Page 19 of Slammerkin


  'Abi?' The London girl, her arms piled high with lawn. 'The mistress sent me in to wash this batch of new handkerchiefs, if I may.'

  The maid-of-all-work cleared her throat. 'Wait a while. This water dirty.'

  'Very good,' said Mary Saunders with conspicuous civility, depositing her load on the table and drawing up a stool.

  Abi worked on, uneasy under the stranger's gaze.

  After a few minutes' silence, Mary Saunders leaned her chin on her hands like a child. 'Hardly a chatterbox, are you?' she murmured.

  Abi scrubbed harder.

  'Don't they speak English in the Indies, then?'

  'Pick sugar cane, mostly,' said Abi coldly. 'Not much call for talk.'

  'I like a bit of conversation when I'm at work, myself.'

  Who did this brat think she was, Abi wondered? She called this work, as if a bit of light laundry bore the least resemblance to toiling in the cane fields. Abi threw the men's small-clothes into the pot now: flannel drawers, muslin shirts, worsted stockings and garters, all cut much the same.

  'Is this the master's?' asked Mary, snatching at a breeches cuff before it went below the water.

  Abi shook her head.

  'Ah, yes, the nap is low, and here's a little hole; it must be Daffy's. Too busy studying to sew on a patch, I suppose. He's an odd little fellow, don't you think? Daffy, I mean,' she repeated, as Abi hadn't heard her the first time.

  The maid-of-all-work gave a slow shrug and carried on rubbing the clothes together in the soapy water.

  'Has he been here many years?'

  A shake of the head.

  'Three or four?'

  'Maybe one year,' said Abi reluctantly.

  'And where was he before that?'

  'I think he work in his father's inn.'

  Mary Saunders nodded her head, storing the information. 'Yes, I can just see him as a drawer-boy, with cider stains down his front!' She pulled a pair of old velvet breeches out of the pile. 'Now these must be the master's; the cloth's not worn at all, on the side where he buttons it up. How did he lose his leg, tell me? Or was he born that way?'

  Abi shrugged to show she had no idea. She had never thought to ask. It was easy to lose a part of your body, it seemed to her; there were so many ways, it was a wonder anybody reached their death intact. She punched the swirl of clothes with her stick now, watching dirt rise to the surface. Hot water slopped over the side. She might not work fast, but she never quite stopped. That was the first thing she'd learned when she joined the field gang at ten years old: Keep moving. Never look idle.

  Mary was examining a pair of Nottingham stockings. 'Very nice,' she said professionally, testing the delicate pattern with her thumb. She was about to drop them into the tub when Abi stopped her. 'Those go in cold,' she said, gesturing to a basin.

  'And these lace ruffles? They must be the mistress's too.'

  'No wet at all. Only dust with bran for take the grease out.'

  Mary nodded and went for the bran tub. 'I never did any laundry in London; we had a neighbour do it for us. It's vastly complicated. I don't know how you keep it all straight.'

  Recognising flattery when she heard it, Abi ignored that.

  The Londoner plucked up a cambric shift now. 'This must be Mrs. Ash's,' she murmured, sniffing at it. 'Smells as sour as her face.'

  Abi found the corner of her mouth curling with amusement.

  Mary was plucking long grey hairs out of the nurse's nightcap. 'If she goes on at this rate she'll soon be bald as an egg. So what did the husband die of, then—being preached at?'

  The washerwomen were busy wringing out the sheets in the scullery; they couldn't hear a word of this. Abi muttered, 'Didn't die. Ran off, I hear.'

  The girl's eyebrows went up. 'That explains a lot. Would you blame the man?'

  Abi pursed her lips so as not to smile.

  'When did this happen?'

  'Twenty years back, I hear,' said Abi, bending a little closer.

  Mary covered her laughing mouth and whispered through her fingers, 'So no one's laid hands on the old bitch since ... 1743!'

  A yelp of laughter escaped from Abi's mouth. And then the washerwomen came through, so she straightened up and began hauling clothes out of the tub. The London girl worked by her side.

  That afternoon Mary and her mistress sat sewing in the shop, not two feet apart. 'I was wondering,' Mary began mildly, 'is Abi a slave?'

  'Not at all.' Mrs. Jones looked up at her, shocked. 'We'd never do such a thing as sell our Abi.'

  'What is she, then?'

  'A servant,' said Mrs. Jones uncertainly. 'One of the family.'

  Mary mulled this over. What a multitude of oddities the word family could cover. 'But she's not free to go, is she?'

  'Go?' Mrs. Jones's lips pursed. 'Where would the creature go? I think we treat her kind enough.'

  'Does she get any wages?' suggested Mary.

  'Well, no, but what would poor Abi do with wages?' Mrs. Jones looked at her in such confusion that Mary said no more about it.

  Here in the Marches, she was coming to realise, folk had no idea that things could ever be different.

  After three weeks in the house on Inch Lane, Mary could hardly remember any other life. The Seven Dials gauzes and taffetas she kept hidden in the bag under her bed seemed like relics from a former life, limp costumes from a play. She didn't recognise herself in her scrap of mirror. How shockingly respectable she looked, with her boiled white caps and her plain wool stockings and only the discreetest hint of carmine on her lips; how young! And how the St. Giles strollers would howl to see Mary Saunders now, scratching a living without opening her legs.

  Her mistress intrigued her. Mrs. Jones seemed to have no vanity at all. Her face was only a little haggard; its lines were sweet, especially when she smiled. But the only time the dressmaker ever looked in the long mirror in the shop was when one of her patrons was standing in front of it, posing critically in a half-made gown. 'Why do you always wear black?' Mary asked Mrs. Jones now, teasing slightly. 'Is it for simplicity, or as a foil for the patrons?'

  'Really, I couldn't say, Mary,' the mistress murmured over a difficult stitch. Then she looked up, into space. 'I went into mourning for my last boy, and I suppose I never thought to change back...'

  It was the first time she'd mentioned the other children, the dead ones. Mary wanted to know more—their number and names—but something prevented her from prying into such a painful subject.

  Mrs. Jones rarely stopped moving all day, and nor did Mary. Their window-lit corner of the shop was a chaos of fabrics, ribbons, spools, and scissors, but Mrs. Jones claimed to know where everything was, even if it sometimes took her half an hour to find it. For the whole month of January the two of them had worked on fat Mrs. Fortune's enormous riding-habit, made of grey wool so deep Mary's fingers sank into it. All the girl had to do was hem, but perfectly; it would clearly never occur to Mrs. Jones to let a little flaw pass.

  The girl only got a chance to rest when she lingered for a moment in the passage between the stays room or the shop, or went out to use the necessary behind the house, her arms wrapped round herself to keep out the frigid wind. At such times she sometimes felt like leaving the back door to swing, and running down Inch Lane to find the nearest way out of this narrow town.

  One morning hail fell from ten till half past eleven. Mary had never seen the like of it. There was no limit to weather, in this part of the world; there was nothing to contain it. She stood at the narrow window and watched the icy hail smashing down on the roofs. Daffy came home from market with blood all down his neck; his ear had a gash in it half an inch long. He told them about a rumour going round that a crow had fallen out of the sky with its head split open.

  'I hear you used to work in your father's tavern,' Mary mentioned to the manservant at dinner. 'But I thought he was a curate?'

  Daffy gave her an unreadable look.

  Mrs. Jones chipped in to fill the silence. 'Oh, Joe Cadwaladyr
could never be expected to keep body and soul together on what the vicar allows him.'

  'That's right,' added her husband. 'If the poor fellow hadn't his inn as well he'd have starved by now!'

  Mrs. Ash looked up from her tiny Bible, her mouth turned down. 'Ecclesiastes says,' she began, 'Better a crust with a quiet conscience than two hands full along with vexation of spirit.'

  No one had an answer for that.

  'Crow's Nest,' remarked Hetta.

  'That's right, my clever,' said her mother, reaching down to part the child's milk-white hair, 'Daffy's father owns the Crow's Nest Inn.'

  The manservant was squirming, so of course Mary couldn't let the subject rest. 'If you had a job in your father's tavern, what made you come to work here, then?' she asked lightly.

  Daffy shoved back his chair and stood up. 'I'd best deliver those hats,' he told Mrs. Jones.

  When the door had shut after him Mary looked round with wide eyes.

  The master reached down for his crutches. 'It's as well for Daffy to be with us, learning a clean trade,' he added gravely, 'but I don't like to interfere between father and son.' He said no more before going off down the corridor to the stays room.

  'What did I say?' Mary asked her mistress.

  'Ah, there's bad blood there,' murmured Mrs. Jones, shaking her head.

  Some afternoons Mary sneaked upstairs and lay on her bed for a few minutes, just to get away. She couldn't bear to be so thickly set around with people who knew her name and could make demands of her. In the shifting crowds of St. Giles, it had somehow been easier to be alone. She lay on her side on the narrow bed and turned the greasy pages of the Ladies' Almanack she'd paid ninepence for at the last Bartholomew Fair. On the cover, young Queen Charlotte looked out glumly, despite her fur-lined cape. Mary shut her chilly eyelids for a moment and conjured up that exquisite fur around her throat.

  'Mary?' The mistress's voice, like the sharp cry of a blackbird. 'I've need of you.'

  The girl remembered London as a place of infinite freedom. Now it seemed she'd rented out her whole life to the Joneses in advance. Service had reduced her to a child, put her under orders to get up and lie down at someone else's whim; her days were spent obeying someone else's rules, working for someone else's profit. Nothing was Mary's anymore. Not even her time was hers to waste.

  'Coming, mistress.' She stamped down the stairs.

  Whenever Hetta managed to escape from her nurse, she liked to follow the new maid round, clutching at her skirts. The child's questions followed each other like waves. 'What colour is this called?'Is it dinner time yet?' 'How old are you?'

  'Guess,' panted Mary, shovelling ash out of the grate.

  'Are you ... ten?'

  'No. More.'

  'Are you a hundred?'

  'Why, do I look it?' said Mary, laughing despite herself as she wiped ash off her cheek with the back of her hand. 'I'm fifteen, and that's the truth.'

  'My brother was nine. My brother Granz.'

  'Was he,' said Mary, casting the little girl a curious glance.

  'He got skinny and went to heaven in a chariot.'

  'That's right.'

  'I'm not skinny,' Hetta remarked, a little guiltily.

  Mary swallowed a smile. 'I should hope not.'

  'Mrs. Ash calls me a porkish little glut.'

  This made Mary laugh out loud, despite herself.

  'Do you really have no mother?' asked Hetta suddenly.

  Mary stopped laughing. 'That's right.'

  'She's gone to heaven?'

  'I hope so,' said Mary grimly, picking up the bucket of ash.

  The afternoon was the longest stretch of work, but at least Mary was generally sitting down in the shop. She snoozed over her needle, hemming the skirts and bodices of the better families of Monmouth. Tannery owners, cap merchants, and iron-masters, that was all; not a viscount among them. Beside her, Mrs. Jones used her great curved scissors to cut confident shapes in silks and brocades, turning every now and then to consult one of the pattern dolls John Niblett had brought her last week in the back of his wagon. Their aprons were two inches long; their skirts were no wider than cabbages. With their twiggish arms and thick necks, Mary thought they looked like rats dressed up as duchesses.

  Mrs. Jones could go on for hours about the latest romance she was reading. Sometimes she even talked about the boy she'd lost the previous summer, her Grandison—named, of course, for Mr. Richardson's best novel. Privately, Mary thought it just as well the boy hadn't had a long life, bearing the weight of such a name. Now, to hear Mrs. Jones talk, you'd have thought he'd been the kindest, cleverest young fellow that ever reached nine years of age. But when Mary had asked Daffy about him, the manservant admitted that he'd once caught the boy holding a cat's tail in the coals.

  Now she let out an enormous yawn.

  'You're not used to working such hours, are you?' asked Mrs. Jones with a hint of amusement.

  Mary shook her head. 'In London I was often idle,' she confessed.

  'But you said you went to school?'

  'Oh yes,' she answered, her tongue dry. Careless, ducky! said Doll in her head. 'I only meant, the last few months, before Mother...'

  Mrs. Jones clucked sympathetically, pins between her lips. Plucking them out a minute later, she said, 'I suppose you gave up the school when poor Su needed nursing?'

  Mary nodded mutely, as if the memory were too painful for speech.

  When the light started fading, round four o'clock, Mrs. Jones had Mary switch to the simpler chemises and seamed stockings that she sold ready-made to the lower sort; now it wouldn't matter so much if a stitch wasn't perfectly straight. It occurred to Mary—sitting sewing by the side of Mrs. Jones—that this was just what Susan Digot had always wanted for her girl. Mary pressed her teeth together hard. The beggarly luck of it, to end up obeying the cold bitch who'd thrown her onto the streets in winter! Well, at least her mother would never hear the end of this story, if Mary could help it. Susan Digot would eke out her days wondering whether her only daughter had given birth in a frozen gutter. She'd go to her grave not knowing, and good enough for her.

  'Mary?'

  She glanced up, afraid her thoughts were showing on her face.

  But Mrs. Jones was smiling in concern. 'You've pricked yourself.'

  She hadn't felt it. Bright blood flecked the hem of Mrs. Jarrett-the-Smith's winter petticoat.

  'Let you run and rinse it out in the kitchen. Ask Abi for cold water, and a rub of lemon.'

  'It's plain cheap cotton,' muttered the girl.

  'Then let it be clean, at least,' said Mrs. Jones.

  'Why can't I be steaming that taffeta cape of Miss Barnwell's?'

  'Because this is our bread and butter, Mary.'

  When the girl came back from the kitchen she stood staring out of the little window of the shop, where twilight was settling on the roofs of Monmouth. 'Did my mother like it here?' she asked abruptly.

  Mrs. Jones looked up with startled eyes. 'Why, Mary, what a thing to ask!'

  'But did she?'

  The mistress bent over her sewing. 'It wasn't a question Su would have put to herself.'

  'Why not?'

  'We none of us would have. This was home. Is,' she added confusedly.

  'And will you stay here forever, then?' asked Mary, curiously.

  Mrs. Jones thought for a moment before asking, 'Where else would we go?'

  Mary had always had a feel for clothes and what they meant. But these days she was learning to read a costume like a book, decipher all the little signs of rank or poverty. She was developing a nose for vulgarity; much of the stuff she'd paid out her earnings for, at the stalls of the Seven Dials, now struck her as shoddy tat. Fine cloth, that was what mattered, according to Mrs. Jones, and clean lines. And the very best dresses weren't the brightest and gaudiest but the ones that contained months of hard labour: edges stiff with hand-sewn lace or knobbed with beading. There was no way to cheat or skimp on it: beauty was work
made flesh.

  Something else Mary was learning: what mattered just as much as what someone wore was how they carried it off. The best silk sack gown could be ruined on a stooping, countryish customer. It was all in the gaze, the stance, the set of the shoulders. Mary set herself to learning how to move as if the body—in all its damp indignity—was as sleek and upright as the dress.

  Whenever she heard a particularly sharp rap at the front door, she knew it would be a footman knocking on behalf of his mistress, and she would run to clear the little sofa in the shop, straightening her apron as she went. Most afternoons the household on Inch Lane was as busy as a hornet's nest. Patrons plagued Mrs. Jones with last-minute requests.

  One Saturday, for instance, she was sold out of yellow ribbon by eleven o'clock, and had to disappoint Mrs. Lloyd who wanted some specially to bind a silk chrysanthemum onto her wheat-straw hat. Then Mrs. Channing ran in to have the hem of her new robe à la française taken up half an inch, having got the notion that she might trip on it when walking into church. Mary knelt down to pin up the mauve silk. 'We have a black ourselves, now,' Mrs. Channing carolled, catching a glimpse of Abi going through the passageway with a pail of dirty water. A footboy, only half as big as your maid. He's a very handy little mannikin; I've named him Cupid. My husband picked him up in Jamaica where they go for only sixpence a pound.' She released another of her shrill laughs. Her knees shook, the flesh on them like pudding.

  Mary could tell if a visiting patron was true quality by the fact that they managed to follow her through the narrow hall without giving any hint that they had noticed her existence. The effect was quite crushing; at least in the old days, cullies had looked her in the face. True ladies and gentlemen, it seemed, had eyes only for their own images in the glossy looking-glass.

  The patron Mrs. Jones was most proud of was Mrs. Morgan, wife to the Honourable Member. 'Why, the Morgans of Tredegar have always sat in Parliament for Monmouth,' the mistress told Mary, marvelling at the girl's ignorance. Flat-faced Mrs. Morgan wore a black fur cape in all seasons and was carried everywhere in a sedan chair, preceded by a large Frenchman called Georges who held her purse and ushered loiterers off the street in front of her with sweeps of his great ivory fan.