Tom Holland

There's a kind of the quality of the country girl who comes to London and leads the high life effectively by being a courtesan for very wealthy men.

Yes, or Skittles with her very tight writing habit.

And so Mary Jane tells stories about how she had made a great success for herself in a very, very upmarket brothel in Knightsbridge, which is one of the kind of the classiest areas of the West End, that she had had beautiful dresses, that she'd ridden around in a carriage, that she'd eaten oysters in fashionable restaurants, all this kind of thing, that in her own words, she had led the life of a lady.

And perhaps a marker of that is that Mary Jane, she seems to have decided wasn't good enough for her.

And so she starts referring to herself as Marie Jeannette.

And the hint of the French is telling because she also told a story about how she had been taken to Paris by, quote unquote, a gentleman.

But she had only stayed there, she said, a fortnight and then returned to London.

But when she comes back to London, she doesn't go back to the West End.

She doesn't go back to her life of carriages and beautiful dresses and oysters.

She goes to the East End.

And that's puzzling.

What had changed in those two weeks?

And the stories that she tells...

are kind of full of melodrama.

She strongly implies that she's in the East End because she's hiding from people who are out to get her, but who?

She launches an abortive attempt to liberate a chest full of dresses that she says is in a house in Knightsbridge, but nothing really comes of it.

And she also says that a man has appeared near to where she's living, claiming to be her father, but wasn't hunting her down

for any of this beyond what she herself is reporting.

Yeah.

I mean, it makes her seem glamorous.