Slammerkin (29 page)

'Don't remember.'

'In London, you know,' remarked Mary, 'there's a great many people like you.'

'Like me?' Abi repeated hoarsely, lifting her head.

'Black in the face,' said Mary. Then, with a tiny giggle, All over, I mean to say.'

This was news to Abi. She cleared her throat; it sounded too loud in the slumbrous house. 'How many?' she whispered.

She could feel the tug in the blankets as the girl shrugged. 'Lots.'

'But how many?' Since the day the doctor had brought her to Monmouth, Abi had counted no more than three dark faces, and they were all footboys to visiting gentry; none of them lived in the town.

'How should I know?' answered Mary with a touch of asperity. 'Two in any busy street, I'd say.'

Abi let herself savour the image. 'Their masters let them out on the streets?' she asked after a minute.

'Oh, the greatest part of them don't have masters,' said Mary. 'London's full of runaways. The East End is crawling with free negroes. Some of them have English wives, even.'

'But free women, too?'

'Indeed. I knew an Indian girl whose master left her behind, to save the price of her passage to Holland. Oh, and there's a club where all the girls are black.'

'Club?' Abi pictured the little gathering of tradesmen upstairs at the King's Arms.

'You know,' said Mary impatiently, 'a place where girls dance.'

Abi pictured it. 'For white men?'

'Well, yes, mostly. For whoever pays to see them,' said Mary, a little awkward. 'But they're not like you, these girls,' she added. 'They get wages, don't you know.'

Abi shut her heavy eyes and tried to imagine such an extraordinary place. What were they wearing, these girls so like her yet not like her at all? How did they dance? Like back in Africa, or the slave dances of Barbados? Or did they skip in complicated patterns like the English? She spoke at last. 'How much wages?'

'Oh, don't ask me,' said Mary. 'But the thing is, they're free to come and go.'

Abi thought of it: the coming and going. 'Do whites spit?'

A heave, as the girl went up on one elbow. 'Do they what?'

'Sometime,' Abi said neutrally, 'when I go on message, folks spit.'

'Country boors,' said Mary scornfully after a few seconds. 'What can you expect of Marchermen? They're just frighted at the sight of you. Give them a year or two and they'll get used to your face.'

'Eight,' said Abi, very softly.

'What's that?' Mary leaned a little closer.

'I been here more than eight years already.'

There was a pause. The girl seemed to have nothing to say to that. She lay down with a thump, making the bed shake.

'Tell me more,' whispered Abi in the darkness.

'About London?'

She nodded, forgetting Mary couldn't see her.

The girl let out an enormous yawn. 'Well, I don't remember much spitting at blacks, there. Londoners save their spit for Frenchies! The blacks keep to themselves and give no one any trouble. They all seem to know each other,' she added. 'If one is thrown in gaol, you may count on it the others will come and visit him, with food and blankets and such. Once I even heard of a supper party, a sort of ball,' she added with another yawn, 'and only blacks were allowed in.'

The older woman didn't ask any more questions. Her head was
too full already; it clinked like a jar full of pebbles. She lay by Mary's side until the girl's breaths lengthened into sleep.

Oh, child, what kind of foolishness is this?

Mary Saunders had slid into routine like slipping into deep water; she'd tasted the dull sweetness of knowing what to do at every hour of every day; of being sure there would be breakfast, for instance, and what that breakfast would be.

The moment she liked best was teatime, if there were no patrons visiting. Then she and the mistress could put down their work for a quarter of an hour and take tea together in the shop. At first the brew was hot enough to scald Mary's whole body from the inside, but it cooled rapidly in the saucer. She took small sips to make it last, holding the porcelain rim between her teeth. It would break so easily if she bit down. She was still plagued with occasional thoughts like that, images of destruction. Surely someday, by a word or a sign, she wouldn't be able to hide who she was—or at least used to be.

'Another drop, Mary?'

'Yes please, madam.'

One day Mrs. Jones leaned across the teacups as if she had a secret to impart. 'You know—,' she began, then broke off. 'That is, my husband was quite right about the principle of the thing.'

Mary waited.

'I mean to say, that you should call me madam, whenever we have company and such. But when we're on our own, you know,' she stumbled on, 'then it's not so necessary.'

The girl smiled into her tea. Victory, sweet as pineapple.

Why hadn't she been born to Jane Jones instead of Susan Saunders, it occurred to her now? She didn't want to have her mother's hands. She didn't want to be her mother's daughter. In this house, Mary was coming to realise, stains wore off and lies came true. Mary was indeed a hard worker and embroidered like an angel. She could almost believe she was a virgin again.

Most evenings she stole ten minutes before supper to look through her scraps. She had a tiny piece of everything she'd worked on so far: champagne satin from Mrs. Tanner's night robe, green watered tabby from Miss Partridge's pleated petticoat, and a dozen others besides. Now that she knew what good cloth felt like, she realised what nasty rubbish was most of the stuff hidden in her bag under the bed. The fabric was no good, to start with: dull-napped and limp, with cheap dye that faded in sunlight or after one wash. That open robe with the salmon scalloped petticoat she'd thought so fine when she found it on a stall on Mercer Street—she fingered its patchy sheen now and blushed to think she'd paid four shillings for the thing. The royal blue had seeped off the back of her jacket-bodice already. Trash. And as for the cut of most of her dresses, it appalled her to think she'd been strolling round for so long with all her seams slightly askew.

Her new scraps were only leftovers, slipped into her pocket at the end of the day; Mrs. Jones never even seemed to notice they were gone. But already Mary had sewn herself a handkerchief from six triangles of best white cambric, with an edge of blue ribbon, and some evenings she took a half-inch of candle up to her room after dinner and worked on a little scarf, from a strip off the end of that silvery gauze they were using for Miss Fortune's overskirt. Not that she had any call for finery, in her present life, but someday—

It was still Mary's firm belief that service was a fool's game, and no way to make a living. But for the moment she couldn't seem to think of another. Her old trade seemed inconceivable. The Seven Dials life sounded like a lurid drama, acted out with puppets against a black sheet.

In the back of Mary's mind was one tiny anxiety: surely somebody in the house would wonder why she didn't have monthly courses like other girls. She even thought of getting hold of some pig's blood to wrap up in rags. But one day as she passed Mrs. Jones in the narrow hall, each carrying a bale of cloth, the mistress rested a hand on the girl's shoulder and murmured that she knew Mary was only a young thing yet.

Mary gave her a puzzled smile.

'And I didn't start till my seventeenth year, myself. But whenever your time comes on you ... if you should ever find your small-clothes
stained,'
the older woman said in her ear, 'just you come to me at once.'

Mary kept her face straight. 'Yes,' was all she whispered.

'At such times,' said Mrs. Jones, 'a girl needs a mother.'

Mary watched her out of sight. She felt giddy with swallowed laughter. To think that she'd got the belly business over and done with at fourteen, down in Ma Slattery's reeking cellar, but in this house she was considered a chit of a girl who hadn't even begun!

Suddenly she wanted to weep.

Deceiving the Joneses was all too simple.
Easy as pissing the bed,
as Doll used to say. Decent people only saw what they were expecting to see. She was reminded of a purse-snatch called Mary Young who'd had a pair of artificial arms, or so the story went. Young used to sit in church with her straw-filled gloves folded demurely in her lap, while her real hands were busy picking pockets left and right. She'd had a good long career before they carted her off to Tyburn.

Even Hetta trusted Mary. She was always asking for a splash of the maid's Hungary water on her dimpled wrists, and she begged to learn the clapping games that London children played. At dinner, Hetta often wriggled over to stand beside Mary, till the maid gave in and lifted her onto her lap. Why the child had taken a liking to her she couldn't tell, except that anyone would be a relief after that old poison ivy of a nurse.

These days Mary went about her duties like someone who'd never been out past midnight. A little sharp-tongued, perhaps, but a good girl on the whole. The marks of her old trade didn't show on the outside, it seemed. Some days she even forgot that her lies weren't the truth. She almost began to be convinced by her own story of a wandering orphan, bereaved of the best of mothers.

One day at the afternoon tea table, Mrs. Jones and her patrons were full of veiled allusions to someone called Sally Mole.

'You never met her,' said Mrs. Jones afterwards.

'Who is she, though?' asked Mary.

'Was.' The mistress sighed, shaking her head over her tiny perfect stitches. 'She's dead now, poor wretch. Complications.'

'What sort of complications?'

Mrs. Jones rolled her eyes. 'You're a terrible one for the questions, Mary Saunders. If you must know—'

'Yes?'

'Sally Mole ... she was a local girl. Known to go with men. Strangers.' Mrs. Jones covered her mouth with her hand. 'It makes a body's skin crawl.'

And indeed Mary, sitting there beside her mistress, did feel shame rise like a sickness inside her.
Strangers,
she thought.
A body's skin.
Heat scalded her cheeks.

'See, now, I've made you blush!' Mrs. Jones reproached herself. 'It's not fitting, at your age, to hear such foul things.'

So Mary dipped her head and attended to her hemming.

Nance Ash had been keeping an eye on the Londoner for a while. Well, somebody had to be vigilant. She'd questioned her own judgement, at first. Could it be that she disliked Mary Saunders simply because of her youth and vigour? Certainly, it galled her to see such a stripling playing tig in the hallway with Hetta, the two of them charging about like dogs and crashing into the furniture. And then, Mary Saunders had a habit of questioning the nurse's authority in apparently tiny things—the choice of a word, a prediction about trade or weather—as a way of undermining her in greater matters. The new maid was in very thick with the mistress, these days; there was much talk of
her mother's hands,
and
such a genius for the needle.
As if sewing a few flowers was real work, deserving of gratitude. As if it could compare with the endless burden of raising a girl child, and a brattish one like Hetta at that.

So Mrs. Ash had continued to pray to the Lord for understanding and patience to enable her to bear sharing a house with Mary Saunders. Only gradually, over the weeks, had she let herself become convinced that the Londoner was rotten through and through.

It was not a matter of hard evidence yet, just a sort of vapour that hung about the girl. But it was only a matter of time before the corruption burst out and revealed itself. Mrs. Ash comforted herself with the Book of Job:

How oft is the candle of the wicked put out!
They are as stubble before the wind,
and as chaff that the storm carrieth away.

'There's something not right about her, don't you think?' she remarked to Daffy one morning as he was sanding a miniature wooden sailboat for Hetta in the yard.

'Who?' He looked up, startled.

'The Londoner, of course.'

'Oh, do you still call her that?'

'I think she rouges. Those lips aren't a natural shade.'

'They look all right to me,' he said lightly.

Mrs. Ash gave him a stern stare. Surely the Saunders creature hadn't got her claws into him already? 'And it wouldn't surprise me if she turned out to be a thief,' she added. 'It's said the big city's full of them.'

'You're a bit hard on the girl,' said Daffy, his wig slipping as he bent over the toy, sanding vigorously.

'You know you must tell the mistress if you catch her out in any dishonesty, though,' remarked Mrs. Ash. 'It's our Christian duty.'

'It seems to me,' muttered Daffy, 'that our Christian duty is to mind our own business.'

The nurse went purple to her cheekbones. The manservant had never given her such a back-answer before, in the year since he'd come to live on Inch Lane. So much was clear to her: Mary Saunders was spreading seeds of rebellion wherever she turned.

One morning when the girl was out at market, Mrs. Ash
climbed the creaking stairs to the little attic room where the two maids slept. And there she found her proof at last. The mattress was scattered with colour: strips and corners of silks and taffetas, a curl of silver thread and a length of lace wound round a bit of paper torn out of a book. All spread across the thin brown blanket like a miniature pageant of the vices—Vanity, Idleness, and their bastard child, Theft.

Mrs. Ash hoarded the knowledge for a few hours. But when she passed the girl in the hallway, later in the morning, she held up one flat hand to stop her in her tracks. 'I know your crime,' she said, with no preamble.

Mary Saunders went a sickly kind of white.

'Shall I inform the mistress,' the nurse went on almost civilly, 'or would you rather make your own confession?'

The girl's jaw was jutting out. 'What have I got to confess?' Her voice shook with guilt.

Mrs. Ash stepped some inches closer. 'I know you despise us as peasants who've seen nothing of the world. You think yourself our better because you come from the City. As if we'd soil our shoes on the streets of that Gomorrah!' She found she was almost spitting; she paused for a second and licked her lips dry. 'But we're not so ignorant down here that we don't know the laws of the land.'