Slammerkin (4 page)

At the Seven Dials, there were only a few harlots standing about on this warm May evening; the girl with the scarred face wasn't there. Mary stood against the central pillar and scraped her hands till the grease and down of the pigeon was gone. The stone left lines on her palms. Nobody paid her any attention. Her hollow stomach folded in on itself. Faint light leaked from a nearby cellar, along with the click of dice. The damp air was falling round her; it must be nearly nine o'clock. Round and round the pillar she went, craning up and counting the seven blind dials, until she lost count.

Mary had nowhere to go but home, so she set out in the opposite direction. Her stomach rumbled; she was filling up with rage again. If her mother thought Mary was going to settle for the same sort of gritty-eyed, bleached, half-buried, half-life—

The peddler was leaning in a doorway off Short's Gardens. Mary only recognised him when she came up close. She was almost as tall as him these days, she noticed with a shock. A reek of gin clouded him, and he made a skewed sort of bow as she came up close.

He lifted his huge eyebrows and took a drink from the dark bottle in his hand. 'The schoolgirl,' he said with a wet smirk.

'Is it still a shilling?' Mary's voice came out hoarse as a crow's.

'What?'

'The ribbon, sir. The scarlet,' she repeated stupidly.

The man opened his coats as if to remind himself of the one she meant, but without a light there was no telling one colour from the next. He pursed his lips; he seemed to be trying to remember. 'One and six,' he said at last.

Mary's eyes stung from straining through the twilight. 'But you said—'

'Times is hard, my dear. Getting
harder
every day.' He leaned on the word. It sounded like a riddle, but Mary couldn't think what the answer might be. 'One and sixpence,' the peddler repeated, letting his coats fall. 'Or a kiss.'

She blinked at him. He grinned back, his teeth faintly white.

Then the girl Mary Saunders had never known herself to be took a step closer.

The old man's tongue pushed past her lips as if looking for something, a buried treasure. It tasted like a burnt thing. It thrashed like a dying fish and bruised the roof of her mouth. She thought she might choke.

When he backed her against the wall, Mary didn't scream. What surprised her was the dull absence of surprise. 'Hush now, hush now,' he slurred in her ear, and she thought she remembered her father saying the same words, one stifling night when she couldn't sleep. Now the peddler's hands were full of her skirts and his bristling face was grinding into her forehead as if to leave a secret mark. The darkness covered them like smoke. Mary held her breath so she wouldn't make a sound. Somehow she knew that she'd stepped beyond the point of screaming. Somehow she knew that no one would save her now. 'Hush,' said the old man, more urgently, as if to himself.

She didn't whimper even when a stone in the wall pierced the skin of her shoulder. It was over in minutes. Little pain, no pleasure. Just a sudden vast stretching and the hot black sky above.

She stood and watched the peddler walk away. She had a wet face, and one sleek satin ribbon in her fist.

When Mary got home at last that night, there was a moment when she might have spoken. Her thighs were slick; they shook under her smock. She thought the first word she spoke might make her burst into tears. She was almost ready to say, 'Mother, something terrible—'

But Susan Digot was raging. A girl of fourteen out past ten o'clock, when decent folk were long in their beds? Hanging round the Dials, no doubt, in defiance of orders, along with every bit of trash the city could throw up? '
If you mix with muck, you'll end up just as brown,'
she quoted contemptuously.

So all Mary said was that she was sorry. She turned her grazed face away from her mother's candle and went to bed in the next room, where Billy was fast asleep, his foot dangling out of the end of the bed.

When she pulled the ribbon out of her mattress, at first light the next morning, it was brown.

The girl stayed away from the peddler after that, but it made no difference. She'd outgrown ignorance like a skin that had split, and been shed, and crumbled away to nothing. Now she'd never be that child again.

Still, she played her part for all she was worth. Later, she thought it must have been herself she was trying to fool.

As that summer panted to a close, Mary gave no trouble to her mother. When William Digot occasionally stirred out of his weary doze to give his wife's daughter an order or a warning, she never answered back. In September there were raucous celebrations for the young King's wedding, and even more for his coronation a fortnight later, but Mary didn't even ask if she could go and watch the fireworks. She never complained about the meagre food anymore, not even during a bad week in October when a bundle of quilting fell on the hearth and got singed, and Susan Digot shrieked loud enough for the neighbours to hear, and had to make it up out of her pay. Some days Mary said she had no appetite, and gave half her bread to the small boy, chewed up soft. She hurried to school along the slippery streets, where the creaking alehouse signs hung low and blocked out the light. She kept her head down over her desk and joined in the chants as if they were gospel.

It is a crime
To waste time.

Her voice, deeper than all the others now, rose above them.

The wage of vice
Is fire and ice.

Once, after a sermon by the visiting chaplain, Mary Saunders was found weeping under the row of coat pegs. When the Superintendent asked what the matter was, all the girl could say was that she'd lost another button off her smock.

For the first time in her life Mary tried praying.
Mighty Master,
she whispered into her pillow,
Mighty Master.
She listened hard, but there was no answer.

She came home one October evening and her stepfather struck her across the eye.

She stared up from the floor, blinking. Black dust moved beneath her knees. The strangest thing was that Susan Digot was not sewing; her linen lay in untidy folds on her chair. Her face was scrunched up like a bag. In her hand, vibrating as if in a draught, was a scrap of paper. The boy whined in the corner, unfed. Susan Digot brought the note up to her eyes, and began to read aloud. 'Your daughter—' Then her voice drained away. She dropped the note at Mary's feet.

Mary didn't want to touch the letter. She tilted her head and deciphered the words upside down.

Yore dawters a hor. You ony have to look at her bely.

That was all. Mary said it over and over to herself, till the words fitted together. Till she knew for sure what she'd spent five months half suspecting, half denying.

Her mother bent and dragged her to her feet. The two of them were as tall as each other. Susan Digot took the grey school smock in two hands and pulled it to lie smooth against her daughter's body. Such a strange gentle curve, arching above the girl's skinny thighs, nothing anybody would have noticed through her loose smock if they weren't looking. The mother sucked in her breath.

'It's true, Devil fetch her,' said her husband, softly.

Mary's half-brother screamed. 'Milk!' The front of his mother's dress was dark in two places.

William Digot stepped so close Mary could smell the loud tang of coal. 'Who've you been meddling with?'

She found she couldn't speak.

'Who was it, hussy?' He seemed to have come fully awake at last. His fists were bunched like rats. But his wife slid between him and her daughter and wrapped her bony arms around the girl.

For a moment Mary thought it was somehow going to be all right. 'Why?' whispered her mother. Her chin pressed down on the girl's head, almost lovingly. Her sour bodice leaked onto Mary's shoulder. 'Why?'

The girl tried to remember. Her thoughts moved like mud.

'Did he have a knife?' whispered her mother, almost hopeful.

Mary shook her head. She couldn't think of a single lie. 'A ribbon,' she whispered, husky.

The word got lost in the silky folds of her mother's neck. Susan Digot moved back a little, and bent down to hear her. 'A what?'

'A ribbon.' The silence lengthened. 'He had a red ribbon,' Mary added faintly, 'and I had a wish for it.'

That night Mary learned that all she owned in the world fitted into an old shawl. Her mother packed the shifts and petticoats together as if she were mashing a potato; her fists were white. She never looked at her daughter. Her husband had stalked out to an alehouse, and the boy had been sent to bed with the heel of the loaf. As Susan Digot folded and pressed, she kept talking, as if she feared that a moment's silence would weaken her. 'We only get one chance in this life, Mary Saunders, and you've just tossed yours away.'

'But—'

'You couldn't be satisfied with your lot like every other body on this earth, could you? For all my efforts to raise you right, all my long labours, you've sold yourself into the lowest trade there is. For a ribbon!' She spat the word as if it were the name of a sin. 'For a cheap, grubby little scrap of luxury. Is that all you're worth, then? Is that the price you put on yourself?'

'I'm sorry,' sobbed Mary, and at that moment it was true. She would have done anything to reverse time and crawl back into her childhood.

'Answer me this, what did you lack?' asked Susan Digot, twisting the clothes together as if she could squeeze an answer out of them. 'When were you ever starving? What did William and myself and little Billy ever have that we denied you?' Her questions hung on the air, like a fog indoors.

'Nothing.' Mary sounded entirely meek, as if this was the response to a catechism. But the meek didn't inherit the earth, she knew. The meek inherited bugger all.

'We gave you a home, and schooling, didn't we?' asked her mother. 'Didn't we? And the chance of a good living by your needle, if only you hadn't been too proud to take it. We gave you all we could—all we had—but you've ended up in the muck anyway.' She spoke as if her mouth was full of salt, and she tied the last knot so hard that a piece of the shawl came away in her hand.

'I didn't—' But the sentence trailed off, because Mary couldn't remember what she hadn't done, could only think of what she had done or what had been done to her, five months back: the dark, foreign exchange in the alley, in the warmth of a May evening. 'I didn't mean—' But she couldn't remember what she'd meant. Besides, it didn't matter anymore. The facts stood up like boulders in a muddy field.

'You're your father's daughter,' said Susan Digot, in a voice so broken that for a moment Mary heard it as the beginning of mercy. 'I see Cob Saunders in you every time you turn your head.'

Mary crept a little nearer. She looked into her mother's reddened, watery eyes, so unlike her own. 'When he was with us—' she ventured.

Susan Digot's face shut like a door. 'You don't remember. You were too young.'

'But I do,' insisted Mary.

'He was a stinking cur,' said Susan Digot, pronouncing the words like an epitaph. 'To go off rioting on a whim, and leave me a widow and a debtor! I rue the day I ever married him.'

Her daughter's mouth was trembling, but Susan carried on, more rapidly now. 'You're Cob's all right, twisted at the root. The bad seed never dies out. You're headed for damnation in a hurry.' She picked up the small hard bundle in two fingers, and stared down at it as if it were verminous.

'What am I to do?' the girl whispered.

Susan Digot's shoulders shrugged as if wrenched out of their sockets. 'If ribbons are what you like, then try living on ribbons!' she spat. 'Try depending on your fancy menfriends instead of your kin. See how far you'll get on your own! And soon you'll be dragging another soul into this world of pain,' she added, her forehead contracting. 'I only hope it never opens its eyes.'

Mary tried to speak but nothing came out. 'What's—what's going to become of me?'

'Maybe you'll wind up in the workhouse, or maybe you'll swing from a halter at the end of the day,' Susan Digot said formally, holding out the bundle. 'I just thank the Maker I won't be near to see it.'

The girl's throat opened. 'If you let me stay a while, Mother—'

'Don't you use that word.' She shoved the packed shawl into Mary's arms.

'One more chance—'

'You've used up all your chances.' The woman strode over to the door and pulled it open, so the October night was sucked into the house and tainted the air with smoke.

'Mother,' repeated Mary faintly.

But the salt-blue eyes looked right through her. 'You have no mother now.'

In all her fourteen years Mary Saunders had never been out past midnight. Gradually it came to her that the night only began when the decent folk barred their doors. There was a whole other festivity of darkness, for which the twilight was only a rehearsal.

She saw an unconscious man dragged out of a cellar on Dyott Street by his collar, and the wig stolen off his head; he had only patches of hair underneath, the colour of dishwater. On High Holborn a drunken boy tried to snatch her bundle but she ran. 'Poxy jade,' he called her, and other words she didn't know. Later she hid in a doorway on Ivy Lane, twitching with cold, and an old woman crawled by, her bare breasts hanging down like rags. 'The birds has got under my skin,' the creature screeched, over and over. Mary shut her eyes so she wouldn't be seen. A while afterwards, she heard grunting behind the door and bent down to look in the keyhole; two people were face down on the floor together, juddering backwards and forwards, and both of them were men.

There were puzzles she couldn't begin to solve and horrors she could only guess at. Mary tramped on fast enough to keep her feet from going numb and tried to think of any door she could knock on at this hour of an October night. She had no relatives in London. Cob Saunders must have made some friends in the city, Mary supposed, but he'd never brought them home, and she'd have been too young to know their names.

Her feet automatically led her the way she walked every morning, to school. Its narrow windows were black. Mary stared through the iron gates. Could it have been only this afternoon that she'd passed out through them freely, a child in uniform like a hundred others? There was no refuge for her here. The girls she'd known were all gone from London. And if she stood here all night, the teachers wouldn't take her in tomorrow morning, not even if they found her half-frozen on the step; not once they'd made her tell them why she had no home to go to.