Slammerkin

  Encased in the odorous canvas, she fought with a knotted tape. How ugly were the inner workings of elegance, she thought. The voices came through very muffled. When Miss Elizabeth shifted from foot to foot, the whalebones creaked like a ship. Jonah, thought Mary, remembering her schooldays.

  At last she heaved up the edge of the hoop and wriggled into the air. Miss Elizabeth was grinning at herself in the long glass like a child. Mary dusted herself down unobtrusively.

  'Vastly vulgar,' pronounced Miss Maria.

  Her sister's face plummeted.

  'Take it off, Elizabeth. You know I'm right.'

  Ladies couldn't be expected to think of the time, Mary knew, as they didn't dine till six. Her stomach growled like a captive animal. But she watched, and listened, and curtsyed every chance she got, and did everything the Misses Roberts asked and other things before they'd thought to ask, and finally she won a little soft smile from Miss Elizabeth.

  'Your maid is a capable girl,' Mary overheard Miss Elizabeth tell Mrs. Jones.

  'That's the truth, madam. I don't know how I ever managed without her.'

  That bit was spoken in Mrs. Jones's ordinary voice; there was no gush or falsity to it. Listening, with her back turned, Mary felt her skin tighten and glow.

  'Might madams be pleased to bespeak any clothes today?' suggested Mrs. Jones.

  They would not. Nothing quite suited. But they might send for her and her maid again.

  'He's a good man, right enough,' Mrs. Jones told Mary as they sewed their way towards each other round the four-yard hem of Mrs. Harding's new lavender robe à la française. 'He's never raised his hand to me, you know, not like'—her voice went down to a murmur—'Jed Carpenter, who takes a horsewhip to his wife.'

  'So how did he lose his leg, madam?' asked Mary.

  Mrs. Jones smiled at her. The fact was, this was one of her favourite stories, though she never told it outside the family. 'I tell you this, Mr. Jones is the bravest fellow. He was only a wee boy of nine years old, see?' Her eyes never lost their grip on the tiny stitches. 'He was helping the ostler down at the Robin Hood for thrupence a day. This coach and four came through on the way to Gloucester, and the gentleman, he hopped down outside the inn, and didn't poor Thomas run in to take the reins, and the near horse trod on him.'

  'Kicked him?'

  'No, no, just lifted up as gentle as you please, and stood down on the boy's bare foot.' Mrs. Jones could see the scene as clear as an engraving, with the colours put in by hand: the glossy brown of the flank, the red mark in the snow. 'Mashed it to mush he did.'

  'Pugh!' said Mary, her mouth wrinkling up.

  Mrs. Jones's hands had stilled on the linen. 'It rotted black as your boot, I don't mind telling. Up to the knee the next day, and along the thigh the next.' She marked out the stages of putrefaction on her dusty black skirt.

  'Does it go that fast?'

  'Like mould on fruit,' said Mrs. Jones with relish. She resumed her sewing, faster than before. 'So Dai Barber came to cut it off. But Thomas's mother—a good woman, our neighbour she was—we heard her tell Dai, "Put away your saw. My boy'll die with all his limbs on."' She paused to thread her needle again, squinting against the dregs of the afternoon light. Her eyes weren't what they were.

  'And what happened next?' Mary Saunders stretched her cramped hand out in front of her.

  'Well. The lad within on his truckle bed, he bawled out so the whole street could hear, "Look you, Mother, I'll not die yet, not for a long while. Bring me in the axe and I'll chop it off myself!"'

  There was that disbelieving look in the girl's eyes again. Where had such a young creature picked up such an expression? London had to be a very hardening place. 'I tell you, Mary,' said Mrs. Jones urgently, 'you've heard nothing like the sound, outside a sawyer's yard.'

  'So Mr. Jones cut off his own leg?'

  She shook her head impatiently. 'Dai Barber did it, with his saw. He put Thomas out with gin, but the boy still screamed through his dreams. None of us on Back Lane got a blink of sleep that night.'

  Mary, bent over her needle, looked revolted. Then, in a curious tone, she asked, 'You used to live down Back Lane?'

  There was no use pretending any different. Nothing could be hidden from servants, Mrs. Jones knew that much. 'Oh, aye,' she said lightly. 'Thomas and I both grew up there, only two doors apart.'

  She could see Mary absorb the new knowledge and store it away. At such moments the girl had the same thoughtful look as Su Rhys used to wear. 'But go on about the leg,' said Mary.

  'Well, they dipped the stump in salt water, and it healed up clean as your elbow. Within a month the boy was hopping along like a one-legged rooster.' Mrs. Jones let a smile crease her face.

  They stitched their way along another foot of ruched silk. Mrs. Jones released her breath in a little puff, blowing tiredness out of her way.

  'So he didn't die of it, then, for all his mother's fears,' observed Mary.

  'No, thank the Maker,' said Mrs. Jones with a shocked laugh, 'or where would I be now?'

  'Here.'

  She stared. Sometimes this girl gave the most peculiar answers. 'Monmouth, maybe, I grant you, but I wouldn't be Mrs. Jones.'

  'What if you'd married Ned Jones the baker, madam?' asked the girl in a sly murmur.

  'Ah, what indeed?' Mrs. Jones gave the girl's arm a little shove with the heel of her hand. 'I wouldn't be this Mrs. Jones, would I? Up to my eyebrows in flour I'd be then, so you wouldn't know me.' She rather liked this image of herself: unrecognisable, chalky white. She sewed on, faster.

  It struck her that anyone seeing the two of them together would think them friends, or mother and daughter. Mrs. Jones knew she lacked the carriage of a mistress. It wasn't that she was ignorant of how to behave. All the advice books warned about keeping a proper distance, and a romance she'd been reading only the other night illustrated the dangers of befriending the lower orders. Intoxicated by any Degree of Familiarity, they soon fall into Impertinence. The heroine ended up being compromised by a duke.

  But what was Mrs. Jones to do? She forgot all the advice once she and Mary sat down with their needles and fell into conversation. The girl might be penniless, because her shiftless father had died in gaol, but wasn't she Su Rhys's daughter still? Couldn't she read and write and cast account better than Mrs. Jones herself, if it came to that? The mistress shifted a little uncomfortably on her stool. It struck her as strange, suddenly, that she who'd grown up shoeless on Back Lane was now lording it over the daughter of her best friend. How arbitrary were the ups and downs of the world. And how could she not grow a little familiar with the girl, while they bent together over the same piece of silk, which pulled back and forth between them like a bird on warm air?

  'Does it hurt him still?'

  Mrs. Jones was startled out of her reverie. Mary was staring at her own bare elbow, its curious knob emerging from the grubby lace.

  'The leg? Only the old itch in the winter. Thomas always says it did him good.'

  'Good?' Mary's voice was appalled.

  How could she explain it to this girl, who was only fifteen years old, whole in body and spirit, with her life spread out in front of her like an untouched feast? 'He knows he's been through the worst,' said his wife gently. 'He's nothing more to fear.'

  Mary's private plan of leaving with the thaw had been put to one side, as it were. She had pumped Mr. Jones about Bristol, where he'd done his apprenticeship. He claimed it was the next to greatest city after London—not that he'd ever seen London himself—but nothing he'd described to Mary made it sound much better than Monmouth. She'd asked Daffy about other towns within a few days' ride, but all he'd offered was a history of their settlement from the Romans on, and a list of their principal exports. They sounded a shabby lot. If Mary couldn't yet risk returning to London—and Caesar's knife—it seemed to her that she might as well stay where she was, for the moment, and eat her fill, and earn a wage.

  Waking in the night, she was soothed by th
e faint lines of the attic room. At least she had a share in a bed instead of just a straw mattress. At least the blankets had no fleas. There weren't any holes in these walls for the wind to whistle through. No landlady to thud up the stairs; no killer hammering on the door. Mary was clean now; no one touched her. She lay motionless, conjuring up the worst of London, to make herself grateful. Here on Inch Lane she could watch the moon through glass, instead of following its naked light down an alley where in all likelihood Doll still sat, blue and ruined, crumbling with the first thaw.

  Mary rolled over, with her back against Abi's steady heat. She wouldn't think about Doll. She wouldn't dwell on what was past.

  Abi was in that state between waking and sleeping when the girl's voice came out of the dark, beside her ear. 'Abi,' in a whisper. 'Are you awake?' She heard Mary Saunders's head shift and thump the pillow into place. Then the hiss came again. 'I can't sleep. I'm too tired.'

  Abi groaned and tucked her face into her cupped hand, which lay between them.

  'It's not right, how the Joneses keep you,' remarked Mary.

  Abi pulled her head off the pillow like a turtle. She weighed the remark: not just what was said, but why.

  'A friend of mine,' Mary remarked, 'used to say, Never give up your liberty.'

  Abi brooded over the phrase.

  'You know what liberty means? Belonging to yourself?'

  'Never had that,' said Abi finally.

  'You must have,' said Mary a little impatiently. 'Before you were a slave, I mean. When you were a child back in Africa.'

  Abi stretched out on her back and considered the matter. 'No,' she told Mary slowly, 'I belong to king then.'

  'What, King George?'

  'No, our king,' Abi said. 'Me and my mother and many—hundreds—children and wives, we all belong to king back then.'

  'What,' asked Mary, disconcerted, 'you were a slave, back in Africa?'

  Abi shrugged uncomfortably. 'Well. It was family. He was father.'

  'What, your own father kept you as a slave?'

  This girl didn't understand the first thing. Abi yawned hugely. 'Not a bad life there. Little work, plenty food.'

  'But he sold you to the whites?'

  Abi tucked her face into the crook of her arm. She never liked remembering this bit. Her words were muffled. 'He needed guns.'

  The silence lasted so long that she was almost beginning to slip into sleep, when the girl spoke up again. 'Why does it say Smith on your shoulder?'

  'That was a master.'

  'The one who brought you to England?'

  'No. Another one.'

  'How many masters did you have, in Barbados?' said Mary curiously.

  'Don't remember.'

  'In London, you know,' remarked Mary, 'there's a great many people like you.'

  'Like me?' Abi repeated hoarsely, lifting her head.

  'Black in the face,' said Mary. Then, with a tiny giggle, All over, I mean to say.'

  This was news to Abi. She cleared her throat; it sounded too loud in the slumbrous house. 'How many?' she whispered.

  She could feel the tug in the blankets as the girl shrugged. 'Lots.'

  'But how many?' Since the day the doctor had brought her to Monmouth, Abi had counted no more than three dark faces, and they were all footboys to visiting gentry; none of them lived in the town.

  'How should I know?' answered Mary with a touch of asperity. 'Two in any busy street, I'd say.'

  Abi let herself savour the image. 'Their masters let them out on the streets?' she asked after a minute.

  'Oh, the greatest part of them don't have masters,' said Mary. 'London's full of runaways. The East End is crawling with free negroes. Some of them have English wives, even.'

  'But free women, too?'

  'Indeed. I knew an Indian girl whose master left her behind, to save the price of her passage to Holland. Oh, and there's a club where all the girls are black.'

  'Club?' Abi pictured the little gathering of tradesmen upstairs at the King's Arms.

  'You know,' said Mary impatiently, 'a place where girls dance.'

  Abi pictured it. 'For white men?'

  'Well, yes, mostly. For whoever pays to see them,' said Mary, a little awkward. 'But they're not like you, these girls,' she added. 'They get wages, don't you know.'

  Abi shut her heavy eyes and tried to imagine such an extraordinary place. What were they wearing, these girls so like her yet not like her at all? How did they dance? Like back in Africa, or the slave dances of Barbados? Or did they skip in complicated patterns like the English? She spoke at last. 'How much wages?'

  'Oh, don't ask me,' said Mary. 'But the thing is, they're free to come and go.'

  Abi thought of it: the coming and going. 'Do whites spit?'

  A heave, as the girl went up on one elbow. 'Do they what?'

  'Sometime,' Abi said neutrally, 'when I go on message, folks spit.'

  'Country boors,' said Mary scornfully after a few seconds. 'What can you expect of Marchermen? They're just frighted at the sight of you. Give them a year or two and they'll get used to your face.'

  'Eight,' said Abi, very softly.

  'What's that?' Mary leaned a little closer.

  'I been here more than eight years already.'

  There was a pause. The girl seemed to have nothing to say to that. She lay down with a thump, making the bed shake.

  'Tell me more,' whispered Abi in the darkness.

  'About London?'

  She nodded, forgetting Mary couldn't see her.

  The girl let out an enormous yawn. 'Well, I don't remember much spitting at blacks, there. Londoners save their spit for Frenchies! The blacks keep to themselves and give no one any trouble. They all seem to know each other,' she added. 'If one is thrown in gaol, you may count on it the others will come and visit him, with food and blankets and such. Once I even heard of a supper party, a sort of ball,' she added with another yawn, 'and only blacks were allowed in.'

  The older woman didn't ask any more questions. Her head was too full already; it clinked like a jar full of pebbles. She lay by Mary's side until the girl's breaths lengthened into sleep.

  Oh, child, what kind of foolishness is this?

  Mary Saunders had slid into routine like slipping into deep water; she'd tasted the dull sweetness of knowing what to do at every hour of every day; of being sure there would be breakfast, for instance, and what that breakfast would be.

  The moment she liked best was teatime, if there were no patrons visiting. Then she and the mistress could put down their work for a quarter of an hour and take tea together in the shop. At first the brew was hot enough to scald Mary's whole body from the inside, but it cooled rapidly in the saucer. She took small sips to make it last, holding the porcelain rim between her teeth. It would break so easily if she bit down. She was still plagued with occasional thoughts like that, images of destruction. Surely someday, by a word or a sign, she wouldn't be able to hide who she was—or at least used to be.

  'Another drop, Mary?'

  'Yes please, madam.'

  One day Mrs. Jones leaned across the teacups as if she had a secret to impart. 'You know—,' she began, then broke off. 'That is, my husband was quite right about the principle of the thing.'

  Mary waited.

  'I mean to say, that you should call me madam, whenever we have company and such. But when we're on our own, you know,' she stumbled on, 'then it's not so necessary.'

  The girl smiled into her tea. Victory, sweet as pineapple.

  Why hadn't she been born to Jane Jones instead of Susan Saunders, it occurred to her now? She didn't want to have her mother's hands. She didn't want to be her mother's daughter. In this house, Mary was coming to realise, stains wore off and lies came true. Mary was indeed a hard worker and embroidered like an angel. She could almost believe she was a virgin again.

  Most evenings she stole ten minutes before supper to look through her scraps. She had a tiny piece of everything she'd worked on so far: champag
ne satin from Mrs. Tanner's night robe, green watered tabby from Miss Partridge's pleated petticoat, and a dozen others besides. Now that she knew what good cloth felt like, she realised what nasty rubbish was most of the stuff hidden in her bag under the bed. The fabric was no good, to start with: dull-napped and limp, with cheap dye that faded in sunlight or after one wash. That open robe with the salmon scalloped petticoat she'd thought so fine when she found it on a stall on Mercer Street—she fingered its patchy sheen now and blushed to think she'd paid four shillings for the thing. The royal blue had seeped off the back of her jacket-bodice already. Trash. And as for the cut of most of her dresses, it appalled her to think she'd been strolling round for so long with all her seams slightly askew.

  Her new scraps were only leftovers, slipped into her pocket at the end of the day; Mrs. Jones never even seemed to notice they were gone. But already Mary had sewn herself a handkerchief from six triangles of best white cambric, with an edge of blue ribbon, and some evenings she took a half-inch of candle up to her room after dinner and worked on a little scarf, from a strip off the end of that silvery gauze they were using for Miss Fortune's overskirt. Not that she had any call for finery, in her present life, but someday—

  It was still Mary's firm belief that service was a fool's game, and no way to make a living. But for the moment she couldn't seem to think of another. Her old trade seemed inconceivable. The Seven Dials life sounded like a lurid drama, acted out with puppets against a black sheet.

  In the back of Mary's mind was one tiny anxiety: surely somebody in the house would wonder why she didn't have monthly courses like other girls. She even thought of getting hold of some pig's blood to wrap up in rags. But one day as she passed Mrs. Jones in the narrow hall, each carrying a bale of cloth, the mistress rested a hand on the girl's shoulder and murmured that she knew Mary was only a young thing yet.