Slammerkin (22 page)

As she spoke, Mrs. Jones unfolded a length of brown silk so thin Mary thought it would feel like the wings of a moth. Mary kept nodding, but she was too distracted to take it all in. She watched the chintzes, satins, and damasks eddying in the draught.

'And this is Mrs. Morgan's slammerkin, or some would call it a
trollopee; a loose sort of morning gown. She's wife to our Member of Parliament, you know.'

Mary hid a grin. The harlots all wanted to dress like ladies and the ladies returned the compliment, it seemed. Mrs. Morgan's unfinished dress was white velvet; it hung from a hook in the ceiling as if it were being poured out. 'Is she beautiful?' she asked, on impulse.

'Mrs. Morgan?' The dressmaker's mouth pursed in mild distress. 'Well, no. I'd be telling a falsehood if I said so.'

'A pity,' murmured Mary. Above the flaring scalloped edge of the gown's train a tiny pattern had begun to spread. She looked closer: apples and snakes, in silver thread.

'I've been flowering it for a month already,' said Mrs. Jones, with a tiny sigh. 'If I do a very good job and it's finished by August, Mrs. Morgan might be persuaded to come to us for her daughter's first season, don't you know!'

Looking up into the silvery folds, Mary promised herself something: she would learn to make clothes like these. And what's more, someday she'd wear them. Her fingers closed on the ice-white hem; the pile felt as deep as fur.

'Have a care,' said Mrs. Jones.

Mary pulled her hand back as if she'd been burnt.

She knew she wasn't trusted, yet. It was only to be expected.

After tea that afternoon, for instance, Mrs. Jones locked up the little chest and pocketed the key. As if Mary would nick a scoop of her cheap China tea!

The first thing Mary did when she finally reached the attic room, late that night, was to pull
The Whole Duty of Woman
out of her pocket and drop it into the stained pot under the bed. The last thing she wanted was a book to tell her how to be a good maid. She could rip out the pages one at a time to wipe her arse.

On the flat pillow, Abi's face was blank with sleep. She wore no night-cap; her hair was a bristling storm cloud. The bones of her
face caught the faint starlight. She looked older now; something about the set of the jaw.

Mary slid in beside her and lay at the edge so as not to wake the maid-of-all-work. Sharing a bed was a delicate business, and she was in no hurry to make an enemy, even if the woman had been intolerably mean about the beer, this morning. How strange, to lie down beside someone who wasn't Doll, and not exchange a word. Mary held herself still, feeling she'd lived through a day that had lasted all year. It seemed impossible that she'd ever be allowed to go to sleep.

Thick frost coated the black window, and snow was beginning to drift down. Abi's breaths came slow and sibilant, like the ocean. It was so silent outside, Mary couldn't believe there was a town out there at all. It seemed to her that this tiny house was adrift on a white sea.

Then she must have fallen asleep, because in her dream she was in the Piazza at Covent Garden, dancing with a bear. All round her, people were selling things out of barrels: frogs, and lit fireworks, and babies, and cups of gold. A tiny man opened a walnut and pulled out a skirt the colour of the stars. Carriages and carts dashed through the square, and two of them collided. A keg of blue water was overturned, and fish gulped and writhed on the cobblestones. But in the centre of the Piazza, undisturbed, fingers and claws barely touching, Mary and the bear maintained their stately gavotte.

Abi woke in the night with that crawling feeling that told her she was not alone. The Londoner lay beside her, snoring lightly; she had a reek of perfume about her, something acidic. Abi wrapped her arms tightly round herself to make sure their nightshirts didn't touch.

'You'll be company for each other, won't you?' was what Mrs. Jones had said, with her nervous little smile.

What she needed, Abi realised, was an obeah woman. These things were simpler back in Barbados. On the island, if some chit of
a girl moved in, and tried to boss you around, and slept on your mattress without asking your leave—taking up nearly every inch of it with her pale sharp elbows—you'd naturally turn to obeah. That girl would know to be afraid. Even after the longest day in the fields, if you had a sore grudge in you, you could find relief by walking over to the old woman's hut with a gift of some corn mush or a tot of rum and simply saying,
That new girl's a thorn in my foot, won't you put some good strong obeah on her for me?

Of course, the problem with thinking about Barbados was that every sweet memory had ten evil ones hanging on its tail. Scratching her shoulder blade just now, for instance, Abi's fingertips met the
S
in the word
Smith.
Smith was her first owner; he had bought a job lot of them off the ship, eighty-six women and girls all polished up with palm oil to look healthy. The branding-iron was red gold, she remembered, and when it descended a smell went up like fried chitterlings.

Most nights Abi said her name to herself—her true name, from Africa—over and over, to draw herself back into the arms of sleep. But now her bed was occupied by a stranger, she'd have to be sure not to whisper it, not even to think it secretly in her head, in case it slipped out.

All quiet on Inch Lane. Nothing stirred in the house.

In her narrow room, Mrs. Ash crawled onto her back. Moonlight slipped its blade between the shutters; it made her breasts ache. Times like this, in the awful accuracy of the night, she knew what she had become: a dried-up bitter thing of thirty-nine.

She always seemed to start out on the wrong footing. This London girl, for instance; Mrs. Ash had had the civilest of intentions, but somehow she'd taken an instant dislike to the creature, sitting at table all pert and bright-eyed in her stylish hoops. Mrs. Ash knew she herself lacked the gift of making herself liked. She was always on the edge of things.

Once upon a time there'd been a woman of twenty-two called Nance Ash; a new wife and mother in the tiny village of Abergavenny in the Black Mountains. She had no Welsh, so her husband spoke English to her, tenderly enough. She kept to herself, by and large, but she did no one any harm.
Kind enough,
her neighbours would probably have said, for all they knew of her. Kind enough, at any rate, to keep the baby in bed between her and her husband on a cold January night. She wouldn't have left him to freeze stiff in a cradle, as too many did. She kept him lovely and warm between her breasts, didn't she?

Could've happened to anyone,
as they said to her husband.
The will of the Maker, and no use fretting over it.

If only Owen Ash hadn't been stupid with drink and rolled onto his back, not feeling the soft bundle crushed under him; if only his wife Nance hadn't been sleeping so sound, or if she'd woken to check the infant in the night, if only the creature had been a bit stronger, cried a little louder—

An overlaying's nobody's fault.
That was what everyone said.

The thing was, though, that baby had been Nance Ash's only chance. Without her knowledge, on that one long night all the hope was pressed out of her life. The next day her tiny boy was put in a coffin no bigger than a hatbox, and her husband, blind with gin, called her terrible names and stumbled out into the lane. After three days she knew he was never coming back, no matter how long she waited.

No longer mother, no longer wife. Her parents were dead and she'd been their only child. She had no relatives left alive. She'd never possessed what you might call friends. The neighbours offered what they could, but in Abergavenny in wintertime, that wouldn't be much; certainly not enough to keep flesh on a grown woman's bones. Her only skills were those that would have fitted her to be a wife and mother. Nance Ash was reduced to beggary, with her own milk dribbling away through her stays.

Which is why she would always owe the Joneses a proper gratitude. When she'd jolted into Monmouth on her neighbour's cart, all dusty from the road, Thomas Jones had nodded approvingly at her swollen chest and hired her on the spot. She hadn't been able to speak, at first, she remembered now; she'd just nodded her head. Mr. Jones had told her quite gently that she should stop crying. 'It might sour the milk for our little Grandison.' Then he'd asked whether her husband was gone for good. She'd quite understood the question. For a wet-nurse, a widow was best; seed spoiled the milk.

It was in those days that she'd first turned to the Good Book. Before that she'd assumed life was going to be a pleasant enough business, and thought little about it. But in the first years of what everyone called her widowhood, Mrs. Ash had felt a terrible hunger to make sense of the whole story. And in the Scriptures—troubling and enigmatic as they could be, at times—she had learned to see a pattern. For all the days of this life the evil might triumph over the good, but in the end the sinners would be cast down and the clean souls would be lifted up. The Lord's was the only company in which Nance Ash could really feel at ease, because she was convinced He loved her, no matter how she snapped or no matter how many lines there were on her forehead. He was her one true friend. And she knew she had His written promise: in the end He would wipe away all the tears from her eyes.

In return, she gave thanks regularly. The Joneses had offered her a home, hadn't they, when there was nowhere else to go but the workhouse, or the bare ditches? And in return she had fed their children well. When Grandison was weaned, Mrs. Ash had clung on in the family; she'd even taken in some other babies to keep the milk flowing. She'd nursed all the Jones children, and it wasn't her fault if they'd died, all except for little Hetta. These things happened. It wasn't as if she'd blighted them. She'd given every drop she had for thirteen years, all told, right up until the day Hetta turned her face from the wrinkled nipple and screamed for bread and dripping. There were plenty of other wet-nurses in Monmouth by
then, and no one asked Mrs. Ash to take in their child. Her worn-out breasts hurt for a while, but soon dried up. Strange, to have them lie flat against her ribs, after so many years of fullness.

She had to give Thomas Jones full credit. The man might be missing a leg but he had more than his share of principle. Another father might have lacked understanding of the sacred bond between nurse and child; a lesser man might have told her that her job was over once Hetta was weaned. The family could have turned her off to save the price of her wages, and few in Monmouth would have thought any the worse of them. But Mr. Jones had kept Mrs. Ash on to rear the girl so his wife could spend her days cutting and sewing in the shop. Oh, Nance Ash never lacked gratitude.

She knew how much, above all, she had to thank her Maker for. She went to church twice a week, but most of all she read His Holy Word, and puzzled over it, and tried to live it, and every night she stayed on her knees by the bed until they were bruised. But when the moonlight came in the shutters, on nights like this one, Nance Ash couldn't help thinking of how she'd had her single chance and lost it as easy as a leaf might be blown from a tree, simply because she'd slept sound one night seventeen years ago this January, dreaming of God alone knew what. She'd never slept right though a night since. She just wished, now, she could remember what she'd been dreaming of, all those years ago: what was it that had been so sweet she hadn't wanted to wake?

It was still pitch black out; Mary decided it couldn't be later than half past five. The second day of her new life.

'Mary!'

There it was again, from somewhere downstairs. Mrs. Jones: her voice had that strange lilt to it—like Susan Digot's, it occurred to Mary now. But this wasn't Mary's mother or Mary's house. This was a mistress waking a hired maid.

All at once Mary knew she'd wandered out of her own story into another, and was lost. She pressed her face into the pillow and stopped breathing.
Service.
The word sounded so harmless, so everyday. Folk went into service all the time.
I've found a very proper place,
they said;
I mustn't lose my place.
But whatever place this was, it wasn't Mary's.

She conjured up Caesar's impassive plum-coloured mouth to scare herself. She couldn't show her face back in London yet, she knew.
Monmouth's a hidey-hole, that's all,
said Doll in her head.
Like that stinking ditch we crouched in when the bread riot ran amok, remember? Anything can be borne for a while.

'Mary Saunders!'

Nan Pullen once said a strange thing about her mistress, the same woman who would one day hand Nan over to the magistrate. Masters and mistresses were only cullies by another name, according to Nan. You pretended to be satisfied, or grateful, even. You served them, but they never knew you. You robbed them of whatever you could, because whatever they paid, it was never enough for what they asked.

Mary hauled herself off the pillow and sat up. Abi was lying beside her like a figure on a tomb, arms folded. Mary almost jumped. She had thought the maid-of-all-work would have been up hours ago, starting the fires and boiling water. 'Good morning,' she said warily.

Abi said nothing, only stared up at the ceiling.

'Aren't you needed, below?'

'I sick.'

Mary gave her a closer look. No flush or sweating, not a shiver. 'What ails you, in particular?' she asked pointedly.

'I sick,' repeated Abi, and turned her face to the window.

As Mary hurried down the stairs past the Joneses' bedchamber, the mistress called her in. 'Do you need any help dressing, madam?' asked Mary.

'Oh no,' said Mrs. Jones, flustered, tugging the cage of her hoop up around her narrow waist, 'I only wished to ask if you slept well.'

'Well enough, madam. So Abi's been taken sick, it seems,' said Mary neutrally.

'Ah, yes, so she told me when I looked in, first thing this morning.' Mrs. Jones worried at a knot in her hoop strings. 'She's not as strong as she looks, you see.'