Slammerkin (28 page)

But in spite of her prognostications, the air stayed soft as a feather. Every day there was a little more light for a few minutes longer. Mary hadn't realised how much the darkness had been weighing on her spirits till it began to lift.

'My family,' Mary caught herself saying, as she chatted to a scullerymaid at the pump on Monnow Street, 'my family are the Joneses of Inch Lane.'

'The Roberts sisters were the first in these parts to keep a carriage,' Mrs. Jones murmured, so the driver wouldn't hear. 'They've never asked for me before. How good of them to send the driver!'

Mary was rummaging distractedly through the trunk on the floor of the carriage. 'Shall we show them the burgundy grosgrain?'

'And the pink. They like a bit of brightness.'

The thick mud of Monnow Street slowed the carriage wheels. The bridge at this end of town was an ancient stone enclosure, grey tinged with pink. The traffic slowed to a crawl through the narrow passage; packhorses jostled cornbarrows in the gap. Mary caught a glimpse of a tiny door; clearly someone lived in the stonework over their heads. Once on the other side of the gate, something unlocked in her chest, and there seemed more air. This, she realised, was the first time she'd left the town limits.

'Are they handsome ladies, these sisters?' she asked as the carriage jolted up the drive, and the thick shrubs closed around the muddy windows. She stared up at Drybridge House's painted shutters and the crumbling carvings above the door. She pictured a pair of heroines from a genteel comedy, one fair, one dark.

'Once, perhaps,' said Mrs. Jones, amused by the question.

Mary had never seen such antiquities close up. Miss Maria Roberts was stringy as a bean, with a face like a pickled walnut. She wore a wrapping gown in orange lace. Her sister, Miss Elizabeth, shuffled out to receive them in a pair of stained French mules. A green silk sack gown drooped from her shoulders. It was old, but finely made; Mary stared at it and thought,
I'd turn heads in that.

A pleading look from her mistress reminded her to curtsy; she made it a deep one. All she had to do was hold things, tie things, unfold and fold, while looking profoundly respectful. It was up to Mrs. Jones to provide the reassurance. Flattery rose up and filled the air like incense. 'For a winter ball? How delightful. Not at
all
unsuited to a lady of your years, Miss Maria, how could you think so?'

A vast confection in rose taffeta. 'See how it brings out the pink in Miss Elizabeth's complexion!'

Mary knelt on the thick Oriental carpet to fasten the gold-braid garter around the old woman's thigh. The fat rolled like satin. 'A little too tight,' fretted Miss Elizabeth.

'Your maid pinches my sister,' barked Miss Maria.

The maid was so very sorry. The mistress was even sorrier. The room was getting hotter. The pink stockings, clocked with gold thread, wrinkled in Mary's fingers and wouldn't stay up.

'Fetch my sister's pannier, girl,' said Miss Maria. Mary ran to the closet and emerged with the most enormous hoop she'd ever seen, from thirty years ago. Between them, she and Mrs. Jones stretched it out for Miss Elizabeth to step into. They fastened it with tapes around her waist; it bobbed, it swayed, it bulged a little on one side. Finally Mary abased herself on hands and knees and crawled inside.

Encased in the odorous canvas, she fought with a knotted tape. How ugly were the inner workings of elegance, she thought. The voices came through very muffled. When Miss Elizabeth shifted from foot to foot, the whalebones creaked like a ship. Jonah, thought Mary, remembering her schooldays.

At last she heaved up the edge of the hoop and wriggled into the air. Miss Elizabeth was grinning at herself in the long glass like a child. Mary dusted herself down unobtrusively.

'Vastly vulgar,' pronounced Miss Maria.

Her sister's face plummeted.

'Take it off, Elizabeth. You know I'm right.'

Ladies couldn't be expected to think of the time, Mary knew, as they didn't dine till six. Her stomach growled like a captive animal. But she watched, and listened, and curtsyed every chance she got, and did everything the Misses Roberts asked and other things before they'd thought to ask, and finally she won a little soft smile from Miss Elizabeth.

'Your maid is a capable girl,' Mary overheard Miss Elizabeth tell Mrs. Jones.

'That's the truth, madam. I don't know how I ever managed without her.'

That bit was spoken in Mrs. Jones's ordinary voice; there was no gush or falsity to it. Listening, with her back turned, Mary felt her skin tighten and glow.

'Might madams be pleased to bespeak any clothes today?' suggested Mrs. Jones.

They would not. Nothing quite suited. But they might send for her and her maid again.

'He's a good man, right enough,' Mrs. Jones told Mary as they sewed their way towards each other round the four-yard hem of Mrs. Harding's new lavender
robe à la française.
'He's never raised his hand to me, you know, not like'—her voice went down to a murmur—'Jed Carpenter, who takes a
horsewhip
to his wife.'

'So how did he lose his leg, madam?' asked Mary.

Mrs. Jones smiled at her. The fact was, this was one of her favourite stories, though she never told it outside the family. 'I tell you this, Mr. Jones is the bravest fellow. He was only a wee boy of nine years old, see?' Her eyes never lost their grip on the tiny stitches. 'He was helping the ostler down at the Robin Hood for thrupence a day. This coach and four came through on the way to Gloucester, and the gentleman, he hopped down outside the inn, and didn't poor Thomas run in to take the reins, and the near horse trod on him.'

'Kicked him?'

'No, no, just lifted up as gentle as you please, and stood down on the boy's bare foot.' Mrs. Jones could see the scene as clear as an engraving, with the colours put in by hand: the glossy brown of the flank, the red mark in the snow. 'Mashed it to mush he did.'

'Pugh!' said Mary, her mouth wrinkling up.

Mrs. Jones's hands had stilled on the linen. 'It rotted black as your boot, I don't mind telling. Up to the knee the next day, and along the thigh the next.' She marked out the stages of putrefaction on her dusty black skirt.

'Does it go that fast?'

'Like mould on fruit,' said Mrs. Jones with relish. She resumed her sewing, faster than before. 'So Dai Barber came to cut it off. But
Thomas's mother—a good woman, our neighbour she was—we heard her tell Dai, "Put away your saw. My boy'll die with all his limbs on."' She paused to thread her needle again, squinting against the dregs of the afternoon light. Her eyes weren't what they were.

'And what happened next?' Mary Saunders stretched her cramped hand out in front of her.

'Well. The lad within on his truckle bed, he bawled out so the whole street could hear, "Look you, Mother, I'll not die yet, not for a long while. Bring me in the axe and I'll chop it off myself!"'

There was that disbelieving look in the girl's eyes again. Where had such a young creature picked up such an expression? London had to be a very hardening place. 'I tell you, Mary,' said Mrs. Jones urgently, 'you've heard nothing like the sound, outside a sawyer's yard.'

'So Mr. Jones cut off his own leg?'

She shook her head impatiently. 'Dai Barber did it, with his saw. He put Thomas out with gin, but the boy still screamed through his dreams. None of us on Back Lane got a blink of sleep that night.'

Mary, bent over her needle, looked revolted. Then, in a curious tone, she asked, 'You used to live down Back Lane?'

There was no use pretending any different. Nothing could be hidden from servants, Mrs. Jones knew that much. 'Oh, aye,' she said lightly. 'Thomas and I both grew up there, only two doors apart.'

She could see Mary absorb the new knowledge and store it away. At such moments the girl had the same thoughtful look as Su Rhys used to wear. 'But go on about the leg,' said Mary.

'Well, they dipped the stump in salt water, and it healed up clean as your elbow. Within a month the boy was hopping along like a one-legged rooster.' Mrs. Jones let a smile crease her face.

They stitched their way along another foot of ruched silk. Mrs. Jones released her breath in a little puff, blowing tiredness out of her way.

'So he didn't die of it, then, for all his mother's fears,' observed Mary.

'No, thank the Maker,' said Mrs. Jones with a shocked laugh, 'or where would I be now?'

'Here.'

She stared. Sometimes this girl gave the most peculiar answers. 'Monmouth, maybe, I grant you, but I wouldn't be Mrs. Jones.'

'What if you'd married Ned Jones the baker, madam?' asked the girl in a sly murmur.

'Ah, what indeed?' Mrs. Jones gave the girl's arm a little shove with the heel of her hand. 'I wouldn't be
this
Mrs. Jones, would I? Up to my eyebrows in flour I'd be then, so you wouldn't know me.' She rather liked this image of herself: unrecognisable, chalky white. She sewed on, faster.

It struck her that anyone seeing the two of them together would think them friends, or mother and daughter. Mrs. Jones knew she lacked the carriage of a mistress. It wasn't that she was ignorant of how to behave. All the advice books warned about keeping a proper distance, and a romance she'd been reading only the other night illustrated the dangers of befriending the lower orders.
Intoxicated by any Degree of Familiarity, they soon fall into Impertinence.
The heroine ended up being compromised by a duke.

But what was Mrs. Jones to do? She forgot all the advice once she and Mary sat down with their needles and fell into conversation. The girl might be penniless, because her shiftless father had died in gaol, but wasn't she Su Rhys's daughter still? Couldn't she read and write and cast account better than Mrs. Jones herself, if it came to that? The mistress shifted a little uncomfortably on her stool. It struck her as strange, suddenly, that she who'd grown up shoeless on Back Lane was now lording it over the daughter of her best friend. How arbitrary were the ups and downs of the world. And how could she not grow a little familiar with the girl, while they bent together over the same piece of silk, which pulled back and forth between them like a bird on warm air?

'Does it hurt him still?'

Mrs. Jones was startled out of her reverie. Mary was staring at her own bare elbow, its curious knob emerging from the grubby lace.

'The leg? Only the old itch in the winter. Thomas always says it did him good.'

'Good?' Mary's voice was appalled.

How could she explain it to this girl, who was only fifteen years old, whole in body and spirit, with her life spread out in front of her like an untouched feast? 'He knows he's been through the worst,' said his wife gently. 'He's nothing more to fear.'

Mary's private plan of leaving with the thaw had been put to one side, as it were. She had pumped Mr. Jones about Bristol, where he'd done his apprenticeship. He claimed it was the next to greatest city after London—not that he'd ever seen London himself—but nothing he'd described to Mary made it sound much better than Monmouth. She'd asked Daffy about other towns within a few days' ride, but all he'd offered was a history of their settlement from the Romans on, and a list of their principal exports. They sounded a shabby lot. If Mary couldn't yet risk returning to London—and Caesar's knife—it seemed to her that she might as well stay where she was, for the moment, and eat her fill, and earn a wage.

Waking in the night, she was soothed by the faint lines of the attic room. At least she had a share in a bed instead of just a straw mattress. At least the blankets had no fleas. There weren't any holes in these walls for the wind to whistle through. No landlady to thud up the stairs; no killer hammering on the door. Mary was clean now; no one touched her. She lay motionless, conjuring up the worst of London, to make herself grateful. Here on Inch Lane she could watch the moon through glass, instead of following its naked light down an alley where in all likelihood Doll still sat, blue and ruined, crumbling with the first thaw.

Mary rolled over, with her back against Abi's steady heat. She wouldn't think about Doll. She wouldn't dwell on what was past.

Abi was in that state between waking and sleeping when the girl's voice came out of the dark, beside her ear. 'Abi,' in a whisper. 'Are you awake?' She heard Mary Saunders's head shift and thump the pillow into place. Then the hiss came again. 'I can't sleep. I'm too tired.'

Abi groaned and tucked her face into her cupped hand, which lay between them.

'It's not right, how the Joneses keep you,' remarked Mary.

Abi pulled her head off the pillow like a turtle. She weighed the remark: not just what was said, but why.

'A friend of mine,' Mary remarked, 'used to say,
Never give up your liberty.'

Abi brooded over the phrase.

'You know what liberty means? Belonging to yourself?'

'Never had that,' said Abi finally.

'You must have,' said Mary a little impatiently. 'Before you were a slave, I mean. When you were a child back in Africa.'

Abi stretched out on her back and considered the matter. 'No,' she told Mary slowly, 'I belong to king then.'

'What, King George?'

'No, our king,' Abi said. 'Me and my mother and many—hundreds—children and wives, we all belong to king back then.'

'What,' asked Mary, disconcerted, 'you were a slave, back in Africa?'

Abi shrugged uncomfortably. 'Well. It was family. He was father.'

'What, your own father kept you as a slave?'

This girl didn't understand the first thing. Abi yawned hugely. 'Not a bad life there. Little work, plenty food.'

'But he sold you to the whites?'

Abi tucked her face into the crook of her arm. She never liked remembering this bit. Her words were muffled. 'He needed guns.'

The silence lasted so long that she was almost beginning to slip into sleep, when the girl spoke up again. 'Why does it say Smith on your shoulder?'

'That was a master.'

'The one who brought you to England?'

'No. Another one.'

'How many masters did you have, in Barbados?' said Mary curiously.