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

hospital. You were there for months, feverish and delirious. To try to set you right, they made an incision on the back of your neck, covering it with a warm cup to draw out your bad blood.
    When they released you, you stayed in London, working for the Matthews family and caring for their children. Mrs. Matthews and her daughter gave you informal lessons in writing and reading. You also gained some attention from the Matthewses by making the extraordinary claim—inspired by the fasting of the Jewish man next door?—that you sometimes went several days without eating.
    For six months after that, you lived at the Magdalen Hospital, a home for repentant prostitutes. You made up a background for yourself in order to get in, starting with the claim that you were an orphan whose father died when you were a newborn.
    A year later, in a London bookstore, you met a man called Baker. But after traveling around together for a few months—long enough for you to get pregnant—he gave you the slip. You told different people different made-up stories about who the father was.
    While pregnant, you worked at the Crab Tree pub. During your six months there, you called yourself Hannah, said your husband was dead, and told stories so outrageous that they delighted many a soul but fooled none of them. You gave birth to a son last year and left him at the foundling hospital—though you lived nearby and visited your baby each Monday.
    You became a servant for the Starling family—alternately entertaining and scaring the daylights out of their children with your stories—near the end of October. Right around that time, your son died. The next month, the Starlings dismissed you for setting fire to two beds in one week.
    It was five months later that Princess Caraboo appeared in Bristol. You had picked back up on your old pastime of begging, and doing so in a made-up tongue. You also found a begging partner—your roommate at a boarding house—and together you came up with the idea to make yourself more intriguing by wearing your black shawl as a turban.
    Combined with your lingo, it did the trick, and you decided to try your luck alone in the countryside around Bristol. You could don and shed your exotic-foreigner persona at will—but that was about to change. You were about to take up that role around the clock before an endless audience of visitor after visitor.
    Among them has been Dr. Wilkinson. He examined your scar and confirmed that it certainly had not been made by any Englishman or European. In the first days of June, his accounts of his meeting with you began to be published in newspapers all over England, complete with a gushing and detailed description of you:
    . . . a sweet smile; her mouth rather large; her teeth beautifully white and regular; her lips a little prominent and full, under lip rather projecting; her chin small and round . . . She appears to be about 25 years of age; her manners are extremely graceful, her countenance surprisingly fascinating . . .
    You were flattered, of course. But it’s one thing to fool a family or a single community, and quite another to be put on stage before an entire nation. With that mounting, suffocating pressure, is it any wonder that you bolted to Bath? You left behind all the trinkets and objects you’d been given to examine, no matter their worth. You covered the two dozen miles by foot and by cart, and here you are.
    And there he is. Dr. Wilkinson has caught up with you here at the Circus. Like a persistent hound—a puppy, really—he’s following you as you stroll around the railed garden in the middle.
    Well, he’s not following you —he’s following Princess Caraboo.

MONDAY, JUNE 9, 1817
ALMONDSBURY, ENGLAND
    It’s the next morning, and you’re back at the Worralls’.
    After Dr. Wilkinson accompanied you back to the gathering crowd at the Pack Horse, two women suggested to him that their home would offer you