Slammerkin (25 page)

No one had an answer for that.

'Crow's Nest,' remarked Hetta.

'That's right, my clever,' said her mother, reaching down to part the child's milk-white hair, 'Daffy's father owns the Crow's Nest Inn.'

The manservant was squirming, so of course Mary couldn't let the subject rest. 'If you had a job in your father's tavern, what made you come to work here, then?' she asked lightly.

Daffy shoved back his chair and stood up. 'I'd best deliver those hats,' he told Mrs. Jones.

When the door had shut after him Mary looked round with wide eyes.

The master reached down for his crutches. 'It's as well for Daffy to be with us, learning a clean trade,' he added gravely, 'but I don't like to interfere between father and son.' He said no more before going off down the corridor to the stays room.

'What did I say?' Mary asked her mistress.

'Ah, there's bad blood there,' murmured Mrs. Jones, shaking her head.

Some afternoons Mary sneaked upstairs and lay on her bed for a few minutes, just to get away. She couldn't bear to be so thickly set around with people who knew her name and could make demands of her. In the shifting crowds of St. Giles, it had somehow been easier to be alone. She lay on her side on the narrow bed and turned the greasy pages of the
Ladies' Almanack
she'd paid ninepence for at the last Bartholomew Fair. On the cover, young Queen Charlotte looked out glumly, despite her fur-lined cape. Mary shut her chilly eyelids for a moment and conjured up that exquisite fur around her throat.

'Mary?' The mistress's voice, like the sharp cry of a blackbird. 'I've need of you.'

The girl remembered London as a place of infinite freedom. Now it seemed she'd rented out her whole life to the Joneses in advance. Service had reduced her to a child, put her under orders to get up and lie down at someone else's whim; her days were spent obeying someone else's rules, working for someone else's profit. Nothing was Mary's anymore. Not even her time was hers to waste.

'Coming, mistress.' She stamped down the stairs.

Whenever Hetta managed to escape from her nurse, she liked to follow the new maid round, clutching at her skirts. The child's questions followed each other like waves. 'What colour is this called?' 'Is it dinner time yet?' 'How old are you?'

'Guess,' panted Mary, shovelling ash out of the grate.

'Are you ... ten?'

'No. More.'

'Are you a hundred?'

'Why, do I look it?' said Mary, laughing despite herself as she wiped ash off her cheek with the back of her hand. 'I'm fifteen, and that's the truth.'

'My brother was nine. My brother Granz.'

'Was he,' said Mary, casting the little girl a curious glance.

'He got skinny and went to heaven in a chariot.'

'That's right.'

'I'm not skinny,' Hetta remarked, a little guiltily.

Mary swallowed a smile. 'I should hope not.'

'Mrs. Ash calls me a porkish little glut.'

This made Mary laugh out loud, despite herself.

'Do you really have no mother?' asked Hetta suddenly.

Mary stopped laughing. 'That's right.'

'She's gone to heaven?'

'I hope so,' said Mary grimly, picking up the bucket of ash.

The afternoon was the longest stretch of work, but at least Mary was generally sitting down in the shop. She snoozed over her needle, hemming the skirts and bodices of the better families of Monmouth. Tannery owners, cap merchants, and iron-masters, that was all; not a viscount among them. Beside her, Mrs. Jones used her great curved scissors to cut confident shapes in silks and brocades, turning every now and then to consult one of the pattern dolls John Niblett had brought her last week in the back of his wagon. Their aprons were two inches long; their skirts were no wider than cabbages. With their twiggish arms and thick necks, Mary thought they looked like rats dressed up as duchesses.

Mrs. Jones could go on for hours about the latest romance she was reading. Sometimes she even talked about the boy she'd lost the previous summer, her Grandison—named, of course, for Mr. Richardson's best novel. Privately, Mary thought it just as well the boy hadn't had a long life, bearing the weight of such a name. Now, to hear Mrs. Jones talk, you'd have thought he'd been the kindest, cleverest young fellow that ever reached nine years of age. But when Mary had asked Daffy about him, the manservant admitted that he'd once caught the boy holding a cat's tail in the coals.

Now she let out an enormous yawn.

'You're not used to working such hours, are you?' asked Mrs. Jones with a hint of amusement.

Mary shook her head. 'In London I was often idle,' she confessed.

'But you said you went to school?'

'Oh yes,' she answered, her tongue dry.
Careless, ducky!
said Doll in her head. 'I only meant, the last few months, before Mother...'

Mrs. Jones clucked sympathetically, pins between her lips. Plucking them out a minute later, she said, 'I suppose you gave up the school when poor Su needed nursing?'

Mary nodded mutely, as if the memory were too painful for speech.

When the light started fading, round four o'clock, Mrs. Jones had Mary switch to the simpler chemises and seamed stockings that she sold ready-made to the lower sort; now it wouldn't matter so much if a stitch wasn't perfectly straight. It occurred to Mary—sitting sewing by the side of Mrs. Jones—that this was just what Susan Digot had always wanted for her girl. Mary pressed her teeth together hard. The beggarly luck of it, to end up obeying the cold bitch who'd thrown her onto the streets in winter! Well, at least her mother would never hear the end of this story, if Mary could help it. Susan Digot would eke out her days wondering whether her only daughter had given birth in a frozen gutter. She'd go to her grave not knowing, and good enough for her.

'Mary?'

She glanced up, afraid her thoughts were showing on her face.

But Mrs. Jones was smiling in concern. 'You've pricked yourself.'

She hadn't felt it. Bright blood flecked the hem of Mrs. Jarrett-the-Smith's winter petticoat.

'Let you run and rinse it out in the kitchen. Ask Abi for cold water, and a rub of lemon.'

'It's plain cheap cotton,' muttered the girl.

'Then let it be clean, at least,' said Mrs. Jones.

'Why can't I be steaming that taffeta cape of Miss Barnwell's?'

'Because this is our bread and butter, Mary.'

When the girl came back from the kitchen she stood staring out
of the little window of the shop, where twilight was settling on the roofs of Monmouth. 'Did my mother like it here?' she asked abruptly.

Mrs. Jones looked up with startled eyes. 'Why, Mary, what a thing to ask!'

'But did she?'

The mistress bent over her sewing. 'It wasn't a question Su would have put to herself.'

'Why not?'

'We none of us would have. This was home. Is,' she added confusedly.

'And will you stay here forever, then?' asked Mary, curiously.

Mrs. Jones thought for a moment before asking, 'Where else would we go?'

Mary had always had a feel for clothes and what they meant. But these days she was learning to read a costume like a book, decipher all the little signs of rank or poverty. She was developing a nose for vulgarity; much of the stuff she'd paid out her earnings for, at the stalls of the Seven Dials, now struck her as shoddy tat. Fine cloth, that was what mattered, according to Mrs. Jones, and clean lines. And the very best dresses weren't the brightest and gaudiest but the ones that contained months of hard labour: edges stiff with hand-sewn lace or knobbed with beading. There was no way to cheat or skimp on it: beauty was work made flesh.

Something else Mary was learning: what mattered just as much as what someone wore was how they carried it off. The best silk sack gown could be ruined on a stooping, countryish customer. It was all in the gaze, the stance, the set of the shoulders. Mary set herself to learning how to move as if the body—in all its damp indignity—was as sleek and upright as the dress.

Whenever she heard a particularly sharp rap at the front door, she knew it would be a footman knocking on behalf of his mistress,
and she would run to clear the little sofa in the shop, straightening her apron as she went. Most afternoons the household on Inch Lane was as busy as a hornet's nest. Patrons plagued Mrs. Jones with last-minute requests.

One Saturday, for instance, she was sold out of yellow ribbon by eleven o'clock, and had to disappoint Mrs. Lloyd who wanted some specially to bind a silk chrysanthemum onto her wheat-straw hat. Then Mrs. Channing ran in to have the hem of her new
robe à la française
taken up half an inch, having got the notion that she might trip on it when walking into church. Mary knelt down to pin up the mauve silk. 'We have a black ourselves, now,' Mrs. Channing carolled, catching a glimpse of Abi going through the passageway with a pail of dirty water. A footboy, only half as big as your maid. He's a very handy little mannikin; I've named him Cupid. My husband picked him up in Jamaica where they go for only sixpence a pound.' She released another of her shrill laughs. Her knees shook, the flesh on them like pudding.

Mary could tell if a visiting patron was true quality by the fact that they managed to follow her through the narrow hall without giving any hint that they had noticed her existence. The effect was quite crushing; at least in the old days, cullies had looked her in the face. True ladies and gentlemen, it seemed, had eyes only for their own images in the glossy looking-glass.

The patron Mrs. Jones was most proud of was Mrs. Morgan, wife to the Honourable Member. 'Why, the Morgans of Tredegar have always sat in Parliament for Monmouth,' the mistress told Mary, marvelling at the girl's ignorance. Flat-faced Mrs. Morgan wore a black fur cape in all seasons and was carried everywhere in a sedan chair, preceded by a large Frenchman called Georges who held her purse and ushered loiterers off the street in front of her with sweeps of his great ivory fan.

The day Mrs. Morgan brought in her youngest daughter for a fitting, Mrs. Jones turned remarkably silly, Mary thought. And I believe this will be Miss Anna's very first season?' The dressmaker
was practically squeaking as she knelt down, brushing the dirty snow from the girl's boots.

A stately inclination of the head from the mother.

'Well, now. An open half-skirt over a petticoat quilted in this rose satin would, dare I suggest, be perfect for one of the many London routs or balls to which I must imagine Miss Anna has been invited.'

Mary bit her lip, embarrassed for her mistress. Mrs. Morgan rubbed the satin between two fingers as if feeling for a flaw in the weave.

The mistress turned to Mary and smiled with her lips closed over the gap in her teeth. 'Our new maid has come to us all the way from the capital, have you not, Mary?'

'Yes, madam,' muttered Mary. It galled her to be shown off like a new bolt of paduasoy.

'I do not go there myself, you know, madam, owing to family obligations,' said Mrs. Jones, turning back to the Honourable Member's wife, 'but I have my intelligencers! Oh, yes, Mary tells us of all the wonders of London city.'

'What wonders?' piped the girl with the long neck who was holding a spotted bodice up against herself; it was much too pretty for her.

All eyes turned on Mary. She briefly examined her memories. She couldn't decide which to drag out for Miss Anna Morgan, whose eyes were as blue as cheese. Mobs ripping doors off their hinges? That maid who had jumped out of the blazing window in Cheapside? Doll, frozen in the alley, white as whalebone?

'There are fireworks, didn't you tell us once, Mary?' prompted her mistress with an edge of desperation.

Mrs. and Miss Morgan stared.

'Yes, madam,' admitted Mary grudgingly. 'Several times a year.'

'As if the stars have plummeted down for the convenience of the
beau monde
!' carolled Mrs. Jones. And might I venture to suggest perhaps that Miss Anna might wear a cape of this green palatine to Vauxhall Gardens?'

'Ranelagh,' Mrs. Morgan corrected her, bringing a handful of
the palatine close to her narrow eyes, then letting it down again. 'We don't frequent Vauxhall.'

'Of course,' murmured the dressmaker.

Not that poor Mrs. Jones would know the difference, thought Mary, remembering Vauxhall at midnight, dew on the grass where she earned her fare home.

'We don't see you at church, Mrs. Jones,' commented the Honourable Member's wife, breaking in on Mary's memories.

'No, madam.' Mrs. Jones hesitated. 'My husband's health, you understand...'

'Does not stop him from hopping along Wye Street as fast as any man.' The woman's voice was like sand.

'No, madam,' murmured Mrs. Jones.

Any minute now her ladyship would be asking them to lick her heels. The old school rhyme chimed in Mary's head:

May I know my lowly station
At the doorstep of creation.

Now Mrs. Morgan examined her white velvet slammerkin, the few inches of its hem embroidered with silver apples and snakes. 'The work goes slowly, Mrs. Jones.'

'My dear madam, I assure you, I expect to make great progress in the next month as the days begin to lengthen.'

'Your London girl embroiders?'

Mary had opened her mouth to say no, when her mistress rushed in with, 'Of course. She knows all the very latest effects!'

A stately nod. Now Mrs. Morgan was interrogating a tiny butterfly cap in the long mirror. Mrs. Jones went up on her toes to pin it onto her patron's greying head. 'How the lace sets off your hair! Just down from Bristol, this is.'

'I think Mrs. Fortune has the same.'

'Madam!' protested the dressmaker. 'Hers is nothing like. Not half so dainty. This is the very pattern of the one Mrs. Cibber wears as Juliet on the Drury Lane stage, Mary tells me.'

Mrs. Morgan frowned at her image. 'You're sure I won't be put out of countenance when I meet Mrs. Fortune at the Shrove Ball?'

'Heaven forbid,' prayed the dressmaker. She was rooting in a trunk now; her voice was muffled. 'And if I can furnish madam with any other little necessaries...' She came up, panting, with a shred of lace in her hand. 'You might like to cast your eye over this vastly pretty handkerchief, painted with the Peace of Utrecht—'