Slammerkin (3 page)

Afterwards she squatted in the corner and watched the Digots eat the pie, feeding the corners to little Billy. Her tears dried to salt on her jaw. Her stomach growled; she hoped they could hear it. Finally she stood up and turned her pocket inside out. 'Look,' she said, her voice shaking, 'there was a hole and I didn't know it.' She pushed her thumb through the gaping seam to show them.

William Digot looked up from his dinner. 'You could have poked that there yourself,' he accused.

His wife stared at the frayed pocket, and for a moment such a peculiar look strayed across her face that it almost seemed she might cry.

'It wasn't thievery!' said Mary, almost shouting.

Her mother's eyes flickered over her. 'Carelessness is just as bad.' Then she held out her tin plate with the crust of pastry on it, like someone feeding a dog.

'She doesn't deserve it,' remarked her husband, eyeing the plate.

'She's my daughter,' said Susan Digot, quiet and fierce.

Was the woman raging against her child, or her husband, or the Mighty Master who had burdened her with such a family, and so little pie to divide between them? Mary would have liked to knock the crust onto the floor, or even better, to look away, quite indifferent—but she was too hungry for dignity tonight. She took the crust between finger and thumb and choked it down.

The lesson she learned that night was not the one intended. The next time she was sent to buy dinner, she knew enough to lie about the price of the half-dozen oysters; she kept that penny, to pay herself back for the beating.

Mary had bled two months in a row now. Susan Digot had wet eyes, the first time, and muttered about this being greatly early for it all to begin, even if Mary was taller than many a grown woman. 'I was a child till I was past sixteen, back in Monmouth,' she added aggrievedly. 'Everything moves too fast in the big city.'

The pointed bones of Mary's elbows were wearing through her grey uniform, and she'd lost a button off the front where her chest was swelling. These days she wasn't paying attention at school. She forgot to join in with the chanted rhymes, even though she knew them all by heart. Her mind stretched and yawned like a tiger. She could read and write and make accounts better than any other girl in the school; what else could she learn here? The other girls her age had all left by now, one to become a washerwoman, another to be apprentice to a stockinger, and three more to hem piece-work. A girl that Mary had almost thought of as a friend was gone into service in Cornwall, which might as well be the end of the world. All these trades seemed to Mary to be wretched.

Other girls seemed unburdened by ambition; most folks seemed content with their lot. Ambition was an itch in Mary's shoe, a maggot in her guts. Even when she read a book, her eyes skimmed and galloped over the lines, eager to reach the end. She suspected ambition was what was making her legs grow so long and her mouth so red. In the gap between day and sleep, when Mary curled her swelling body in the hollow of the mattress she shared with Billy, she was plagued by vague dreams of a better life; an existence where dirt and labour would give way to colour, variety, and endless nights dancing in the Pleasure Gardens at Vauxhall, across the river. Sometimes Mary's sense of grievance focused like a beam of light. Before dawn, when she woke up with a start at the sound of the first carts jolting by, or the wails and kicks of the boy lying at the bottom of the bed, it was as clear as glass in her head:
I deserve more than this.

The earth itself seemed restless this year. There was a quake in February, and another in March, when Susan Digot's last chinaware plate that had belonged to her parents slipped from the shelf and smashed itself to bits on the hearth. People took these to be warnings; some said a great quake was coming which would shake the city of London to bits. Preachers said God in his wrath meant to raise the waters of the Thames and drown all the sinful gamblers, drunkards, and fornicators.

William Digot told his family it was all a lot of nonsense, but when the time came and Londoners began to flee to the outlying villages, his wife managed to persuade him that it would do no harm to move the family to Hampstead for the night. They sat on the heath looking down at the city. When nothing had happened by ten o'clock, they sought out the barn floor where they were to bed down in the straw alongside eleven other families. William Digot got in a quarrel with the owner about the exorbitant rates she was charging; she made him leave his best shirt as a surety for the money.

The stink and the raised voices kept Mary awake. Later she got up and sneaked out onto the heath. Wrapped in her mother's shawl, she squatted beside the barn, staring down at the flickering lights of London. Mary thought of the masked balls and the all-night card parties, the satin-shod revellers who laughed in the face of the wrathful Almighty. It was a city full of glitter and glee, and it was all about to be destroyed before she'd had so much as a taste of it.

She waited to feel the earth start to shudder, or the air to fill with the rising reek of the Thames. But there was no punishment, that night, only a long taut silence as the stars came out one by one.

In May of the year 1761, Mary turned fourteen. After school that day she passed through the Seven Dials and caught a glimpse of the back of the scarred harlot. On an impulse, she followed the girl up Mercer Street, past St. Giles-in-the-Fields. What was it her mother said?
Every man in St. Giles who's not a beggar is a thief.
But Mary scurried on after the white wig with its cheeky red ribbon. When the girl stopped at a gin-shop Mary hung back; then her quarry reemerged, swinging a bottle.

At the Holborn warren she'd heard called the Rookery, Mary stopped, afraid to go any further. The harlot disappeared between two buildings which leaned drunkenly on each other across a street no wider than the span of Mary's arms. Courts cut the nearby streets, yards cut the courts, and yards conspired briefly in crannies. Mary had heard that no one chased into the Rookery by a watchman or even a Bow Street Runner ever got caught. Two Indian sailors passed by then, and one of them winked his white eye at her. Mary ran half the way home.

Susan Digot looked up from her stitching and rubbed her damp forehead with the back of the hand that held the needle. Her coppery hair was turning grey. 'Ah, Mary, at last. I got us a pigeon. It's very high, look you, but in a good spiced ragout we'll hardly taste it.'

The quills were loose in the pigeon's skin. The girl plucked fast, to get it over with, shuddering a little. The big feathers flared in the fire, but the small ones clung to her fingers. Her knife laid the pigeon's entrails bare. She thought of what it meant to be fourteen.

Susan Digot watched her daughter, and licked the thread as if she were thirsty for its flavour. 'You'd have quick fingers for the work.'

The girl ignored that.

'High time you learned a trade, now you're a grown woman.'

Mary concentrated on getting all the dirty innards out of the pigeon. She hadn't thought her mother had remembered her birthday.

'Plain work, fancy work, quilt work ... A girl won't ever starve as long as she's a needle in her sleeve, Mary.'

The girl turned and stared into her mother's eyes; they had always been the dirty blue of rain clouds, but recently she'd begun to notice the red around their rims. They were ringed as sure as targets and speckled as if by darts. How many more years would they last? Mary had seen a pair of blind seamstresses that lived in a garret in Neal's Yard; you could count the bones in their arms. So she shook her head and turned back to the flattened pigeon. She scooped up its guts on the edge of her knife and flicked them into the fire.

For a moment she thought it was going to be all right; silence would fill up the little room as the last light gave way to evening shadow. When Digot woke for his dinner, the talk would start up again, and Mary knew how to steer it onto harmless topics: the mild air, or how strong Billy's arms were getting.

But Susan Digot pushed her fading hair back from her face and let out her breath as if it hurt her. 'All this reading and writing and casting account is well and good, and when Cob Saunders insisted you go to the Charity School I never said a word against it, did I?'

It was not a question that required an answer.

'Did I stand in your way?' she asked her daughter formally. 'I did not, even though many told me so much schooling would be wasted on a girl.'

Mary stared mutinously into the fire.

'But it's time you thought of getting your bread, now. What do they say about it at school?'

'Service.' The word came from the back of Mary's throat. 'Or sewing.'

'There now! Just as I say! Isn't that right, William?'

No answer from the man in the corner. Mary let her eyes slide over. Her stepfather was nodding, halfway asleep, his head repeating its coal-dust mark on the wall.

'And if it was the needle, couldn't I start training you up myself, Mary?' her mother rushed on.

She sounded fond of her daughter, for a moment. Mary was reminded of the years when there were only the two of them, the Widow Saunders and her child, and they shared one narrow warm bed.

'And if you turned out vastly handy, Mary, and why shouldn't you with those fingers the very spit of mine, well couldn't I get you out of this filthy city? Maybe I could even send you to Monmouth.' Susan Digot's voice had a hint of light in it, as always when she said that word. 'My friend Jane Jones that's a dressmaker, I could write to her. Wouldn't she take you for apprentice in half a minute?'

The pigeon bits clung to Mary's fingers. She shook them into the pot one by one. They didn't amount to the size of an egg. How were they meant to make a nice spiced ragout for four?

'A fine place it would be, Monmouth, for a growing girl,' said her mother longingly. 'Such clean civil people as they are, and the greenness all around, and the quiet of the streets.'

Mary conjured it up in her mind as best she could: a muffled, pristine little city. 'I don't like quiet,' she said.

'As if you know what you like, child that you are!' said her mother, astringent again. 'Besides, the main thing is to find you a trade.' Her voice softened again, and her hands stilled on the cloth. 'Once you're trained you could come back and work alongside of me. Partners, we'd be.'

Mary looked into her mother's shining eyes, observed the dampness of her lower lip. Her guts tightened. So now she knew what was really going on.
A trouble shared is a trouble halved.
Maybe she'd been bred up for this very purpose, to stand as a buffer between Susan Digot and her fate.
Like mother, like daughter.
With ruthless love Susan Digot was offering her child all she had, all she knew: a future that went no further than this dank cellar. Mary would inherit it all in the end: the Digot men, the bent back, the needles, the scarlet eyelids.

'I'm sorry,' she whispered.

For a moment she thought her mother knew what was unspoken between them, the delicacy of their mutual betrayal. For a moment it seemed that they might come to some kind of understanding.

But then she saw that Susan Digot hadn't heard her, would never hear her. 'Or would you rather go into service?' said the woman coldly. 'Speak up, which shall it be?'

'Neither,' said Mary clearly, scraping the knife on the edge of the pot.

A hawking cough from the corner; William Digot was awake.

'Then what'll you do with yourself, so?' his wife snapped. She held her needle like a weapon, aimed at her daughter.

Mary nibbled her lip as she set the cooking pot over the coals. A thin strip of skin came away in her teeth with the sweetness of blood. 'I don't know. They're both wretched trades.'

'And where did you ever get the idea, Miss,' spat her mother, 'that you were marked out for anything better? Such greed! Such wilfulness!'

Her husband roused himself with a hunch of the shoulders. 'Does the girl think we'll feed her forever?' he asked hoarsely.

Mary looked away so the man wouldn't see her face. She poked at the hissing pigeon pieces with her knife.

Answer your father,' snapped Susan Digot.

Mary kept her mouth shut, but looked her mother in the eye as if to say that she would have, if her father had been there.

Susan's small slate-blue eyes, so unlike Mary's, blazed back at her. 'What do you propose to make of yourself?'

'Something better,' the girl said between her teeth.

'What's that?' said her stepfather.

A little louder: 'I have a wish to be something better than a seamstress or a maid.'

'A wish!' William Digot roared, wide awake now, his blackened nails digging into his breeches. 'Your mother and I drudge all day to put food on the table, but that's not good enough for Milady Saunders, is it? And what might Milady Saunders have a
wish
for, then?'

She was tempted. She was on the verge of turning and saying: Any smell but the stink of coal dust. Any trade but the cursed needle. Any place in the wide world but this cramped cellar.

Her mother put down her sewing. Her callused hand gripped Mary's jaw before the girl could say any of that. Dry fingers sealed Mary's mouth, almost tenderly.
Save me, Mother,
she wanted to whisper.
Get me out of here.

'We're each of us born into a place on this earth. We must make the best of it.' The woman's voice had a dropped stitch in it. 'Your father forgot that, and took liberties with his betters.'

'And look what came of it,' said William Digot with satisfaction.

Mary broke away. The door crashed shut behind her. She could hear the boy send up his thin scream.

The sky was covering over with darkness like a rind on cheese. All down Long Acre the lamps spilled tiny circles of yellow; the oil released plumes of smoke. In the distance the Covent Garden Piazza was a dazzle, loud with the sound of violins. But Mary wanted to stay out of the light.

Once she turned up Mercer Street the shadows thickened where the lamps had been smashed. In the parish of St. Giles, it was said, the locals didn't like a spotlight shone on their doings. Mary's breath came quick and shallow as she ran along the slippery cobbles. She was glad she hadn't worn her shoes; she told herself that she had nothing worth stealing, nothing worth anyone's while to hurt her for.