Slammerkin (34 page)

Mrs. Jones toyed with the notion that the ladies of Monmouth were her puppets: walking advertisements for her handiwork. The vainer ones flicked their heads from side to side like pigeons, to check that no one was wearing more ruffles than themselves. With all the coloured skirts and plumed straw hats, and the old stained glass behind them, the little church was as bright as a fruit bowl. Even Cadwaladyr's vestments were as vivid as a bruise.

The curate's sermon was on dress. 'Are the fair sex empty vessels,' intoned Cadwaladyr gloomily, 'that they must make such a fuss of their outsides?'

Mrs. Halfpenny had woken up now. Beside her, plumes twitching in annoyance, sat the stately Mrs. Morris of Chepstow, who owed five guineas at the Joneses and God knows what elsewhere.

'The waste of time and money on mere attire will surely reduce this nation to beggary,' complained the curate. 'Unless—' his reddened finger moved along their pews—'the ladies turn of their own will from proud vanity to sober economy.'

There were rustles and creaks all around. 'And this from a seller of spirituous liquors!' hissed Mrs. Halfpenny.

'The fellow is trying to ruin our trade,' murmured Mrs. Jones mischievously in Mary's ear. She'd never heard ladies rebuked to their faces before.

But Cadwaladyr must have realised by now that he'd gone too far. Midstream, his sermon changed direction. Neatness without could signify neatness within; he went so far as to admit that the Creator was gratified by beauty in his creatures. 'But above all, what He demands is transparency of heart,' the curate went on, his voice rising: 'that His people should be what they appear to be.'

Beside Mrs. Jones her maid sat with her jaw jutting out. She seemed to have taken against the man. What an unpredictable girl Su Rhys's daughter was. Not that Su had been entirely free from moods and megrims herself, good woman that she was.

St. Mary's was as hot as an oven by the time the sermon was over. Under the weight of incense and pomade, Mrs. Jones registered the sweat of outrage. And another smell she didn't recognise, dark and vegetative. Only on the way out, shuffling to the back of the church behind the vast arcs of skirts and the odd dress sword, did she remember what it must be. Behind the pews the church was floored with the gravestones of the great families. In one corner the pavement had been dug up, and earth piled high, smothered in flowers and leaves. It must have been a winter burial; the greenery had rotted to the slime of February, and it all smelled rampantly alive.

'Sometimes,' Daffy said dreamily, 'when I have a whole day off, I walk right down the Vale to the old abbey at Tintern. There's never a soul there. I like to stretch out in the long grass and count the windows. I never end up with the same number twice!'

Mary lay with her face six inches from his, in Chippenham Meadow at eight in the evening of the mildest day of April. She could feel Daffy's hot breath on her cheek. He was one of those people who gave off a sort of cloud of heat in every direction, even through his double-layered winter jacket.

'The sky is so blue through those old stone pillars, Mary. It looks as if a giant wandered by and lifted off the roof to see what was inside. Maybe I'll take you down to Tintern someday, in the summer?' he suggested. 'It's a long enough walk, but you're stronger than you know.'

She nodded, not listening. Her head was propped on her fist; she glanced down at the tops of her breasts, creamy as fresh butter.

Now he was rambling on about the crows, pointing as they wheeled from tree to tree at the darkening horizon. 'They each go off to search for food alone, at twilight,' he said eagerly, 'but then the leader calls them home. They chase each other, for sport, but they all end up asleep together in one great roost. Strength in numbers, you see.'

Mary yawned and stretched, inched a fraction closer, as if she didn't know what she was doing. She could see the front of Daffy's breeches tautening. Power pulsed in her like water in a spring. She told herself that she could make this man stand up like an ear of wheat.

Oh, it was delicious, this moment before the demand, before the rebuff. Because of course she would say no. She had no intention of risking her new life for a roll in the grass with Daffy Cadwaladyr.

He'd better not try it. He'd better not take a single liberty. Mary wouldn't even need to speak, in fact; she would simply push him off her, the moment he stopped talking and climbed on top of her. Because every man came to a moment like that. Young or old, civil or boorish, they all reached a point where what was happening in their heads was rendered irrelevant by what was happening in their breeches. Even the gallantest gentleman, when he was all talked out, would take hold of a girl and crush her against him as if she were no more than a mattress. They couldn't help it; it was their low nature. It wasn't worth getting upset over. What was it Doll used to say, cackling all the while?
They'd fuck a goat if they couldn't find a woman, dearie. They'd fuck a hole in the wall!

Daffy had stopped talking, without her noticing. It was as if he'd run out of words. He did a peculiar thing, then; he reached out and touched Mary's cheekbone; lightly, as if he was brushing away
a speck of coal dust. She thought of Doll, that first morning, wiping mud out of the lost child's eyes.

Her throat hurt, all at once, as if she were swallowing a stone. She wished the two of them could stay forever frozen in this moment, hidden in the grass, as the setting sun slid across the fields of Monmouth. Before any asking, any refusal. While this strange, tame young man was still looking at her as if she were worth any price.

It all came down to the market in the end, she reminded herself. When corn was plentiful, the price of bread would fall. Whatever a woman gave away, she cheapened. Men wanted what they couldn't afford. For all Daffy's book-learning, Mary knew he'd turn out to be the same as every other man, in the end; for all his soft talk, she knew exactly what he needed from her.
A hole in the wall.

Mary Saunders had never given anything away for free, and she wasn't about to start now. She let his hard fingertips move across her mouth, for a long second, while she gathered all her powers of refusal.

'Marry me,' he said simply.

She sat up so fast she scraped her elbow. The black world spun round her. 'What?'

'Didn't you hear me?' he asked, blushing red.

Sick with dizziness, Mary started laughing. It was all she could think to do.

Daffy put his hand over her mouth, as if to seal it up. 'Let me speak,' he said hurriedly. 'Give me a minute. It's a very sensible plan.'

'It's a nonsense!'

'No,' he gabbled, 'no, listen. I'm a cautious man—'

'You're a fool with swollen breeches!'

He blinked at her, startled. Very well; let him know how coarse she could be. Let him realise what an impossibility he was asking.

Daffy got up on one knee, and knotted his hands together. 'I swear,' he began, 'I swear it's not just a matter of ... amorousness. It seems to me—it has seemed to me for some time now,' he corrected himself, 'that you and I have much in common.'

Mary let her mouth twist into a smile. Was that what he called it?

'I mean,' he added hastily, 'we neither of us seem to have any immediate prospects of bettering ourselves, but when we consider the matter closely, we're both in a position to profit from our experience.'

'Daffy, man, what are you talking about?'

He cleared his throat with a donkey's bray and rushed on. 'I know you're fond of the family, as am I, but they can't expect us to stay forever. What I mean to say is, by the end of the year I'll be ready to set up my own sign as a staymaker. And you—you're almost qualified for dressmaking, and millinery, and such, aren't you? Mrs. Jones is always saying how quick a learner you are. And so before too long it might be possible for us to...'

'Marry?' she asked in the long silence.

Daffy nodded so hard she thought his head might crack off. 'I'd wish,' he said, straining for the words, 'to be the kind of husband who's as much ... friend as lover. Do you understand me? What I'm offering is a—a partnership, in all things.'

Mary's mind scurried like a rat. The man liked her, wanted her, was her match in hard work and ambition; was that such a small fortune? What had the Joneses, when they'd started out, but a mutual fondness, a few skills, and a wish to rise in the world?

'I know you're still very young,' he rushed on, 'and if you liked we could wait. But not too long, I hope. I mean, if you say yes.'

Mary let herself down into the grass. Her heart lurched in its cage of ribs.

'Please,' he added. 'I meant to say, please. I've thought it all through. I've thought of nothing else. I haven't read a book in weeks!'

That made her laugh again, in triumph. She let her eyes rest on his blue liquid ones. 'What about Gwyn?' she asked, for the pleasure of hearing the answer.

His cheeks were dark with all the blood in them. His wig was slipping off. 'I never felt like this before,' he said simply. 'I didn't think to ever feel like this.'

What would life be like with such a man? Nothing Mary had ever bothered to imagine, in her dreams of a glittering future. It would be a chance to shed her old self, once and for all. She would be an ordinary girl again, then an ordinary wife. This was the town all roads seemed to lead to. The ending to every story she'd ever read.

'Maybe,' she breathed.

'Yes?' His voice was harsh, like a soldier's in battle.

'Maybe yes.'

'D
ON'T FORGET
the rowan.'

'Rowan?' repeated Mary, mending the handle of her basket with a bit of old twine.

'For nailing up over the door,' said Mrs. Jones patiently. 'To keep out witches.'

Mary stared at Mrs. Jones over the kitchen table, and gave a helpless shrug. 'Whatever you say.'

It was May Eve, and Mrs. Jones had released Mary from the endless hem of Mrs. Vaughan's muslin cape and sent her off to the woods to go blossoming. 'It brings the summer in,' Mrs. Jones explained, half-laughing. 'If we don't hang blossoms up by May Morning, nothing will bear fruit.'

And indeed, thought Mary, the world was full of strange things and stranger people, so what harm could it do to nail up a few branches of blossom?

In the warm evening the river was cluttered with swans and gulls. The trees shuddered with roosting crows. There were purple bunches Mary didn't recognise till she got up close, and breathed in, and remembered the baskets in Covent Garden: lilacs. How the
scent of them used to swim above the stink of the discarded fruit underfoot. She walked deeper into the wood now. An old tree, slumped under its rolls of bark, was turning green all over; through cracks in its sides the fresh twigs were breaking out, hungry for the light.

In a clearing Mary passed half a dozen locals hacking branches off a fallen birch that was the length of four men. Jarrett the Smith looked up and wiped the sweat and insects off his forehead. 'How d'you like our Maypole, Mary Saunders?'

She gave him a quick smile.

'Long enough for you, is it?' And a sly guffaw from another fellow.

Who'd said that? Maybe the red-haired man at the back, one of the ones whose names she didn't know. But they all knew her, evidently. She walked on faster. Her heart was thumping in her chest. Would they have spoken that way to any female passing through the woods today, given that it was the season of rising sap and dirty jokes?

She was safe, Mary reminded herself. She was not yet sixteen, a virgin without a history. Her only secret was that she was engaged to be married to Daffy Cadwaladyr, a respectable manservant of twenty.

Nothing was impossible.

She wasn't sure which bush was rowan, but she started to fill her basket with white tangled blossom; if she brought home a bit of everything, she'd be all right.

The creak of a breaking branch, and she spun around. But it was only Daffy, his face lit up with a smile like a Roman candle. 'Sneaking after me, were you?' she asked, trying to be stern.

'Mrs. Jones sent me to carry your basket.'

'She didn't!'

'She did!'

'She knows, then,' Mary told him, letting him press his throat against her wide red mouth. 'She's such a romantic.'

'She can't know,' he said, troubled. 'I haven't said a word yet. We agreed, not a word till after Christmas.'

'The woman's got eyes in her head, hasn't she?' murmured Mary.
'And she can smell it on the air. Every bird and plant in this wood is getting mated. It's the season.'

Not a word from Daffy; he'd loosed her long dark hair from its starched cap and dipped his face into it. His breath was a live creature at the nape of her neck. And suddenly for the first time in her life Mary felt it. A flickering in her stomach; a thrill as sharp as a blackbird's note. It occurred to her that this must be what Doll had had with her journeyman: what ordinary women felt at the hands of ordinary men.

Was it indeed due to the season, the ripening on all sides? Or was it because of the seriousness of this man's fingers? Mary's body shook behind her rigid stays. There was no time to waste. When she ripped open Daffy's breeches, a button fell into the ivy. His eyes were startled, huge. 'Wait—' he stuttered.

Mary didn't bother answering. Hair hung damp in her eyes. She didn't care if she was giving herself away by such forwardness, or if her hands had the practised ease of a harlot. What mattered was to catch hold of this tiny feeling before it disappeared for ever.

She was on top of him, then he was on top of her. There were twigs in his wig. Her heel was caught in a loop of ivy. All round them the scent of crushed blossoms went up. Daffy's lips moved as if drinking Canary wine from an invisible bottle. His legs thrashed like flames.

She slid him into her, swallowed him up. Daffy's whole body went as stiff as a corpse. It was then that Mary realised he'd never done this before in his life. He was much too new at it to realise she was no virgin. She was touched; she was appalled. His bliss was so close she could nearly taste it. She waited for it to spread into her body, fill it up.