Slammerkin

  Mrs. Jones gave a little shiver. 'Jessie Adams, that was; she was a friend of my grandma's.'

  Mary moved on to the next, which was still bare of moss. 'Sacred to the memory of Grandison Jones—' Her voice dried up all at once.

  '—son of Thomas Jones, of Monmouth, and his wife Jane.' The older woman's tone was gentle.

  The girl couldn't think what to say.

  'Now Delmont, our third,' said Mrs. Jones, pointing to the name farther down the headstone, 'I got that name out of a story by Mrs. Haywood. Even if she was a bit of a hussy!'

  Mary counted the names. It was a small square, lightly scored with letters; she tried to guess its cost.

  'Maybe Thomas would be better off with a young girl who could give him half a dozen boys,' Mrs. Jones went on, as if remarking on the weather.

  Mary stared at her.

  'But who could suit him or know his ways as I do? Besides,' murmured Mrs. Jones, moving on to the next grave, 'I've not quite given up yet.'

  Something in her tone alerted the girl. Could it be? Surely not. A tiny laugh in the mistress's breath, as she smoothed her plain black bodice over her stomach.

  'You're not—'

  'Did I say so?' asked Mrs. Jones innocently.

  Mary gave her a wide grin. 'I thought—' Then she stopped herself before the insult slipped out.

  'You thought I was too old. Yes,' said Mrs. Jones meditatively, 'I was afraid I might be.'

  They walked on a little way. Mary stooped to read an epitaph so old its letters were almost worn away.

  We all must die, there is no doubt;

  Your glass is running—mine is out.

  Mrs. Jones slid her arm into Mary's as they moved on towards the river. 'I've not told Thomas, mind,' she murmured.

  'Why?' asked Mary. At the thought that she was the first to know, she felt delight like a chip of sugar in her mouth

  'Oh, I mustn't raise his hopes yet. I used to tell him every time I had the least expectation, but then he was sorely disappointed when it came to grief. And he was so very broken in his spirit when Grandison was taken last year. Mind you, it comes to all of us, rich or poor,' Mrs. Jones added, looking back at Monnow House, the highest in the line of creamy buildings. 'Madam in there's been brought to bed ten times, and not a one living.'

  Mary tried to imagine it. Something like Ma Slattery's cellar, but ten times over; all your ambitions amounting to blood in a pail.

  As they neared the river, she was startled by a glimpse of its blue. Though there was no visible sun, the Monnow shone like a broken sword cutting its way through the countryside. It held a slice of sky, that was what it was; Mary looked up and saw the bright blue, tucked between the clouds. At the end of the lane the cottages ran out and there was only muddy meadow. She and Mrs. Jones picked their way carefully, so as not to ruin their shoes.

  The earth crumbled softly at the river edge, fraying into the water. Mary watched the ripples advancing. Then she pointed in puzzlement. 'I thought it ran the other way, down to Chepstow?'

  'Oh, it does,' said Mrs. Jones placidly. 'Look closer.'

  Mary bent over the water and saw how she'd been tricked. The ripples were only on the surface, carved by the breeze.

  'If you watch that twig, and those leaves coming down to us,' said Mrs. Jones, 'you'll see its true path, hidden under the ripples.'

  The bell told them it was noon already. They turned to hurry back to Monnow House.

  Mr. Jones was totting up the books. Meaning, he leant one elbow on the edge of the little polished desk and looked over the shoulder of Mary Saunders, who was quicker at calculations. 'Hmm,' he said every now and then, in a judicious tone.

  He spent his time fretting.

  He had read all the right literature. He had paid good money for volumes with titles like Aristotle's Masterpiece and Conjugal Love; he kept them in a locked drawer in this very desk, so as not to cause scandal among the servants. Between their covers he had gleaned much wisdom, such as: never perform your duty on an empty stomach. Or, a woman who lies on top will give birth to a dwarf. Thomas Jones considered himself a conscientious husband. He watched his wife for the sure signs of pregnancy: thickened ankles and a swollen vein under the eye. He did his best to give her pleasure, because without it, he knew, a woman never conceived.

  But these days he had the feeling she was lost to him.

  Mary Saunders had been making little stifled exclamations for some time. Now she jabbed at the ledger with her stubby quill. 'Twenty-two pounds, five and sixpence!'

  He leant over to read the total. 'Ah. The Morgans.'

  'They haven't paid you a penny in fourteen months.'

  Mr. Jones licked his lips. 'Is it so long? Well, the Honourable Member is a busy man.'

  'His wife swans in here every month.'

  'Mary.' He sighed. 'You don't seem to realise the difficulty of our position. Such patrons must not be pressed.'

  'Are you a worm under their boots?'

  Mr. Jones gave her a very cold look, and she bit her lip. He tapped the ledger to indicate that she should carry on with the accounts.

  He wondered where his wife was now. Sewing away in the shop, no doubt, her needle moving as fast as a swallow. She always let him know when she was going out to a patron's house, and informed him of what she'd told Abi to serve for dinner. And whenever he asked after her health, she would say, 'Very well, thank you, my dear,' or mention some trivial face-ache or stye. But for a long time now she hadn't told him anything that mattered. Above all, she didn't explain why she always seemed to fall asleep between the hour they retired to their room and the moment he climbed into bed after her.

  Mr. Jones was not an excessively demanding man. Not as far as he knew. In the old days, for instance, whenever his wife was pregnant, he'd quite understood the importance of refraining, so the child wouldn't be shaken in the womb. Those had been burdensome times, but at least he had felt that he and Jane were at one, conspirators in a thrilling enterprise; their eyes might meet above the tea-kettle, and he would take a long scalding drink and know that all this self-command would be worth it in the end. After they'd lost Grandison last year, they had tried again at once, but it came to nothing, and then he hadn't wanted to put Jane to the trial again so soon. But the months had gone by, and still she didn't turn to him in bed, or so rarely that he hardly even remembered the last time. He didn't want to press her, but considering her age, their time was running out. And to wait, as he now did, without knowing when or why, was more than he could stand.

  A terrible thought struck him. Had it not, in fact, been understood between them that they did indeed mean to try again? Perhaps Jane was worn out. Perhaps she had given up, without ever saying the words. And who was he to oblige her to hope again? What did he know of the dreadful disappointments of a woman's body?

  He could hear Hetta in the passageway, bumping into something over and over, and laughing. Heaven knew, he was grateful for her. But a daughter, no matter how devoted to her parents, was only theirs for a time; she would marry into another family and bear children with another name. Was it presumptuous to long also for one single son? A son that would inherit the business, and support his parents when they were too old to work? It was a lot to ask, but he asked it. It was part of his quiet bargain with the Maker. It was the triumphant future for which the boy Thomas had swapped his leg.

  Mary Saunders breathed heavily over the books. 'Do they balance?' he asked.

  'Not yet.'

  She was at her most handsome when she was concentrating, her lips pursed and dark from biting, her eyes on her work. His wife assured him the girl was not even a woman yet, which he found hard to credit, but she believed that grief, such as Mary's for her dead mother, might well delay the matter. He hoped she wouldn't leave them for a good ten years, for all her daft ambitions about going on the stage or catching a rich husband. Some local journeyman would marry the girl in the end, perhaps, or even a glover or stockinger. Women should not spend all the
ir very best years in service, drying into spinsterhood. Look at poor Mrs. Ash; who would believe she was four years younger than his wife?

  His eyes throbbed as he tried to follow the figures under Mary's pen. They would never add up. Drapers charged early, and patrons paid late, or never, and even in good months there was a scarcity of coin, which was all the fault of the Dutch. Sometimes he was amazed there was dinner on the table every night. His wife was such a capable manager, she never complained. She never told him her troubles anymore; not for months now. Instead she entrusted them to this chit of a girl. He heard the two of them murmuring like bees over their work in the shop, but if he walked in he could never tell what they were talking about. The chosen confidante was a stranger to the family who had none of his experience of the world, who could offer no comfort—who, above all, didn't love Jane Jones as he did.

  What was it that women had between them that made the words flow as easy as milk? What was it that his wife couldn't say to him?

  One afternoon, by bad luck, Mrs. Harding and Mr. Valentine Morris both sent their carriages to Inch Lane with last year's suits, demanding an inch let out here and two inches there, and could Mrs. Jones kindly give the collar a more modish cut, and have the whole pressed and returned in time for the May Ball? Mr. Morris's German valet and Mrs. Harding's French maid swore at each other in narrow hall.

  'I don't know at all, Mary, it's a whirling world,' said Mrs. Jones, letting her head sink back against the wall of the shop for a moment. Her heart was thudding, and she felt as heavy as oak, though her shape hadn't changed at all yet. 'New patterns every year, stitches so tiny I can hardly see them, names of stuffs I can't so much as pronounce ... Is there no end to it all?'

  'Haven't fashions always come and gone?' said Mary Saunders.

  Mrs. Jones shrugged her shoulders to ease their ache. 'It seems faster, these days. Sometimes I think of what my grandchildren will wear to church, and I might not even know the words for it.' Her hand rested on her belly, still flat, and she gave the girl a tiny smile.

  Hetta was fractious; she insisted on playing with the needle box, and after Mrs. Ash had come into the shop three times to tell her she'd drop it, finally she did. The nurse took the child out of the room by the ear, muttering, 'This is what comes of having a name out of a storybook,' which of course was aimed at the mother. Mrs. Jones got down on her knees beside Mary to pick up the tiny needles.

  'Hetta hates her,' whispered Mary conversationally, 'and do you wonder at it?'

  'Oh, Mary.' Mrs. Jones dropped the needles back in the box. 'If you could find it in your heart to be a little kinder to poor Mrs. Ash ... She won't be here forever, you know.'

  The girl's eyes widened. 'You mean—'

  'This time is different, isn't it?' murmured Mrs. Jones, glancing down at herself. 'We'll be needing a wet-nurse, see.'

  Mary nodded delightedly. 'So Mrs. Ash will have to go.'

  'Well,' said the mistress helplessly, 'I must start looking out for a place for her, that's all I mean.'

  'I hear they need females in Virginia...'

  'Mary Saunders!' She smacked the girl on the wrist, swallowing her smile. It faintly troubled Mrs. Jones that she couldn't make herself feel very sorry at the prospect of losing Mrs. Ash after all these years of faithful service. Nothing much mattered these days except what was happening inside her: like a blast of trumpets on a soundless day.

  Sometimes when she glanced up from her sewing it was as if twenty years had rolled up like a carpet and she was a girl again, doing her darning with Su. She talked to her old friend sometimes; more and more these last months, ever since she'd begun to suspect her condition. Su, she said in her head, thank you for your daughter. I only wish you could have seen mine. There was an infinitesimal hint of a curve below her ribs, but not enough to show, yet. She shut her eyes and wished hard that this one would be a boy. One who would live.

  Her husband was looking hangdog these days. In bed at night, his eyes rested on the ceiling; he never guessed that his future was sprouting like a seed beside him. She would have comforted him in the best way she knew how, except that it might endanger the child. Time was she used to tell Thomas everything, but that was years ago, before their family grew and shrank again, before any of the necessary secrets. She longed to give him the good news, but something laid a chill hand on her and said to wait. Just a little longer. It mightn't be true. It mightn't last; it mightn't live. So for now she kept the secret hidden in her mouth like a pearl. She sat and stood and walked as if her skirts were lined with silver, but nobody noticed except Mary.

  Now the two of them were laughing over some bit of nonsense when Daffy came into the shop to deposit a stack of trunks. Mary's laughter cut off as if a door had slammed shut. Mrs. Jones looked up from her needle, and noticed that the two servants both looked everywhere in the room except at each other. 'Mary,' she said quietly, a few minutes after Daffy had left, 'is there anything you wish to tell me?'

  The girl shook her head, eyes on her sewing.

  'I mean to say, I did once think—that is, I know how young you are, but I once imagined that you and Daffy might be beginning to have ... a fondness for each other. Was I wrong?'

  'No,' muttered Mary.

  'These things do often occur, in a household,' said Mrs. Jones vaguely. 'It's only natural.'

  Finally the girl looked up, her cheeks flushed. 'The truth is—he asked me to marry him.'

  'At sixteen!' said Mrs. Jones, her mouth puckered with shock.

  'He wanted to marry me and take me away from here, and I said no.'

  'Mary!' exclaimed Mrs. Jones, her eyes brimming over at the thought of it. 'My poor girl. My poor good girl.' The maid smiled a little, shyly, while the mistress searched in all her pockets for a handkerchief. 'Don't mind my foolishness,' Mrs. Jones stammered through her tears. 'It's only my condition.'

  Mary handed over a clean folded handkerchief, and Mrs. Jones mopped her eyes with it. How glad she was; how blessed by such loyalty. To know there was someone who cared about her too much to leave her service, who would stand by her through all trials!

  'Cider's ever so strengthening in the early months, I've heard,' Mary told her mistress, and frequently offered to go down to fetch her some from the Crow's Nest after dinner. Mr. Jones was all in favour of whatever could restore a bit of colour to his wife's cheeks.

  Mary's life was folded over like a hem. There was a day side and a night side, and to look at one you'd never guess the other. She wasn't too sure which Mary was the real one. It was strange, but it was how it was.

  Hidden in her bag under the bed, her single gold-clocked stocking was getting heavier, the coins mounting up. Grubby ones, shiny ones, a few with edges clipped off by coiners, and a whole crown a sozzled lawyer from Edinburgh had dropped between her breasts for a tip, probably thinking it was a penny. Cadwaladyr was civil, these days, apart from his mocking eyebrows; he always gave her a few minutes to get round the back and out of sight in the little room above the stable, before sending the cullies out to her. Sukie—his own invention—was the name he gave her. 'Tell Sukie I sent you,' was what he said to the cullies. They were always travellers, passing through, on their way to Bristol or the North, for a job or a sale or a bargain; Mary had told Cadwaladyr from the start that she wouldn't touch a Marcherman, for fear of starting talk in the town.

  Most nights she found it effortless, being Sukie. It was strange to be dressed so respectably and have an unpainted face, and to work so fast and so surreptitiously round the back of the inn, but otherwise the trade was as familiar as an old glove. Once she was greeted by a queue of three Yorkshiremen outside the stable, quarrelling over who'd go first. Another night, a drunken Cornishman wanted to do it standing up but fell down on her and got mud all over her blue holland gown.

  She offered no preliminary toying, unless the cullies needed it. It wasn't like the old times in London, when she had taken some sort of pride in pleasing, in luring customers back for more.
No, these days she was in a hurry and all she wanted was her half of the two shillings it cost these men to get relief in the wilds of the Marches. Sometimes they grabbed her by the breasts, exclaiming over them. If she was face-on, she had to smell the men's beery breath; one lout even tried to kiss her, but she moved her mouth away. Mary preferred to lie face-down on the straw mattress and think about other things, such as the diamonded petticoat she was embroidering for Miss Lucy Allen, but which she would look much handsomer in herself.

  Right at the end, when a cully was weakened, she sometimes put her mouth to his ear and told him that if he gossiped about Sukie to a soul in Monmouth, she'd come after him with a knife and make an opera singer of him.

  She was always careful. As far as the drinkers at the Crow's Nest knew, she was just a maid who popped in for a pint of cider for her mistress every few nights, and never lingered to flirt or play dice. She never went round the back to the stables if there was anyone there to see her. And Cadwaladyr wouldn't blab, would he? Not as long as she kept paying him his poundage? But then Mary remembered his face, that first night he'd recognised Jane Jones's new maid as the girl who'd tricked him at Coleford: his eyes under their thick white brows, standing out with rage.

  One cold evening an Irishman who stank of baccy, with a little worm of a yard, tried to bargain her down: 'Sixpence for you and the same for the innkeeper.'

  'Why,' she asked, 'because you're only half-sized?'

  He made her nose bleed. She walked home empty-handed, with some story of getting a sudden nosebleed in the lane.

  'Did you see a black rabbit?' asked Mrs. Jones wisely.

  Mary shook her head, and another red drop escaped her handkerchief.

  'Ach, it's always the black rabbits that bring on bloody noses, don't you know?'

  That was the only time Mary went unpaid. Most nights she was home in a quarter of an hour with a shilling or two in her pocket. 'What a good lass you are,' Mrs. Jones would say, taking a mouthful of her cider.