Mr. Jones's fuzzy head looked odd once the rest of him was dressed. He raised a cloud of blue powder when he clapped on his dishevelled wig.
'Should you like to have Daffy up to dress your peruke, my dear?' asked his wife.
He shook his head, sitting down at the mirror and taking up a comb.
Mary suspected the master would always see to his own wig, even if he had ten thousand pounds a year. She'd never yet heard him say the words I need.
After a week Mr. Jones decided that the new girl was settling in well. She had a slightly bold manner, at times, but that was only to be expected in a girl who'd grown up in the streets of the great city; impudence was endemic there, he'd heard.
As a rule Mary Saunders was to be found cleaning the house or helping his wife in the shop, but every now and then his wife sent her through to the stays room with a message or a query. The girl was acutely aware of his missing leg, he noted with amusement; sometimes she'd offer to fetch things so he wouldn't have to get up, dreading perhaps that he might trip on the edge of a floorboard! At such times Mr. Jones swatted her away, hopping across the room with his arms piled high with unfinished stays, his head almost touching the ceiling. 'Find someone who has need of you, girl,' he liked to say.
Once Mary Saunders came in when he was cross-legged at his work, the translucent plates of whalebone laid out in front of him on the little low table which was scored as if by a wild animal. He cut strips of bone with his knife, then whittled them down. Laid out in rays around him on the rush mat, they reminded him of the articulated skeleton of some star-shaped fish.
'How many bits of bone do you need?' Mary asked. 'Sir,' she added, a half-second too late.
He glanced up at her. 'Forty pieces,' he answered pleasantly. 'Forty at the least.'
She watched over his shoulder for a few minutes. He could feel her gaze on his hands. 'I thought they'd all be the same shape,' she remarked at last.
Mr. Jones looked up from his blade and laughed. 'Girl! Is the human form a rectangle?'
Mary blinked at him. Did she understand the word, he wondered? It was only female schooling she'd had, after all.
'Am I a mere box-maker?' he asked, more simply.
She smiled uncertainly.
He gave a little sigh, but the truth was, he loved to explain his trade. He took up the new stays for Mrs. Broderick that hadn't been covered yet. 'You need strong verticals to press the stomachs in, and diagonals across the ribs,' he told the girl, stroking the double lines of backstitch that went up either side of each ridge. 'Then these thin horizontals are required at the back to flatten those unsightly shoulder blades. Not forgetting the wide shaping bones across the front, to plump up the breasts.'
She looked away, at the word; suddenly he remembered that the girl was only fifteen.
'Such are the whims of fashion,' he rushed on, 'that the neckline sinks a little lower every year. Some staymakers use steel across the top,' he added, 'but in my view whalebone is just as efficacious, and more genteel.'
Mary still wasn't meeting his eye; perhaps she was one of those modern young girls who were martyrs to their modesty? 'How many seams are there?' she asked softly.
'Oh, some lax fellows get by with five or six,' said Mr. Jones, 'but I'd be ashamed to go under ten.' His hand caressed the shoulder-straps of the stays he was holding. 'I bone the straps too. It's these little touches that make a set stand out from the crowd. The great staymaker Cosins, of London—'
But she'd interrupted him. 'How can they stand out when nobody sees them?'
He gave her a tiny smile. 'Those with an eye can see the shape through no matter how many layers of bodices and jackets.'
'As if the cloth were glass?' asked the girl, fascinated.
'Exactly. The French call us tailleurs de corps, tailors of the body,' he added crisply. 'We are artists who work in bone. Though whalebone is in truth a sort of giant fish-tooth.' He dropped a splinter of it into the girl's hand. 'Some cheap staymakers rely on goose quill and others on cane, but in my view there's no substitute for the true Greenland baleen.'
She looked at him blankly.
'Have you never seen a whale, Mary?'
'No sir. There were none in London.'
'Nor in Monmouth,' he said with a chuckle. 'I meant a whale in a picture. Here—' With the help of his hands he lurched to a standing position. The girl stepped backwards, clearly afraid they would collide. With two hops he had reached his little bookcase and unlocked it. In an old gilt-spined periodical he found what he was looking for: an engraving of a fat monster ploughing through the waves. He tapped the lines that represented the coast. 'Greenland,' he said. 'Three months from here.'
The girl peered at the picture. Only when his callused finger pointed out the boat with the tiny men in it did she seem to realise what size the whale was. He could hear her suck in her breath.
'They say his teeth are fifteen feet long, Mary.'
'Is that true?'
'I don't know.' He stared at the picture. 'I do hope so.'
She offered to go, then; she hadn't meant to disturb the master, she said. But he assured her he could do with some assistance, since Daffy was out delivering stockings. So he had her hold a long strip of whalebone bent like a bow while he backstitched it into its narrow sheath of linen. Her hands were surprisingly steady.
It was in the afternoons that Mary felt most restless. Sometimes the mistress seemed to notice this, and sent her out on errands on the pretext that 'Abi seems tired today, don't you think?' The black maid appeared to be working to rule these days, going about the bare minimum of tasks with a mulish manner that Mary interpreted as: Let the Londoner do it.
But Mary was glad enough to get out of the house. Today the long list she had to memorise ended with 'a half pound of coffee from the chandler's, look you now, and ask them all if they'd be so kind as to put it on the slate till Friday.' Look you now. That's what Mary's mother used to say. But unlike Jane Jones, Susan Digot had usually been pointing out some disaster: a spill, a breakage, another ruined day.
Dirty snow was piled up against the houses. In the weeks since Mary's arrival, Inch Lane had narrowed to the width of her skirt. Was this winter going to last forever?
There were no pavements here, as there were in much of London; you had to pick your way along the street through all the rubbish and dung that stuck up out of the snow. Coming out of Inch Lane, Mary found herself smack in the middle of Monmouth, halfway between the genteel houses of Whitecross Street and the stink of the small docks. The cramped quality of the place still amazed her: nobs and mob not two minutes' walk apart. Everywhere she turned, the walls were lime-washed; the small doors glared.
Since the first day she'd stepped outside the house, she'd kept one dreading eye out for that Welshman from the inn at Coleford, the man she'd bilked of a whole pound for what she'd claimed was her lost virginity. But she'd never caught a glimpse of him in Monmouth. He had to be a farmer from beyond the mountains, she decided.
By now Mary had learned the names of the dozen streets, and that was all there seemed to be to this little knot of a town, snowbound between two rivers. Over there in the curve where the tiny Monnow met the fat Wye lay Chippenham Meadows; folk walked there on summer evenings, according to Daffy. But summer seemed to Mary like another country. Time stood still in this part of the world; in the house on Inch Lane, the Christmas evergreens were still nailed to the walls.
The wind made her eyes run; she pulled her scarf across her face and tugged the open ends of her mittens over her fingertips. Her thin boots skidded on the packed snow. She couldn't remember why she'd longed to get outside today. She had two shawls knotted round her shoulders, over her cloak, and she was still freezing. The air was so peculiarly clean, it smelled of nothing at all.
She bought a twist of salt in paper from the grocer's; a stoppered jar of green ointment from Lomax the apothecary for Mrs. Ash's mysteriously ailing legs; a slice of fresh butter from the stall by the bridge.
An hour later Mary trudged back along the Wye with a heavy basket. The half a crown in her pocket was Mrs. Jones's change. No chance of losing it; ever since the night her mother had beaten her for the lost penny, Mary had never put her hand into her pocket without checking her seams for holes.
Be sure and always carry half a crown to prove you're not a whore.
How does that prove it, Doll?
It pays off the Reformer constable, lack-wit! said Doll Higgins, who'd always kept a half a crown in her shoe, and never drank it, not even when she'd pawned the cloak off her back. Doll, who'd had a mortal dread of losing her liberty, and thought a half a crown would stand between her and all harm.
A woman stumped by through the snow with three children at her skirts. 'Idle hands!' she barked at Mary.
The girl jumped. At first she didn't understand the words, the woman's accent was so thick. She stared into the dull brown eyes of the woman who carded wool as she walked, scraping the muddy shreds into place. Behind her the hurrying children worked away on smaller combs.
'I've a basket to carry,' Mary protested, her voice coming out too shrill.
The stranger never broke her stride. She called back over her shoulder, 'Carry it on your elbow next time, why don't you, and put those fine fingers to use.' Her children scurried after, still clacking their combs like untrained musicians.
Alone on the road, Mary stared down at the fingertips emerging from her mittens, purpled by cold where they gripped the basket. She could hardly feel them. But she saw now, with a malicious pleasure, how smooth they were compared to a real Marcherwoman's. In her old life, the only job of work these hands had ever done was hold her skirts up out of the mud, or rub the occasional old fellow's tool to life. She snorted aloud at the thought. What would the locals call her if they knew that?
At the chandler's, the women were gossiping as loudly as geese, but they fell silent as soon as Mary came in. She still wasn't sure whether it was Welsh they spoke among themselves, or English with a thick Welsh accent. But the chandler was a friendly fellow. 'Su Rhys's daughter, in't it?' he asked, wrapping up Mary's parcel of ground coffee.
Mary nodded, startled. 'Can you tell by my face?'
The chandler laughed like a monkey, and a few of the women joined in. 'Not at all, dear. We've had word of you, that's all.'
'Welcome home,' added one of the customers.
Mary thanked her stiffly, and got out of the shop as fast as she could. Home, indeed! Were they mad?
As she hurried down Monnow Street, wind lifted settled snow like dust before an unseen broom. The road cleared and filled again, white dust moving like muslin, gathering and smoothening along the air. It was snowing upside down now, from the ground up, swirling into her face. She looked up at the sun over the spire of St. Mary's, a white ball swathed in cloud. Sheds in the distance were the same dim brown as the trees. It was a world without colour; Mary couldn't shake off the impression that she was gradually going blind.
A flick of blackness drew her eyes upwards. Crows were gathering in a skinny beech, bouncing in the branches, shifting their heads from side to side as they cawed, as if looking for trouble. Mary craned up and tried to count them.
Five for riches,
Six for a thief.
Her neck hurt as she let her head drop back and her mouth open. There was another, in the next treetop. And another.
Seven for a journey,
Eight for grief.
Others wheeled overhead. Her eyes were watering. The birds' croaks were fusing into one great excitement. She blinked snow off her lashes. Scores, hundreds of crows, all homing to this skeletal tree; shaking away from it in a wide arc, then doubling back as if constrained to return. Some waited on the very ends of the branches as if preparing to migrate, but she knew that couldn't be so. It wasn't as if they had anywhere else to go.
Now she was paying attention, Mary realised that the air had been full of the crows' rapid grumble all morning. Such a sore cawing; a shallow abrasion of the throat that seemed to expect no acknowledgement, no answer, certainly no consolation. She wondered what was grieving them. The scarcity of worms? The long wait for spring? The fact that they hadn't been born peacocks? The dark beaks repeated the birds' resentment as if they had to, as if they'd forgotten why they ever began but now knew no other sound to make. The heavy sky shook with their complaint.
Across the river the men were going up and down the white fields with barrows; a dark stench drifted through town. 'What are they doing in the fields?' Mary asked Daffy when she squeezed past him in the little yard.
'Dunging,' he said between blows. The log split apart under his axe.
She repeated the word, derisory.
His breath came out in a cloud. 'They spread dung out to be ready for the plough, see. To fertilise and fructify the soil.'
Him and his words! Mary pursed up her lips. 'What'll they sow, then?'
'Coltsfoot,' he said, leaning on his axe for a second. 'Hogweed. Maybe crow garlic.'
Mary laughed out loud. 'Don't think to fool me with your nonsensical names.'
'As if a city girl would know one leaf from another!' he said.
She believed him now, but she wouldn't say so. She dawdled on the icy doorstep. As the man lifted the axe high in the air, his shoulders were thick as a terrier's. 'That's what you all call me, the Londoner, isn't it?'
Daffy's axe paused; he glanced up.
'I've heard you in the Stays Room, with the master, and with Abi too.'
He split a log cleanly. 'Here's another little quaint country saying you may not know: Those who listen at doors won't hear any good of themselves.'
'Do you bear me a grudge, then?' Her voice was merry.
His blade stuck; he had to batter the log against the stump before the axe cut through. He spoke gruffly. 'All I say, and I'll say it to your face, is you got a place that should have gone to another.'
So that was it. This wretched job! At once Mary went on the attack, as Doll had always taught her. 'This other you mention,' she began sweetly, 'I don't suppose she's that little brownish girl I've seen you dawdling with in the market?'
Daffy straightened up. 'My cousin Gwyneth,' he said through narrowed teeth, 'is the finest woman who's ever walked the earth.'
He'd bared his throat to her blade; he knew it and she knew it. 'I do beg your pardon,' said Mary softly. 'I must have been confusing your fine cousin with some ragabones I saw begging for heads and tails round the back of the fish stall.'
She wouldn't have been surprised if he'd hit her, now, but his hands stayed wrapped around the shaft of the axe, and his eyes rested on the log-pile. The man's silence impressed her. Perhaps he was wondering how she came to be such a shrew before the age of sixteen. Mary occasionally wondered that herself.
Finally Daffy glanced up at her. 'One day, when you're reduced in your circumstances, you'll regret your uncharitable talk.'
Mary regretted it a little already. Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.
For Abi, the last Monday of each month started hours before dawn. The washerwomen, hired for the day, gave her the stick to churn the sheets while they measured out the lye. Only bent over this cauldron in the scullery did she ever begin to feel warm. The women were always glad when Mrs. Ash sent Abi to help them; she could face the steam twice as long as any Christian, they said. 'Leather in place of skin, that's for why.' They thought she didn't understand them, just because she never bothered to engage in foolish chit-chat. Sometimes, Abi had discovered, it was useful to be thought a halfwit—or a half-ape, more likely.
They set up a tub on the kitchen table for the white small-clothes and poured in fresh boiled water. 'Bestir yourself now, Abi,' said the younger washerwoman loudly, tipping a load of clothes into the froth.
The maid-of-all-work smiled with her lips shut, having learned that the sight of her bright teeth could cause outbursts of nervous laughter among white folk. Lye stung the pink cracks in her hands as she immersed th
em to begin the scrubbing. Abi could read volumes off the folds of cloth as they moved in the water; every stain told a story. The child Hetta, for instance; her woollen bodice was tiny and easily scrubbed between fingers and thumb. Her petticoat was rimmed with dust and splashed with yellow. What was the polite phrase the mistress liked to use? Like takes out like. Meaning, that petticoat would need boiling in a pot of fresh piss after the first wash.
The washerwomen in the scullery were laughing like drunkards. She'd have to check the level of the beer after they were gone.
The Londoner's sleeve ruffles had waxy grease on them; clearly Mary Saunders wasn't used to trimming and snuffing the candles yet. Abi would have to melt the tallow off with the end of a hot loaf later, and she'd get no thanks for it either. The girl's shift smelled of her lemony scent. She was said to be fifteen, this Mary Saunders, but her eyes were twice that. Where had she picked up that hard stare? Maybe folk were all like that in London.
Abi rather regretted that she'd never made it to the great city. After the long voyage, eight years ago, her master the doctor had come up from Bristol to winter at Monmouth, and commissioned the Joneses to make him a new suit for the season, from hat to shoe-buckles. When he set off the following March, he still owed them six pounds ten, so he handed over Abi in lieu of the cash. She had cried without a sound for three days—not because she missed the doctor, but because everything was alien to her in England.
The Joneses hadn't quite known what to do with her, at first, but they'd soon found her useful. In this chilly house on Inch Lane, she'd learned how to make soap from ash and lights from reeds, when to curtsy, how to say yes, sir, yes, madam, who not to annoy (above all, the Ash woman). Daffy the manservant had offered to teach her to read, but at first she'd distrusted his motives—since when did a white man ever want nothing for something?—and even when she did allow him to show her a page of his book, the scratchings on the page repelled her. They were some form of magic she didn't want to touch.