Slammerkin (38 page)

'Hetta hates her,' whispered Mary conversationally, 'and do you wonder at it?'

'Oh, Mary.' Mrs. Jones dropped the needles back in the box. 'If you could find it in your heart to be a little kinder to poor Mrs. Ash ... She won't be here forever, you know.'

The girl's eyes widened. 'You mean—'

'This time is different, isn't it?' murmured Mrs. Jones, glancing down at herself. 'We'll be needing a wet-nurse, see.'

Mary nodded delightedly. 'So Mrs. Ash will have to go.'

'Well,' said the mistress helplessly, 'I must start looking out for a place for her, that's all I mean.'

'I hear they need females in Virginia...'

'Mary Saunders!' She smacked the girl on the wrist, swallowing her smile. It faintly troubled Mrs. Jones that she couldn't make herself feel very sorry at the prospect of losing Mrs. Ash after all these years of faithful service. Nothing much mattered these days except what was happening inside her: like a blast of trumpets on a soundless day.

Sometimes when she glanced up from her sewing it was as if twenty years had rolled up like a carpet and she was a girl again, doing her darning with Su. She talked to her old friend sometimes; more and more these last months, ever since she'd begun to suspect her condition.
Su,
she said in her head,
thank you for your daughter. I only wish you could have seen mine.
There was an infinitesimal hint of a curve below her ribs, but not enough to show, yet. She shut her eyes and wished hard that this one would be a boy. One who would live.

Her husband was looking hangdog these days. In bed at night, his eyes rested on the ceiling; he never guessed that his future was sprouting like a seed beside him. She would have comforted him in the best way she knew how, except that it might endanger the child. Time was she used to tell Thomas everything, but that was years ago, before their family grew and shrank again, before any of the necessary secrets. She longed to give him the good news, but something laid a chill hand on her and said to wait. Just a little longer. It mightn't be true. It mightn't last; it mightn't live. So for now she kept the secret hidden in her mouth like a pearl. She sat and stood and walked as if her skirts were lined with silver, but nobody noticed except Mary.

Now the two of them were laughing over some bit of nonsense when Daffy came into the shop to deposit a stack of trunks. Mary's laughter cut off as if a door had slammed shut. Mrs. Jones looked up from her needle, and noticed that the two servants both looked everywhere in the room except at each other. 'Mary,' she said quietly, a few minutes after Daffy had left, 'is there anything you wish to tell me?'

The girl shook her head, eyes on her sewing.

'I mean to say, I did once think—that is, I know how young you are, but I once imagined that you and Daffy might be beginning to have ... a fondness for each other. Was I wrong?'

'No,' muttered Mary.

'These things do often occur, in a household,' said Mrs. Jones vaguely. 'It's only natural.'

Finally the girl looked up, her cheeks flushed. 'The truth is—he asked me to marry him.'

'At sixteen!' said Mrs. Jones, her mouth puckered with shock.

'He wanted to marry me and take me away from here, and I said no.'

'Mary!' exclaimed Mrs. Jones, her eyes brimming over at the thought of it. 'My poor girl. My poor good girl.' The maid smiled a little, shyly, while the mistress searched in all her pockets for a handkerchief. 'Don't mind my foolishness,' Mrs. Jones stammered through her tears. 'It's only my condition.'

Mary handed over a clean folded handkerchief, and Mrs. Jones mopped her eyes with it. How glad she was; how blessed by such loyalty. To know there was someone who cared about her too much to leave her service, who would stand by her through all trials!

'Cider's ever so strengthening in the early months, I've heard,' Mary told her mistress, and frequently offered to go down to fetch her some from the Crow's Nest after dinner. Mr. Jones was all in favour of whatever could restore a bit of colour to his wife's cheeks.

Mary's life was folded over like a hem. There was a day side and a night side, and to look at one you'd never guess the other. She wasn't too sure which Mary was the real one. It was strange, but it was how it was.

Hidden in her bag under the bed, her single gold-clocked stocking was getting heavier, the coins mounting up. Grubby ones, shiny ones, a few with edges clipped off by coiners, and a whole crown a sozzled lawyer from Edinburgh had dropped between her breasts for a tip, probably thinking it was a penny. Cadwaladyr was civil, these days, apart from his mocking eyebrows; he always gave her a few minutes to get round the back and out of sight in the little room above the stable, before sending the cullies out to her.
Sukie
—his own invention—was the name he gave her. 'Tell Sukie I sent you,' was what he said to the cullies. They were always travellers, passing through, on their way to Bristol or the North, for a job or a sale or a bargain; Mary had told Cadwaladyr from the start that she wouldn't touch a Marcherman, for fear of starting talk in the town.

Most nights she found it effortless, being Sukie. It was strange to be dressed so respectably and have an unpainted face, and to work so fast and so surreptitiously round the back of the inn, but otherwise the trade was as familiar as an old glove. Once she was greeted by a queue of three Yorkshiremen outside the stable, quarrelling over who'd go first. Another night, a drunken Cornishman wanted to do it standing up but fell down on her and got mud all over her blue holland gown.

She offered no preliminary toying, unless the cullies needed it. It wasn't like the old times in London, when she had taken some sort of pride in pleasing, in luring customers back for more. No, these days she was in a hurry and all she wanted was her half of the two shillings it cost these men to get relief in the wilds of the Marches. Sometimes they grabbed her by the breasts, exclaiming over them. If she was face-on, she had to smell the men's beery breath; one lout even tried to kiss her, but she moved her mouth away. Mary preferred to lie face-down on the straw mattress and think about other things, such as the
diamonded petticoat she was embroidering for Miss Lucy Allen, but which she would look much handsomer in herself.

Right at the end, when a cully was weakened, she sometimes put her mouth to his ear and told him that if he gossiped about Sukie to a soul in Monmouth, she'd come after him with a knife and make an opera singer of him.

She was always careful. As far as the drinkers at the Crow's Nest knew, she was just a maid who popped in for a pint of cider for her mistress every few nights, and never lingered to flirt or play dice. She never went round the back to the stables if there was anyone there to see her. And Cadwaladyr wouldn't blab, would he? Not as long as she kept paying him his poundage? But then Mary remembered his face, that first night he'd recognised Jane Jones's new maid as the girl who'd tricked him at Coleford: his eyes under their thick white brows, standing out with rage.

One cold evening an Irishman who stank of baccy, with a little worm of a yard, tried to bargain her down: 'Sixpence for you and the same for the innkeeper.'

'Why,' she asked, 'because you're only half-sized?'

He made her nose bleed. She walked home empty-handed, with some story of getting a sudden nosebleed in the lane.

'Did you see a black rabbit?' asked Mrs. Jones wisely.

Mary shook her head, and another red drop escaped her handkerchief.

'Ach, it's always the black rabbits that bring on bloody noses, don't you know?'

That was the only time Mary went unpaid. Most nights she was home in a quarter of an hour with a shilling or two in her pocket. 'What a good lass you are,' Mrs. Jones would say, taking a mouthful of her cider.

In the attic room, Abi was dreaming of plantation food: slithery mackerel, pumpkin and pigeon-peas, a gulp of rum if you were
lucky. Coocoo, sapadillo, jambalaya: even the words warmed her mouth.

She floated up from sleep to find Mary Saunders stepping out of her petticoats by the light of a thin tallow candle. It was late. She caught a waft from the girl, and it reminded her of something. 'You been with a man?' she asked curiously.

Mary jumped, and turned on her. 'Of course not!'

'Only asking,' muttered Abi, putting her face in the pillow.

The girl continued folding her clothes across the chair as if they were royal robes.

Who could he be, Abi wondered? Not Daffy Cadwaladyr; he was going round with a face sealed up like wax these days, and spent every spare moment deep in
An Historical Account of the Hebridean Isles,
as if nothing was real unless it was written in a book. Could the girl have found herself another lover among the whey-faced men of Monmouth?

As Mary climbed into bed, Abi held onto the hem of the blanket. She heard a faint clink: a chain, or a necklace, or a coin on another coin? Then the soft scraping of a bag being shoved back under the bed, and Mary lay down flat again.

Finally Abi understood, and all at once was overcome with sorrow.

She'd known a few slave girls who got hired out by their plantation masters to make a bit of cash when times were hard, but she'd never before met a woman who sold her body of her own choosing. Not one who had a job, and food, and a roof over her head. It crushed her spirits to realise that even Mary—the bold, the careless Mary Saunders, the Londoner with high ambitions—wasn't a free woman.

She decided to risk asking. 'Mary. You do it for money?'

There was a terrible silence. Abi wished she'd kept her mouth shut. Then she heard a delicate letting out of breath and Mary said, 'I don't know any other good reason.'

Abi couldn't answer that. She hadn't lain with a man in so long
she could barely remember what it felt like. The last must have been the doctor who'd brought her to England, she supposed. He'd woken up hard on the ship every morning and ridden her first thing, with the sea rolling past their cabin porthole like a green monster. One day he had peered at her cunny afterwards, calling it
most interesting;
he said English women were not shaped so. He even made a drawing of it to put in a book he was writing. Abi's legs shook with cold, but the doctor told her to hold still for the sake of science. After days of labour he had proudly showed her the drawing, and she had howled in panic. There was no face, no body, just a fruit axed open, leaking across the page.

'You won't tell a soul?' asked Mary in the darkness.

Abi answered that with a contemptuous puff of breath, which seemed to reassure the girl. 'After I come live on Inch Lane,' said Abi reflectively after a minute, 'I lay wake up here, waited for master to send for me.'

'What, Mr. Jones?' said Mary with a tight giggle.

The woman shrugged. 'Masters are like that with house girls. Then after while I thought maybe Mr. Jones lose more than leg.'

Mary's laughter rose and filled the air.

'Now I think things just different in this country.'

They lay side by side, silent. 'Do you miss the business?' asked Mary at last.

This was hard for Abi to answer. 'Maybe the end bit,' she admitted at last. She thought of heat and wet cupped inside her, those times she'd been put to breeding with the big field slave, though it had come to nothing. All peaceful,' she said, remembering, 'no more noise, no more jigging about.' Nothing more being asked of her, nothing she'd done wrong, nothing to guess at or say sorry for.

On Saturday night Mrs. Jones went to bed early, complaining of backache again. Her husband wondered if that was just another excuse for going to sleep before him. He sat up over his
Bristol Mercury,
the words almost indistinguishable in the candlelight, till everyone else had gone to bed too. He was restless tonight; the May air coming through the window was scented with flowers. For the first time in years, he felt like going to a tavern. He reached for his crutches.

By the time he reached the inn by the Meadow where the crow's nest stirred in the mild breeze, his bladder was troubling him. He hopped around the back of the building. And there, of all people, was Mary Saunders, leaning against the stable wall.

'Mary?' he said blankly. 'I thought you were abed.'

Her hand shot up to hide her face, then fell. Her eyes were tarnished coins on white leather. Mr. Jones wondered, was the girl sick, or astray in her wits? 'Mary?' he repeated, making sure she was the same person who'd sat next to him at supper. 'Whatever's the matter?'

'Nothing, sir.' Her voice was salty and peculiar.

'But what in Heaven are you doing here so late?'

'I don't know, sir.'

What a fool you are, me old muck-mate! How quick you lose your head in a tight spot!
Mary thought she could hear Doll Higgins open her throat and laugh. There were so many lies she could have told her master, if she hadn't been so shocked to see him. That she was stretching her legs while Cadwaladyr filled Mrs. Jones's jug, for instance. Or that she had felt queasy in the alehouse and had stepped out for some air. She could have claimed she wanted a look at the moon, even—only the moon was dark this week. The stars, then; there was the Plough, shovelling away all night.

But her mouth was sealed shut now, after that one stupid phrase: 'I don't know.' Mr. Jones swung his crutches and moved closer to her. His face was shifting; she watched suspicion fill up the lines. She couldn't think of a word to say. Disaster was about to fall on the two of them.

Heavy steps: Sukie's cully at last. Like an ill-timed actor he shambled round the corner, steadying himself with a hand on the
sooty bricks. His bearded face was lit with anticipation. Mary stared at the sky. Surely, seeing a man and a woman in conversation, this fellow would simply piss against the wall and go back to the inn.

'Where be the whore then?' he called.

Mary squeezed her eyes shut.

'I beg your pardon?' Mr. Jones was hoarse with surprise.

'Landlord said there'd be a young trull above the stables that'd do it for two shilling.' The man peered into the shadows, where Mary was standing. 'I'll bide my turn,' he told Mr. Jones amiably, 'but I can't stop long.'