Slammerkin (35 page)

But the fact was, the act felt the same as it always had. A necessary conjunction. A temporary occupation. She was numb. She was a million miles away.
Not half so big as his father, is he?
remarked Doll in her head.

Mary squeezed her eyes shut. Her own thoughts repelled her.

It was all over in minutes. 'Oh, Mary,' Daffy cried in her ear, 'oh, Mary, oh, Mary,' till it became a sound that had no meaning.

His dead weight on her was the same as any other man's; the same crumpled feeling, the same stickiness, cooling as fast in the twilight. She wanted more than anything to shove him off her, and had only mercy enough to lie still.

When he raised his head she saw his eyes were wet. 'This is the happiest hour of my life,' he whispered huskily.

She strained her neck up to kiss one of his eyelids. The whole thing was impossible.

Kneeling up, searching in the foliage for his missing button, Daffy spoke more calmly. 'Let's come back here, to this very spot, every May Eve,' he said, 'for the rest of our lives.'

Mary stopped brushing leaves off her skirt, and stared at him. 'But Daffy,' she began warily, 'we won't be in Monmouth
always.'

'Where else will we be?'

A watchman's wooden rattle started up in Mary's head. 'There won't be enough room for us here.'

'But Monmouth is growing apace,' he told her cheerfully. 'I believe it could soon bear two staymakers, and two dressmakers. We may need to begin in another town in the Marches, but it won't be long until we come home.'

Home.
The word was bitter in her mouth. This was where the trap lay, she saw now. 'London's that,' she said, almost gruffly. 'My home is nowhere else. I'm a London girl.'

Daffy shook his head gently, as if at a child. 'Not any more, my sweetling. If you could see how much you've changed—'

Anger made spots behind Mary's eyes. 'I'm the same as I ever was. And as for you, I thought you claimed to have ambition!' she spat at him. 'I didn't know you planned to eke out your days in a miserable crow town.'

His face went white. 'If it's good enough for the Joneses—'

'Pox on the Joneses!' she roared. 'I want more from life than to end up a poor man's Mrs. Jones.'

Daffy's hands were twined together like wet rope. He wore the painful expression of someone trying to recall the second verse of a song. 'Mary, Mary,' he remonstrated, 'all else aside, how could we think of bringing up our children in the big city?'

She stared at him. For a moment she'd forgotten how little he knew about her. He had no idea who she really was: a barren, raddled whore. His innocence repelled her as much as her own deceit.

She and he were too unlike, she saw now; they could no more combine than oil and water. They wanted different things in life and had different plans for getting them. Mary's path and Daffy's had briefly crossed in this blossoming wood before snaking away in opposite directions. The old happy ending had no place in this particular story. How could she have been such a fool?

'I've made a mistake,' she said quietly, and turned to pick up her basket.

'What do you mean?'

'I can't marry you.'

'Not quite yet, I know,' Daffy blundered on, 'but in good time—'

How could she ever have thought of mating herself to such a plodding, ordinary man? 'Never,' said Mary, walking out of the wood.

John Niblett the coach driver brought news that the war with France was over at last after seven years, and the Government had ordered public rejoicings in every town. But Mr. Jones spent the evening poring over the
Bristol Mercury,
and announced over griddle cakes at supper that this so-called peace was a disgrace. 'We beat the dogs fair and square, and now we're handing them back Guadaloupe and Martinique!'

Mary would have liked to stroll down to the bonfire on Chippenham Meadow—they said there was going to be dancing—but she feared to meet Daffy there. The man's eyes were as red as a rash these days. He kept hovering in her vicinity, as if he had some grand, decisive declaration to make. But she made sure never to be alone with him. Nothing he could say would make any difference.

Within a few weeks the blooming trees were scraggy again. Mrs. Jones said bloom fall was the season that always made her sad; it came on so quickly. The blossoms nailed to the walls of the house faded and curled after a few weeks, but their smell grew stronger.

To Abi, they always seemed to have a tang of rot. Late one warm May night she lay on her side of the bed and stared out the tiny window. The shutter had been left wide open to catch some air. There was nothing to see but an indigo sky. Beside her, Mary Saunders let out a long breath between her teeth.

'You fight with your fellow?' asked Abi.

Mary's head turned towards her as quickly as a bird's. 'What fellow?'

Abi snorted mildly. As if the way Daffy had been looking at Mary recently wasn't enough to spark tinder.

Mary turned her back and spoke very low into the darkness. 'He's not my fellow.'

That meant yes. A bad fight. Abi waited; sometimes silence was the loudest question.

'Besides,' said Mary, flouncing onto her back and staring up at the low ceiling, 'I wager I'll get farther on my own than if I harness myself to such a dumb ox.'

'Where you going to?'

'Never you mind.'

Again, Abi waited. She had learned not to be hurt by such automatic rebuffs. This girl had to be handled like a sharp-clawed cat.

'London, where else?' said Mary at last, as if the darkness were squeezing the words out of her.

'When?'

'Not anytime soon, but someday. There's no use going back till I have good clothes and money. Turn up empty-handed in the city,' said Mary scornfully, 'you might as well lie down in the road for the carthorses to trample.'

Abi shut her eyes and suddenly was back in Bristol, the day the ship from Barbados came in to port, nine years ago, in the chilliest rain she'd ever known. Her skin where the brass collar had been was naked, raw. The streets were no wider than outstretched arms, as crammed with faces as a trash heap with rats, and every face was white. While Abi had been waiting for the doctor to collect all his trunks, an enormous rattling cart had borne down on her, and it had occurred to her to step in front of it. What had stopped her, she wondered now? Cowardice? Or fear that her spirit, set loose in those tangled streets, would never find its way home to Africa?

'I ask for wages, like you said,' she mentioned.

'Why, I never thought you'd dare,' said Mary, animated. 'And?'

Abi shook her head mutely.

Mary let out a puff of contemptuous breath. 'A girl I used to know in London, she once told me, masters are like cullies.'

'Cullies?'

'You know,' the girl said hastily, 'men that go to whores. Masters are like that to servants; they use you up and toss you aside like paper. What did he say, when you asked?'

'She,' Abi corrected her. 'Was the mistress.'

A tiny pause, while Mary registered this. 'Oh,' she said at last, 'I thought it would have been the master. Still, Mrs. Jones can't go against his word, can she? When it comes down to it,' she added bitterly, 'a wife's only a kind of upper servant.'

'She say maybe give me present, at Christmas.' Abi heard the flatness of her own words.

She found her hand being pulled along the sheet and held very tight. It was a curious sensation, mildly uncomfortable, but also comforting. She tried to remember the last time anyone had held her hand like that: without trying to make it do anything.

Mary's narrow fingers traced the scar that went right through Abi's hand, from back to palm. 'What happened here?' she whispered. 'I know it was a knife, but what really happened? Was it long ago?'

Abi let out a tiny sigh. For a while she didn't say anything; long enough that she thought the girl might have drifted off. But the grip on her ragged palm never loosened. 'I come into house—' Abi began at last.

'This house?'

'No, no. Big estate in Barbados. Was house slave by then. Easier. Saved my life, you know? Wouldn't lasted half as long in the fields.'

'Go on.'

She squirmed a little. She'd never put words to this memory before, let alone English. 'So that day the door standing open.'

'Yes?'

'And master, he there on the floor, all bloody.'

Mary gave a little whistle of excitement.

'There was big knife,' Abi went on, 'stick up out of his eye. It look so bad.'

'What did you do?'

'Try take it out, but it stuck fast.'

'Ugh!'

Abi let out a little painful laugh. 'So then neighbour men run in, and find me with blood.'

'On your hands?'

'All over.'

'And they think you've done it?' asked Mary, leaning up on one elbow.

'They sure,' Abi corrected her, 'because of blood. And they want—what you call it? After killing.'

'A trial?'

Abi cleared her throat in frustration. 'A yes. Yes to killing.'

'A confession?'

'That the word. But I won't give no yes. Won't say I done nothing. Not me.'

'So they let you go?'

Abi stared up at the dark ceiling. What was the point of relating the facts when this girl just didn't understand what it was like, back on the island?

'Go on,' whispered Mary, like a child cheated of her bedtime story.

'So they put me on kitchen table,' said Abi weightily, 'tell me they going stick the knife into one bit and another bit till I say yes, then after they going kill me quick.'

The attic was quiet. 'My God.'

'They start with this hand here,' said Abi, tugging it out of Mary's grasp.

'So what stopped them from going on?'

'Another neighbour come in then, say they catched the man with blood on his shirt.'

'Which man?' asked Mary, bewildered.

'The killing one. He got master's moneybag in pocket.'

'Just in time for you!'

Abi let out a small snort. 'You don't know nothing.'

'Well, tell me, then!'

'Then the neighbours take me to auction, sell me for pay for master's funeral.'

'How much did you fetch?'

'Twenty pound,' Abi told her. Was the girl impressed by this figure, she wondered, or did she consider it trifling? 'It would be more,' she added a little defensively, 'except for my hand bleeding.'

Mary lay very still beside her.

All in all, Abi was glad she'd told this old story. It made it smaller, she found, to wrap it in words and fold it away. She rolled over now and pushed her face under the pillow, waiting for sleep.

On Mary's birthday, it so happened that Mr. Channing came back to Monmouth from the horse races and paid nine months of tailoring
bills in full. Mr. Jones told his wife to bring the best port up from its hiding place in the scullery, for a double celebration. Mr. Channing rode off after a single glass, but Mr. Jones sat up after dinner toasting his king and country, his patrons, and all his family. 'To our maid Mary, the best of young women, with heartiest felicitations on completing her sixteenth year!'

They raised their glasses.

'To Henrietta Jones,' he declared next, 'the Belle of the West!'

'Why am I a bell?' Hetta demanded, tugging at her father's cuff-ruffle as he drank.

'Because you make so much noise,' suggested Mrs. Ash without looking up from her Bible.

'No, my dear,' he said, lifting her onto his lap, 'it's a different kind of bell, that means beautiful lady.' And indeed as he looked down at her snow-white head, it did seem to him that Hetta was all he could ask for in a daughter. And for some men, that would be enough; some men wouldn't wake up in the middle of the night from dreams of driving in a carriage beside their fine handsome son.

She bounced violently on his knee and started up the old game. 'Fafa, where did your leg go?'

'Did I never tell you?' His eyes widened. 'One night I was fast asleep and a big rat chewed it off.'

'He didn't!' Her voice was delicious with fear.

'He did. Has he never woken you up nibbling your toes?'

'Don't scare the child,' laughed Mrs. Jones, looking up from her work.

On his ninth glass of port, her husband sensed a delightful cloudiness about his head. His throat opened, and words spilled out; he even insisted on wetting Hetta's lips with port, 'to give her a taste for the best.' After his wife had gone off with Mrs. Ash to put the child to bed, Mr. Jones couldn't seem to move from his chair. It was so very comfortable; the liquor had fitted every curve of horsehair to his body. At last only his maid Mary remained by the bottle, her head resting on one fist, listening.

'Oh, indeed, great plans, great plans. In a few years, Mary, I shall buy up a draper's business to combine with ours. The Joneses of Monmouth will be known as the most complete purveyors of sartorial goods west of Bristol.' He relished the genteel ring of the words.

'How many years are a few?' asked Mary.

Mr. Jones shrugged, insouciant. 'Certainly by the time our next boy is born.' He could see the girl come alert at the phrase, but he went on. 'My intelligencers tell me that our trade is likely to have tripled in value by then.'

'Really, sir.'

Did she disbelieve him? There was a dry edge to the girl's answers sometimes. Like her mother Su Rhys before her. What Mr. Jones didn't let himself remember in his wife's presence was that he'd never much liked her best friend. 'Hetta will go to a school for young ladies,' he hurried on, 'and my son will become a gentleman.'

'How can you be sure?' Mary asked.

'I shall send him to the best tutors—'

'No, but,' she hesitated, clearly struggling for tact, 'how do you know you will have another child?'

Mr. Jones beamed down at her. The port was singing in his veins. 'My wife is young yet. God will provide.' He leaned his elbows on the table until his face was a foot from hers. 'He owes me,' he whispered, too loudly.

Mary Saunders leaned back a little.

'Don't you see?' Mr. Jones had never explained his conviction to anyone. He'd tried to tell his wife once, but she covered her ears and called it sacrilegious talk. 'It's a sort of...
bargain.'