Slammerkin (43 page)

The dressmaker bobbed gratefully.

'For the winter, I think I'll have you make me a riding-habit, as well as three complete suits of clothes for my daughter's first season. And your husband might fit us both for some dress stays.'

Mrs. Jones nodded, glowing. Mary could tell she was too excited to speak. Their eyes met over Mrs. Morgan's shoulder, and Mrs. Jones gave the girl a tiny wink, as if to say that their worries were over. The dressmaker picked up the dress, and Mary rushed to help her hold it like a cloud of white over Mrs. Morgan's head so madam could worm her way into it.

Mary stood back and considered. What an almighty waste of a year's embroidery! Inside her silver-veined splendour, the woman looked plainer than ever. Stretched over the gigantic hoop and layers of petticoats, the slammerkin seemed to fill the room, bobbing against the trunks and almost knocking over a chair. It was magnificent, in this humble setting, but it was also quite ridiculous. Mary itched to try it on. How much better she would carry it off than Mrs. Morgan. Mary's breasts were twice the size, for starters. A laugh bubbled up in her throat.

'Why is your maid looking at me so insolently, Mrs. Jones?'

Mary blinked, and looked down at her hands. She'd forgotten to be careful.

'Was she, madam?' said Mrs. Jones, breathless.

'Indeed she was.'

The girl had turned her back, now. She pretended to be sorting through some jackets hanging from the ceiling; she buried her head among them and bit her lips to stop the laugh from coming out.

'Well, Miss, what have you to say for yourself?'

Mrs. Morgan's voice, tight as a chicken's, increased Mary's merriment. She pressed her face against a train of cool satin. 'I'm sorry, I'm sure.' Her words came out muffled.

'You will look at me when you address me!'

Mary turned, with a face as rigid as china.

'High time you learned some respect for your betters.'

The word hung in the air between them. Mary kept her mouth sealed shut. But she couldn't prevent one eyebrow lifting. A gesture that whispered,
You, my better?

Now her mistress's eyes flicked between the two of them in panic.

'I beg your pardon, madam,' Mary said to Mrs. Morgan, adding a deep curtsy, to be on the safe side.

'She meant no harm.' Mrs. Jones gave her patron a paralysed smile.

Mrs. Morgan sighed and turned aside to examine her profile in the long mirror. 'I would not keep a girl so pert, myself,' she remarked.

'No, madam,' said the dressmaker. 'She's not generally so. It's the heat, I do believe.'

'I doubt she would have reached such a height of impudence without some encouragement, Mrs. Jones.'

No answer to that.

The Honourable Member's wife lifted her arms resignedly to indicate that Mrs. Jones should begin undoing the slammerkin. 'The neckline a quarter-inch lower, I think.'

'Very good, madam.'

She stood there like a doll with her arms in the air. And Mary, watching from under her lowered lids, realised all at once that the rich were useless. The more servants they depended on, the feebler they grew. Parasites!

But she went over to help her mistress with a perfect humility of manner. She meant to behave herself for the rest of the fitting. And all was well until, in the struggle to hoist the narrow bodice off over her head, Mrs. Morgan's shift fell open and her left breast flopped over the edge of her stays. It resembled nothing so much as a lightly fried egg, livid and elongated, quivering on the edge of the plate. Mary had never seen anything so funny in her life. She looked up and saw the Honourable Member's wife, who had noticed what the girl was looking at. A huge and terrible laugh spilled out of Mary's mouth before she even knew it was coming. She clamped a hand over her lips, but it was too late.

What Mary remembered afterwards, as she stood in the hall, against the closed door—with her heart banging almost loud enough to drown out Mrs. Morgan's shouts: 'By Christ, I say she laughed at me! I tell you, the slut guffawed in my face!'—was not Mrs. Morgan's face, but Mrs. Jones's. Lost, dreading, like a child in a wood.

Mrs. Jones couldn't eat a bite of supper. Afterwards, she waited till she was alone with her husband.

'Jane?'

She looked up, startled at the first name.

Mr. Jones laid a warm hand over hers. 'You're not yourself this evening.'

She blinked at him with grateful tears. 'It's nothing.'

'Has the child been tiring you?'

How she would have liked to nod, to blame it all on the petty exhaustions of an ordinary day. It wouldn't be the first time she'd have kept something from Thomas, after all. She had had bigger secrets, lies of omission.

But she shook her head regretfully. 'It's only—Mary. She was ... pert. With Mrs. Morgan.'

His forehead drew into a knot. 'Pert?'

'She meant no real harm—she only laughed—'

'Laughed? At what?' he interrupted, his face dark.

'Nothing,' said Mrs. Jones unconvincingly. Somehow she couldn't bear to describe the incident, the breast in all its pallid limpness. She was half afraid she might laugh herself.

'And what of the commission?'

His wife squirmed. 'That's what's worrying me. That's why I've brought it up at all. When she first came in today, Mrs. Morgan asked me to undertake three sets of clothes for her daughter—'

'And now it seems Mary Saunders has caused an utter breach in our relations with our most prominent patron!' He pronounced the words as if in a court of law.

His wife flinched. 'I don't know about that, Thomas. Mrs. Morgan left in such a hurry—'

His hand thumped the table. 'We'll be lucky,' he growled, 'if any member of that family ever steps into our shop again.'

Mrs. Jones put her face in her hands.

'As for the girl, I'll give her
pert,
he roared. 'I'll give her
no harm.
Bring the chit down this minute and I'll whip the smile off her face.'

His wife could feel her face stiffen into a mask of horror. 'But my dear, consider—'

'Bring her down for a round dozen this minute, I say. Her kind can't be reasoned with.'

'Thomas.' Mrs. Jones tried to gather her forces. 'We've never re-sorted to such punishment in our family. I cannot agree—'

'You cannot?' The vein on his nose stood out. 'Well, what matter if you can agree or not? I hope we'll have no petticoat government in this house!'

In the whole length of their marriage, through money troubles and domestic disputes, she'd never seen her husband's face so distorted, so beyond her reach. It was as if, by some piece of girlish foolishness, Mary Saunders had ruined her master's life.

Mr. Jones pushed his chair back; it made a dreadful squeal. Every nerve in his wife's body strained away from him, but she stayed where she was. He stood, breathing heavily. Something was softening his face—not kindness, it seemed to her, but some obscure doubt. As he scrabbled for his crutches, he mumbled something, so low she barely caught it.

'I beg your pardon?' she whispered.

'You do it. More seemly.' And with that he'd lurched out of the room.

'Abi said I was wanted.'

When Mary came in, the mistress was standing in the parlour like a thief, red-eyed, her hands behind her. 'Mary,' she said very fast, 'Mr. Jones—that is, we—have decided, my husband and I, that you deserve a whipping for your conduct today.' A birch rod emerged from behind her skirts. She toyed with it, as if it was some fashionable accessory she didn't know how to use.

Mary looked at her mistress very hard. They waited in a dull silence. Mary couldn't quite believe it. She hadn't been whipped since she was thirteen years old, and lost the penny through a hole in her pocket.

Mrs. Jones's words squeezed out painfully: 'What you did was very bad.'

'What did I do, exactly?'

The older woman's lips trembled. 'You laughed at Mrs. Morgan.'

'I meant nothing by it. I said I was sorry.'

Her mistress put her hand up to cover her mouth. Realising it still held the birch, she put it down again. 'It was the way you looked at her, when you were laughing.'

'I'm not responsible for my face, madam!'

But Mary knew this was bluster. When she had accepted the advance on her wages, back in the spring, she'd as good as signed herself over. Her back, her hands, her words, every muscle in her face.

'Your behaviour deeply offended Mrs. Morgan. It has probably lost us the year's most important business.'

'Well, she shouldn't have been so touchy,' muttered the girl.

'Oh, Mary,' said Mrs. Jones helplessly, 'what lady could bear to be looked at in that way, at such a moment?'

At this Mary couldn't prevent her mouth from forming into a tiny smirk.

'If you prove yourself to be a child,' Mrs. Jones said, in a stiff and borrowed voice, 'I must treat you like one.' She shouted loud enough to startle them both: 'Come in, Abi!'

Only when the maid-of-all-work came in, expressionless, and stooped over, did Mary understand. She was to undo the laces of her stays and bare her back, then put her wrists in Abi's hands and lean
her body against the curve of Abi's spine and give herself over to be whipped like a common convict. When all she'd done was laugh at the wrong moment! When the order had clearly come down from Mr. Jones, who wanted her punished not for today, but for the night when she'd lifted her skirts to him.

Mary didn't have to stand for this. All she had to do now was walk upstairs and pack her bag. She had more than enough money to take Niblett's wagon to London and make a new start.

But something held her. Maybe the habit of servitude. Maybe the stillness of the three women, like masked actors in a play. Or the look in her mistress's unfocused eyes that said,
Help me, Mary?

Mr. Jones stood with his ear pressed against the door, hard enough to make it tingle. As each blow fell in the little parlour he seemed to feel the wood shake. Nobody inside the room spoke a word or let out a cry of pain. His wife was not shirking the job, he could tell, even though she couldn't know he was listening. Whatever Jane set herself to do, he thought with appalled love, she did to the best of her ability. Even if the choice was not hers to make.

The strokes came hard and regular. At the tenth, there was a hiatus, as if Mrs. Jones had lost count, or more likely, he imagined, as if she was shaken by the sight of a speck of blood leaking through the girl's shift. But then came the eleventh, and finally the twelfth. The silence was a dreadful relief.

It was he who needed a whipping. Mr. Jones did know that, now he had calmed a little. It should have been him in there, baring himself to his wife's birch rod and begging her to lift the skin off him. He should have knelt at her feet and said,
I broke our marriage vows with a dirty whore, one you think of as a daughter.
And then he should have asked,
What can I do to repay you? What bargain must we make so we can go on?

***

Gall makes a poor supper.
That's how Mary's mother used to put it. And tonight Mary could taste bitterness going down like a nut, settling in her stomach. It planted itself, put down roots, and began to grow, nourished on her dark blood.

Alone in the attic room, she shifted position on the bed now. The pain forced a little gasp out of her. She reached behind her with shaking hands and started to undo her bodice. The stays took longer to come away. But she was damned if she'd cry.

What was it Doll had said once, waking out of a deep drunkenness on a winter's night?
No use getting fond of folk. They'll always let you down in the end.
Mary reached under the bed, wincing at the bruises and weals along her back. She scrabbled for her stocking, the little worm that contained all her hopes. She spilled its riches across the rough blanket, faintly cheered by their ring and shine. This was all that stood between her and all the other girls out there. This was all she could rely on: gold and silver and brass, firmer than steak between her teeth. She arranged her hoard in piles and made letters and numbers from them. They all spelled freedom.

The candle was down to half an inch. She was tired to the bone. Pain moved back and forth across her back, like lines scribbled through a sketch to strike it out. All at once Mary couldn't keep her eyes open. She let herself sink down on the bed, embracing her dragon's hoard. She wondered, would she wake with a heart turned to stone.

Mrs. Jones stood still. Not a sound from behind the door; barely a wink of light through the keyhole. She raised her hand to knock, but it was shaking. Her fingers still smarted from wielding the birch.

She pushed the door open, and for a split second before the draught snuffed out the candle she saw Mary Saunders, slumped across the bed in her shift, like a child who'd fallen asleep unawares. The small light glossed her dark hair before it went out.

Mrs. Jones heard a clink, and a half curse, and the scrabble of a tinderbox. 'No, please, my dear,' she began, 'I'm sorry—'

'Wait,' ordered the girl in the darkness.

When the candle had been lit again, Mrs. Jones stepped forward and sat on the very edge of the bed. There was a thin pillow between them.

'I thought it was Abi,' said the girl, very cold.

'No.' Mrs. Jones's voice was hoarse. 'Abi's to sleep with Mrs. Ash tonight. I thought you might rest easier with the bed to yourself.' She looked down at her closed fist. 'There's something I must say, my dear. Can you not guess what it is?'

Those eyes, like scorch marks on a sheet.

'It wasn't my own wish to punish you in that way. I know you meant no malice, with Mrs. Morgan...' She cleared her throat; the noise was deafening in the little attic. 'Well,' she said, very low, 'we have the same master, you and me both.'

That bold eyebrow, inching up again, putting a question mark after everything.

'Aren't we all servants, one way or another, Mary?' pleaded her mistress.

The girl put her hands down on the pillow and leaned very close to Mrs. Jones. 'Maybe so, madam. But some get whipped,' she whispered with hot breath, 'and some do the whipping.'