Slammerkin (12 page)

Mary's eyes moved down the queue, picking out Misses from Ruineds. ('That's what the good girls are called, Ruineds,' Doll had said derisively. 'Tell anyone who asks, you was pure as snow till some gentleman took advantage.') The Ruineds had a bruised, bewildered air about them. One wore a little pearl cross around her neck, and clutched it as if at any moment she might be transported to a better world.

By now the thin November sun was high in the sky, drilling into Mary's eyes. She should have worn a straw hat, but the only one she had was red, with a broken feather, and Doll said they'd never let her in with that on, so Mary had had to leave it behind in the garret with all her other favourite things. It wasn't that she didn't trust her friend, exactly; what troubled her was the thought of robbers, a fire, or any of the thousand things that could steal away her stock of glad-rags.

Dressing, this morning, Mary hadn't been sure whether it would be better to look like a respectable Penitent, or a wretched one. She'd put on the plainest jacket and skirt she had, but she knew she still had the mark of a Miss on her. Was it the satin shoes, with their worn points? Or just the way she stood, a little too practised, her hip too far out? She couldn't remember what innocence looked like. She tried to conjure up a memory of herself as a charity schoolgirl, her face blank as paper. No use: all gone.

A stir in the ranks; the tiny Miss in the torn slammerkin had keeled over in the gutter. Mary craned to see. After an uneasy moment, five women rushed to pick her up. Were they trying to prove their kind-heartedness, Mary wondered? Two porters in fat grey wigs walked out with a padded stretcher. They carried the little girl along the whole length of the queue. Her lips were blue. The great doors shut again behind her.

'That one's a sharper and no mistake,' muttered a sunken-checked woman in front of Mary.

Mary grinned and began to answer, but the cough doubled her over and took all the air from her lungs. That was a neat trick, fainting in the gutter; why hadn't she thought of that? Doll would have. Mary would have had nothing to fear if only Doll Higgins were with her. 'Why don't you come along too, then?' she'd complained, as she got up before dawn.

But Doll had lain back on their lumpy straw mattress and let out one of her cackles. 'Catch me letting them lock me up in there!'

Mary tried not to think about the locks. She tried to remember why she was here. For medicine for her cough. For food she wouldn't have to earn. For shelter in the worst of what was shaping up to be a brutally cold winter. The Magdalen was the only place in London a girl like her would be taken in, and all she had to do was persuade some do-gooders she was ashamed. That was all they asked.

Her mouth filled with sour water. It occurred to her at this point to walk off, to give up the place she held in this four-hour queue and make her way back across the city to the Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street for a pint of small beer. Only the thought of Doll's face twisted with rage kept her feet frozen to the ground. 'All you have to do is keep your head down for a couple of months and save your damn skin,' Doll had told her, towards the end of their argument. 'You ever heard of a better bargain?'

A rumour came down the line now: 'They're not taking but one in five.'

Mary's mouth set in a hard line.

Another message passed from ear to ear, faster this time: 'They like you barefoot.' Girls started plucking off their shoes and throwing them in the gutter. The woman in front of Mary was barefoot already; her toes stood out like worms on the hard ground. Mary glanced down at her own satin pumps. Five shillings she'd paid for them, at Bartholomew's Fair; they'd been practically clean, then. She was damned if she was going to throw them away before they had so much as a hole in them.

As the queue inched its way between the high panelled doors, Mary listened hard. It was important to have a story, she realised; something for the clerks to write down, something that sounded well. Three women in a row ahead of Mary—Drury Lane Misses, the lot of them—all claimed to be ladies' maids whose masters had tricked them with promises of marriage. Others lifted their stories from ballads, French romances, and even a recent trial. Mothers were all dead in childbirth, it seemed, and fathers all at sea.

The only honest words Mary heard were spoken by the woman just in front of her, who Mary reckoned was toothless from a mercury cure. Mary bent closer to hear what she muttered. The woman didn't bother acting. She told the clerks she'd always walked the streets, but at her age she couldn't earn her dinner anymore.

The younger clerk gave her a chilling look. 'Is that all you have to say for yourself?'

She nodded tiredly.

The older clerk wiped his pen.
'Application refused,'
he recited, writing in a huge leather-bound account book.
'Petitioner too hardened to reclaim.'

The woman pushed past Mary blindly. She spat on the doorpost on her way out.

Mary's chest was hammering. Her turn. She tried to cough, to exhibit her neediness, but she could only produce a faint clearing of the throat.

'Name?'

'Mary Saunders,' she said, before it occurred to her to lie. Her deep hoarse voice made the younger clerk glance up at her. She curtsyed, to soften the impression. She watched the older clerk scratch the words in the right column.

'Age?'

'Fifteen,' she said softly. It was true, but it sounded like a lie. Maybe fourteen would have been even better.

'Reason for application?'

'If you'd be so good as to put down whatever you think fit, sir,' she whispered.

A pause. Then it worked; the words rolled out like a prayer.
Most Gracious Governors,'
the clerk murmured as he wrote,
'this Petitioner has been guilty of prostitution and is truly sensible of her offence. Her penitence is equalled only by her resolution to begin a better life.'

The worst of it was the surgeon. Behind a thin curtain he laid Mary flat on her back and stuck his fingers in her privates, 'to discover your state of health,' he claimed, not paying a penny for the privilege. Nasty fingers, too, studded with warts.

'Any itch? Any whitish running, or yellow?' he asked. Any stoppage of urine?'

'None, sir,' she said, trying to sound as if she had no idea what he meant.

He didn't believe her, she could tell. He went on peering between her legs and muttering. She didn't think there were any marks of her old ailment, though. She was tempted to kick him in the face, but she supposed that might damage her chances. Then he stood up and looked in her mouth, for mercury scars, she presumed. Thank God she'd never been poxed; that was harder to hide than the clap.

Mary had a feeling they were going to take her. She could smell her luck turning.

One week later, she lay in her narrow bed in the ward and reminded herself what a lucky slut she was. So why did she keep wanting to cry?

If she had stretched out her arm she could have touched the sharp back of Honour Boyle in the next bed. Honour was a Devon girl; the Piazza used to be her beat till she had a child born half-formed, and she sickened of the trade. She wasn't a bad sort, but she was no Doll Higgins. This ward was the one for Misses of some education. They could all write their names, in here; not that they'd much call to.

Steps in the corridor; Mary recognised Matron Butler's pacing feet. The Matron had sad eyes and such a high hairline, her forehead seemed to bulge with the burden of her knowledge. She didn't trust any of the Misses, which in Mary's book meant she was no fool. The Matron reserved her mercy for the hapless Ruineds, who got the occasional basket of fruit from Lady Subscribers and had the best ward at the top of the Hospital, with a view all the way across Goodman's Fields to Tower Hill.

Mary had missed the Guy Fawkes bonfire. She hadn't been outside for seven days. She hadn't felt sun on her face except through glass.

The Magdalen was the biggest building she'd ever lived in, and the cleanest. No matter how long she lay awake and listened in her bleached sheets in the scrubbed ward, Mary couldn't hear so much as the scurry of a rat. None of the clutter and filth of the city could get through the Magdalen's great doors. None of the news, even; none of the noise. This was a silent world of its own, sealed off from the real one. A convent, or a cage.

The Penitents knelt in chapel every day and twice on Sundays, being preached at by the Reverend Dodds. As for their costume, Matron Butler explained that there was to be nothing in excess, nothing for beauty's sake, nothing to which any visiting Subscriber could take exception. Every girl wore the same low-heeled shoes, the same worsted stockings; even the dull green of their garters had to be hidden by the roll of stocking over the knee. Two quilted linen petticoats and one under-petticoat apiece; no more, no less. Their gowns, were all thin shalloon wool, the colour of dust; their aprons were bleached to muttonbone. The sleeves they buttoned on in the morning all had the same lawn ruffles at the elbow—one row only, for fear of vanity. Their long, fingerless mittens, their stocking purses, their needlecases, were all absolutely uniform. Decency, above all: the linen neckerchief had to be tucked into the stays so as to cover every inch of skin, and the cap had to seal off the hair dressed low in a bun, without a curl.

The greyness appalled Mary's eyes. It left a taste of ash in her mouth. At night she squeezed her eyes shut and dreamed of walking the Strand in her reddest quilted petticoat. When she woke and put her hand to her unpainted face, it felt dry as old paper.

But she knew enough to be grateful. Meat and greens at nine and one every day in the clattering refectory; nothing too tasty, 'nothing spiced high enough to inflame the female constitution,' as the Matron put it dryly, but it was all solid food, and all for free. The Penitents had to say prayers before and after meals, but Mary was used to that from school; she'd have chanted the almanack if she'd been told to. The tea was only powdered sage, but at least it was hot. When they were served collops of beef, that first afternoon, Mary's plate held as much as her whole family would have dined on, back on Charing Cross Road.

She kept her eyes half-shut and got through the first days like a sleepwalker. She ate, she slept; her cough began to ease. Even her chapped lips grew smooth.

Matron Butler constantly had to remind the Penitents not to glory in telling tales of their former lives. What Mary found so silly was that they were expected to forget the trade, while living cooped up with dozens of other whores! The Matron's eyes darkened with concern as she addressed them before breakfast: 'This is your great opportunity to shed the past and start afresh.' Otherwise the rules were simple:
No drink, lie-a-beds, swearing, gaming, quarrelling, or indecency. No one is kept here against her will.

It was the drink Mary missed most. After a week without so much as a pint of burnt wine to warm her stomach, she felt always on the point of running away. The water they were given smelled fresh, but it was like drinking nothingness; Mary felt even emptier afterwards. The idea was to wipe the Penitents clean like slates, she knew, and to make them start again from scratch. The plan was to make them forget who they were.

But she had promised Doll to give it a try, and strings of ice were hanging from the eaves outside; the winter was proving just as bad as the fortune-tellers had predicted. Mary burrowed under the blanket and thought of the other Petitioners: the ones turned away for being too old, too poxed, too bad at faking repentance. She wondered how many of them had a roof over their heads tonight. Not that she'd spare a tear for them.
Every girl for herself,
as Doll always said.

What was that other line of Doll's?
Never give up your liberty.
How grand it sounded. And now, on her advice, here was Mary Saunders, a Magdalen fallen and lifted, lost and found, undone and restored—and locked up tighter than any bawdy-house girl.

The workroom had fallen silent. Matron Butler held out the needle, point up.

'I don't sew, madam,' repeated Mary, a little louder. She coughed violently against the back of her hand.

'You must understand, Saunders,' said the Matron gently, 'that there is nothing else for you to do.'

The girl tightened her folded arms.

'It is certainly unfortunate that you've not been taught this most useful of female skills,' Matron Butler went on, 'but it's never too late to make a new start, as Reverend Dodds likes to remind us.'

Mary glanced up. Was that a hint of irony?

'The Governors,' the Matron said in her official voice, 'wish the Penitents to acquire the habit of industry by means of shirt- and glove-making for persons of quality who are kind enough to extend the Hospital their patronage.'

Mary nodded, bored.

Matron Butler leaned her pale fists on the table and spoke, soft and urgent. 'It's also a chance for you to earn honest wages by honest work for the first time in your life.'

Mary could hear the anger sing in her blood. As if she didn't know what work meant. How easy it would be to cause a minor riot now, in this over-packed chicken coop! She could break a few heads, tear a few skirts, get herself kicked out and be back in Rat's Castle with Doll before nightfall.

But the thought of Doll steeled her: she had promised to stay till her cough was gone. So, after a long minute, Mary took the needle between finger and thumb. Its tip was sharp. She thought of what damage it could do.

The Matron set to teaching her plain-stitch. Mary thought of a plan: she would be such an incompetent needlewoman that after a day or two the implement would be taken away from her for good. She meant to scratch her thumb and cover her square of linen with brown smears.

She never anticipated that halfway through the morning, as she watched her needle duck in and out of the cloth like an otter in a stream, she would feel pleasure like heat in her fingers. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she caught Matron Butler smiling, but when she glanced up, the Matron's head had turned away.