her cheapest dish
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    It was a dream that heralded the day my life changed: a dream of John Francis aged seventeen again, a long-limbed, smooth-faced youth. He had been invited to dine at Palatine House. My mother, bless her soul, was alive again and smiling, and even Father was agreeable. I too was young again, sixteen years old, overflowing with feelings since quite lost to me.
    We sat about the table and picked at Mother’s genteel sweetmeats: apricot biscuits, quince paste, and sugared walnuts. John caught my eye whenever he could; there was a teasing mischief to his looks that banished my usual awkwardness. When my parents left us alone, John’s large hand, very warm, slipped under the table and took hold of mine. Then he kissed me, very tenderly and moist, on the lips. He held my face in his big-knuckled hands and something passed between us; something so powerful that my girlish hopes burst into life. I was like a scrawny chick comprehending its marvellous change into a dove. I was young and giddy with pleasure, struck with wonder that this was how my life would be.
    Instead I woke to a muzzy July dawn. My feet poked out from the end of my childhood bed. I idled for a while, picking those strips around my nails that they call ‘mother’s blessings’, rehearsing my dream to extend its pitiful life. Then, as the Brabantists do, I asked myself what portents it contained. Food was generally deemed to be God’s bounty, unless it was a monarch’s banquet, when it signified the sin of gluttony. Was that slow kiss the Devil’s work? I could not believe wickedness could feel so thrilling.
    I got up, for my nail began to bleed from an ugly wound. Perhaps the dream was only a cruel figment sent to torture me? Above me hung John’s portrait; all I had left of him since he’d sailed away. And I remembered events as they truly had been, my father lying drunken on the ground, and John Francis looking at me in a sort of agony. After that, any lad who even smiled at me got short shrift from my father. Then Father made his decision. ‘You must bide with me now, Grace,’ he said. ‘I’ll not take a servant, for no free soul should slave for another. But as my daughter it’s your duty to keep house for me, now your mother has