Slammerkin (30 page)

Mary tried to push past.

'Thou shalt not steal,'
said Mrs. Ash in the voice of Moses.

The girl froze, and stared at her. 'Steal?' she repeated.

As if she didn't know that's what it was called! 'Doesn't the Scrap Act call it plain theft, to keep the odds and ends of any trade, whether for misuse or for sale? These'—and with a flourish Mrs. Ash dragged a fistful of bright fabrics out of the depths of her pocket—'these items belong to your masters, and well you know it. Silk, this is,' she said, flapping a triangle of bright blue, 'I know that much, and you can't pretend otherwise!'

The Londoner did something very odd, then. She didn't try to snatch the bits of cloth; she made no denials. Instead a look crossed
her face that was something like relief. She put her head back and laughed like a girl who had no cares in the world. She had all her teeth, and they shone.

Mrs. Ash was left alone in the passage, her hands clenched as if with cramp.

In the wavering light of the candle, that night after supper, Mary's needle seemed to wink in and out of existence. Spots wandered across the worn linen, and for a moment Mary thought they were bloodstains. In the deep yellow candlelight an infinity opened between her eyes and the needle, and she couldn't remember which side of the cloth was up. To shake off this vertigo, she leapt to her feet to trim the wicks. She liked to do this before Mrs. Jones reminded her to. It gave her a flickering sense of being needed.

There was a knot deep down in her stomach. Nothing had been said about the scraps yet. She'd never heard of that wretched law—if it wasn't the nurse's malign invention. Had Mrs. Ash decided not to tell the mistress, or was she just biding her time, planning to expose Mary in front of the whole family? Mary could feel the nurse's eyes sweep over her, every now and then.

Mr. Jones read a paper in his shabby brown wing-chair; his eye-lids fluttered. Mary watched him from beneath the edge of her mob-cap. He sat so straight, so much like any other man might sit with his legs crossed, that it seemed to Mary not so much that his leg was gone as that it was invisible, tucked out of sight somehow. Her sore eyes felt tricked as they searched for the line missing from the picture. His muscled arms bulged at the cuffs.

Which bits of a man were necessary, she wondered? Mr. Jones seemed a whole man as he was, but what if he had no legs at all? Or no arms? If only his trunk remained, propped up on the couch, would he still be Mr. Jones? How much could a man lose and still be himself? What about his yard, she wondered; what would he be without that?

His eyes lifted to hers.

Hot-faced, Mary looked back at the candle she was trimming.

Mr. Jones cleared his throat with a great rumble and turned a page. 'These trading posts we're fighting the Frenchies for—I must admit I'm hard put to it to tell one from the other.
Quebec,
for instance; I wonder, is that one in India?'

'Such heathenish names,' muttered Mrs. Ash.

'And I see here the Prime Minister has warned the American colonists that if they push the Redskins any further west it will come to blows in the end.'

'Imagine,' said Mrs. Jones vaguely, her eyes on her needle.

'There's news of a great fire in London, Mary,' the master added, peering at the bottom of the page. 'A street called the Strand; do you know it?'

It was all Mary could do to keep from crying out. She imagined the great porticoes, three times the size of anything in Monmouth, blackened by flame, and the Misses racing along the gutters, their light skirts pocked with ash. 'I do,' she said faintly.

Mrs. Jones looked up from her needle, blinking. 'What's London like, then, Mary?'

Where to begin? 'Well, all the streets are lit up, all the time,' Mary told her mistress. She knew she was exaggerating, but she had to, or she'd miss the truth by a mile.

Mrs. Jones grinned as if she'd heard a very good joke.

'Such a waste of candles,' said Mrs. Ash severely from her corner.

Mary didn't turn her head. 'No, they're oil lamps on poles,' she boasted. 'And the flames are every colour of the rainbow.'

'They can't be,' observed Daffy.

'Well, they are,' she said cheekily. 'Have you been there, that you know so much about it?'

'No,' said Daffy, very calm, 'but I'd wager I know more than you about the chemical processes of combustion.'

Mary rolled her eyes. Did he hope to dazzle her with syllables? What a curious fellow he was. They'd shared a house for more than
a month, and had it ever occurred to him to so much as kiss her? Not that she'd have let him, but it did seem strange that he hadn't tried. Mary still wasn't used to being around men who showed no sign of wanting from her what all the others had wanted.

Mrs. Jones was still marvelling over the street lamps. 'Just to think of it!' Her small pupils held pinpricks of light.

Mary's lies got wilder after Daffy had gone off to his basement room with
Botanical Curiosities of the Island of Britain
and half an inch of candle. The others would never know the difference, she decided, so she could tell them anything. She had the impression she was conjuring London out of the hot musty air of the little parlour. She claimed, among other things, that the streets were so choked with Dutchmen, Mohammedans, and Indian princes that you could walk for half a day and never see a plain English face.

'Mohammedans, really?' asked Mr. Jones with interest.

'Thousands of them!' Mary added that fine ladies wore trains ten yards long, with spaniels taught how to carry them in their mouths. Fighting bucks duelled every hour of the day in St. James's Park, so the air rang loud with their steel, and the grass was dark with blood. She even did the street cries for the family's entertainment, in her best Cockney accent: 'Noo great cockles, sprats, lamprils!'

'Foyne warsh-ball, come buoy!'

'Cherry roype, red pippins!'

'Ave ye any corns on y'toes?'

She made them laugh, all except Mrs. Ash, who'd gone off to bed in the middle of Mary's description.

'London's not half such a place in my romances, though,' said Mrs. Jones puzzled. 'There it's all paying calls and buying gloves.'

Mary gave her a startled glance. She should have remembered Mrs. Jones was a novel-reader. Lying about her past had become such a habit, Mary found it hard to stop. She let out a contemptuous puff of breath. 'Pugh! Authors!' she said. 'They don't see the half of it, cooped up with their pens all day.'

'Very true,' said Mrs. Jones, nodding. 'I can almost see why your
father and mother took themselves off to London. It must have been a thrilling sort of life, at times.'

Mary almost wanted to slap her for her foolishness. Why did the woman believe everything she was told?

She tried to imagine them together, her grim-faced mother and this woman whose voice was always rippling up and down, whose small pointed face never stopped moving. But for that Mary would have needed to picture them before their lives had split like two paths in a wood. To see her mother as she'd been when she was a girl called Su Rhys, before anything and everything had gone wrong, before the fool she'd married had lost his eleven days.

'Oh, Mary, before I forget,' murmured Mrs. Jones, digging in the pocket that hung inside her skirt. She produced a handful of shiny scraps of fabric, and leaned over.

The girl received them in her cupped hands. The very same ones that Mrs. Ash had confiscated; not a thread missing! She stared at her mistress.

'It's only natural for a girl to have a liking for odds and ends,' said Mrs. Jones lightly, 'and I can't do much with them myself. Next time, ask me, and I'll see if I can spare enough for a little cape.'

Mary's eyes were prickling. 'You're too good,' she said, very low.

Mrs. Jones waved the thanks away as if it were a fly, and returned to her sewing. Then she let out a genteel burp, and remarked, 'I can't seem to stomach that last batch of beer.'

'Some good cider, that's what you need,' said her husband.

'Why, yes, that would be more wholesome, I believe.'

'Daffy,' said Mr. Jones a minute later, when the manservant came in with an armful of sticks for the fire, 'you might go down to the Crow's Nest to fetch the mistress a pint of cider.'

Daffy stopped in his tracks.

'Go on,' said Mr. Jones mildly, 'it's late already.'

The manservant cleared his throat. 'The King's Arms is not much farther.'

Mrs. Jones laid a small hand on her husband's wrist ruffle. 'My dear—'

'Now, Daffy, enough of this nonsense,' he said, his voice booming in the little parlour. 'The Crow's Nest is the nearest and the cheapest, and it's high time you mended this foolish quarrel with your father—'

Mary stood up. 'I'll go.'

Her master and mistress stared at her.

'I'd be glad to get a breath of air,' she said with a yawn. 'I'll just fetch my cloak.'

Daffy gave Mary a smile so grateful it took her by surprise. The fellow thought she was doing him a favour!

Mr. Jones's forehead was creased. He applied to his wife: 'I don't know; should the girl be out so late?'

'Ach, it's only round the corner. If she kept herself safe on the streets of London, Thomas, I think she can go as far as the edge of the Meadow. Just go straight down Grinder Street, Mary, and tell Cadwaladyr to put it on the slate.'

Everything was just around the corner in this town.

Mary's lantern shed a weak circle as she picked her way down Grinder Street to where there was a gap in the houses. The chill air wormed under her cloak. She turned towards the Meadow, which was a sea of black earth. There was the Crow's Nest. She'd been expecting a painted sign, but the crow's nest hanging above the bright doorway of the alehouse was real; it still held a few fragments of eggshell. Some of its twigs hung loose, twitching in the cool wind. She blew out her lantern.

Though the only light inside came from a pair of fires, Mary winced at the brightness as she came in out of the night. There was a reek of old beer and straw. She worked her way through a knot of old men, knuckling dice on the beaten earth floor; when one of them accosted her in a mumble, she took no notice. She kept her cloak fastened in spite of the blast of heat from the fire. So this was
what Daffy had left behind him, she noted curiously; a low, shabby sort of place.

In the corner behind the barrels the drawer-boy straightened up. He couldn't have been more than ten. 'Sup of perry, lass?' he asked cockily.

'Cider. For Mrs. Jones. And draw it fresh,' Mary told him, handing over the tankard.

'Always,' sighed the boy, pulling the spigot from a barrel.

When he handed over the pint, she gripped it and turned to go.

'Penny halfpenny,' called the boy, louder than he needed to.

Heads turned through the smoke. Mary began to flush. 'Mrs. Jones said to put it on the slate.'

'Not bloody likely. Pay the reckoning or give the cider back.'

What an insufferable boy. She turned on her heel, and behind her he shouted 'Cadwaladyr!'

The landlord emerged from the back, his leather apron rolling. 'What's this?'

Mary interrupted the drawer-boy. 'I'm maid to Mrs. Jones the dressmaker, sir, and she sent me...' But by then she had recognised Daffy's father. Fright gripped her by the throat and cut off her breath. She'd never known the man's name, but how well she remembered the eyebrows like white flames, and the weight of him on top of her, in that dirty inn at Coleford.

Devil take the man! Disappearing and turning up again like some kind of spectre. She hadn't caught a glimpse of him since they'd both got down from Niblett's wagon in the first week of January. Now here he was, landlord of the nearest tavern—and he knew her too, though she dropped her eyes at once and turned her face into her dark hood. Cadwaladyr's gaze burned against her cheek.

'She won't pay for the cider,' said the boy.

'Mark it down on the slate,' his master told him.

'I weren't to know
which
Mrs. Jones, was I?' he grumbled.

But Cadwaladyr shoved him away. 'There's a spill wants mopping in the cellar.'

Mary kept her eyes on the floor. All she could hear was the click of bone dice above the dull chatter.

Cadwaladyr stepped nearer as soon as the boy was gone. 'I know you, don't I?' he said very quietly.

She decided to go on the offensive. 'To my cost,' she said miserably.

The landlord leaned close, till his broad nose was only a few inches from her chin. His whisper was wet. 'No use playing the innocent with me, Miss. Not a week after Coleford but I came down with the clap!'

She looked back blankly. Her heart scrabbled like a rat in a cage. So it was true what Doll once said, then, that you could spread it long after your own symptoms were gone. 'Mr. Cadwaladyr, I have no notion—'

'You have something, though, because you set me afire with it,' he said in a rumble. 'I think you must be as arrant a poxy slut as ever walked the Strand.'

He couldn't know how close he'd hit. Mary's eyes scurried. She could have cursed this so-called clergyman for a lecher who'd deserved no better than he'd got, but she didn't dare provoke him. If he raised his voice to denounce her, she was ruined in this town. Already some drinkers were casting curious glances.

'That's a pound you owe me, for starters,' he added, a little louder.

Mary let her face pucker; her eyes glittered with tears. Frantically she searched for something that would make them spill over. She thought of Ma Slattery's cellar; of Doll, rotting in the alley. But still the water hovered behind her eyelids, as if these memories were only stories, horrors that had happened to some other girl. Until she thought of a night long ago, and said in the silence of her mind,
Mother.
Then tears slid down Mary's cheeks.

Her voice was choked; she leaned on the bar and spoke low in Cadwaladyr's ear. 'How dare you make such insinuations, after what you did to a friendless girl?'

She grabbed the tankard of cider and spun around before he could answer. She was out the door and halfway down the lane before she remembered her lantern was unlit. The night was black as tar; she had to fumble her way like a blind woman.