Can I See Your I. D.? by Chris Barton Read Free Book Online

flowers and feathers in your hair, and beat a gong and tambourine in the garden. You climbed trees, swam naked, shot arrows while running about, and rowed Mrs. Worrall around the pond.
    Mrs. Worrall’s friends, enchanted, came with objects for you to examine and secondhand stories of Asia to share with each other. Before them, you mugged, danced, gesticulated—and paid attention . Once they accepted that you could not speak English, they would say anything in front of you, all the time feeding you the material you needed to further your masquerade.
    That dagger, for example. One dedicated visitor brought an Asian dagger, explaining to the other visitors how the natives used poison on the tip. Soon after, you just happened to demonstrate, rubbing juice from the leaves of a houseplant onto the blade, poking yourself with the tip, and then pretending to faint from the toxins.
    And all those books—what would you have done without them? Those the vicar had brought were just the beginning. No one suspected that you could actually make sense of the words while you perused the pictures.
    One guest brought a big book about Java, and your response was clear. This, you wanted them to understand, was your home.
    When another book included examples of Sumatran dialects, you seized on them—these, you wanted them to know, formed the tongue you spoke. And with a little inspiration from a volume depicting written languages from around the globe—Arabic and Persic, Sanskrit and Greek, Chinese and Malay—you produced spirals and loops and diamonds and dots from your own language.
    You took apart the information provided by those visitors, and then you put it back together in a way different enough and sufficiently exotic for your listeners to accept as the way things were in your homeland.
    What’s more, you were consistent. “Lazor” always meant “ladies,” “manjintoo” always meant “gentlemen,” “rampue” always meant “pigeon,” and so forth. You always greeted visitors with the palm of your hand placed against your temple—on the left for women, on the right for men. And after you got such a reaction with a morning escapade to the rooftop—where you chanted to “Alla Tallah,” the name for God that you spotted on page 316 of Pantographia —you made sure you returned to the roof each Tuesday.
    Above all, you flattered those who came to gawk at you. Or, rather, you gave them the opportunity to flatter themselves by showing how much they knew (or imagined they did) about exotic topics and showing how cultured the titles on their bookshelves were. They may have been making fools of themselves, but they sure felt smarter.
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    At last, this Sunday morning in Bath, you have arrived at the Circus, this great circular plaza in the middle of town. For now, you’re alone, but can Dr. Wilkinson be far behind? As you stroll about, never far from your mind is the story you concocted with the unwitting collaboration of the Worralls’ bluestocking guests—the story of how Princess Caraboo got to England in the first place.
    It involved not only a kidnapping but also deadly hand-to-hand combat. And two sets of pirates. And surgery performed on the back of your neck before you finally jumped overboard and swam onto the shores of England.
    You do have a scar at the base of your skull. And in fact, you did obtain that scar in the midst of an ordeal. It’s just that your actual ordeal did not resemble in the slightest the one that you shared with the folks in Almondsbury.
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    You were born Mary Ann Willcocks twenty-six years ago in Witheridge, Devonshire. A cobbler’s daughter, you were poor, and poorly educated. After a falling-out with your family, you left home without a penny or a change of clothes.
    Eventually, as you neared London, begging along the way and sleeping in haylofts when you had to, you got sick and were admitted to a