Slammerkin (11 page)

Much later, after the music was over, the night turned chilly. Mary found Doll with her head in a uniform's lap, helpless with gin, laughing so violently she seemed in danger of choking. 'Excuse us, soldier. Time we were getting home,' said Mary, hauling on Doll's hand.

Her friend yawned and grinned guiltily. 'Got the fare for two, ducky?' she slurred. 'Because I must admit—'

'Oh, Doll! Not again!' Mary looked pointedly at the soldier, but all he managed was to turn out his pocket, which held nothing but crumbs.

So much for a holiday. Mary left them on the bench and went off down the long gravel walk, to where the lights ran out, and the path branched into a sort of maze, and gauzy figures stood around waiting. Trade was poor; it took her half an hour to find a cully. He had lace cuffs that hung to his fingertips, and a clammy, unhealthy look to his neck. But she got two shillings off him, which took herself and Doll safe home across the river with drinking money to spare.

When Mary tried to be witty, these autumn days, it came out sour. Doll had taken to calling her Miss Crab. 'Have a go at Miss Crab here, but mind her claws,' she'd say, shoving Mary into some cully's arms; 'you might wake up missing a bit!'

These days the pair of them didn't stroll the whole length of the river just for larks anymore. Instead, they'd taken to meeting for a snifter and a gossip in a dead-end alley behind Rat's Castle. There they could rest their bones on a heap of bricks and pebbles someone had hidden and never come back for. Mary and Doll ducked down that alley whenever they got word that the Reformation Society had sent out their men.

The strollers had no fear of the city constables, who spent their time in exhausted pursuit of thieves and murderers, and rarely bothered a girl at her honest trade. But the Reformation bullies were hired by their Society to do nothing but stamp out vice, as they called it. One night in early October Mary didn't move fast enough. When the cry around Seven Dials turned into a chorus—
Reformers, it's the bleeding Reformers!
—she was engaged in finishing off a buttonmaker by hand, in a doorway in Neal's Yard. She tried to run, but the men cut her off at the top of the yard. They had sticks with metalled ends, and they were fast runners. They shouted at the cullies, calling them sinners and whoremongers, but they arrested only the girls. Mary was one of about twenty Misses rounded up; she went quietly, wary of the sticks.

At the Dials, she couldn't see Doll in the crowd; she knew she should be glad of her friend's escape, but she could have done with her company. The rumour was going round that they were all to be committed to gaol. Panic locked Mary's throat. Some of the drunker Misses were whimpering already.

Mary heard her friend before she saw her. 'Get your base paws off me, you scurvy rogues!' Doll Higgins was being dragged up Mercer Street, struggling in the grip of three Reformation constables like a sail in a rough wind. Her bodice was torn open, showing one creamy breast, and she had a fresh cut on her jaw, but she was enjoying herself hugely. 'Call yourself Christians?' she bawled. 'Don't make me laugh!'

Mary was afraid for her and wanted to make her stop, but Doll was in full spate. 'There's girls here not thirteen years old,' she raged, sweeping her hand over the crowd. Her finger alighted on Mary, and she gave her a wink. 'That skinny thing there, for instance; twelve years old and barely a week on the town, poor wench. Would you drag her off to Bridewell too, you filthy dogs?'

The head Reformer stepped up to Doll, almost respectfully, and backhanded her. Mary heard the crunch of his knuckles against her cheek. Doll subsided into silence. She winced, and spat out a bit of tooth.

Mary did get to go home that night; all the younger girls were let off. But those the Reformers called the
hard cases
were put in fetters and led off to the Bridewell, down at Blackfriars.

For two nights Mary didn't go out on the streets except to ask for news, but there was none. She stayed in the garret and waited, chewing the skin off her thumb. Sometimes, she knew, girls came back from the Bridewell with slit noses as a perpetual mark of their crime.

On the third morning in stumbled Doll Higgins, her back all scabby from the lash but her nose as pert as ever. 'You missed a bit of an adventure, my girl,' was all she'd say. Mary washed her friend's stripes with gin.

All in all, Doll was the worse for wear these days. She gave every sign of running out of jizz. That scar that had once stood out bold and brash—when the child Mary used to watch out for the beautiful harlot at the Dials—now sank into her cheek like a furrow. Mary tried to get her to eat a good dinner, but Doll only had a taste for the old blue ruin. Mary feared her friend might end up like that woman they'd seen one night, staggering down Fleet Ditch in search of her children, too addled to remember where she'd left them, skidding on scraps of offal left behind by the tripe men. Last winter, Doll had stood between Mary and all harm, but now more often than not it was the younger girl who had to keep an eye out for the elder, if there was any trouble, and help her up the shaky stairway of Rat's Castle at four in the morning, the boards groaning as if they'd collapse any minute.

Worse than that: Doll had broken her own rule. She'd started pawning her clothes. She was often short, on rent day. 'I haven't your head for figures,' she'd complain. If Mary hadn't the money to cover for both of them, Doll would haul herself out of their fusty garret in the late afternoon with a bodice or shawl, go down to stalls on Monmouth Street and stroll back boasting she was rich again. She claimed she had enough in the way of silks and satins that surely she could trade a few in, at this stage in the game. Mary had never heard anything stupider. Even the sailors knew how much clothes mattered; that's why, if they wanted to punish a Miss for poxing one of them, they docked every scrap she wore with their knives.

Sometimes Mary bought Doll's things back for her from the pawnbroker's the next week, at twice the price. Her friend barely noticed. 'A girl's clothes are her fortune, Doll, isn't that what you've always told me?'

But Doll only laughed and said she looked better naked.

One night, in the Royle brothers' cider cellar, Doll let slip that she had just turned twenty-two. 'When?' asked Mary, suspecting she was lying so the Royles would buy her drinks.

'Yesterday.'

'You said nothing.'

Doll shrugged. 'I was soused; I've only just remembered.'

Nick Royle was a cheapskate, so all he did was propose a toast and lift his glass high.

'No toasts,' said Doll, wrenching at his arm.

Nick got cider all down his sleeve. His brother squeezed the cloth and sucked it like a baby. Mercy Toft laughed, lunatic-style.

'What's the matter with you?' hissed Mary to Doll.

'No toasts,' said Doll grimly. 'Forget I said a word. Aren't we all dying fast enough?'

In candlelight she stood as magnificent as ever, but at noon her face hung like pale leather. There were tuppence bunters on the street as old as thirty, Mary knew; one of them was half mad from the mercury she'd taken to cure her syphilitic pox. If you were still there at forty, it was under the ground, not over it. Mary wasn't going to stay past the age of twenty; she promised herself that much.

That gave her five years. In the meantime she was spending every spare penny on clothes of her own. It seemed to Mary these days that there was nothing else you could place your trust in. Clothes were as lasting as money, and sweeter to the hand and eye; they made you beautiful and others sick with envy. On Sundays she went off to Hyde Park to see what the quality were wearing these days as they rode about showing themselves off; her eyes sought out the tiny details of pleats or buttons, the altered curve of a set of new hoops. Once she'd dragged Doll out of bed to come with her, but Doll had ended up making a scene and frightening a baronet's horse.

Mary could hardly remember that she herself had ever been a shy girl. Now she could haggle with the best of them at all the stalls from the Seven Dials down to the Piazza at Covent Garden; the traders knew not to try their tricks with her. At night when she couldn't sleep, she consoled herself with the inventory of her possessions. She had sleeves, bodices, ruffles, and embroidered stomachers, a brown velvet mantua and a cardinal cape. She owned a spray of silk daisies and a black ribbon choker, one silk slammerkin in violet and another in dark green. Doll had taught her all she could, but Mary's taste was finer. She was saving four yards of oyster grosgrain she'd got cheap from the pawnshop; someday she'd have it made up into a wrapping gown any duchess would give her eye-teeth for.

Something would turn up, for her and Doll both. You never knew. There was no use worrying over a future that might never happen, because the end could come as quick as a wink. The other night a warm wind had blown up and the sign of the Blue Lion fell down on Tilly Denton's head. Caesar had been her bully-man; he buried her handsome enough, as the girls agreed, and they all made sure to be at the graveside, as a mark of respect. (Not to poor Tilly, so much as to her pimp; you wouldn't do him an insult if you valued your skin.) But a decent burial wouldn't be much consolation, Mary thought, if you were snuffed out as quick as a taper.

The cough came with the first frost in October. Mary ignored it. Soon it was her constant shadow, pressing on her chest when she walked uphill, nagging at her on and off all day, raising its voice at night. 'Shut your mouth,' moaned Doll, tugging the edge of the mattress round her head.

Mary's voice had always been deep but it was huskier and darker now, with a hint of a growl. It made some cullies nervous. She tried to smile instead of speaking.

It was going to be the worst winter in years. All the signs said so: birds, berries, the fortune-tellers' coffee-grounds.

The Magdalen was Doll's idea. Weren't they all? 'Mary, old muck-mate,' she remarked one day, 'you'll not last the winter.' They were walking the Drury Lane beat, curtsying to gentlemen actors and pursing their lips at everything in breeches. Where Mary's skirts were tucked up on one side as the mark of the trade, cold wind dug in. She doubled over with a whoop and hawked up blood, red and yellow against the slithery mud of the street. Ugliness covered the world. She stared down at the mess, as if divining her future.

Doll stood over her, hands perched on hips like hungry birds. 'You ought to take that to the Magdalen Hospital, so you should.'

'I'm not so sick I'd risk my life in a hospital, thank you,' gasped Mary.

'It's not a real one, lack-wit,' said Doll with a snort. 'That's just the name. It's meant for getting young chits off the town before they end up raddled old jades like me.'

Mary grinned back at her, wet-mouthed.

'Think of it!' said Doll. 'Free bed and board through the worst of the winter. Liz Parker went in like a bag of bones and came out fat as ham.'

Mary tried to speak, and started coughing again. When she finally caught her breath she said, 'Doll-Doll, I'm no penitent.'

Doll's eyes rolled, and she jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the theatre behind them on Drury Lane. 'So you ain't picked up nothing about acting, all those times I took you to the play?'

The wind rose, and Mary pulled her taffeta scarf over her mouth. She turned for home.

Doll ran along beside her. 'You can't say I'm not right.'

'I'll think about it,' whispered Mary, holding in her cough.

'You'll do it. I'll see you do. If I don't, may my next sleep be my last,' finished Doll triumphantly.

Mary stopped and looked at her hard. 'And what about you?'

'What about me, then?'

'What about the rent?' Mary didn't know how else to put it. 'Mrs. Farrel's no liking for Misses. She'd put you out soon as look at you, if you fell behind.'

Doll's gaze was icy. All of a sudden her face was an inch from her friend's. Mary tried not to look at the scar, frilled like lace, dusted with powder. 'Don't you fret about Doll Higgins, dear heart. Never needed you in the first place, did I?'

So on the first Thursday morning in November, Mary wiped off every trace of paint before she set off—her stomach in a reef knot—to walk right across the city to Whitechapel.

'Night-night,' mumbled Doll from her pillow.

Mary didn't know what to say. She stood in the doorway, and waved her hand, but Doll's eyes were shut.

Mary'd never gone quite so far out of her home beat before. She had to ask the way to the Magdalen Hospital three times, and she imagined the East Enders who gave her directions looked a little askance. What an odd thing, that posing as a Penitent shamed her more than walking the streets ever had.

The Magdalen Hospital was an imposing block of stone. Hours after the line of Petitioners had formed, it still stretched along two sides of the building. There had to be forty girls here, Mary reckoned, and she was about halfway along. The downstairs windows were all shuttered—to stop the Petitioners from seeing what went on inside, maybe. A man in some kind of uniform walked up and down to keep them in order. He seemed like a servant, but they all bobbed their heads to him just in case he turned out to be important. Mary pulled her shawl so tight her shoulders turned in, and edged a little nearer to the railings. Was that Con March from the Rookery? Mary gave her a tentative nod, but the other girl avoided her eye.

Mary shifted from foot to foot in the cold morning air, her breath like a cloud around her. A huge cough went through her like an earthquake. It was lucky that she was used to standing round on street corners; how well she knew that feeling of sending down roots between the icy cobbles. Hadn't she often taken on a cully standing up against a frozen wall, or let herself be bargained down to ninepence just to get indoors?

She amused herself now by eyeing the other Petitioners. That tiny girl in carmine and a torn lace-edged trollopee, she was definitely your Covent Garden stroller. The one beside her looked poxed to Mary. If they spotted the disease, Doll claimed, they'd send the girl off to the Lock Hospital, where the food was the worst.