Slammerkin (2 page)

Not that they were poor, exactly. Mary Saunders and her mother and the man she was meant to call Father had a pair of shoes each, and if baby Billy didn't learn to walk too fast, he would have a pair too, by the time he needed them. Poor was another state altogether, Mary knew. Poor was when bits of your bare body hung through holes in your clothes. Poor was a pinch of tea brewed over and over for weeks till it was the colour of water. Falling down in the street. That smell of metal on the breath of that boy at school who collapsed during prayers. 'Blessed are the meek,' the Superintendent was intoning at the time, and she stopped for a moment, displeased at the interruption, then continued, 'for they shall inherit the earth.' But that boy hadn't inherited anything, Mary decided. All he'd done was fainted again the next morning, and never come back to School again.

Yes, Mary knew she had much to be thankful for, from the leather soles under her feet, to the bread in her mouth, to the fact that she went to school at all. Dull as it was, it was better than mopping floors in a tavern at eight years old, like the girl in the cellar beside theirs. There weren't many girls who were still at school when they turned thirteen; most parents would call it a waste of education. But it had been Cob Saunders's fondest whim that his daughter should learn what he never had—reading, writing and casting account—and as a matter of respect, his widow saw to it that the girl never missed school. Yes, Mary was grateful for what she'd got; she didn't need her mother's sharp reminders. 'We get by, don't we?' Susan Digot would say in answer to any complaints, pointing her long callused finger at her daughter. 'We make ends meet, thank the Maker.'

When Mary was very young she had heard God referred to as the Almighty Master, and ever since then she'd tended to confuse him with the man her mother quilted for. The delivery boy would arrive with a sack of linen pieces every week or so, and dump it at Susan Digot's feet: 'The Master says to get this lot done by Thursday or there'll be hell to pay, and no more stains or he'll dock you tuppence on the shilling.' So in the girl's mind the Mighty Master owned all the things and people of the earth, and at any time you could be called to account for what you had done with them.

These nights, in Mary's dreams, mustachioed Frenchmen knelt before her, and she hid her face behind a stiff fan of lace. The scar-faced harlot from the Dials shook her head like a silver birch in a high wind, and the red ribbon slid right down into Mary's hands, as smooth as water.

'Get up now, girl,' came her mother's cry first thing in the morning. Mary had to empty the Digots' brimming pot into the gutter, and blow on last night's fire, and toast crusts on a blackened fork. 'Make haste, now. Your father can't dawdle here all day.' As if he was any father of hers; as if his kindness to Mary had lasted any longer than it took to court the Widow Saunders. 'Come now, can you not hear Billy boy whining?' As if Mary cared.

A boy was worth ten times as much as a girl, Mary knew that without ever being told. Since the girl's half-brother was born, though, Susan Digot had not looked more content, but the opposite; her elbows sharper, her temper shorter. There seemed a kind of fury about her sometimes when she looked at her daughter. 'Four mouths to fill, I have,' she muttered once, 'and one of them a great useless girl's.'

While Mary was waiting at the corner for the milkmonger each morning—and especially if he'd bittered the milk with snail juice to make it froth as if fresh—she took refuge in her best memories: the time her mother had taken her to watch the Lord Mayor's Procession, or the sky-splitting fireworks on Tower Hill last New Year's Eve. As she hugged her pint basin of tea and soaked her crusts to soften them, she conjured up a luxurious future. She dwelt on how she would have her maid wind a scarlet ribbon into her plaits every morning; how its gaudy stain would make her hair gleam like coal. The sounds of her future would be foreign ones: flutes, and galloping horses, and high trills of laughter.

All day at school Mary thought of gaudy colours as she copied out Precepts and corrected the spelling of the girls in the neighbouring desks. None of the tasks set demanded more than a fraction of her mind, that was the problem. The Superintendent called her proud, but Mary thought it would be nonsense to pretend she didn't know she had quick wits. As far back as she could remember, she had found her schoolwork ludicrously simple. Now she busied herself with fantasies of hooped gowns with ten-foot trains as she stood—a full head above the younger girls—reciting the Principles of Goodness:

Put upon this Earth to work
None but wicked children shirk.

Mary was so used to these rhymes by now that she could join in with the chorus of voices while her mind was altogether elsewhere. Could chant the Five Requirements for Salvation, for instance, while deciding that once she was grown to womanhood she would never wear beige. She tried not to think about how empty her stomach was, or the Mighty Master in the sky, or what piece-work he was going to hand her, or how long a life she'd have to do it in. That Immortal Soul the teachers harped on so much—Mary knew she'd swap it quick as a blink for the merest inch of beauty. A single scarlet ribbon.

In September, old King George dropped dead and young George was the new king. William Digot said things might take a turn for the better now. This fellow had been born on English soil, which was more than you could say for his dad and his grandad, 'and Lord knows we've had enough of those Germans and their fat wives.'

When he fell asleep in his chair, Mary peered over his shoulder at the newspaper in his lap. She suspected her stepfather couldn't read one word in three; he just stumbled his way through the headlines and looked at the pictures. Under the title 'King of Great Britain, Ireland, Gibraltar, Canada, the Americas, Bengal, the West Indies, and Elector of Hanover' there was a full-length drawing of the young king; his expression a little nervous, his thighs in their velvet breeches as smooth as fish.

Crouched by the window to catch the last of the daylight, Susan Digot nibbled her lip. Mary knew her mother took no interest in politics. All the woman had ever wanted was to be a proper dressmaker, shaping elegant skirts and jackets instead of quilting coarse six-inch squares twelve hours a day for dirt pay from a master she'd never met. She and Cob Saunders had both grown up in a faraway city called Monmouth before they'd come to London in '39. 'What was it brought you and my father to London in the first place?' asked Mary now, softly, so as not to wake the coalman.

'Whatever makes you ask a thing like that?' Susan Digot's eyes were startled, red at the rims. But she didn't wait for an answer. 'Myself and Cob, we thought we'd better ourselves, but we should have bided at home.' Her fingers moved like mice across a hem, stitching as fast as breath. 'It can't be done.'

'What can't?'

'Bettering yourself,' said her mother bleakly. 'Cob didn't know the London cobblers had the trade all sewn up, did he? He never got the work he wanted, the fine skilful stuff. Patching holes with cardboard, that was about the height of it. Here, count these.'

Mary went over and knelt at her mother's knee, lining up the squares stuffed with muslin. She imagined her father as a cross-legged fairy man, tapping nails into pointed dancing shoes with his tiny hammer. But no, that wasn't right, that was out of a story. When she concentrated, she could see him as he'd been: the great bulk of him.

'Cob wouldn't have gone and got himself killed back in Monmouth,' added her mother, her mouth askew. 'There was never such bloodshed there.'

Mary tried to picture it: blood on the London cobbles. She'd seen a riot go down Charing Cross last year: boots clattering past the basement window, and shouts of 'No Popery,' and the screech of breaking glass. 'Like the No Popery?' she said now, eager.

Susan Digot sniffed. 'That was nothing to the Calendar Riots your father got mixed up in, nothing at all. The chaos and confusion, you can't imagine it.' She went silent, and there was only the scratch of her needle on the cloth. Then she asked, 'And what about me?' giving Mary a hard look as if she should know the answer. 'Wasn't I as neat a needlewoman as my friend Jane, look you, and here am I wearing out my fingers on squares like some iron machine while she was making costumes for the quality, last I heard!'

That Mary could imagine more easily:
costumes for the quality,
sleek and colourful as fruit on a china plate. Scarlet ribbons threaded through hems, sleeves, stomachers. 'Why can't you be a dressmaker now, though, Mother?' she said suddenly.

Susan Digot let out an impatient sound. 'Such impossibilities you invent, Mary. I never got the skills for more than hemming, did I? And where would I be supposed to get the capital to start up for myself, or the space for a shop likewise? Besides, my eyes aren't what they were. And isn't London choked with dressmakers already? What could possess anyone to hire me?'

Her voice grated on her daughter's ears. Dreariness and complaint, that was all she ever spoke nowadays. Mary tried to remember the last time she'd heard her mother laugh.

'Besides,' the woman added sternly, 'William provides for us now.'

Mary kept her head down so her mother wouldn't see her face.

She was sure there had been better times, when she was small and her mother was still Mrs. Saunders. There was a tiny picture in the back of Mary's mind of being weak after a fever, and her mother holding her in the crook of her arm, and feeding her warm ale posset with a pewter spoon. The posset was soft on Mary's throat, going down. The spoon must have been lost since, or pawned maybe. And she was sure she remembered Cob Saunders too, the vast shape of him against the light as he worked by the window, his hammer as sure as a heartbeat. The dark fuzz of his beard used to catch crumbs; after supper he'd lift his small daughter onto his lap so she could comb it with her fingers. Mary couldn't have made up a picture as vivid as that, could she? She knew it was from her father she'd got her height and her dark eyes and hair; all she had of her mother's was a pair of quick hands.

Even the food had been better in those days too, she was sure of it. She thought she remembered a week when there'd been more than enough of everything, after Susan Saunders had made a big sale, and the family had fresh meat and tuppenny ale, and Mary was sick all down her shift from the richness and the thrill of it, but no one got angry.

'How many is that, then?' said her mother, and Mary was jolted back into the present, the fading light of afternoon.

She looked down uncertainly at the pile of pieces on her lap. 'Fifty-three, I think, or maybe fifty-four...'

'Count them again,' said her mother. Her voice sagged like an old mattress. 'Maybe's no good when the Master sends for them, is it?'

Mary started again as fast as she could, thumbing the pieces but trying not to dirty them, while beside her Susan Digot bent closer to her sewing. 'Mother,' the girl asked, struck by a thought, 'why didn't you ever go back to Monmouth?'

The seamstress gave a little jerk of her shoulders. 'Cob and I, we didn't fancy crawling home with all our mighty plans demolished. Besides, he wasn't a man to give up hope. He had a liking for London,' she said contemptuously. 'It was his idea to drag us here in the first place.'

'No but afterwards,' the girl said eagerly, 'after my father died.' She could see it like a tale in a book; herself as the little girl in her widowed mother's tender arms, the two of them costumed in black satin, jolting along in a plush-lined coach to the fabled city of Monmouth where the air smelt clean and the people smiled at each other in the street.

Her mother shook her head as if there was a bee buzzing in it.
'You make your bed,'
she quoted,
'and you lie in it.
This is where the Maker has put me and this is where I'll stay. There's no going back.'

And there was never any arguing with that.

One damp November evening Mary had been sent in search of a shell-cart for tuppence worth of winkles when she bumped into the ribbon peddler coming out of an alley off Short's Gardens. He opened his coat at her like a pair of wings. Mary backed away in fright. His coat was old, blackened at the edges. But there, pinned to the lining, long and snaky and curled at the end like a tongue: the very match of the harlot's ribbon.

'How much for the red one?' The words slipped out on their own.

'A shilling to you, dear heart.' The peddler cocked his grizzled head sideways at her as if she had made a joke. His eyes were shiny.

Mary ran on.

It might as well have been a guinea he'd asked. Mary had never held a shilling in her hand. And when she stood at the shell-cart tonight and dug into her smock pocket for the two pennies William Digot had entrusted to her to buy the family's dinner, one of them was gone. There was a hole in the cloth, its edges soft as Billy's eyelashes.

What was she to do? A pennyworth of winkles would never stretch to four people, she knew, so she ran round the corner to the pieman on Flitcroft Street and asked him had he anything for a penny. The ham pie he gave her had a broken crust but it looked filling, at least. All the way home she kept her eyes on the ground to catch the winking of the lost penny between two cobbles or in a gutter overflowing with peelings and turds, but she never caught a glimpse of it. As if a coin would lie long in the dirt of Charing Cross!

She hoped the Digots would be content with the pie, as it was hot and smelt wholesome. Instead, Susan Digot called her a liar. 'You spent the penny on hot lardy-cake, didn't you?' she said, rubbing her sore eyes with the heel of her hand. 'I can smell it off your breath.'

Over and over again, as the hard end of the broom landed on her legs, the girl sobbed out her defence: 'I lost it! I lost the penny, I swear!'

'Oh, Mary,' said Susan Digot, and hit her again.

She'd been thrashed before, and harder, but somehow she had never felt so injured. What good was it to be a grown girl of thirteen, if she could still be put over her mother's knee and beaten for something she hadn't done?