Slammerkin (33 page)

'Had he a yearning for her, do you think?' asked the girl. 'He speaks very highly of her,' she added slyly.

Daffy stopped short, disconcerted. 'You mean—when he was first widowed?'

'Or even before that, when they were all young together. Cadwaladyr didn't marry till late, did he? Long after Mrs. Jones did. And he never took another wife after your mother died, though he could have done with the help, it sounds like.'

'That's true,' said Daffy unwillingly.

'And if your father did have a longing for the mistress,' Mary went on with animation, as if telling a story, 'that would explain why he so resented your coming to work for Mr. Jones.'

'That wasn't it at all,' objected Daffy, his mind moving like mud. 'My father thinks the tavern—'

'Damn the tavern!' Mary's dark eyes glittered. 'It's jealousy, pure and simple. He can't bear to see you in service to the man who stole the woman he wanted!'

Daffy shook his head as if to get rid of a troublesome fly. 'You've read too many romances,' he said pointedly. 'You should try an encyclopaedia.'

'Romances are more educational,' she called back. She was almost dancing, now, circling ahead of him across the green back of the hill.

'They are not. They've misled you. Not all motives are low,' he insisted sternly. 'The human heart is not such a gutter as you think it.'

'Daffy,' she said, coming up very close to him and speaking softly. 'Take my word for this. I know more about the human heart than you'll find in all your encyclopaedias.'

Something in her eyes like bitterness, or sorrow. It shocked him. What had happened to these eyes, in only fifteen years of living? He wanted to reach out and shut them with his callused palm. He wanted to kiss Mary Saunders till the mountains wheeled around them.

She turned away, as if she could read his mind. 'What's the master's leg like, tell me?' she asked after a minute, as breezy as ever.

'What?' asked Daffy, dizzy.

'The leg he hasn't got. What's it like?'

Daffy wrestled with the metaphysics of this.

'I mean the bit of it he has, before it stops,' she said impatiently. 'Is it jagged, then? Can you see the teeth marks of the saw?'

'I've never seen it.'

'You must have.'

Daffy shook his head again.

She walked a little closer to him, and whispered: 'Is there anything else missing?'

This was a most forward and peculiar girl. His face was hot. He turned to face into the cool breeze and stared down into the valley.
'That's the Sugar Loaf,' he remarked after a minute. 'And there's Glamorganshire. They speak no English there.'

Mary gazed down on the foreign country. After a few minutes, she spoke as if continuing a silent conversation. 'You could do better.'

He glanced at her, bewildered.

'That Gwyn. She doesn't sound like she was much of a match, anyway. And first cousins shouldn't marry, I've heard; they have queer babies. I'm sure you could do better.'

He didn't know what to say. He felt like laughing, but no sound emerged.

Mary pointed to a flower with a big white head. 'What's that one?'

'Ah, yes,' he said. 'Ramsons, it's called. Rub it on your wrists for perfume.'

She obeyed, unguarded. A reek rose from her.

Daffy laughed aloud. 'Some call it wild garlic.'

She threw the crushed stems in his face and ran down the hill.

Mr. Jones had never made a bigger set: fat old Widow Tanner would need sixty bonings for her new Easter stays. Well, if he finished them by Good Friday he was going to charge her double, and defy her to query it! Mary Saunders held an arc of whalebone for him while he backstitched it into place. Her hands were sure; they never trembled.

'I'll name no names, Mary,' he murmured, tugging the thread taut, 'but some staymakers do no more than slot the bones into tucks in the cloth, so they ride about as they will.'

The girl sucked in her breath as if shocked at the very idea. He knew she was making fun of him; he didn't take offence. His eyes focused on the skeleton of boning in its skin of dull linen. It would take three more days of work before he could start adding the sets of laces—front, back, and side—that Mrs. Tanner's vast flesh would require.

'Will this pair be silk?'

He gave the girl an amused glance. He'd never known anyone to take such a relish in fine fabric. 'The cover will be. But that matters little, Mary. Any set of stays can look well on the outside, even if there's shoddy work within.' He moved the girl's cold hands infinitesimally, to change the angle of tension. 'It's the bones that matter.'

'I know that,' she said a little bored. 'But the new green paduasoy is so much handsomer than that old brocade you used on Mrs. Pringle's stays.'

Mr. Jones's mouth curled up at both ends. Ah, well now, beauty. Beauty demands sacrifice, Mary.'

'Sacrifice?'

'The French have never understood that,' he pronounced. 'Their lovelies are loose; all they care for is a row of glossy bows, and a plump
decolletage.
But here in England we make the most unyielding stays in the world.
Upright in body,
he quoted, '
upright in soul.
English ladies' sides are straight and narrow beyond anything nature can produce.'

'Stays hurt though, sometimes. You should try them,' she remarked under her breath.

He let that bit of pertness go. 'There's a universal worship of beauty which the tender sex cannot escape. Did you ever see the Misses Gunning, Mary?'

She shook her head.

'No, of course not, you must have been a child,' he corrected himself. 'Well. They were the most famous beauties of their day, Miss Maria and Miss Susanna. Can you guess how Miss Maria died?'

Another impatient shake.

'Paint,' he said with grim satisfaction. 'She used a powder to make her face pale and smooth, and it poisoned her in the end.'

Mary gave a little shudder. 'So will you be making Hetta a pair of stays?' she asked after a minute.

He glanced at her curiously.

'Haven't you heard her asking for them?'

'The child's not six years old,' he murmured, pushing his long needle through the linen.

'So, in the case of your own daughter, you admit they might do harm?'

This girl had a dreadfully teasing manner, sometimes. Mr. Jones bit down on a smile. 'Hetta might do well enough with a little pair in canvas, kept loose. I have always discouraged my wife from lacing too tight.'

Mary Saunders glanced down at herself. His eyes followed hers. Under her blue bodice her chest was as taut as a sapling. For fifteen, she was a full-figured woman. 'Where did you get that pair?' Mr. Jones asked professionally.

'London.'

'But what shop?'

Her dark eyes clouded over. What had he said? 'A friend left them to me,' Mary answered finally, 'when she died.'

He returned his eyes to his work. 'Its a simple set,' he said briskly, 'not much force to them, but the line is true.' His hands dithered over the white fragments of whalebone, then seized the one he wanted. 'You're not the kind of customer I like, though,' he muttered under his breath.

'No?' asked Mary.

'Not enough needs fixing,' he said neutrally. 'A girl like you might as well wear a sack.'

He didn't look up, in case she was blushing.

'So you prefer ugliness?' she asked a little hoarsely.

'In a sense,' Mr. Jones told her. 'That set of stays I made for Mrs. Leech, for instance—now there was a challenge. You realise, Mary, I can mould the female form into whatever I like. I aim for an effect of harmonious symmetry, much like the architectural designs of Mr. Adam, I like to think.' He thought this allusion was probably wasted on the girl. 'I might go so far as to call myself a maker of women,' he explained.

'So you improve on the work of the Maker?' she asked cheekily.

His blade slowed as he pondered this remark. 'Continue it, rather. I use what He has provided us with to bring His creations to the height of perfection.' Mr. Jones lifted a curved slip of white bone up to his eyes for inspection. 'But I have a liking for stays themselves, quite apart from fitting them to their wearers. The intricacy of them, you know; the strength.'

'Yes?'

'How they hold everything in place.'

Mary Saunders smiled. Her mouth was really too wide, her master decided. Her lips had too much blood in them. What was that old rhyme?

Men's Tools according to their Noses grow;
Large as their Mouths are Women too below.

Head bent, he blushed faintly over his work.

The manservant came in then, with a stack of boxes. He brought a faint tang of the outdoors with him; the smell of hard work in the fresh air.

Mr. Jones glanced up just then, to ask Daffy something, and saw the manservant standing there, arms by his sides, looking at the maid, and the maid staring back at him.
Mary and Daffy,
the master said to himself, turning away;
Daffy and Mary.
Like an old rhyme.

He heard Hetta squeal in the passage, and Mrs. Ash's stern tones, drowning her out. He waited for the quick steps that meant his wife, and her voice, soothing the child and the nurse too.

What Mr. Jones had seen had locked his throat, and made him turn a little sick. His hand was shaking, so he laid down the blade. He felt old, and crippled. A pain started up in the leg he'd lost a quarter of a century ago.

Nance Ash woke with a sense of weight on her hands and face. After a few seconds, she remembered that this was Easter Sunday.
The Lord is risen.
She waited to feel her spirits lift, but nothing happened.

Easter was her favourite festival, as a rule. It had few of the frivolities of Christmas. It was concerned with pain, and the purposes of pain, and pain's triumph and consolation. But this morning her heart was shut up like a tomb, and the great stone was too heavy to move aside.

On the floor below she could hear the quick steps of her mistress. A woman of whom Nance Ash would have to say that she was fond, even if Mrs. Jones had thwarted her on many occasions over the years (most recently and disgracefully in the matter of those cloth scraps), and had an unfortunate tendency to place her trust in false friends such as Mary Saunders. A kind enough mistress; better than many, no worse than some. Not noticeably godly, but not quite godless either. A woman who had come up from nothing—Back Lane, Mrs. Ash added mentally, which was worse than nothing—by means of some skill with a needle and marriage to a hardworking man.
The Lord maketh poor and maketh rich.
God had seen fit to place Mrs. Jones at the head of a family, secure in the love of a fine upstanding husband, for reasons best known to Himself. And Mrs. Ash He had put under this woman as a servant.

It would never occur to Nance Ash to question His will. He had given her masters who had kept her on long after her milk dried up, out of charity. The word was a dry crust in the mouth, but then, what else had she to swallow? For the thousandth time, Nance Ash steeled herself to obey.
And the Angel of the Lord said unto Hagar, Return to thy Mistress, and submit thyself under her Hands.

All this could be borne. Worse than this could be endured. In hopes of a resurrection in the end.

She dressed the same way as she had every day of her life. Dolling herself up for Easter would hardly impress the Risen God. On a turn of the stairs she almost ran into the Londoner and the manservant, who were standing deep in conversation. Their faces were not a foot apart. At the sight of Mrs. Ash they backed off. Guilt on the air, like dust motes catching the light.

'Good morning, Mrs. Ash,' said Daffy, very sprightly. 'May I be the first to offer the felicitations of the day?'

'The resurrection of our Lord is not a carnival,' she told him, brushing past. She didn't look behind her to see the girl's face; she knew just what mixture of impudence and lasciviousness it held. The cheek of her, to come into this household and set herself to distract a young man from his duties! It seemed to Mrs. Ash now that Daffy had been an excellent fellow until Mary Saunders fixed her dark eyes on him.

Well, they had better be careful, the pair of them. She wasn't going to turn a blind eye to smuttiness in corners, whatever others did. What they were feeling—oh, Nance Ash remembered it well enough from the days of her engagement, that unholy knot of excitement in the stomach—it could bring them down like a hurricane in the end.

For Easter dinner the Joneses were going to have hare pie, thanks to Daffy, who'd come home with two of the creatures over his shoulder. Mrs. Jones smiled to herself as she brushed egg across the pastry lid. The Lenten days were over.

That was twice recently that Mrs. Morgan had commented on their absence from church; it was time for the whole family to make an appearance. At St. Mary's, the women sat in a row at the back of the right-hand pews, packed in like fish. Mrs. Jones had put her teeth in, for the occasion, so she was trying to remember not to smile too wide, for fear the pewter settings would catch the light of the candelabra. On her left was Mrs. Ash, down on her knees from the moment she'd entered the church, head on her hands; her mistress swallowed a wave of irritation. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her husband and Daffy, over on the men's side. Daffy was looking up at the ceiling as if something miraculous were happening among the spiders there. Her husband had his hands knotted in his lap in a perfectly orthodox fashion. No one would guess his conviction that, as he'd put it to her only the other night, the Church of England was as corrupt as a dead dog, and not at all a suitable place for addressing the Divine.

Mrs. Jones took a long breath and began to enjoy herself, despite the feeling of too many teeth in her mouth, eating her up. All around her she recognised clothes she'd sewn herself. She elbowed Mary when Miss Theodosia Fortune went by in that taffeta cape with the festooned hem that had caused them so much trouble. Then she craned to see past Mrs. Halfpenny, asleep in her butterfly cap, delicate snores rising. Over on the other side of the church, Mrs. Halfpenny's husband, the town clerk, had got something tucked inside his prayer book, she noticed; his lips moved as he read.