Slammerkin (24 page)

Across the river the men were going up and down the white fields with barrows; a dark stench drifted through town. 'What are they doing in the fields?' Mary asked Daffy when she squeezed past him in the little yard.

'Dunging,' he said between blows. The log split apart under his axe.

She repeated the word, derisory.

His breath came out in a cloud. 'They spread dung out to be ready for the plough, see. To fertilise and fructify the soil.'

Him and his words! Mary pursed up her lips. 'What'll they sow, then?'

'Coltsfoot,' he said, leaning on his axe for a second. 'Hogweed. Maybe crow garlic.'

Mary laughed out loud. 'Don't think to fool me with your nonsensical names.'

'As if a city girl would know one leaf from another!' he said.

She believed him now, but she wouldn't say so. She dawdled on the icy doorstep. As the man lifted the axe high in the air, his shoulders were thick as a terrier's. 'That's what you all call me, the Londoner, isn't it?'

Daffy's axe paused; he glanced up.

'I've heard you in the Stays Room, with the master, and with Abi too.'

He split a log cleanly. 'Here's another little quaint country saying you may not know:
Those who listen at doors won't hear any good of themselves.'

'Do you bear me a grudge, then?' Her voice was merry.

His blade stuck; he had to batter the log against the stump before the axe cut through. He spoke gruffly. 'All I say, and I'll say it to your face, is you got a place that should have gone to another.'

So that was it. This wretched job! At once Mary went on the attack, as Doll had always taught her. 'This other you mention,' she began sweetly, 'I don't suppose she's that little brownish girl I've seen you dawdling with in the market?'

Daffy straightened up. 'My cousin Gwyneth,' he said through narrowed teeth, 'is the finest woman who's ever walked the earth.'

He'd bared his throat to her blade; he knew it and she knew it. 'I do beg your pardon,' said Mary softly. 'I must have been confusing your fine cousin with some ragabones I saw begging for heads and tails round the back of the fish stall.'

She wouldn't have been surprised if he'd hit her, now, but his hands stayed wrapped around the shaft of the axe, and his eyes rested on the log-pile. The man's silence impressed her. Perhaps he was wondering how she came to be such a shrew before the age of sixteen. Mary occasionally wondered that herself.

Finally Daffy glanced up at her. 'One day, when you're reduced in your circumstances, you'll regret your uncharitable talk.'

Mary regretted it a little already. Sometimes words were like glass that broke in her mouth.

For Abi, the last Monday of each month started hours before dawn. The washerwomen, hired for the day, gave her the stick to churn the sheets while they measured out the lye. Only bent over this cauldron in the scullery did she ever begin to feel warm. The women were always glad when Mrs. Ash sent Abi to help them; she could face the steam twice as long as any Christian, they said. 'Leather in place of skin, that's for why.' They thought she didn't understand them, just because she never bothered to engage in foolish chit-chat. Sometimes, Abi had discovered, it was useful to be thought a halfwit—or a half-ape, more likely.

They set up a tub on the kitchen table for the white small-clothes and poured in fresh boiled water. 'Bestir yourself now, Abi,' said the younger washerwoman loudly, tipping a load of clothes into the froth.

The maid-of-all-work smiled with her lips shut, having learned that the sight of her bright teeth could cause outbursts of nervous laughter among white folk. Lye stung the pink cracks in her hands
as she immersed them to begin the scrubbing. Abi could read volumes off the folds of cloth as they moved in the water; every stain told a story. The child Hetta, for instance; her woollen bodice was tiny and easily scrubbed between fingers and thumb. Her petticoat was rimmed with dust and splashed with yellow. What was the polite phrase the mistress liked to use?
Like takes out like.
Meaning, that petticoat would need boiling in a pot of fresh piss after the first wash.

The washerwomen in the scullery were laughing like drunkards. She'd have to check the level of the beer after they were gone.

The Londoner's sleeve ruffles had waxy grease on them; clearly Mary Saunders wasn't used to trimming and snuffing the candles yet. Abi would have to melt the tallow off with the end of a hot loaf later, and she'd get no thanks for it either. The girl's shift smelled of her lemony scent. She was said to be fifteen, this Mary Saunders, but her eyes were twice that. Where had she picked up that hard stare? Maybe folk were all like that in London.

Abi rather regretted that she'd never made it to the great city. After the long voyage, eight years ago, her master the doctor had come up from Bristol to winter at Monmouth, and commissioned the Joneses to make him a new suit for the season, from hat to shoe-buckles. When he set off the following March, he still owed them six pounds ten, so he handed over Abi in lieu of the cash. She had cried without a sound for three days—not because she missed the doctor, but because everything was alien to her in England.

The Joneses hadn't quite known what to do with her, at first, but they'd soon found her useful. In this chilly house on Inch Lane, she'd learned how to make soap from ash and lights from reeds, when to curtsy, how to say
yes, sir, yes, madam,
who not to annoy (above all, the Ash woman). Daffy the manservant had offered to teach her to read, but at first she'd distrusted his motives—since when did a white man ever want nothing for something?—and even when she did allow him to show her a page of his book, the scratchings on the
page repelled her. They were some form of magic she didn't want to touch.

'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.'