On the third of April, 1817, a young woman in a black turban knocked on a cottage door in the Gloucestershire village of Almondsbury. She was exhausted. She was hungry. She would not speak a word of English. Over the next two months she would pray five times a day to a god she called Allah-Tallah, fence with sticks in the orchard, climb the trees in the magistrate's parkland, and one morning strip naked and swim in his lake.

Her name, when a Portuguese sailor named Manuel Eynesso turned up at a Bristol inn to translate, was Princess Caraboo of Javasu. An island in the Indian Ocean. She had been kidnapped by pirates. She had escaped by jumping overboard in the Bristol Channel and swimming to shore. The magistrate's wife, Elizabeth Worrall of Knole Park, found her enchanting. She kept her. She paraded her at parties. The Bath and Bristol gentry rode out to Knole to meet the princess. The Bristol Journal printed an engraving of her face.

Just down the road, in Bristol, a lodging-house keeper named Mrs Neale picked up that same newspaper. She looked at the engraving. She put down the paper. She went to find Elizabeth Worrall. The princess of Javasu, she said, had lived in her boarding house the year before. The princess of Javasu was a Devon cobbler's daughter named Mary Willcocks. She had been a servant girl, a beggar, and an inmate of a London workhouse. She had spent years, alone, inventing a language. She was twenty-four years old.

Elizabeth Worrall, oddly fond of her impostor, did not press charges. She paid for Mary's passage to Philadelphia. Mary performed briefly as Caraboo on the American stage. She returned to England in 1824. She settled in Bristol. She married a man named Baker. And until she died on Christmas Eve 1864, she made her living importing live leeches for the Bristol Infirmary.

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