Slammerkin (21 page)

When the door was shut Mrs. Jones turned to Mary. Her colour was high, against her high-necked black jacket; she looked like a girl. 'It's for the harvest, don't you know.'

'The harvest?'

'The plough must go round all the houses for a blessing before the spring sowing starts, you see, or the grain won't thrive.'

Mary couldn't help letting out a little giggle. 'You don't really believe that, do you?'

'Well,' said Mrs. Jones, stiffly.

Mary knew she'd gone too far; she was going to lose her place on her first day. Her stomach sank.

'I couldn't say, for sure, if it does much good.' The mistress fiddled with the string of her apron like a child, then her small eyes brightened again. 'But it does no harm, surely!'

'Surely not,' echoed Mary. She went back to the parlour where she'd been scrubbing rugs with damp tea-leaves. There was no reasoning with country folk. They would hold to their charms and customs till the Last Trumpet. Now she thought of it, Susan Digot
always used to throw salt over her shoulder, even when they couldn't afford to buy more. And once, Mary remembered, when she'd dropped a tiny mirror and cracked it, her mother had knelt down on the floor and wept for the
seven more years' bad luck.

The world was changing, Mary was confident of that much; already it was not the same one as her mother had grown up in. But in a backwater like Monmouth they'd clearly never heard about the changes, and wouldn't believe in them even if they had.

Her breath rose as she scraped up the dirty tea-leaves; her ribs protested against her tight-laced stays. Mrs. Ash was right about one thing: hoops were a hindrance when you were down on your knees. But since when did a young woman dress just for comfort, like any dog or cat?

She shook a stray lock of hair out of her eyes, and saw Abi in the doorway, standing like a pillar. She hadn't heard her come in; the maid-of-all-work moved from room to room like a ghost. Perhaps she was only newly arrived from the plantations? She seemed a mute lump of a creature.

'Mistress send me for help you,' said Abi at last. She had a heavy accent but at least she spoke English. Her voice was not a girl's, Mary realised; she had to be thirty at least.

'Very good,' said Mary with a civil smile. It was best to take charge from the start, she decided all at once. This woman was twice her age, and might prove difficult. Mary saw herself as a higher sort of maid—an apprentice dressmaker, really—and even if some of her duties overlapped with those of the maid-of-all-work, there was to be no confusing them. So she pointed to the biggest rug, a brown square heavy with dust.

There was a pause. Abi's lip curled a little, and then she knelt down at the edge of the rug.

The two laboured away on their hands and knees in silence, but sometimes when Mary turned her head to ease her stiff neck, Abi was watching her with those huge white eyes. Her stays were leather; Mary could glimpse them through a hole under her arm. The maid's
skirt hung so flat, she mustn't have so much as a petticoat under it, the poor wretch. Her left hand had a pink gash in the middle of the brown, Mary noticed—right through from front to back. 'What happened to your hand?' she asked.

No answer.

Mary tossed her head. She wasn't so desperate for conversation with this sulky creature anyway.

Back in the scullery, Abi immersed her hands in the basin of kettle water and let out a slow gasp. The relief of the heat filled her like a pain, from the knuckles up. She'd been more than eight years in this country, but she would never get used to the cold till the day she died. Already this month the mistress had started talking about the whiff of thaw in the air, but Abi couldn't smell it. All her nostrils caught was snow and dirt outside, fire and bodies in the house. At each daybreak, Abi was too immersed in work to notice what the air smelt like, and before she got around to looking out a window, it seemed, the afternoon's portion of light was used up and it was night again. As far as she could tell, this country was locked in perpetual winter. Even in the season they called summer, the sun was thin and watery; it never soaked into her skin.

'Abi?' The mistress's voice on the stairs. The maid tipped the hot water into the slop bucket and went into the tiny pantry for the bacon.

Abi wasn't her real name, of course, only the sound she answered to in the house on Inch Lane, except for the times she pretended she hadn't heard. She'd had as many names as fingers, over the course of her thirty years. When she was a baby in Africa she'd had an infant name. Then when she'd started turning into a woman the old ones had picked her a name that meant
bush heavy with berries.
She hadn't heard another mouth form the sounds of that true name since she'd been hoisted onto the ship—clinging to her mother's fingers—at nine years old. On the voyage to Barbados she'd had no name at all;
she'd been all at sea, slipping down a gap between the old self and the new.

The Joneses called her Abi because it was short for Abigail, which meant a maidservant, according to Mrs. Jones. Abi remembered other names that other masters and mistresses had given her, back in Barbados. Each of them hovered round her head for a year or two:
Phibba, Jennie, Lu.
They made no difference. She had cast a name off like a shift, every time she'd changed hands.

Mrs. Jones ran in on light feet. 'Abi? Don't forget to rinse the lettuce well this time, won't you?'

Abi nodded mutely, and carried on trimming the bacon. Lettuce! You might as well chew on the grass of the field for all the good it would yield up. But it wasn't her place to comment. She'd learned the first rule of survival, back on her first plantation.
Keep your head down, child,
her mother told her before she died of the yaws;
don't ever meet nobody's eye.

The bacon was purple, like a bruise. It had taken Abi years to learn to cook this food. Even the names were peculiar and unappetising:
milk pottage, mess of dried pease, chine of mutton with egg-sauce, quaking pudding.
None of this pallid food had any sun in it; even the dried pepper and cinnamon kept in jars on the chimney piece were only ghost spices. When Abi sat down to her own food in the kitchen after each meal—she ate alone and preferred it that way—her plate of leftovers tasted of nothing; her mouth never even began to tingle.

There was the newcomer, the London girl, standing in the doorway with a slightly uneasy look. Hoping to find the kitchen empty, was she? Abi carried on carving hard rind off the bacon and pretended not to notice the girl's presence.

Ah, Abi,' said Mary Saunders as if she were the mistress, 'I just came down for a cup of small beer.'

Abi let her head swing like a bell, meaning no.

The girl drew herself up. 'All I want—'

'Nothing till dinner,' Abi interrupted. 'Is rules.'

Mary Saunders chewed her upper lip.

'Anything go missing, I get blame,' added Abi levelly.

'Quite so. But those dusty rugs have given me a dreadful thirst; I'm sure Mrs. Jones would agree that it's a special case—'

'You nobody special,' pronounced Abi, looking the girl in the eye.

A long pause. The Londoner's pupils were black as cinders. She turned on her heel without a word.

Trouble: Abi could smell it like something gone bad under a floorboard. That was foolish, what she'd just done. She'd let her temper rise. The day had gone wrong from the start; it was that Ash woman's fault for looking skew-ways at her with those colourless eyes at breakfast. Just now Abi had been provoked into forgetting another rule of survival that her mother had taught her:
whatever white folks says, is so.

By one Mary's stomach was grumbling. Dinner was at two, in the parlour. Salt bacon in pottage, with raw leaves; Mary lifted them with her fork, to check for slugs. She'd never eaten anything so green in her life.

'You won't be used to fresh salads, Mary?' said the mistress. 'They're a gift from Mrs. Ha'penny's own greenhouse, imagine!'

Mary smiled back as if she were grateful. She folded a leaf into a tiny parcel and washed it down with weak beer.

Conversation was mostly a matter of 'Pass the pepper-pot, would you, Daffy?' or 'Pickles, Mr. Jones?' Occasionally the master expounded his views on corruption in His Majesty's Government, or the Dutch interference with trade. Mrs. Ash didn't say a word out loud; when she wasn't whispering orders to Hetta, her lips moved silently in prayer, like a lunatic. The Joneses let the child steal titbits from their plates, as if she weren't plump enough already. There must have been more than one that died, Mary realised suddenly. To be married twenty years, and only have one child living—that wasn't much of a score.

Well, if they lost this one, it wouldn't be for want of feeding. Mary watched the child's mouth stretch around a vast lettuce leaf, and found herself grinning. Hetta caught her eye, and froze. Mary screwed up her nose. Hetta did the same, and laughed silently, open-jawed, the leaf hanging out. This child had a bit of wit, then, Mary decided.

But as soon as Mrs. Ash noticed their little game, she shut Hetta's mouth with a snap of her hand and announced to the table, in apocalyptic tones, that a crow had stolen her wedding ring off her window-sill.

Mary's eyebrows went up. 'I didn't know you had a husband,' she said in congratulatory tones.

The nurse flushed darkly.

'Mrs. Ash is a widow,' murmured Mrs. Jones. Mary hid a smile. To think of any man brave enough to lift that woman's dank skirts! No wonder he hadn't lasted long.

Her own sympathies lay with the crow. It should have known a gold ring was no use to it, but it clearly hadn't been able to resist the glow, the hint of hot sunlight in the depth of January.

Later that day Mary was washing the stairs—
like any old skivvy,
Doll mocked in her head—when the manservant passed through the hall under a gigantic bale of coarse linen. Any interruption was a chance to straighten her sore back, so Mary got to her feet and tugged her hoop back into the right shape. 'Where does Wales start, then?' she asked him, pressing a hand into the small of her back.

'Just over thataway,' said Daffy, jerking his head over his shoulder. 'The Black Mountains. It's mostly Welsh spoken beyond Abergavenny.'

'So this is England?' Mary felt a distinct sense of relief.

'Not at all,' said the man, sounding injured. 'It's the Marches. We're Marchermen.'

She let out an impatient breath. 'Which country are we in, then?'

'Both. Or neither, you might say,' Daffy added slyly, shifting the weight of the bale onto his other shoulder.

He headed for the door into the Stays Room where Mr. Jones worked. 'How can you people not know where you live?' she said to his back.

She thought at first that he hadn't heard. Then his head turned. 'You don't know the first thing about us,' he threw over his shoulder.

There was the mistress coming downstairs, drawing up her improvers on their iron hinges to squeeze past Mary with a smile. The girl pulled back her scrubbing brush and watched Mrs. Jones's shoes pick their way through the suds. The red heels were worn down at the back, she noticed; the family business mustn't be too profitable yet. It gave her a tiny prick of amusement to see the edge of one under-petticoat trail in a soapy puddle.

'Oh, Mary, you haven't even seen the shop yet, have you?'

Mary shook her head.

'What was I thinking of?' cried Mrs. Jones. 'Let you leave all this for now'—carrying the bucket and brush down to a corner of the tiny hallway—'and come with me this minute.'

'Very well.'

But the mistress paused then, in the hall, so Mary bumped into her from behind. 'Ah yes. My husband—' Mrs. Jones began awkwardly.

Mary waited, her arms folded.

'Mr. Jones thinks perhaps, that is to say, it might be best if you were to call me madam, Mary.'

'Very well.'

Purple suffused Mrs. Jones's cheeks. 'For instance,' she said, as if remarking on the weather, 'there you might say, "Very well, madam."'

'Very well, madam,' said Mary. Her mimicry was barely audible.

The shop was a small space, peopled entirely by clothes. A lady's embroidered bodice, laced up with silver, hung from hooks set in the ceiling. Ruched under-petticoats swayed in the icy draught from the door; Mary had the impression they'd just stopped dancing. A quilted
petticoat in swanskin flannel was tasselled in ten places. A French sack dropped voluminous pleats of yellow and white silk. 'Stripes, on a sack gown?' asked Mary.

Mrs. Jones put her hand under the hem to catch the light. 'My draper in Bristol assured me it's the very latest thing. This one's promised to Mrs. Fortune for the Shrove Ball. She says if I sell stripes to any other lady in Monmouth, she'll see me ruined!'

Mary joined in the laughter a little absently. She walked up to a riding-habit in fine green wool and brushed it with one finger. Her mouth watered as at the smell of a cut lemon.

She turned to Mrs. Jones. 'You made all these? Madam,' she added belatedly.

'Aye, but not the hats,' said Mrs. Jones modestly. 'Them and the gloves I have sent down to me from Cheltenham.'

Mary tried to remember what she'd made her mother say in that letter about the poor orphaned daughter's sewing skills. She'd never seen finer work in the shops of Pall Mall. Her eyes took the measure of a jacket in blue watered tabby. 'This'll be a casaquin, I suppose?' she said casually.

'Lord bless you, no, you innocent!' laughed Mrs. Jones. And for the next hour she explained the difference between a fitted casaquin and a caraco like this one, and a pentelair which was really a cross between a jacket and a sack gown but shorter, and a palatine and a mantelet and a cardinal, and, most importantly between a round gown and an open gown, not to mention a wrapping gown and a nightgown (which was worn only in the day). Mrs. Jones had strong views on what was
à la mode,
what was
démodé,
and what was likely to be
the coming thing.
The first rule of cut was,
Be true to the cloth.
The first rule of business was,
Give the customers what they want.