Slammerkin (45 page)

Cadwaladyr would never know where the eleven-odd pounds in the Poor Box came from; he'd marvel at such goodness, and wonder which of the local rich had made such a gesture. Then, afterwards, if anyone ever asked about money found in Mary Saunders's room Mrs. Jones could deny all knowledge. It was dirty money, to her, until it went into the Box. At least now it could feed some of the town's landless and jobless unfortunates for a few months, or pay for a dozen paupers' funerals.

As Mrs. Jones stood up she felt the weight of it against her leg. Temptation ran through her like a wave of desire. It occurred to her for the first time that she could very easily keep the money. It could slip into her private savings that she kept in a box in the bottom of
her wardrobe. It could recompense the family for the loss of the Morgans' commission. It could form another wall to shield them from disaster, in case all their plans of advancement went awry. No one need ever know.

She felt quite faint with the idea of it. Money from nowhere: not worked for, not sweated! Mrs. Jones stood motionless, for a moment; anyone who saw her would have thought she was praying. And she was, in a way.
Judgement,
was the word she was mouthing to herself.
Remember the Day of Judgement.

She glanced around: no one in sight. Then she pulled the stocking out of her pocket and rushed over to the Poor Box on the wall. Her hands came up full of coins; she stuffed them into the slot.

The air cooled a little in the second week of September. Down by the river, Jennett the Gelder was cutting the boars; their incredulous squeals rang through the town. Mary walked home with a basket of malt for the winter brewing. Her legs trembled under her; her breath was shallow. The fields were newly seeded with rye. She saw a small child racing at the birds to scare them away. How many days would it take him to earn a penny? Her eyes stung. Ever since the fever broke she'd been ready to cry over nothing.

But she hadn't been entirely idle, during her convalescence. She'd come up with a good story at last: so simple, Mary cursed herself for not having thought of it before. The money, she was ready to confide in Mrs. Jones, was a secret legacy from her mother.
Tell no one you have it, Mother said to me on her deathbed. Keep it hidden away for hard times. For your old age.
Mary had been rehearsing this story all week, till it sounded like Gospel truth.

There was something black hanging from a fence by the bridge into town. Mary's eyes were weak and blurry still from the fever; she went up close. A dead crow, hung by its feet, its wings sagging wide as if it were flying downwards, about to hit the ground. It swayed on
the wind. Mary picked up the smell coming off the body, dark and musky.

She hurried home.

She knew if she watched and waited, the right moment would come, and it had.

'How do you feel in yourself, now, Mary?' asked her mistress.

'Quite well.' It was only a little lie. Her vision was only slightly blurred. She could stop her hands shaking if she remembered to.

Mr. Jones was out at his club, where he went more and more, these evenings. Mrs. Ash was upstairs mumbling over her Scripture. Daffy had gone walking by the river on his own. Even Abi was out for a taste of the mild evening air.

If Mary didn't speak up now, she might never get the chance. 'I was wondering,' she began, 'now that I'm in my health again...'

'Yes?' said her mistress.

'Can I have my money back?'

That bright, loving face disintegrated all at once. Mrs. Jones's breath seeped away. 'Oh, Mary.'

'I'm ready to tell you, now, where I got it,' the girl said with what she hoped looked like an innocent smile. 'I should have—'

Mrs. Jones shook her head and interrupted. 'No need, no need.'

'But I want to tell you,' Mary insisted. 'I want to set your mind at rest. I can trust you with what I've never told a soul.'

'Mary.' Mrs. Jones put her fingertips against her maid's lips to hush her. After a long moment, she went on, almost in a whisper, 'It's gone.'

Mary's face went stiff. 'Gone?'

Mrs. Jones licked her lips nervously. 'I did what was best.'

The girl waited.

'I put it in the Poor Box.'

Mary heard the words, but she could make no sense of them. The thing was impossible.

'You see, my dear,' said her mistress in a rush, 'I know you did wrong—though I don't know what, exactly—but I feel sure in my heart that you're not a wicked girl. This way, the money is put to good use and you're cleansed of it. Do you see? It'll go to paupers, and orphans.'

'Orphans?' repeated Mary hoarsely.

'Yes, poor creatures, orphaned just as you were.'

Mary's mind raced. Then let them work for their bread, just as she had!

'You can put it out of your mind, now,' gabbled Mrs. Jones, watching her face. 'You can make a fresh start. We won't speak of it again.' She leaned over and patted Mary's hand. She let out a breath of relief. 'Now I think I'll step out for a little air, too, the evening's so close.' She hurried to the door.

The silence of the house closed in around Mary Saunders, and she stayed sitting there like an unfinished statue. It was all a great puzzle and bewilderment. Her mind was tired from the fever still, that had to be it. Any minute now she'd understand.

Then outrage swept through her veins, intoxicating her like gin. Charity, that was what they called it.

Grateful we must always be
For the gifts of charity.

But what about the thefts of charity? The sins of charity? The arrogance of a woman who confiscated another's whole hard-earned fortune and dropped it in the Poor Box? Who made herself a Lady Bountiful with another woman's sweat, with the proceeds of a hundred nights round the back of the Crow's Nest?

With one bound Mary reached the stairs. Time to pay herself back. In the Joneses' room she went straight for the wardrobe. The box was locked, but that wouldn't stop her. Mary ran downstairs, her heart pounding like a drum. In the empty kitchen she picked up the first thing she could find, a cleaver with smears of mutton fat on its blade. On the way back upstairs she heard herself panting like a
wolf. With the back of the cleaver she smashed the lock of the box till it came clean off. The lid opened with one loud crack.

She counted, and counted again, sure her eyes were cheating her. There was only eight pounds, three and sixpence. Mrs. Jones's puny, private store. For a moment Mary almost pitied her mistress.

Then she remembered the Poor Box, and rage began to bubble up in her again. This fury was bigger than the fever. It moved like a great wind that sucked up everything in its path. It astonished her. Rage at every cully Mary had ever serviced, every disapproving woman's face, her mother, even Doll—everyone who'd ever judged her and tutted over her and thought they knew best and let her down in the end. Kicked her out or left her, one or the other or both, always and everywhere. All Mary's old griefs welled up now, but rage swallowed them as fast as they could come. Her mouth was bitter, her legs were locked, her hands were sharp.
The bitch is going to get what she deserves.

First Mary filled her pocket with the contents of the smashed box. She'd be damned if she was going back to London without some money to start a new life. Then she went to her room and rouged her mouth and her cheekbones. She ran downstairs again; nothing could tire her now. She used the cleaver to whack open the store cupboard. She had the strength of ten women. She ripped the cork out of a bottle of best Canary and drank it right off, though its harshness made her cough. She took another bottle into the shop.

If she went back to London without fine clothes, Mary thought blurrily, she'd be nothing but a beast of the field, a vagabond, shooed along from parish to parish till she ended up in the workhouse with her feet chained to the wall. Time seemed to have slowed down now. The long mirror tempted her, so she shucked off her plain brown dress and climbed into Mrs. Morgan's white velvet slammerkin.
A loose dress for a loose woman, you sleezy slut of a slammerkin,
laughed Doll in her head. It was hard to fasten the dress on her own
with fingers made clumsy by the drink, but she managed. She filled the dress as if it had been made for her. The little silver snakes were wriggling on their long train. Mary stood and twirled in front of the mirror, and the whole world seemed to turn. Enraptured, she grabbed the bottle of wine and toasted herself, from her endless train to her scarlet lips. She'd never seen anything more beautiful.

It was hard to decide what else to take. Her mind was gliding along as if on ice. Her future might depend on the cut of a neckline, she knew that. Miss Theodosia Fortune's new red cape, of course, and Mrs. Partridge's green paduasoy sack gown, and she couldn't think of leaving that pink bodice she'd quilled for old Miss Elizabeth Roberts. It was too young for Miss Roberts, anyway, thought Mary; no use primping in the grave! She crushed taffetas and piled slithery satins high in her arms; she propped a pair of Pompadour heels under her chin. There was no limit to what she could carry. She'd made these dresses, sewn her sweat into them. She'd wear them. They were hers.

'Mary?'

Her limbs froze. The wine swirled in her head. She turned at last, like a packhorse under her load. She stumbled on her snowy train.

'Mary!'

She'd never heard her mistress shout before. Startled, she lost her grip on the dresses, and they slid to the floor.

Mrs. Jones's face was deformed. 'Take that off at once.'

Mary looked down at herself, the white velvet river of her body, and all of a sudden she was stone-cold sober.

This was where the road petered out. Where could she run to, this time? In a minute, she knew, Mrs. Jones would call for the constable and have her maid taken away as a thief. Mary could be hanged for this; they would hang her by the neck till she was dead for the theft of so much as a single lace-edged handkerchief, let alone two armfuls of the best dresses west of Bristol.
This woman has all the power,
thought Mary with absolute clarity.
I live or die by her word. She said I was her daughter, but she could have me killed.

'Don't talk to me that way,' she said at last. The sounds came out slowly, thick as mud. 'You don't even know me.'

'I know very well who you are,' said Mrs. Jones. 'You're my servant.'

So much for love.
Mary gathered all the bile in her mouth and spat in her mistress's face.

The older woman, petrified to stone, looked back at her. There was spit on her cheek.

'I'm no orphan, by the way, for starters,' remarked Mary. 'My mother's alive and well and hates my guts. Every word I've ever said to you was a lie.'

All the colour had drained from Mrs. Jones's face.

'I'm a whore; hadn't you guessed it yet? You're not the sharpest knife in the box, are you, Mrs. Jones? That money you stole, I earned it with my own crack. I've had every stranger that's passed through this miserable excuse for a town.'

Pain like lightning across the woman's forehead.

'Why, I've had your own husband up against a wall!'

Only a blankness about the mouth.

Then Mary couldn't think of anything else to say. She was emptied out, hollow. She waited for Mrs. Jones to bend under the weight of all those words. She would have liked to see her weep.

Instead, the mistress cleared her throat and said, almost sedately, 'Get out of my house.'

Mary began to drift towards the door, light as air.

And take off that dress before you soil it.'

She froze on the spot. The strange thing was that she could feel the mistress's words coming true. Her skin soured, leaking poison through every pore, contaminating every stitch of the silver embroidery. The velvet hung on her like a snakeskin. She couldn't peel it off now; there'd be nothing left of her. Unable to speak, she shook her head.

Mrs. Jones held out her hand. When Mary didn't move, the mistress made a peremptory little movement of the fingertips.

The meat cleaver was on the sewing table where she'd left it. She picked it up now; its weight was delicious against her fingers. This was the hand she'd always wanted, the hand no one could shake off, no one could ignore. Now Mary had come into her own. Now she was the Queen.

Mrs. Jones didn't seem to notice this transformation. She stepped up to Mary and wrenched at the sleeve of the white velvet slammerkin. They both heard it rip.

Mary stared at her skinny shoulder, laid bare in the gap, like the bone of an animal. Everything was spoiled now. There was nothing left clean in the world.

The first blow was so easy. It happened before Mary knew it—as if the cleaver had taken its own simple revenge on behalf of the dress. Mary didn't know what had happened until she saw blood make a fine spray across her milky-white bodice.

Spoiled, all spoiled.

So then she took a firmer grip on the slippery cleaver and struck again. This time the thick blade lodged in Mrs. Jones's neck. She was on the floor. Blood rose like a fountain, like a firework.

Mary met her mistress's eyes, and now she couldn't tell who was falling, who was bleeding. It all seemed like some peculiar play. Mrs. Jones tried to speak. Mary tried to answer. Their lips barely moved. They addressed each other like beasts in a language neither understood.

The dying woman saw her maid drop to her knees in front of her, saw her lips open, but all she could hear was a great roaring. There was no pain, only a blurring of the lines. Mrs. Jones couldn't comprehend what had happened; she knew only that something was very wrong. There was puzzlement and sorrow and the candle going black. Something she'd forgotten to say or to ask, and where were the children? What was it that she had to remember to do before nightfall? There was red everywhere, and who was to clean it up? She couldn't go to sleep yet. She couldn't let go of the day until everything was done.

Mary had no idea which was the moment of death. The small eyes never did shut. Hours seemed to pass. She couldn't measure time except by the spreading of the tide of blood towards the place where she squatted. When her hem was heavy with red, she staggered to her feet.