Slammerkin (19 page)

'Monmouth,' bawled John Niblett.

Thank the Mighty Master for that much. At last Mary could get out of this chamberpot of a wagon in which she had spent the longest week of her life. She pressed her cheek to the window, and something fell inside her.

Monmouth? This wasn't a city, nothing like a city. It was barely a town. What had she done?

The Welshman was holding out his hand for his writing things now. As she scribbled her mother's name at the bottom, Mary suddenly registered the fact that he was getting down here too. Pox on the man; could he be a local? Of all the stinking towns on the fringes of England, did he have to come from this one?

She should have thought of that before bedding him. She should have paid more attention. She would just have to hope that his house was far out in the country and that their paths never crossed again.

Mary handed the man his box and averted her eyes.

Downstream of the bridge, trees rose from several muddy islands in the river. Crows were gathering at the tips of the highest
branches. One let out an imperative cry and set off for the next tree, flapping heavily, its feathers set apart like blunt fingers. Restlessness infected another, then another. Shapes Mary had taken for leaves came to life and flew in circles. Soon they were all whirring from tree to tree, like needles darning the torn sky.

The wagon creaked across the bridge. At first glance, Mary took in a few pitiful rows of houses; a single spire. This was all there was to Monmouth, clearly. She'd come all this way to end up in a crow town, where there were more birds than people.

'S
EE THE
mark of her tears here.' Mrs. Jones passed the letter to her husband.

He held it towards the candlelight for a moment, then handed it back and edged around the bed.

'To think of Su Rhys's little child grown up into such a tall, handsome girl, and her not here to see it.' A sigh whistled in the little gap between Mrs. Jones's front teeth. 'There was no lingering, though, thanks be to the Maker. The girl told me the fever took dear Su off quick as lime in the end.'

Mr. Jones nodded soberly, sat down, and hoisted his leg to remove his single red-heeled shoe.

'Listen, Thomas, there's one part that wrings my heart.' She read through the letter in a rapid mutter.
'The larning she has from the charity school is reading, writing, sowing ... can cut out a fine shirt and hem cuffs and set her hand to all maner of plain work ... my poor Mary will make a good sarvant being quick and industrous of a humbel disposition without gall or guil.'

'What's heart-wringing about all that?' he asked, pulling his night-shirt on over his head.

'I'm coming to it.' Mrs. Jones leaned closer to the narrow candle.
'If you, old frend, perform so Christian an act as to take my poor motherless dauter into your servise, I have no apprehension that she will do anything to forfet yor trust, and yor reward will be in heaven.'
Her voice grew muffled.
'Pray dear Jane let my spirit rest easy, knowing my onlie girl is safe in your hands.
' She brushed her knuckles against one eye.

'Come to bed now, my dear,' he said, arching his tired back.

'Aye, presently. You know, the girl's not got a penny. She hadn't eaten since Cheltenham! I told her to order chops at the Robin Hood and say the Joneses would be good for it.'

He nodded again, fitting his nightcap over his stubbled scalp.

His wife held the letter stiff, poring over the uneven lines.
'Yor obedient sarvant and eternal frend Mrs. Susan Saunders, Rhys as was,'
she murmured. Then she folded it up very small. 'Such an awkward scribble, for her that was the neatest of all us girls at dame-school. Do you remember how neat in her person Su Rhys was, my dear?'

He nodded.

'Saunders, I mean. How fine she looked on her wedding day, do you remember?'

'I wasn't one of the party,' he reminded her. 'I didn't come home from my apprenticeship in Bristol till the year after.'

'Of course.' Mrs. Jones smacked her temple. 'I have my memories but they're jumbled up like laundry.' She looked down at the folded note, and shut her hand over it. 'I wrote Su a letter when I heard she was widowed, I think, and then another to tell her about her father passing on, but nothing since. I kept forgetting, in the press of business. There's always so much to be doing—'

'Aye, that's true,' he said gently. 'The years pass faster than a person can count.'

'She didn't make the bargain I did, poor Su.' Mrs. Jones's voice was quivering again. 'To think of that clown Cob Saunders leaving Su to scrape a living from shoddy piece-work!'

Her husband let out a little grunt of contempt. 'She picked a weak beam there.'

'But how fast a body can come down in the world! Never married again, it seems, just wore herself out tending the little girl. Just exactly six months my junior, Su was, remember?'

'Was she?'

'And bones in a London churchyard now.'

Mr. Jones watched his wife, bent over the candle. Was she crying, or was it only the light that wavered? He smoothed the cold blanket over the clean line of the stump below his left hip.

'Only think of it, though, Thomas.' His wife's voice shook like a rope. 'To feel your dying come upon you, and your child to be cast adrift on the world. That must be near as bad as, as—'

He couldn't let her go on. 'Maybe it's time you had someone to help you,' he remarked, 'now our busy season's coming on us.'

Her face turned towards him, outlined in yellow light; he couldn't see whether it was wet.

'Has she Susan's hands?' he asked, for something to say.

Her voice brightened. 'She has. Fine thumbs for a needle, I took particular notice. But surely, Thomas, we can't afford a fourth servant?'

'We wouldn't have to pay her till the end of the year,' he improvised, 'and by that time we ought to have got some very profitable orders. The Morgan girl's coming-out trousseau, for instance.'

'Oh, tush!' said his wife shyly, 'they might go to Bristol for that.'

'But Mrs. Morgan looks very favourably on your work. Besides, my dear,' he added with a small shrug, 'if we're ever to expand our trade and attract the attention of even greater names than the Morgans, we must take a chance or two.
He who would succeed must first aspire,'
he quoted.

Mrs. Jones sucked in her breath with pleasure. Her cheeks were the faint tinge of apple-flesh. At times like this, the decades fell away and he caught sight of her old unobtrusive loveliness. As if her hoity friend Susan had ever been a patch on her!

Privately, Thomas Jones thought it was Cob Saunders who'd made the fool's bargain. In their boyhood Cob had been the champion of the schoolyard, but it was his crippled friend Thomas who'd
come top of the class. Cob was a pleasant fellow, but he never could tell a wormy apple from a whole one. Any man who'd pick Susan Rhys over Jane Dee could be said to have deserved what he got: blundering into a riot and dying of gaol fever. A quarter of a century ago, when Thomas Jones had come back from Bristol a new-made tailor, and found Jane Dee unaccountably still single, he'd been convinced it was an instance of the Divine Plan, and he held to that belief today. It was yet another way the Maker meant to reward him for the loss of his left leg.

His wife had that fretting look on. 'And if we found we couldn't afford the girl after all, but?'

'We could pay her what she's owed and turn her off at once.'

'To be sure. How right you are, Thomas, as always. Shall I send Daffy to the Robin Hood tonight, so, to tell her to come in the morning?' she added in a rush.

Mr. Jones inclined his head. 'It will benefit the trade.'

'Do you think so?'

He never answered questions twice. He smiled slightly.

His wife knotted the strings of her nightcap under her pointed chin. 'I feel badly now, that we told Daffy we couldn't take his cousin.'

'But Gwyneth is a farm girl.'

'That's true.'

'What would we have done with her?' he asked patiently. 'Haven't we Mrs. Ash for the child, and Abi and Daffy for everything else? Whereas this Saunders girl, she could sew for you and lend a hand with the patrons. An educated London girl will give an air of
bon ton.

His wife could always hear when he was trying out a new phrase, picked up from the
Bristol Mercury.
And he could never deceive her, he knew, when he did her a favour and called it reasonableness. She smiled over her shoulder, forgetting to cover the gap in her teeth. 'You won't regret this, husband.'

He patted her place in the bed. She blew out the candle and took off the rest of her clothes in the smoky darkness.

He lay beside her, very still. It was safer not to touch his wife. He knew he couldn't put her through all that again, not six months after the last catastrophe. There was a limit to what the frailer sex could endure. So he stretched his leg out very quietly and listened to his own breath. Gradually Thomas Jones was getting the mastery of himself.

Then his wife turned over and laid her soft hot hand on him.

The light of a frosty morning silhouetted the Robin Hood. In the yard of the inn, Daffy Cadwaladyr introduced himself. 'Short for Davyd,' he said pleasantly.

The Londoner looked as if she'd never heard a sillier name in her life.

He heaved the bag onto his shoulder; its contents rumbled. 'What have you got in here then, cobblestones?'

Now she stared at him as if she'd been kicked. Her eyes were black as mineshafts, and her face was all angles. She was too bony to be handsome, he decided; a man needed a bit of flesh to get a hold of.

'Only asking a civil question,' he muttered.

Mary Saunders made no answer to that. She followed a few paces behind, all the way up Monnow Street, as if she feared he'd make off with her precious possessions. The worn soles of Daffy's boots skidded on the icy stones. He'd been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he'd come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might last ten years, at best, but knowledge was eternal.

It was Mrs. Jones who'd sent him down to carry the stranger's bag, though why a servant should start off by being treated like a lady, Daffy couldn't tell; if she hadn't the strength to hoist her own baggage she wouldn't be much use in the tall skinny house on Inch Lane. Nor had anyone informed him why there was suddenly to be a new maid in a family where none had been needed, a fortnight back.

Scraps of meat and paper were frozen to the cobbles. Peddlers
were drifting in, bent under their loads. There were cages of old goats and six-week kids, and the fishmongers who came every Friday to sell salmon to the Papists were setting up their stalls already. 'Market Square,' he said over his shoulder, without stopping.

'This?' Mary Saunders's voice was deep and hoarse.

'Aye.'

'It's not a square,' she protested, 'it's a crude sort of diamond.'

Daffy turned to stare at her. Did London folk all talk in such a croak? Her dark hair was pulled back under a cap and her creased kerchief was tucked up to her neck, as tight as a noose. She had the look of a prude about her, except for that gash of a red mouth. 'It's only a name,' he said coolly.

'Also, I was wondering,' she called after him, 'why is the water so brown?'

'It's from the coal pits,' Daffy told her; 'they stain the streams. But it won't do you a tittle of harm.'

She looked as if she doubted that very much; as if there were poison creeping through her veins already.

Daffy hurried on down Grinder Street. He was mightily tempted to carry on to the Quays, duck between the piles of sacking and the wine barrels, and lose her there. Instead he turned down between the narrow walls of Inch Lane and stopped under the blackened sign that said
Thos. Jones, Master Staymaker
on one side, and
Mrs. Jones, Purveyor of Fine Clothes to the Quality
on the other. The Roman letters were splendid, if he said so himself; he'd copied them out of
The Signmaker's Sampler
—borrowed from a painter friend down Chepstow way—and burnt them on with a poker.

The girl's lips were pursed as she stared up at the sign.

'Can you read, then?' he asked, with a spurt of fellow-feeling.

'Can't you?'

The snobbish vixen! 'I'll have you know, I own nineteen books fully bound,' growled Daffy, 'as well as parts of many others.'

'So that's how you get those sunken eyes,' observed Mary Saunders.

He decided not to resent that remark, because it was true. He reached one numb finger under his wig for a scratch. 'So have you any books in this weighty bag of yours?' he asked as he mounted the stairs before her.

'Reading's for children who've nothing better to do.'

Daffy decided to pretend he hadn't heard that. In the attic, he dropped her bag with an almighty thump at the foot of the narrow bedstead. 'You'll share with the maid-of-all-work, Abi.'

The girl nodded.

'I should warn you, she's a blackie,' he remarked, moving towards the door. 'No harm in her, though.'

The girl looked down her pointed nose at him. 'You forget I'm from London, fellow. We have all shades there.'

Again, she made the temper flare up in his chest like a pain. 'So what brings you to Monmouth, then?' he asked pointedly. He was sorely tempted to suggest that Niblett's coach could take her straight back tomorrow, and he'd even throw in a shilling of his own to speed her on her way.

'My mother came from these parts.'

'Who's that, then?'

'Susan Saunders,' she said unwillingly.

'Born Rhys?'

A wary nod. 'You knew her?'

'I'm only twenty,' Daffy protested.

She gave a little shrug, as if to say it mattered little to her whether he were nine or ninety.

'No, your mother must have gone off to the City years before I was born,' he added, 'but I've heard my father mention her. There are no more left of the Rhys line now, I think? Nor the Saunderses?'