The Book of the Dead

objected to the accusation that she had sold her body. Though she looked like a man, she told the assembled clerics, a visit to her lodgings would show she was every bit a woman. This saucy response outraged the judge. She was sentenced to public penance (dressed in a very unmanly white shift) at the cross outside old St. Paul’s. Mary turned it into a command performance, drinking herself insensible on six pints of sherry first and then weeping so piteously that the authorities released her to preserve the peace.

Mary had a very modern instinct for making money from fame. By the time she was thirty, she was a major player in the London underworld. Her days as a thief and her hours spent in the bear gardens and taverns had built up an unrivaled network of contacts on both sides of the law. As far as her manor was concerned, she always knew who was doing what, and where. This made her the perfect broker for stolen goods. If a purse or a watch went missing, a visit to Moll Cutpurse would usually see it restored on the same day, provided a decent cash reward was produced. It was a protection racket tolerated by the authorities because it kept the mean streets of Southwark under control, and welcomed by the theatres and sporting rings because it allowed them to turn a profit unmolested.

In 1614 Mary married Lewknor Markham, scion of a well-off, upper-class family from Nottinghamshire. Mary’s new father-in-law, Gervase Markham (1568–1637), was an astonishingly industrious author, churning out poems and treatises on everything from forestry, agriculture, and military training to veterinary medicine, archery, and wildfowling. The booksellers were swamped with his works. In 1617 he had five different books on horses all in print at the same time. This exasperated the Stationers’ Company, which forced him to sign an unprecedented agreement in which he promised “never to write any more book or books to be printed of the deseases or Cures of any Cattle, as Horse, Oxe, Cowe, Sheepe, Swine, Goates etc.” His best-known work is The English Hus-wife (1615), a kind of early Mrs. Beeton, full of recipes and handy hints on running a successful household. Quite what drove his son to marry a cross-dressing, bear-baiting gangster is a mystery.

In any event, it seems to have been a marriage of convenience rather than passion, as there is no evidence of their ever having lived together. From Mary’s point of view, having a husband brought respectability, which was good for business. She invariably referred to herself as Mrs. Mary Markham from then on, although she failed to mention her husband at all in her autobiography. In fact, other than the marriage, there is no mention of Lewknor Markham in any historical records. The couple married at St. Mary Overbury, now Southwark Cathedral, at that time the actors’ church, so it’s possible he was involved with the theatre. Why did he marry Mary? Perhaps he was gay? That wouldn’t have been unusual in the Southwark of the day. Or given that the subtitle to The English Hus-wife was “Containing the Inward and Outward Virtues Which Ought to Be in a Complete Woman,” it might have just been two fingers up to his annoyingly successful father. But the most likely reason is money, Lewknor taking a cut from Mary’s business in return for use of the Markham name. That would have been worth hard cash to her.

Mary’s sex life is another mystery. There’s no record of her having had sexual relationships with anyone, male or female. However scary Moll Cutpurse may have been in public, the private Mary Frith sounds rather nice, and her house in Fleet Street, full of dogs and parrots, surprisingly feminine. It was always immaculate—kept spotless by no fewer than three maids—and the walls were covered with looking glasses, “so that I could see my sweet self all over in any part of my rooms.” Self-esteem was clearly not the problem. On rare occasions she did admit to finding a man attractive—one such was Ralph Briscoe, the clerk at Newgate Prison, who was “right for her tooth” and whose life she saved by pulling him out of the ring when a bull had him by the breeches. But sex just seems to have been too much bother, except as a source for humor. Coming across a worse-for-wear neighbor late one night, she called out to him cheekily: “Mr. Drake, when shall you and I make Ducklings?”

To which he responded “that I looked as if some Toad had ridden me and poisoned me into that shape,” that he was altogether for “a dainty Duck, that I was not like that Feather, and that my Eggs were addle. I contented my self with the repulse and walked quietly homeward.”

Good humor, self-deprecation, vulnerability are all there. Perhaps she was happier alone with her dogs and parrots, who loved her unconditionally.

The lusts of others were a different matter. Hovering between the criminal underworld and polite society, Mary was perfectly placed to offer more intimate services than the sale of stolen property. And she had spotted a gap in the market: wealthy women looking for male companions. With the single-mindedness she brought to all her business ventures, she “chose the sprucest Fellows the Town afforded” and turned her house into an escort agency. One of her most audacious coups was to get the male lovers of a woman who had been (with Mary’s help) serially unfaithful to her husband to contribute to the maintenance of her children after she’d died of the clap.

Busy as she was with fencing and pimping, Mary still found time to play Moll for the occasional public performance. The vintner and showman William Banks bet her ?20 that she wouldn’t ride from Charing Cross to Shoreditch dressed as a man. Of course, she did so in style, flaunting a banner, blowing a trumpet, and causing a riot in the process. Part of the excitement was due to the fact that the horse she was riding was Banks’s Morocco, the most famous performing animal in London. Shod in silver, it could dance, play dice, count money, and generally astonish an audience with its intelligence and dexterity. Its most famous trick was climbing the hundreds of narrow steps to the top of the old St. Paul’s and dancing on the roof, watched by thousands below. In the annals of popular entertainment, Moll Cutpurse riding Banks’s horse would have been the Jacobean equivalent of the Beatles reforming and playing on the same stage as the Rolling Stones.

Even at four centuries’ distance, it is this irrepressible side to Mary’s character that seems as fresh as ever. If the idea of bawdy has fallen victim to endless over-the-top costume dramas, full of ale- swigging wenches in low-cut dresses, it’s worth remembering the word originally meant “joyous.” The joy that Mary brought to others with her unconventional life was borne out by the people who knew her. “She has the spirit of four great parishes,” wrote Middleton and Dekker, “and a voice that will drown all the city.” She was a show-off—even sometimes a bully—but the dens and alleyways of south London were a brighter place for her presence. One can imagine her getting on well with Mary Seacole. Both rose from poverty and lived their lives as independent women, on their own terms, in a man’s world.

After the Civil War, the Puritans banned bear baiting. Though Mary outlived Cromwell, she didn’t live quite long enough to see the monarchy restored and her beloved bear garden reopened, but in any case, the Southwark of old was never quite the same again. Mary Markham died wealthy enough to be buried inside St. Bridget’s Church in Fleet Street. Her final request was to be laid face down in her coffin because “as I have in my Life been preposterous, so I may be in my Death”—but whether it was carried out, we’ll never know.

One person who would have appreciated Mary’s last wish was the great twentieth-century physicist Richard Feynman (1918–88). Tall, handsome, and funny, he was also an eccentric prankster with a huge appetite for the preposterous. His own last words were in the same spirit: “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” For Feynman, to be bored in life, work, or death was the ultimate sin.

He was born into a tight-knit Jewish family in New York and didn’t talk until he was well past three years old. Not long afterward, his father, somewhat optimistically, bought him the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. But the young Feynman devoured it: It was his constant companion throughout his childhood, and by his early teens he had read it cover to cover. His father, Melville, a Belarusian car-polish salesman, stretched him in other ways, too. He taught him to predict mathematical patterns using building blocks and took him on long walks where he showed him how to pay close attention to nature. It was his father, Feynman always said, who taught him the difference between “knowing the name of something and knowing something.” Years later he would write:

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing—that’s what counts.

Melville also had a wonderful knack of turning abstract scientific ideas into stories, something his son would inherit and make his trademark:

For example, when I was playing with my electric trains, he told me that there is a great wheel being turned by water which is connected by filaments of copper, which spread out and spread out and spread out in all directions; and then there are little wheels, and all those little wheels turn when the big wheel turns. The relation