Slammerkin (8 page)

'It's true, frig you!' bawled Doll. 'You can take his own weapon—see—and turn it in his face.' That mime was even more obscene. Mercy's laugh turned into a violent cough. They never noticed the pair of footmen hurrying down the marble steps to investigate the matter of the broken glass. Mary had to hook her arm into Doll's and Mercy's and haul them off down Soho Street before they all got their heads broken. They giggled all the way to St. Giles.

The winter was a wet and cold one, but Mary and Doll bought fourthhand fur-edged muffs to keep them warm, when ale and wine and gin wouldn't do the trick. Most of the girls picked a beat and worked it, but Doll said that was tedious stuff. 'The whole city's our bawdy-house, my lass,' she crowed. Mary was coming to learn that men were easy, in the end; not worth being afraid of. Doll showed her where to find them, and when they were ripe for the picking. Mary took strangers against walls, in taverns, in rented rooms; clerks blind with drink on the Strand; rich Bishopsgate Jews restless after sunset on Saturday; young bucks reeling out of Almack's after losing hundreds at brag.

Mary was a free woman now, with more money in her pocket than she'd ever seen in her life before. She dressed in the brightest colours she could find on the stalls of Monmouth Street—pinks and purples and oranges—and never cared if they clashed, so long as the cullies kept looking. She knew herself to be wanted. She wore her rouged face like a carnival mask.

One grey morning she thought of the Mighty Master for the first time in months. 'Are we going to hell?' she asked her friend, suddenly doubtful.

Doll let out a dry chuckle. 'I'm a Roman, ain't I?'

'A what?'

'You know, a Papist, same as my parents before me. I take the sacraments every Easter, rain or shine,' Doll added proudly. 'When I reckon my hour's come, all I'll have to do is send for a priest and get myself absolved.'

'What's that, then?'

'Scrubbed clean, soul-wise.'

Mary considered this image. 'But what about me?' she asked, troubled.

Doll shrugged. And then, more kindly, added, 'They ever told you about the Magdalen in that school of yours? Mary the Magdalen?'

The girl thought she remembered the name.

'Well, she were a whore, and she did all right in the end, didn't she?'

At Twelfth Night Doll took her to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, 'to teach you how to cheek the fellows in the grand style,' as she put it. They paid a shilling each to squeeze into the gallery—the price of a fuck, Mary thought, trying out the new word in her head. Doll gazed round critically and guessed there were no more than a thousand and a half in the house this afternoon. The hum of talk rose like bee song.

Mary felt sick with anticipation. The play was said to be a new one, adapted from the French:
The Game of Love.
Her mother had always kept her away from the theatres, told her that no good would come of folk pretending to be what they weren't. The air was so hot, she felt her shoulders released as if by the touch of the sun. The curtain didn't go up till ten past six, and at first Mary was so dazzled by the set that she could see nothing else. There were great trees that slid on and off the stage, and gilt sofas, and a full moon shining without any visible means of support. The lights stank like burning hair.

But then Mrs. Abington came on in a white flowered gown with scalloped flounces and a ladder of increasingly tiny bows on her stomacher. Mary forgot everything else. 'Does the manager let her pick out what she wants to wear?' she asked Doll.

'Pick it? She owns it,' said Doll. 'The actresses all have to furnish their own clothes.'

Mary watched Mrs. Abington with a sort of tender envy. Imagine owning such dresses and walking out on the stage for thousands of people to stare at you.

'No wonder they need rich keepers!' said Doll with a dirty laugh.

Mary looked at her hard, to see if that was a joke. Then she stared even more closely at the woman who was floating across the stage as if she'd never seen a male member in her life. It puzzled Mary, how a girl could wear such a face after entering into the trade. Maybe it was different for an actress; maybe she could reach into a pair of breeches while all the time pretending to be someone else.

The speeches were hard to follow, above the shrill commentary of the audience, and the swish of fans, and the swell of gossip whenever some viscount or duchess showed themselves in a box. But soon Mary had got the gist of the play. Mrs. Abington was a lady who had switched clothes with her maid, as a sort of joke. It was astonishing, the difference a hat made, or an apron, or a gilt buckle. If you looked like a lady, it seemed, men bowed to you a lot, and if you dressed like a maid, they tried to kiss you behind doors. But what the maid and mistress didn't know was that the gentleman coming to court the lady had done the same swap with his manservant. So they were all liars, and none of them knew who they were flirting with, which made it very funny.

Doll nudged Mary in the ribs whenever a riposte got a laugh. 'There's the old repartee for you, Mary!'

'If you shut your mouth for a minute I might be able to hear it,' said Mary, elbowing her back.

There were folk they were acquainted with—and some they were friendly with, like Mercy Toft and Nan Pullen and Alice Gibbs and the Royle brothers who ran the cider cellar round the corner from Rat's Castle—but when it came right down to it, Mary was coming to the conclusion that she and Doll had no one but each other. Even when they lost themselves in a crowd—they joined in half the peltings and 'rough music' that went on that winter, even helped to burn an effigy of a silk-master who wouldn't raise wages—Mary and Doll always kept one eye out for each other. No one else quite spoke their language, got the joke. They might be seven years apart in age, but they could finish each other's sentences.

There was an old song Doll used to sing, late at night:

Ribbon red, ribbon grey,
Men will do what they may.

By now there was hardly a corner of the city where Mary hadn't turned a trick, from the pristine pavements of the West End to the knotted Cockney streets where Spanish Jews, Lascar seamen from the Indies, blacks and Chinamen all mingled like dyes in a basin. She'd had coopers and cordwainers, knife-grinders and window-polishers, watchmen and excisemen and a butcher with chapped hands. In the crowd that gathered to watch the famous Mr. Wesley preach at the old foundry in Moorfields, Mary had done three hand jobs and earned two shillings. She'd taken on an Irish brickie in Marylebone, a one-legged sailor back from the French wars, a Huguenot silkweaver in Spitalfields, a planter gentleman back from Jamaica, and an Ethiopian student of medicine. She'd charged that fellow double, expecting him to hurt her with his monstrous yard—such were the rumours—but it turned out he was no bigger than an Englishman after all. So now she knew. She was acquainted with the whole city, from a coach trundling along Pall Mall, to the back wall of St. Clement Danes, to a room upstairs at the Lamb and Flag on Rose Street. It was a drover down from Wales who hired that room. 'Lie still,' he'd said afterwards, with his soft lisp; 'lie still a while, Miss, and I'll pay another tuppence.'

She'd had a few bad nights, but she didn't let herself dwell on them afterwards. When she came home once with the marks of a cully's nails on her neck, Doll called her a ninny, and taught her how to knee a man so hard his bag would ache for weeks.

Mary knew she'd never starve, now; she could be sure of that much.
Cunny draws cully like a dog to a bone.
What she had between her legs was like the purse in the old story that was never quite emptied.

Ribbon grey, ribbon gold
You must dance till you be old

Mostly the men blurred together in Mary's mind, after the first two months in the trade, but there were a few who stood out. A greasy-haired jack on Queen Street, for instance, who'd taken her against the side of a cart and—she found afterwards—reached under her skirts with his knife and snipped her pocket in the act. She should have known he was a thief from his crooked eyes.

One regular was a young Scot the Misses all called Mr. Armour—laughing behind his back—because he insisted on wearing a thin sheath of sheepsgut. 'What's that, then?' asked Mary in alarm as he drew it on, the first time.

'A cundum,' he said, digging her breasts out of her stays. 'Reasons of health.'

She held him at bay with one hand. 'Which reasons would those be?'

The Scot shrugged. 'It armours me against venereal itches and fluxes.'

'What, you wear this cundum thing every time you do the business?'

He tore at her laces in his haste to loosen them. 'Well, not with ladies, that goes without saying. Only with women of the town.'

Mary let out a screeching laugh. She sounded like Doll, it occurred to her. 'And what about us?' she asked as Mr. Armour buried his face in her breasts and tugged up her skirts. 'Are we not as likely to get clapped or poxed by you cullies as you by us whores?'

He looked up, wild-eyed, as if he hadn't been expecting argument. He gripped the sheath at the root to hold it on. 'Such,' he panted, 'would seem a necessary risk of your trade.'

He was nudging her knees open, but she had one last question. 'Couldn't I buy one of these cundums myself?'

'Why yes,' he said, straight-faced, and then, with a smirk, 'but I can't imagine where you'd wear it!' And with that he was up to the hilt in her, and the time for talk was over.

Soho Square at five in the morning was a good hunting ground; that was when the lords were finally turfed out of Mrs. Cornelys's Select Assemblies. Once Mary went into the bushes with a nob who turned out to be a Parliamentary Member. He kept talking about a Monsieur Merlin who'd performed for the Assembly in shoes that went on wheels. 'Wheels, I tell you!'

'Never!' murmured Mary, as she rubbed the swelling in his breeches, noting the flawless pile of the velvet.

'Dashed along like some bird—until he came a cropper and smashed through Mrs. Cornelys's mirror. Blood and glass all over, I declare, the poor Frog.'

'Poor Frog,' Mary repeated, addressing the lopsided prick she was lifting out of the velvet. 'Poor, poor little Froggie.'

'Not so very little, surely?' he asked, half-forlorn.

Mary thought the lord must have been drunk, or dreaming, to make up a story like that one. But the image stayed in her head as she straddled him: a little Frenchman, flying along the ground like a swallow, towards disaster.

Another day Mary met a chair-man with a worn-out spine, who carried sedan chairs for a living and suffered with every step. He paid for a room in a bagnio so they could do it lying down. She climbed on top and promised not to shake him. What a luxury that was, to fall asleep afterwards and dream that she was riding through town in the King's State Carriage with its carbuncles of gold.

Ribbon gold, ribbon brown
What goes up must fall down

Not that she was very picky. Street Misses couldn't afford to be, 'not like those bawdy-house bitches on their velvet sofas,' as Doll put it. Mary lay down with prizefighters with broken faces and a sailor with one ball poxed off. (He swore the disease was long cured, but she would only give him a hand job.) It took a lot to disgust her, these days. She went with flogging-cullies who wanted to play mother and wicked son—strange, she thought the first time, for a man to want to be hurt rather than to hurt—and even a freak who offered her two shillings to let him spit in her mouth. The only kind of fellow Mary wouldn't touch was a coalman, because the smell of the dust took her back to the cellar on Charing Cross Road.

She'd never seen any of the Digots since the night she'd left home last November. Once in Lincoln's Inn Fields she stared after a woman hurrying by, her head bent over a huge bundle of cloths, but it couldn't have been Susan Digot, not so far from Charing Cross. 'Decent folk don't wander like we do,' as Doll said with a curl of her lip; 'decent folk stay in their place.'

It did occur to Mary to wonder if the woman had ever made any attempt to trace her. Asked around, kept one eye out, even? Surely where once there'd been love, something had to remain, some scraps, leftovers? Or was it possible for a mother to cut a daughter out of her life as if she'd never been born?

Not that it mattered. Mary wouldn't have gone back now, she told herself, not even if Susan Digot climbed up the groaning stairs of Rat's Castle to beg her on hands and knees. Mary could barely remember her old life: the narrowness of it, the poverty not just of goods but of spirit; the hours of weighty silence, as they'd all sat round the shivering fire. No, it was too late for return, or even forgiveness.

Ribbon brown, ribbon rose
Count your friends and your foes

With Doll life was never dull. There were no reproaches, or sermons, or tasks. The two of them slept in their paint, which left their pillows streaked and gaudy. They paid an Irishwoman in the basement of Rat's Castle to do their laundry. Every few weeks they went to a bathhouse and soaked themselves clean in scalding water. They got their dinner from a chop-house or went without, depending on their purses, but they never cooked so much as a bit of toast. They bought cups of tea and coffee whenever their hands were cold. They drank whatever liquor they could lay hands on and never thought more than a day ahead.

Lovers of liberty, Doll called the two of them. They got up when they wanted, and stayed up all night if they fancied, and at any hour of the day they could climb back up the stairs to bed. For the first time in her life, Mary had time for idleness. Few cullies ever had her for more than a quarter of an hour. She was free to choose one fellow over another, or walk away from the lot of them if her stomach turned at the thought. Sometimes she and Doll took an evening off to sit by the fire in a gin-shop and share a pipe. The drink blurred the edges of everything, turned boredom to hilarity.