Slammerkin (27 page)

Only after supper did the master let the cares of the day slip from him. Mr. Jones liked to tease Daffy about his reading. 'What's that you've got there—a storybook, is it?'

The manservant cast him an injured glance and showed it:
A Compleat Geography of the World.

Mary smirked to herself over the stocking she was darning. Let him look at pictures all he liked, the fellow clearly hadn't the stomach to get him any farther than Abergavenny. He'd had a face like a basset-hound for a fortnight now; he was beginning to get on her nerves.

The master gave a respectful whistle at the title. '
Compleat,
, eh? Not a South Sea island left out?'

Mrs. Jones made a little clucking with her tongue.

'Quite right, my dear, whistling's a vulgar habit,' said her husband. 'I must leave it behind me if we're to advance in the world. You won't grow up to be a whistler, will you, Hetta?'

The child shook her head and writhed on her mother's knees. Mrs. Jones bent over the child to neaten her tangled white curls and sang under her breath:

Migildi Magildi hei now now,
Migildi Magildi hei now now.

'What does that mean?' asked Mary.

Mrs. Jones's eyes went wide as if reading the words on the air. 'I couldn't rightly say, Mary. I had it from my mother.'

Nothing had a reason, in this part of the world, Mary thought irritably; things were as they were simply because they were set that way a hundred years ago.

Hetta pulled free of her mother's fingers and climbed up into her father's asymmetrical lap. 'Fafa,' she began conversationally, 'where did your leg go?'

Mary pricked up her ears.

'It's here in my breeches,' Mr. Jones told Hetta with perfect gravity.

'No Fafa,' the child squealed, pounding his thigh, 'your other leg.'

'Mercy on me, it's gone!' Her father tugged at the fold of soft cloth in shock. 'I must have dropped it in the river.'

'You didn't.' She let out her soprano laugh.

His face furrowed in thought. 'Well, maybe I left it behind a hedge and it was gone when I came back for it.'

'No.' Hetta crowed in delight.

'Well then, it must have come off when your mother pulled off my boot last night.'

'Is it in the boot still?'

'I suppose so.'

'Where's the boot then, Fafa?'

'I must have dropped it in the river.'

Hetta squealed again.

She was still wide awake at eight, after her father had gone off with a lantern to his Tradesmen's Club. ('Gossip and cheap port upstairs at the King's Arms,' confided Mrs. Jones to Mary.) The child pulled at Mary's sewing, and kept asking to try a stitch, till the older girl itched to stick her needle into the creamy-blonde head.

'Come here now,
cariad,
till I tell you a story,' said Mrs. Jones, pulling the child out of Mary's way. Hetta sat down on the end of her mother's skirts. Daffy, snoozing glumly in his chair, moved his feet to make room for her. 'There was once an old couple—'

'What were they called?' demanded Hetta.

'Huw. And Bet,' said Mrs. Jones, licking her thread into shape. Mary, watching her over the hillock of darning on the little table between them, wondered if the woman was making it all up as she
went along. 'And they went to the winter fair at Aberystwyth, so they did, and hired themselves a serving girl.'

'What was—'

Mrs. Jones interrupted her daughter's question. 'Elin.'

She sounded so sure of that name, Mary began to wonder if this were a true story.

'And a very good maid she was.'

Mary's lip curled. She hated stories about good maids. At school the teachers used to talk about virtuous servants whose rewards awaited them in the Hereafter. They made the Mighty Maker sound like the kind of master who was always years in arrears on the wages.

'And the three of them,' Mrs. Jones went on, 'lived happily all through the winter in their farm in the shelter of the hills.'

How did anyone know they'd been happy, thought Mary? How could anyone be sure that Elin wasn't dreaming of the city, with its lights so vivid she could taste them on her tongue?

'When summer came,' Mrs. Jones went on, 'every evening Elin used to take her spinning-wheel down to the meadow and sit beside the stream, singing as she worked. The master and mistress were delighted that Elin spun so much, and they used to count up the bales of wool and cry out,
We have indeed been fortunate in choosing so good a maid.'

Mary covered a yawn with her thimble. She began to suspect the mistress of telling this particular tale for Mary's benefit, more than Hetta's.

'Now, what Huw and Bet didn't know,' said Mrs. Jones, her voice going deeper and livelier, 'was that all the while it was the Little People that were helping her spin.'

Mary's mouth twisted. She might have known. This place was riddled with superstition. Countryfolk couldn't tell the stuff of their dreams from real life. 'Do these fairies ever help anyone to sew, then?' she murmured through the pins in her mouth.

'Never that I heard of, only to spin,' said Mrs. Jones with a quick
smile that showed the gap in her front teeth. Did she know Mary was poking fun at her? Her voice reverted to the dramatic as she turned back to the child. 'Now, Elin was in the habit of carrying a sharp little knife in case the Little People ever tried to take her away with them.'

Hetta nodded soberly.

'But one day she forgot her little knife.'

The child sucked in her breath.

'That evening she didn't come back from the stream,' whispered Mrs. Jones dramatically, 'not the evening after, nor the one after that. All that winter Huw and Bet waited for their maid, but she never came home.'

Hetta pressed closer on the black curve of her mother's hooped skirt.

'Now the next spring,' Mrs. Jones went on softly, 'as soon as it thawed, Bet went down to the stream to look for the girl.'

As if she would, thought Mary sceptically. As if she'd take the trouble.

'Bet looked up and down, that day, and went back the next day, and the one after that. And at last when she was walking along the bank she fell down into a great cavern under the water, and who do you think she found there?'

A broad grin split Hetta's face. 'Elin. Was she—'

Her mother put a finger to the child's mouth. 'But no matter how hard Bet tried, she couldn't save the girl and bring her home.'

Hetta chewed on her upper lip.

'Elin was now wife to an evil fairyman, see, and she'd had his baby, and she could never come back to the mortal world no more.'

There was no sound but the crackle of the flames.

'What a fool of a girl,' remarked Mary at last, 'to forget her little knife.'

Mrs. Jones gave her a sorrowful smile. 'It could happen to the best of us.'

Hetta was still lost in thought. 'And were Huw and Bet left all alone then?'

Mrs. Jones was about to answer when Mary butted in sardonically. 'Not at all. They went to the next hiring fair and got themselves a more sensible maid.'

Daffy cleared his throat, startling them all; he'd seemed asleep. 'You don't know the story,' he told Mary gruffly. 'So why don't you just hold your damned tongue?'

Mary stared across the room. In the shadows his expression was unreadable. She stuck her needle through a double fold of linen. 'I'll go to my bed, so,' she said stiffly, getting to her feet and dropping the darning on the pile.

Mrs. Jones came back from putting the child in her cot and found Daffy still staring into the dying fire. He nibbled at a callus on the side of his thumb. It wasn't like him to cause unpleasantness; she'd always thought of him as an easy-natured fellow. She could see the girl had got under his skin.

A prickly burr on the outside, was Su Rhys's daughter, but that was only her armour. So much would be obvious to anyone who looked into those dark, searching eyes. A bare fifteen, and lost her mother as fast and brutally as a baby abandoned in a gutter! Mrs. Jones didn't like to dwell on it. When she thought of her friend Su's life in London, she shuddered. She thanked her Maker for giving her a husband she could rely on through all trials, and a solid trade, and a house to raise her daughter in, and maybe even a son to come.

She picked up her darning as she sat down across from the manservant. It would be easier to say nothing, and safer, but sometimes it seemed to Mrs. Jones that she'd spent her whole life choosing the easy and the safe, and saying nothing.

But it was Daffy who began. 'I'm sorry for cursing.'

'Oh, it's not that, Daffy. You were very sharp with the girl, that's all,' she said softly.

'If I was, it was no more than she deserved.' His voice came out like a roar. What was the matter with the man?

'But—'

'You must admit she's a sullen hussy, that Saunders girl,' he interrupted. 'Swanning round the house with her citified airs and her clacking tongue—'

'She's a stranger among us, Daffy. She doesn't know our ways.'

'She knows enough to carp and gibe!'

Mrs. Jones let out a long tired breath. Authority had never come naturally to her. Living alongside her servants, she found it hard to think of them as anything other than family: her own adopted flesh and blood. 'You were never acquainted with Su Rhys, were you?' she asked instead.

He stared at her, as if she'd made a feeble effort to change the subject.

Mrs. Jones clucked her tongue at her own stupidity. 'What am I talking about? She'd have gone off to London when you were only a boy. What I meant to say was, Su—Susan Saunders, as she became—was a very fine woman.'

'Is that where the girl gets her eyes, then?' he asked neutrally.

She made a little amused note of that: he was not immune to the newcomer's eyes. 'No, Daff, I don't mean handsome, I mean good. Su was the best of friends to me till her husband took her off to London. And for Mary to grow up with such a mother, living as close as two females can be, and then to have her snatched away in the blinking of an eye—' Her voice trembled. 'And for Mary to come back here to her native place, but not to know its ways any better than a stranger—well, is it any wonder the girl should be a little spleenish at first?'

'I'm sorry for her loss,' said Daffy coldly.

Exhaustion covered Mrs. Jones like a blanket of snow. 'No but try to understand her, would you now? After all the books you've read, you must have a power of understanding!'

He shrugged a little, watching the embers. She should have known better than to try flattery.

'Grief can do peculiar things to a person, you know,' said Mrs. Jones, very low. 'The heart can get all twisted.'

She hadn't meant to call attention to her own losses. The last thing she was angling for was this young man's pity. But he looked at her as if she'd said the one needful thing. He stood up all at once and grinned down at his mistress. 'I'll do my best.'

'Thank you, Daffy,' said Mrs. Jones.

When he went up to bed she was still darning in the last of the firelight.

That night Mary Saunders lay on her side, too tired to sleep. Beside her in the dark, Abi was as still as a corpse. The chime of eleven sounded from St. Mary's around the corner; another icy night. Soon Mary would shut her eyes, and sooner than seemed possible she'd open them again on another icy day.

This had all been an appalling mistake.

How could Mary have thought of going into service, even for a short while, a girl like her who'd known what liberty was? Less than a month in this narrow house had taught her that she had no talent for it. She could play the part of a grateful, obedient maid for an hour or two at a time—but sooner or later her wicked tongue showed itself.

Well, now she knew. She couldn't face another wagon journey in the deep snow, but as soon as the weather broke its grip, she'd be on her way, on the run again. She knew London wasn't safe for her yet—Caesar would still have his knife out for her—but there had to be somewhere else she could go in the meantime. Bristol, or Bath, or Liverpool maybe; anywhere with a bit of room for her talents; anywhere you could call a city.

As always, when she couldn't find her way to sleep, Mary buried her face in the pillow and began to dress herself, in her mind's eye. A shift of white silk, next to the skin; a pair of stockings, silver-clocked. As she weighed up the rival merits of a flowered green
bodice and a ruched pink one, she felt her limbs grow heavy and luxurious.

Soon her time in this purgatorial place would be up. But till the thaw came she had to stick it out, wear the mask. It was only a matter of a few weeks more in this unlikely town where nothing ever happened and nothing ever would. For now, she had to act as if this was her life.

Abi was awake; Mary could tell by the quietness of her breathing. The maid-of-all-work shifted now, and her hand lay across the blanket, its old scar catching the faint starlight. Abi,' whispered Mary, 'what happened to your hand?'

The silence was so long, she'd almost given up on getting an answer. She didn't know why she persisted in trying to coax conversation out of this woman, but it wasn't as if she had a choice of company. Besides, she liked the challenge.

'Got a knife stuck through,' said Abi at last.

'Really?' said Mary encouragingly. Another interminable pause. 'How did it happen?' she whispered.

A slow shrug from the body in the bed beside her, then Abi muttered something Mary didn't catch.

'Beg pardon?'

'Was on my arm,' said Abi, with a little sound that might have been a chuckle or a cough. Then with a heave of blankets she turned her back, but not in a particularly unfriendly way. They lay back to hot back, waiting out the long night.

F
EBRUARY CAME
in as bright as an apple. The snow shrank back; the Wye and the Monnow ran full. Everywhere Mary turned her eyes was wet green. She'd never known the ground to look like velvet.

Mrs. Ash said it would take more than a week's sunshine to fool her. She quoted darkly:

If Candlemas be fair and clear,
There'll be two winters in the year.