Slammerkin (23 page)

Meaning—Mary took her to understand—that Abi was a shamming malingerer, but the mistress didn't want a fight today.

'Perhaps you could help me serve breakfast?'

'Of course,' she told Mrs. Jones, taking the tapes of the slim hoop and pulling them into a neat bow in the small of her mistress's back.

'Why, thank you, Mary.'

The master took no more notice of Mary than if she'd been a cat. It was a strange sensation; most men had been in the habit of taking their breeches down at the sight of her, but Mr. Jones carried right on dressing. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him get his wrinkled linen drawers on under his flowing shirt. She had a childish longing to see his stump, but it was hidden in the folds of linen. She supposed he must have a yard and balls like any man; there was Hetta to prove it. Now he unrolled a woollen stocking precisely along his pale calf and fastened it with a garter over the knee. Mr. Jones's leg was hairy and massive; did it have the strength of two, Mary wondered?

She held the wide black skirt over Mrs. Jones's head—quality grosgrain silk, though dull, she noted—and helped her mistress wriggle into it. Then she picked up the matching sleeves and started buttoning them onto the bodice.

'Oh, Mary, you're very deft.'

'Thank you, madam.'

Her eyes slid back to the master. For a moment, when he stood up in his single leather shoe, the empty leg of his breeches swung.
Then he snatched it up behind with one hand, and fastened it to his waistband with the little button his wife sewed on all his clothes. After that he dressed like any other man. The old-fashioned skirts of his frock-coat, stiffened with buckram, flared around his knee.

Mr. Jones's fuzzy head looked odd once the rest of him was dressed. He raised a cloud of blue powder when he clapped on his dishevelled wig.

'Should you like to have Daffy up to dress your peruke, my dear?' asked his wife.

He shook his head, sitting down at the mirror and taking up a comb.

Mary suspected the master would always see to his own wig, even if he had ten thousand pounds a year. She'd never yet heard him say the words
I need.

After a week Mr. Jones decided that the new girl was settling in well. She had a slightly bold manner, at times, but that was only to be expected in a girl who'd grown up in the streets of the great city; impudence was endemic there, he'd heard.

As a rule Mary Saunders was to be found cleaning the house or helping his wife in the shop, but every now and then his wife sent her through to the stays room with a message or a query. The girl was acutely aware of his missing leg, he noted with amusement; sometimes she'd offer to fetch things so he wouldn't have to get up, dreading perhaps that he might trip on the edge of a floorboard! At such times Mr. Jones swatted her away, hopping across the room with his arms piled high with unfinished stays, his head almost touching the ceiling. 'Find someone who has need of you, girl,' he liked to say.

Once Mary Saunders came in when he was cross-legged at his work, the translucent plates of whalebone laid out in front of him on
the little low table which was scored as if by a wild animal. He cut strips of bone with his knife, then whittled them down. Laid out in rays around him on the rush mat, they reminded him of the articulated skeleton of some star-shaped fish.

'How many bits of bone do you need?' Mary asked. 'Sir,' she added, a half-second too late.

He glanced up at her. 'Forty pieces,' he answered pleasantly. 'Forty at the least.'

She watched over his shoulder for a few minutes. He could feel her gaze on his hands. 'I thought they'd all be the same shape,' she remarked at last.

Mr. Jones looked up from his blade and laughed. 'Girl! Is the human form a rectangle?'

Mary blinked at him. Did she understand the word, he wondered? It was only female schooling she'd had, after all.

'Am I a mere box-maker?' he asked, more simply.

She smiled uncertainly.

He gave a little sigh, but the truth was, he loved to explain his trade. He took up the new stays for Mrs. Broderick that hadn't been covered yet. 'You need strong verticals to press the stomachs in, and diagonals across the ribs,' he told the girl, stroking the double lines of backstitch that went up either side of each ridge. 'Then these thin horizontals are required at the back to flatten those unsightly shoulder blades. Not forgetting the wide shaping bones across the front, to plump up the breasts.'

She looked away, at the word; suddenly he remembered that the girl was only fifteen.

'Such are the whims of fashion,' he rushed on, 'that the neckline sinks a little lower every year. Some staymakers use steel across the top,' he added, 'but in my view whalebone is just as efficacious, and more genteel.'

Mary still wasn't meeting his eye; perhaps she was one of those modern young girls who were martyrs to their modesty? 'How many seams are there?' she asked softly.

'Oh, some lax fellows get by with five or six,' said Mr. Jones, 'but I'd be ashamed to go under ten.' His hand caressed the shoulder-straps of the stays he was holding. 'I bone the straps too. It's these little touches that make a set stand out from the crowd. The great staymaker Cosins, of London—'

But she'd interrupted him. 'How can they stand out when nobody sees them?'

He gave her a tiny smile. 'Those with an eye can see the shape through no matter how many layers of bodices and jackets.'

'As if the cloth were glass?' asked the girl, fascinated.

'Exactly. The French call us
tailleurs de corps,
tailors of the body,' he added crisply. 'We are artists who work in bone. Though whalebone is in truth a sort of giant fish-tooth.' He dropped a splinter of it into the girl's hand. 'Some cheap staymakers rely on goose quill and others on cane, but in my view there's no substitute for the true Greenland
baleen.'

She looked at him blankly.

'Have you never seen a whale, Mary?'

'No sir. There were none in London.'

'Nor in Monmouth,' he said with a chuckle. 'I meant a whale in a picture. Here—' With the help of his hands he lurched to a standing position. The girl stepped backwards, clearly afraid they would collide. With two hops he had reached his little bookcase and unlocked it. In an old gilt-spined periodical he found what he was looking for: an engraving of a fat monster ploughing through the waves. He tapped the lines that represented the coast. 'Greenland,' he said. 'Three months from here.'

The girl peered at the picture. Only when his callused finger pointed out the boat with the tiny men in it did she seem to realise what size the whale was. He could hear her suck in her breath.

'They say his teeth are fifteen feet long, Mary.'

'Is that true?'

'I don't know.' He stared at the picture. 'I do hope so.'

She offered to go, then; she hadn't meant to disturb the master,
she said. But he assured her he could do with some assistance, since Daffy was out delivering stockings. So he had her hold a long strip of whalebone bent like a bow while he backstitched it into its narrow sheath of linen. Her hands were surprisingly steady.

It was in the afternoons that Mary felt most restless. Sometimes the mistress seemed to notice this, and sent her out on errands on the pretext that 'Abi seems tired today, don't you think?' The black maid appeared to be working to rule these days, going about the bare minimum of tasks with a mulish manner that Mary interpreted as:
Let the Londoner do it.

But Mary was glad enough to get out of the house. Today the long list she had to memorise ended with 'a half pound of coffee from the chandler's, look you now, and ask them all if they'd be so kind as to put it on the slate till Friday.'
Look you now.
That's what Mary's mother used to say. But unlike Jane Jones, Susan Digot had usually been pointing out some disaster: a spill, a breakage, another ruined day.

Dirty snow was piled up against the houses. In the weeks since Mary's arrival, Inch Lane had narrowed to the width of her skirt. Was this winter going to last forever?

There were no pavements here, as there were in much of London; you had to pick your way along the street through all the rubbish and dung that stuck up out of the snow. Coming out of Inch Lane, Mary found herself smack in the middle of Monmouth, halfway between the genteel houses of Whitecross Street and the stink of the small docks. The cramped quality of the place still amazed her: nobs and mob not two minutes' walk apart. Everywhere she turned, the walls were lime-washed; the small doors glared.

Since the first day she'd stepped outside the house, she'd kept one dreading eye out for that Welshman from the inn at Coleford, the man she'd bilked of a whole pound for what she'd claimed was
her lost virginity. But she'd never caught a glimpse of him in Monmouth. He had to be a farmer from beyond the mountains, she decided.

By now Mary had learned the names of the dozen streets, and that was all there seemed to be to this little knot of a town, snowbound between two rivers. Over there in the curve where the tiny Monnow met the fat Wye lay Chippenham Meadows; folk walked there on summer evenings, according to Daffy. But summer seemed to Mary like another country. Time stood still in this part of the world; in the house on Inch Lane, the Christmas evergreens were still nailed to the walls.

The wind made her eyes run; she pulled her scarf across her face and tugged the open ends of her mittens over her fingertips. Her thin boots skidded on the packed snow. She couldn't remember why she'd longed to get outside today. She had two shawls knotted round her shoulders, over her cloak, and she was still freezing. The air was so peculiarly clean, it smelled of nothing at all.

She bought a twist of salt in paper from the grocer's; a stoppered jar of green ointment from Lomax the apothecary for Mrs. Ash's mysteriously ailing legs; a slice of fresh butter from the stall by the bridge. An hour later Mary trudged back along the Wye with a heavy basket. The half a crown in her pocket was Mrs. Jones's change. No chance of losing it; ever since the night her mother had beaten her for the lost penny, Mary had never put her hand into her pocket without checking her seams for holes.

Be sure and always carry half a crown to prove you're not a whore.

How does that prove it, Doll?

It pays off the Reformer constable, lack-wit!
said Doll Higgins, who'd always kept a half a crown in her shoe, and never drank it, not even when she'd pawned the cloak off her back. Doll, who'd had a mortal dread of losing her liberty, and thought a half a crown would stand between her and all harm.

A woman stumped by through the snow with three children at her skirts. 'Idle hands!' she barked at Mary.

The girl jumped. At first she didn't understand the words, the woman's accent was so thick. She stared into the dull brown eyes of the woman who carded wool as she walked, scraping the muddy shreds into place. Behind her the hurrying children worked away on smaller combs.

'I've a basket to carry,' Mary protested, her voice coming out too shrill.

The stranger never broke her stride. She called back over her shoulder, 'Carry it on your elbow next time, why don't you, and put those fine fingers to use.' Her children scurried after, still clacking their combs like untrained musicians.

Alone on the road, Mary stared down at the fingertips emerging from her mittens, purpled by cold where they gripped the basket. She could hardly feel them. But she saw now, with a malicious pleasure, how smooth they were compared to a real Marcherwoman's. In her old life, the only job of work these hands had ever done was hold her skirts up out of the mud, or rub the occasional old fellow's tool to life. She snorted aloud at the thought. What would the locals call her if they knew that?

At the chandler's, the women were gossiping as loudly as geese, but they fell silent as soon as Mary came in. She still wasn't sure whether it was Welsh they spoke among themselves, or English with a thick Welsh accent. But the chandler was a friendly fellow. 'Su Rhys's daughter, in't it?' he asked, wrapping up Mary's parcel of ground coffee.

Mary nodded, startled. 'Can you tell by my face?'

The chandler laughed like a monkey, and a few of the women joined in. 'Not at all, dear. We've had word of you, that's all.'

'Welcome home,' added one of the customers.

Mary thanked her stiffly, and got out of the shop as fast as she could.
Home,
indeed! Were they mad?

As she hurried down Monnow Street, wind lifted settled snow like dust before an unseen broom. The road cleared and filled again, white dust moving like muslin, gathering and smoothening along
the air. It was snowing upside down now, from the ground up, swirling into her face. She looked up at the sun over the spire of St. Mary's, a white ball swathed in cloud. Sheds in the distance were the same dim brown as the trees. It was a world without colour; Mary couldn't shake off the impression that she was gradually going blind.

A flick of blackness drew her eyes upwards. Crows were gathering in a skinny beech, bouncing in the branches, shifting their heads from side to side as they cawed, as if looking for trouble. Mary craned up and tried to count them.

Five for riches,
Six for a thief.

Her neck hurt as she let her head drop back and her mouth open. There was another, in the next treetop. And another.

Seven for a journey,
Eight for grief.

Others wheeled overhead. Her eyes were watering. The birds' croaks were fusing into one great excitement. She blinked snow off her lashes. Scores, hundreds of crows, all homing to this skeletal tree; shaking away from it in a wide arc, then doubling back as if constrained to return. Some waited on the very ends of the branches as if preparing to migrate, but she knew that couldn't be so. It wasn't as if they had anywhere else to go.

Now she was paying attention, Mary realised that the air had been full of the crows' rapid grumble all morning. Such a sore cawing; a shallow abrasion of the throat that seemed to expect no acknowledgement, no answer, certainly no consolation. She wondered what was grieving them. The scarcity of worms? The long wait for spring? The fact that they hadn't been born peacocks? The dark beaks repeated the birds' resentment as if they had to, as if they'd forgotten why they ever began but now knew no other sound to make. The heavy sky shook with their complaint.