Slammerkin (9 page)

One crisp February night she met a sweet-faced apprentice playing cricket in Lamb's Conduit Fields. He couldn't have been more than twelve. 'Please, Miss, how much?' he asked, like Jack the Beanstalk at his first market.

'More than you've got,' she said, not unkindly, chucking him under his chin. It was as soft as a cat's.

'I've a shilling,' he said sternly, producing it from deep down in his pocket.

Mary knew he'd probably nicked it from his master to pay for his fleshly education. She took it all the same, and led the boy by the hand behind a spreading holly bush. The ground was soft and barely damp.

She felt almost sad, afterwards, and hoped she hadn't passed on the clap. She thought she was clean, these days—she had no fever or flux, and she always washed in gin when she had it, or piss when she hadn't—but a person could never be sure.

'So now you know,' she told the apprentice, as he struggled with his buttons.

He flashed her a grin.

'Find yourself a girl,' she told him, 'and don't be wasting your money.'

He blew her a kiss before he ran off.

That night she and Doll lay on their leaking straw mattress in their dark room and talked till the poet who'd moved in next door battered the wall with his fists.

Ribbon rose, ribbon white
Each day ends with a night

Many a Miss was a purse-snatch too, which gave the trade a bad name, and was dangerous besides. 'Nobs can stand being poxed much sooner than being picked,' Doll advised. Besides, Mary had her principles. She'd only robbed a man the one time, and he was a lying dog who wouldn't pay the half a crown he'd promised her if she'd let him beat her with his shoe before the act. She waited till he'd drunk himself to sleep on the tavern table, then she ran off with two fine Pinchbeck shoe-buckles and a silver watch. 'Fair dues,' as Doll said.

Mary had yet to figure out why any woman would do it for free. There were some who did it to get children, she knew, and others for pleasure or what they called love. Doll occasionally did it for nothing, mostly with a soft-skinned journeyman carpenter. 'It's a comfort, ain't it?' she argued. Not to Mary. And Mercy Toft was sweet on a bookish Frenchman who was as pale as she was dark; she snuck him up to her room sometimes when her bully-man wasn't around. Mary found such longings unimaginable.

She'd never yet felt this thing called lust, but she knew enough about its signs to copy them. She'd learned the knack of dirty talk. It wasn't so much the words she used—though foul terms did excite some cullies—as the tone. If her voice was sufficiently arousing, she could be talking about porridge for all it mattered. The trick was to pretend to be excited herself. An intake of breath, a catch in the voice: it fooled the cullies every time, and speeded them up like nothing else.

The odd night she lay beside Doll and her carpenter, pretending to be asleep, while they moved together like fish. Doll rolled her head back as if in pain, but her mouth was tender, and her cheeks were wet. Mary stared through the darkness.

She'd never yet opened her legs for her own body's sake, but only for what it had earned her: money, shelter, bargaining time. It wasn't herself Mary sold, she was sure of that much. She just hired out a dress called skin.

Ribbon white, ribbon green,
Some grow fat, some grow lean.

In the months since Ma Slattery's cellar, Mary hadn't had her courses, which was just as well, she supposed. Safer. She'd thought at first that it was just a temporary reprieve, but by now she'd come to the conclusion that her bleeding days were over. It was a peculiar sensation, to know herself finished with all that at fourteen. But not uncommon, among the Misses, Doll said. And, all in all, wasn't it handy for a girl in the trade to get the belly business over and done with?

Mary had the impression that Doll had dropped a couple of brats in her early days. There was no point asking about them, she knew. They wouldn't have lived.

She itched to know her friend's story, but she had to get it by guile, a line at a time; direct questions got no answers. One day they were passing a wig shop on Monmouth Street when Doll mentioned that her first was a peruke-maker.

'Who's that?'

'My first. The man my old folks sold me to.'

Mary gave her a wary look. She was still never sure if Doll was joking or not.

'He'd heard a virgin was a sure cure for the pox,' said Doll, walking on. She let out a laugh like a pebble in a jar. 'Money down the drain!'

Mary ran to catch up. 'How old were you?'

Doll shrugged.

Did this mean that Doll didn't remember, Mary wondered, or didn't think it mattered?

The older girl said nothing more about it that day, but when Mary asked, another time, Doll added, 'I was young enough to know naught. I was so green, I reckoned the fellow was making water in me!' And that terrible laugh came from the very back of her throat.

Ribbon green, ribbon red
The tale's not told till you're dead

One night in March Mary came on to a pair of tars behind St. Mary-le-Bow singing 'The Cunts of Old England.' 'Evening, my dears,' she called, but they didn't seem to hear her. The taller one's voice was rapt with nostalgia.

Then, then, we were able
to fuck or to fight,
our swords always drawn
and our pricks always right—

His friend burst in then, almost jolly:

but now we're a parcel
of shittle-come-shite—

They joined in harmony for the sweeping refrain.

Oh! the large cunts of old England,
and oh! the old English brown cunts!

Mary stood nearby, smiling as she waited for the end of the song. Finally, one of the sailors turned around with his breeches gaping and his yard in his hand. She stepped closer, and he punched her in the breast. 'Wouldn't take you with a pitchfork, my darling,' he crowed.

She backed away, clutching herself, but he pissed all over her, soaking her best violet overskirt. His friend tried to join in but was laughing too hard to aim.

'Rot you for a pair of sodomish arsers!' she shrieked.

She'd learned how to say what she meant, but it wasn't much comfort. Back at Rat's Castle, she sponged her skirt. Doll swore it was good as new, but Mary could still smell their sourness on it.

Not that she'd anything against doing it arseways. There were more than a few cullies who couldn't stand for it any other way. Some Misses declared they'd rather have their throats slit than submit to such filthiness, but Mary couldn't see that it much mattered. Arse and cunny were only an inch apart, after all. It was a clockmaker that taught her how to bear the thing, and though she'd left her teethmarks on his fingers, she was grateful to him for the lesson in the end. She wasn't ready for it, that first time; she didn't understand why he was spitting on himself. She let out a scream when he pushed into her. But she soon learned the trick of it, that night and other nights. If she thought of a door creaking open, or an orange with its peel coming off, it hardly hurt at all. Clearly there was nothing in Mary Saunders that couldn't learn, couldn't bend, couldn't open if it could turn a penny.

One morning she was up an alley with her hand down the stained breeches of a saddler, when she happened to turn her head and recognised the gates of her old school. It gave her an odd sort of feeling, to see the little figures in their grey buttoned smocks lining up in the yard. What a wet-eared innocent she'd been, only a year ago!

Mary and Doll were on King Street one night, sharing a pigeon pie and licking their burnt fingers as they broke it apart between them. Mary nodded at the fresh-varnished door of the brothel opposite. 'D'you think they're hiring?'

Doll blew out a contemptuous puff of air. All the street-cullies ask is a pair of open legs, my dear. In the bawdy-houses, gentlemen are paying so high, they expect a girl to roll her eyes in bliss.' She snorted at the idea.

'How d'you come to know so much about it?' asked Mary.

'Worked two years at Mother Griffith's, didn't I?'

'I didn't know that.'

Doll's lips formed into a sneer. 'You don't know everything, then. Reckon you know a bit more than when I picked you out of the ditch, but you still don't know much.'

'So tell me about Mother Griffith's,' said Mary lightly, refusing to fight.

Doll shrugged and spread her hands. 'What's there to tell? You lie on sofas waiting to get fucked, that's about it. So after two years I ran away, for a bit of liberty.'

Mary grinned at her.

'But the stinking bawd sent Caesar after me, to learn me a lesson.'

'Who's Caesar?'

'Aren't you the innocent,' said Doll fondly, 'not to know Caesar!'

She pointed him out to Mary the next day, down on the Strand. The man was an African, dressed all in white velvet, with a wig like a snowdrift; the polished yew of his face stood out against it. His skin had the high shine that only money gives. 'You'll know him next time.'

'Yes,' said Mary, staring.

'They say he was in a mutiny,' said Doll impressively.

'Where?'

'On a slaver, don't you know, in the Indies. The blacks all upped and massacred the masters, so they say. Imagine!'

Mary gazed at the man called Caesar, who stood talking to a pale girl, one hand resting lightly on his hip. He wore immaculate doeskin breeches: a thrill flickered through her. To think that this fellow once lay in chains, and now here he was, lording it up and down the Strand. It wasn't true, if it ever had been, what Susan Digot used to tell her daughter: that people had to stay all their lives in the places allotted to them.

'She must be one of his whores, and there's another over between the columns, as well as those two flirting with the Grenadier Guard,' Doll added, pointing. 'Caesar runs this whole beat, from George Court to Carting Lane. Not a soul gets in his way. They say he has a protection on him.'

'A protection?'

'Black magic, don't you know.'

It was true that no one came within a yard of the pimp and his girl; the crowds parted round them like water. When Mary walked near enough to see the length of the knife in his glossy belt, she knew why. The heavy scent of Caesar's pomaded wig hung on the air, and he was grinning. She didn't meet his milky eye. She hurried back to Doll, and a terrible thought struck her as she looked her friend in the face. 'I don't suppose it was him—'

Doll fingered her scar as if appraising its value, but her eyes still rested on the stately African. 'Aye. Caesar was Mother Griffith's own bully-man in those days, before he struck out as his own master. Mind you, he let me off easy, I'll give him that.'

'Easy?' Mary put out a hand to her friend's jagged face, but didn't quite touch it. How could Doll speak so lightly, as if it was someone else's story she was telling?

'You know that card-sharp with half a nose we saw the other night?' asked Doll.

Mary nodded.

'And there was a girl found in Pig Lane with no face at all, that was the bastard's work too; they say she'd run off with some money that was owing him.'

Mary covered her mouth. She imagined the great knife descending.

'Well, they wouldn't hire him if he weren't the best, would they?' asked Doll reasonably.

There was no answering that.

'So really it might have been worse. I call this my lucky scratch,' said Doll, tapping her scar with one long grimy nail. She slung an arm around Mary's shoulders and they walked on. 'Let it be a lesson to you, dear heart, never to pay poundage to any idle pimp or bawd. Every girl for herself, remember? Here's the first rule:
Never give up your liberty.'

So this was liberty. Mary was beginning to recognise the taste of it in her mouth: terror salting the sweetness.

Doll could read anyone by the cut of their cloth, from Lyons velvet right down to grubby fustian. One night at the cold end of March, she and Mary were on their way home from Cock Lane in Smithfield, where they'd paid halfpence each to see the famous ghost of the Poisoned Lady, but she hadn't appeared. Doll pointed out a girl on the corner of Maiden Lane, with a thin, pleasant face, a torn shift, and one petticoat. 'That one won't live till summer,' said Doll, as if commenting on the weather.

Mary peered at the girl, as if to distinguish the hand of death on her. 'Will she freeze?'

'Starve,' explained Doll. 'Unless she begs or borrows or steals a good gown, no cully's going to waste a look.'

'She's a pretty thing, though,' Mary objected, glancing back at the diminishing figure at the street corner.

'It's not us they want, you dolt!' said Doll. 'In those rags, the girl can't let on to be anything but herself. Remember, sweetheart, you should go without a week of dinners sooner than pawn your last good gown.'

That was rule two:
Clothes make the woman.

Dawdling outside Almack's, another night, they saw a phaeton fly up, and its door bend back like a wing.

Mary elbowed Doll. 'Who's that dazzler?'

'Her?' Doll's smile was broad and wet; it creased her scar. 'Nothing but a painted whore, no better nor you nor me, and ten years older.'

'No! She's quality, surely.'

'What a fool you are for a spangle, Mary Saunders.'

They watched from behind a pillar as a thick-waisted gentleman ran round to hand the lady down.

'What about that underskirt?' objected Mary. 'It's figured satin, ain't it?' She was beginning to pride herself on her knowledge of these details.

'Only in the crack,' said Doll with scorn; 'the rest of it's plain muslin. And those diamonds in her ears look like paste to me,' she added gleefully, 'and when she undoes those stays, I bet her bubs fall on her stomach.'

Mary gave her friend a shove. 'Jealous old trull!'

Doll sighed, hands on hips, making her white bosom swell like a wave. 'Mark my words, she'll get another few months out of him, and a few more presents, but never an annuity. And another thing,' she said, watching the couple hurry into the club, 'there's pocks as deep as your nail under those starry patches.'