Slammerkin (13 page)

By the end of the month Saunders was the deftest seamstress in the Magdalen, and Matron Butler smiled at her every other day. The Ruineds tossed their heads, and Mary was generally disliked. It wasn't the meagre wages that kept her going, but the satisfaction of the stitching itself. It was a most peculiar thing.

Thread seemed to obey Mary; cloth lay down obediently at her touch. She couldn't imagine what the other girls found so difficult, or how they were so often waylaid by snags and knots. She cut out white kid for gloves, knowing without being told how the leather should lie against the curve of the thumb. She liked the challenge of the more complicated stitches she was learning from the Matron, but even the simplest hem, perfectly done, gave her a rush of delight like gin in her throat. How proud Susan Digot would have been if she could have seen her daughter—as was—biting off the thread as she finished edging the pew cloth for the Magdalen Chapel. And how Doll Higgins would guffaw.

Mary would have written to her friend, if she hadn't known that the Matron opened all correspondence, in or out. Doll wouldn't have grudged the ha'penny to the forger in Rat's Castle to read her a letter from her old muck-mate.
Doll,
Mary would have liked to write,
you'll never believe it. I've worked my way up to Presidor of my ward. That's like a mistress. The others have to treat me civil or I'll report them for moral backsliding. Only the Presidors get real tea to drink instead of that sage muck.

She was keeping her promise, wasn't she? Getting well, getting through the days, right up till Christmas. Not that Christmas differed much from any other day, behind the shutters that kept passers-by from peering into the dark parlours of the Magdalen. Honour Boyle had her pander come all the way out to Whitechapel, got up like a man of the cloth. He brought her a cone of sugar. He kept lamenting, 'Niece, niece, what a pass have you come to!' as he fondled her ankle under cover of her skirts. Honour was laughing so hard she had to pretend she was in tears.

But no one visited Mary. Of course, no one knew she was there but Doll. On Christmas afternoon she went into the needle room and carried on with the lace she was tacking round a cuff. She tried to imagine the man whose arm would fill it. Would he notice the repeated rose motif, or would he wipe his nose on it? She wondered how long it would take her to lose her mind, locked up in this doll's-house where every day was the same. There was a girl in the Ruineds' ward who was said to have been here three years. Maybe you could get so used to obeying orders that you'd never leave.

On New Year's Eve, Mary Saunders was on her knees. She'd held that position for two hours, and every muscle in her body was aching. Darkness draped the high chapel windows.

Her eyes were shut. It had filled her with rage to pull on her grey bodice this morning. There was no call for looking-glasses in the Magdalen, where seventy-two bodies reflected her own. Like mantua-makers' poppets, the girls knelt in rows in the chapel, displaying their uniform virtue to the visitors' gaze. Each wore a flat straw hat—as if to shade her eyes from the light, but really to hide her face—bound on with a royal-blue ribbon. It was the only splash of colour permitted, and a shade Mary had never liked. The Penitents even smelt much the same as each other, it occurred to her now, and no wonder; the same stewed beef, the same sweat, the same whiff of ash soap on their necks.

The opening hymn brought the congregation to their feet with great rustlings and creakings of whalebone. Mary leaned her numb weight on her hands and clambered up. Looking round covertly, she counted five Governors at the back, with their white ceremonial staves catching the light from the sconces. The Lady Subscribers wafted their fans.

The Magdalens were known for their singing, the obedience of their divided harmonies.

How many kindred souls are fled
To the vast regions of the dead

Mary's fingers were icy; she flicked through the prayer book to find the words. Her voice came in with a caw in the third line.

Since from this day the changing sun
Thro' his last yearly period has run?

As the organ crashed between verses, the cheap print blurred for Mary. Who might have died this year, without her knowing? She gave a brief thought to Susan Digot in Charing Cross, quilting squares for petticoats at sixpence a piece; too skinny to live to a great age, surely? Mary wondered if Billy had thrived, or whether he'd swallowed a needle yet. And William Digot; when would he buckle under his load of coal? Strange that they could all be rotten in their graves and Mary wouldn't know of it. And wouldn't much care either.

Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing.

A wintry glance from Matron Butler made Mary bend her head and join in the 'Hymn on the New Year.' Tomorrow would be 1763; it had a new and alien ring to it. Who was to say Mary herself would live to see another Christmas? Her voice died away again in the middle of the verse. She felt an intolerable need to get out of this building. She held her thumbs tightly, like triggers.

Back down on her aching knees, Mary tried to keep her balance. She swayed a little forwards, a little backwards on the stone floor, like a giddy kite tethered to the ground. High in his walnut pulpit stood young Reverend Dodds, announcing the theme.
'Can the Ethiopian change his skin,'
he quoted impressively,
'or the leopard his spots?'

Mary thought of leopards. She'd paid a ha'penny to see one at the Tower last winter; its spots were huge and lush, and it was the angriest creature she'd ever set eyes on. Sometimes it paced back and forth through her dreams.

'The thirteenth verse of the Book of Jeremiah,' Dodds went on, 'is a
vastly
suitable text for this, the last night of the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and sixty-two.' His cauliflower wig dipped over his bright cheeks. Mary eyed the puce breeches that embraced his thighs without a wrinkle: they must have cost five pounds if a penny, she reckoned. Her fingers itched to test the pile of the velvet.

The sermon-tasters in the front rows nodded along like pigeons, as if Jeremiah 13 was the very verse of the very book they would have chosen themselves. An ostrich feather nodded in the gallery, light as foam. A good house, thought Mary: a sprinkling of nobs, and plenty of country cousins up for the Twelve Days, seeing the sights, and none prettier than bad women made good.

The Reverend could be relied on not to weary the visitors with too much hard thought. He turned now to the distresses of the vulnerable young women of London, 'how like straying sheep,' he moaned, 'they fall prey to the ravening wolves of avarice and vice.' The Lady Subscribers sucked in their white and red cheeks. The gentlemen looked into the distance, as if they had never heard of such a phenomenon as 'the slavery of prostitution,' thought Mary with dark amusement.

Now Dodds began his rhapsody on the most humane, most merciful Magdalen Hospital. 'A hospital not for the body, no! but for the
character
—where these young women may return to the natural state of female virtue, and learn to grow the fruits of honest toil.' As his cheeks turned to juicy cherries in the heat of the packed chapel, Mary could almost see why the little girls swooned for the Chaplain-in-Extraordinary, which was his full title. Dodds rose on his toes now and extended one long white hand in the direction of the Penitents, shaking back a triple ruffle. Belgian lace, Mary reckoned, peering past the brim of her hat. And a fat diamond on the finger that pointed now at a girl in the front row, little Amy who'd fainted in the gutter on Petition Day. 'Though the Ethiopian will be black forever, according to the Divine plan,
you,
Amy Pratt, may yet be washed clean of your manifold sins!'

It is a sin
To steal a pin

Mary's head was full of detritus; the rhymes nailed into it at school were the hardest to shake out. Amy Pratt leapt to her feet, now, swaying with excitement. It occurred to Mary to join her, as an excuse to straighten her legs. Had the Reverend picked Amy quite at random tonight, or was it for her pink oval face, exposed now as she raised her eyes to merciful heaven and her hat swung back like a straw halo? The gentleman in the pigeon-wing wig seemed to approve of the choice; he passed his spy-glass to his blond friend—who was too modish to wear a wig at all. The blond stared down as if at the opera-house. Now where had Mary seen him before?

'Here before us,' proclaimed Dodds with a tender wave at Amy Pratt, 'we see a woman—nay, a very child—stripped by penury, enfeebled by hunger, and lured into depravity at an all too tender age.'

Sell it before you lose it,
chanted Doll in Mary's head. Mary exchanged a tiny grimace with Honour Boyle, who was picking her nails with a splinter from the pew.

'But as Jeremiah instructs us,
Then may ye also do good, who are accustomed to do evil,'
the preacher recited in the rolling bass he kept for the Prophets.

Matron Butler, pinned on her knees at the end of the row, knitted up her lips as if she doubted that, somehow. Mary could sense the Matron's cool eyes on her, and she had to pretend to be looking at a painting on the wall. Mary's namesake in dusty oils, the Virgin, six months gone, stumbled across an arid field into the curved arms of her cousin. Mary imagined their big bellies meeting with a thump.

Dodds was bouncing up and down on his shiny toes as he recited one of the Hospital's own hymns.

Flee, Sinners, flee th' unlawful Bed,
Lest Vengeance send you down to dwell,
In the dark Regions of the Dead,
To feed the fiercest Fires of Hell.

He relished the rhymes; Mary suddenly suspected him of writing poetry in his spare time.

But Amy Pratt's faint sobs were swelling now. She burst forth in lamentation, gulping the air like a fish. Honour Boyle was giggling; she could never stop once she got started. Mary avoided her eye. The girls next to Amy Pratt were climbing to their feet one by one, infected by her shame, their tired legs shaking.

'Embrace the light,' Dodds urged them, gripping the glossy edge of his pulpit. Jill Hoop, eleven years old and unused to metaphor, cast an appalled glance at the chandelier that hung near the pulpit; she was clearly reckoning the distance. The older girls quivered in their pews. Who would be the first to faint tonight? Sixteen or seventeen, most of them, years older than Mary; ought to know better, she thought coldly. A bowl of proper tea to steady the nerves, that's what they needed. Or better yet, a slug of gin.

The Reverend managed to look distressed and gratified at the same time. Were those tears in his eyes, or just a glitter of candlelight? 'Be of good cheer,' he told the girls now in a buttermilk voice. 'Through the grace of God and his Son, you have been lifted from the
Hades
of the streets into this
Elysium
of sisterhood.' Upturned faces stared at him, bewildered by the allusions. 'This is no grim house of correction,' he carolled. 'It is a safe refuge from your miserable former circumstances—a happy home at last.'

But the girls had picked up grief like a fever; whimpers passed down the rows. The Ruineds were the most sentimental, Mary thought scornfully. Jane Taverner stooped down, heavy with tears; she was a vicar's daughter. Was it acceptable for a Presidor to remain dry-faced, Mary wondered with a slight start? She knotted her hands on the hard rim of her stays and dipped her chin, as a halfway measure. Her neck began to throb in time with her knees.

When she glanced up next, the velvet-coated blond man was whispering a joke in his friend's ear. She wished she could remember who he was; a lawyer, maybe? He was looking down most eagerly at the Magdalens. At least let him pay for it, thought Mary furiously. Why should we kneel here and let him gawk for nothing?

The lady with the ostrich feather was craning over the rail. Over a dark blue petticoat and bodice she was wearing a loose slammerkin in cream shirred silk; the light of every candle in the chapel was lost in its flounces. Her hair was dressed in such a heavy, flower-studded egg, it was always possible she might topple over the edge of the balcony and keep Honour Boyle laughing all year. Her pearl-ringed hands squeezed the pew cloth. Three of the Ruineds had worked the ivy leaves on that one, Mary remembered; a fortnight it took them, going all out.

Dodds plucked at his throat to loosen his black ribbon. He opened his arms to the gallery. 'You see before you, most honourable Subscribers, a poignant display of true penitence. Do not the salt tears these lovely outcasts shed testify to their abhorrence of their crime?'

It is a crime
To waste time.

Mary shook her head, to clear it of the childish words. Think how much time she'd wasted, kneeling in this chapel, every day and twice on Sundays, and all for the sake of a roof over her head. And here she was, penned into a herd of snivelling girls, while the sermon dragged on and on, and this the best night in the city's calendar. Mary's eyes strayed to the western window. What wouldn't she give to be out there tonight in London's familiar dirt, the streets strung with lamps as if for a perpetual holiday?

Suddenly the city sounded like a story, believed for a moment, then fading away. Mary remembered the huge swollen dome of St. Paul's as if from a dream. How could it be less than two months since she'd been cooped up here like a hen?

The Reverend Dodds slammed his white hand on the pulpit. Mary jumped and almost fell, but there was no room where she knelt in the press of bodies. She couldn't feel her knees; she had the illusion that it was her hollow petticoats that bore her up. The preacher's cambric handkerchief was fluttering in his hand like a badge of surrender. His excitement reminded Mary of a cully's last thrusts before the moment of spending. 'Though the leopard or the Negro cannot change the colour of their skins,' cried Reverend Dodds, 'each of
you
can alter the hue of your heart, and this very night. Heaven,' he urged them in a cracking voice, 'is within your grasp.'