Chapter 7
London, England
Mary was eleven years old the day she learned she was a girl and wasn’t named Mark.
Mark’s stomach had ached that morning, like a mouse was chewing on his innards. But he’d ignored it as he picked up the baskets filled with fresh loaves. He clutched one wrapped loaf to his stomach. The heat seeped through his threadbare shirt, warming his blood and soothing his cramping belly.
A crowd of competing hawkers had gathered outside Mrs. Dalton’s bakery. Mark stood with Ma at the front of the line. If they could be the first to reach the north side of the harbor, they could sell eight baskets of provisions between the two of them and return home before dinner.
“Move it along,” jeered a snaggle-toothed man.
Ma did not betray any sign that she’d heard him. Instead, she calmly handed coins to Mrs. Dalton before shouldering her own baskets filled with hardtack. Her linen dress was the same pale color as the sky. The color of the Thames on a foggy London afternoon.
Ma stood tall despite her tattered skirts. The roped baskets hung from a staff across her back. Her dark hair appeared smooth as silk no matter the weather. She was so beautiful, and Mark suspected she didn’t know it. Or maybe she didn’t want to know it.
“Off we go, then,” Ma said with her usual brightness, striking off with a fast clip.
Mark trailed a few steps behind. With their brisk pace and well-honed route along the Thames, they arrived at the buzzing docks ahead of the other hawkers.
Salty air wafted toward Mark, rustling his straight dark hair tied with a simple leather cord.
The sight of the tall ships always took his breath away.
How did they manage to avoid crashing or tangling their anchors?
To stay afloat even during poor weather?
His stomach seized. He hoped it would go away soon, this case of bad milk.
“Bread?” Mark offered an approaching fishmonger. The man reeked of rotten cod. “Fresh made this morning,” Mark added. The man shook his head. So did the next one, and the next, until—finally—two sailors took a loaf to split and Mark pocketed the money.
“All of London seems to be out,” Ma said, returning from a deal with Captain Southwick, one of their regular customers.
“Fine fortunes today. The good captain bought two bags of hardtack.” Sweat gleamed on her brow, and her eyes danced with delight.
“I reckon we’ll be home early. Might even have enough sugar for a little cake. ”
But Ma’s grin faded in an instant. Mark followed her gaze down the wharf until he landed on a sailor saying farewell to a woman.
The lovers clasped hands, the man’s forehead pressed against the woman’s, and Mark could see the sailor’s lips moving.
He didn’t need to hear to understand. The woman sobbed into his chest before his superior shouted for him to board.
Ma sighed before turning away and scanning the horizon.
Mark couldn’t be sure, but sometimes he wondered if Ma waited for his father to return from one of his voyages.
To return from the dead. Having never met the man, Mark did not think to miss him.
But Ma’s eyes brimmed whenever Mark asked questions.
“My darling child,” his mother once said when tucking him into bed, “the greatest joy and greatest mistake of my life was loving a sailor.” Ma sang songs as she worked, as she scrubbed clothes or carved spiraling skins off of pale potatoes—songs of fishermen’s wives, songs she’d learned from seafarers, and songs so old that no one knew where they came from:
Found me a man who cut his heart in three,
The wind, the waves, and sometimes me.
One in two sailors make widows new.
I raise a cold cup to my ocean of sorrow.
Mark’s innards squeezed, and he could no longer ignore the pressure in his gut.
“I’ll be back, Ma,” he said, leaving the bread in his mother’s care. She nodded absently, understanding, as Mark scurried off to find a place where he could squat out of sight.
He clambered down rock stairs to the underside of a bridge. Then, as Ma insisted, he checked to make sure he was completely alone. When Mark pulled down his trousers, he froze.
Red. He was sticky with blood, his inner legs stained like a butcher’s knife.
His breath hitched.
I’m dying.
His pulse hammered. Ma praised Mark for not being easily frightened—not of the dark, not of strangers, not even of Mr. Robert’s feisty cat who lived on the opposite side of the thin wall.
But now, Mark was terrified.
I’m not ready to die!
Forgetting his urge to urinate and the pain in his abdomen, Mark yanked up his trousers. Blood had soaked through the backside, a cold feeling made all the colder as he sprinted back to the wharf.
Ma was haggling with a merchant. Mark repressed every impulse in his body to not interrupt the sale until it was complete.
“Thank you, sir. Good day,” Ma called after the buyer, that slight singsong quality to her voice fully returned.
How Mark longed to stay quiet. To not burden his mother with this news. It would break her heart. It would break his own heart to leave her.
“Ma,” Mark said, his mouth dry.
Her face fell as she took in his distress. She knelt down.
Mark drew close, whispering into her ear.
She snapped upright, gaze darting in both directions.
“I’m sorry, I—” Mark said.
“None of that rubbish. It is I who am sorry,” Ma said with gentleness.
She rooted through the bags and baskets until she removed a tattered shawl.
“You’re not dying, darling,” she said, with an urgency so quiet that Mark alone could hear it.
The firm confidence put Mark at ease. Ma wrapped the shawl around Mark’s shoulders, gauging the length.
“Ma?”
“Listen closely,” Ma said. Their mirroring mahogany eyes were level, serious.
“I’ll explain this—all of it—tonight.” Her eyes pooled, like she did whenever she spoke of Mark’s father.
Her unmistakable remorse left Mark feeling unsettled.
“Go home and wash. Don’t let a soul see the blood.
You understand, my dear? Clean yourself up, then start on dinner.
” Ma exhaled, then glanced at the remaining baskets.
She smiled a sad smile as she placed a cool hand on Mark’s cheek.
It was tender enough to make his eyes water.
“I’ll return as soon as I’ve sold the rest. And not a moment longer. ”
Later that night, Ma took Mark’s hands in hers. “Do you remember,” Ma said, her eyes intent and her back facing the crackling hearth, “all the times I’ve said that you are different from other boys?”
“Yes,” Mark said, cradling his knees on his sleeping mat in their rented single room.
Ma had reminded him of this difference often and urged discretion about this mysterious point.
His difference had remained unnamed, but Mark knew enough.
To avoid questions about his parentage. To dodge gossip about his and Ma’s circumstances.
To avert his gaze from bathing bodies. To squat away from any prying eyes while other boys urinated against the wall or into open gutters with body parts that looked altogether different from Mark’s own.
He’d known. Hadn’t he always known?
Had he not wanted to know the truth? If not knowing made Ma happy?
The bowls from the fish stew Mark had made were cold and untouched on the table. At his feet lay a neatly folded towel and a wash bin. Mark was “on the rag,” as it turned out. Not dying.
“And this … menstruation … is what makes me no longer a boy?” Mark asked, staring hard at the floorboards.
This unpleasant queasiness felt more like a painful inconvenience than a grand rite of passage.
If he wasn’t dying as he’d feared, why was it this, of all things, that required everything to change?
Ma winced. “Not exactly. This was my fault—a ruse to protect you. Our survival depends on the goodwill of a distant relative who thinks you are a son, not a daughter. It’s a long story.
But I didn’t want you to carry the weight of a constant lie—the haunt that eats me alive every day.
It seemed too cruel a thing to ask a child to do.
I see now that deceiving you was a fool’s errand.
Your bleeding reminds me that this fantasy cannot go on. I fear I’ve done more harm than good.”
Silent tears dripped off Mark’s chin. Despite the shock, another part of him felt a sense of relief, like he might no longer feel itchy in his own skin.
That he’d not been wrong in watching sailors’ wives at the docks, wishing he too might wear a long skirt that rustled as he walked.
Or that he’d desired, since before he could remember, to be seen as lovely like Ma—without knowing in full what that meant.
Ma pulled Mark into a hug, rocking him with soothing sounds. “I’m so sorry, darling. I thought we had more time. I saw no other way. But I was wrong.”
Mark felt his heart swell with a mix of affirmation and sorrow, all tinged with anger. Anger? Had he ever been angry at his mother? He’d trusted Ma completely.
“Do you want to eat?” Ma asked.
“No,” Mark said, rubbing his nose and puffy eyes.
“Do you want to rest? I can tell you more tomorrow.”
“No, I’m ready,” Mark said, trying to sound as old and wise as she was. “Tell me everything.”
Ma kissed the top of his head. “Very well, there is a lot to say,” she said, taking a deep breath. “But to begin, your name is Mary.”
The sound rang like a bell, vibrating from his ears to his toes. Mary. The name that Ma had given him—no, her. As Mark—Mary—huddled against the drafty hearth and listened to Ma that night, she missed nothing of Ma’s words, committing each startling phrase and revelation to memory.
There had been a firstborn, a son christened as Mark. The real Mark. A legitimate child.
A brother.
There had been not one, but two sailors.
A husband lost to the depths in a storm.
Then, a lover—Mary’s father—lost to the noose for piracy.
Ma was with child when the news spread. She, along with a group of forty-seven other women, begged Queen Anne to pardon the men, speaking to their skills and goodness.
But it all came to naught. That mental image of a man dangling from the end of a rope caused Mary to shudder.
Ma had moved herself and the first baby Mark in with friends living in the country, where she could give birth to a new baby in secret so that her husband’s distant family, whose charity she relied upon, would not withdraw their aid when they learned about her illegitimate child.
A bastard, Mary translated. A common enough insult at the docks.
“Do you understand?” Ma asked, explaining her firstborn’s early death to fever shortly after Mary was born. The floodwaters of grief. How Mary had been dressed and brought up as him for a crown a week—the thing that paid the rent even now.
“Can you forgive me?” Ma whispered.
Mary nodded. Her anger toward Ma felt foreign, like a bee-sting welt, and she longed for it to fade. Her mind snagged on the particulars as each piece moved into place, like all those ships taking berth at the dock. Finally, an honest accounting of her life.
A brother dead. To be missed forever.
A father lost.
“I have made many mistakes in my life,” Ma said. “But you were never one of them.”
A crown a week to survive.
“Say something?” Ma urged, wiping away a fresh set of tears. “You can hit me if you wish. As hard as you like.” But the joke made little sense, as Ma had never raised so much as a finger against her.
Mary blinked, dazed but suddenly quite hungry. This change would take time to absorb. All the rules of a baffling game that she’d believed to be unchanging.
For the rest of the night, Mark was too exhausted to be Mary, to learn how to be Mary. He took a seat at the table, and Ma followed. His mother appeared pale and nervous in a way Mark had not seen. His heart ached for Ma. For all the losses she’d suffered. The pain from a sea of secrets.
He hoped he made Ma’s life better—for Ma never once made him feel like a burden. That despite it all, the two of them could be enough. A family. Even as a bastard daughter.
“What do we do now?” Mark asked before picking up a spoon. His stomach still pained him, and he wasn’t sure how much was due to hunger, this newfound ache called womanhood, or Ma’s accounts.
Ma leaned back in the chair and ran a finger over the rough grain of the table.
“I don’t know. There’s still much to teach you about the world and a woman’s place in it—things no child should have to hear.
But no more secrets between us. This time, whatever tomorrow brings, we’ll decide on the path together.
You have my word.” Her voice broke as she reached out a hand. “And my whole beating heart.”