Slammerkin (17 page)

She thought of Mr. Armour's companion, the old man with inky fingers.
No no, my dear, it won't do,
he repeated in her head. The words tapped like delicate hammers.

It is true.
It won't do.
It is true.
It won't do.

She couldn't be a Miss anymore, Mary suddenly decided, not without her friend to turn it into a lark. Not after sleeping two
months on clean sheets. There had to be something better. This was no life at all, without Doll.

She crept along by the river, keeping out of sight of anyone who might know her, and might feel like earning sixpence by telling Caesar where she was. In her bag she found a muslin scarf to pull over her head and face. The water slid along like ale down a giant throat. The cold bent her knees; one false step and she might topple into the freezing waters. Every Londoner who'd seen the boatmen hook a corpse bobbing arse-upwards and draw it in—laughing, as you had to laugh when you hooked that fish, or you'd howl—every Londoner knew that life need last no longer than you could bear it. But Mary wasn't sure it would work today, the water being so thick with ice. If she jumped in she might be held up, snagged like litter, borne slowly away.

'Excuse me, but they say you go to the city of Monmouth.' The near horse threw up its tail and released a dollop of shit. Mary pulled back her skirts just in time. This blue holland—that she'd bought from a stall and changed into down a narrow alley—was the only sober gown she'd got; everything depended on keeping it clean.

The driver withdrew a pipe from his blackened mouth. 'What if I do?' He pushed his crumpled hat out of his eyes and looked her up and down.

Mary stood very straight. Did he know what she was? How could he spot her for a Miss, when she'd got a broad handkerchief tucked into her stays, and a clean white cap under a brand new straw hat? Her face was scrubbed like a child's, without a trace of paint, not even a rub of ribbon red. But was there some sort of brand on her, even now she had left it all behind?

'Where
is
Monmouth, exactly?' she countered after a moment in her deepest voice, nerves making her sound angry.

He grinned back at her. No, he had no idea that she was anything other than what she seemed. That's the one thing the Magdalen had done for Mary, it occurred to her now; where else would she have learned to play this part?

'France,' said the driver at last.

Mary's forehead contracted. France was over the sea. Surely her mother would have said if she'd ever crossed the sea? 'That's not in England,' she said warily.

He let out a great laugh as if it'd been stuck in his throat for some time. 'Naw,' he said, 'it's in India.'

She turned away.

'No more jesting, sweetheart.'

She glared over her shoulder. 'I doubt you could find Dover in a storm.'

'Monmouth,' he said equably, 'is in the Marches.'

'The Marches,' she repeated, as if she knew what that meant and didn't believe him.

'The Borders. Wales, nearly.'

Mary felt a little sick. Her mother wasn't Welsh, surely? She should have listened more closely to Susan Digot's stories.
Myself and my friend Jane,
they began, or
Back in Monmouth,
or
When I was the age that you are now
... 'Wales is not in England, is it?' she hazarded.

'Naw, my dear,' said the driver. 'Wales is where England runs out.'

Soon she was shivering in a corner of the wagon. She should have spent her money on a blanket instead of a dress. The driver called this thing a coach, but Mary wouldn't dignify it with the name. She'd never been in a coach except for trade—'Twice round the park, fellow, and mind the potholes'—but she knew exactly how it should be. Velvet was essential; seats should be sprung and padded; bevelled glass should catch the flare of the street lamps. This thing Mary found herself in now was nothing but a great box on wheels, with eight sluggish horses waiting to haul it. A crack in the frame to her left let in a whistling wind, and the windows held feather-fans of mud.

The driver's name was John Niblett; she hadn't told him hers. This coach was the only one for a fortnight. 'Your luck's in, ain't it,' he remarked, 'to find anything going your way on New Year's Day.'

But Mary thought this might turn out to be the worst idea she'd ever had in her life.

She knew this much in her bones, she couldn't outrun Caesar in London. To stay out of range of his whetted blade for half a day already must have used up what was left of her luck. If she wasn't past the city gates by nightfall, she was sure, she'd be found in some corner of the Rookery, carved up like a Sunday joint, with her limp lips in Caesar's pocket for a souvenir. If she stayed to bury Doll, there'd be two of them stretched together in the Poor Hole.
Forgive me?
she asked in her head, but there was no reply. She simply had to get out of this city. Escape from who she'd been and who she might have become, from the future awaiting her at the end of an icy alley.

Till a few hours ago, the last place it would ever have occurred to her to go was the city her mother came from. What Mary had told the Matron at the Magdalen last night about a job waiting for her in Monmouth had been a lie, plucked out of the air. She only meant to spin a touching story of the welcome always kept warm for her in the household of her mother's best friend. The Jones woman could be dead and buried for all Mary knew, or she might have forgotten the very name of Susan Saunders. Who'd take in the daughter of a friend she hadn't seen in twenty years? What kind of fool would open her house to a stranger?

But it was this simple, when it came down to it: Mary's old life had slipped through her fingers. She couldn't think of anywhere else to go but Monmouth, nor anyone else in the world who might take her in but a woman she'd never laid eyes on.

All aboard,' bawled John Niblett to the passers-by. All aboard for Hounslow, Beaconsfield, Burford, Northleach, Oxford, Cheltenham, Gloucester, Monmouth.'

Along the Strand the coach crawled in the fading light of the afternoon, more slowly than the strollers and their cullies. Traffic had
clogged where a gang of apprentices were playing football, their stockings muddy to the knees.

Niblett had said the journey would take nine days. Mary hoped that this was another of his jokes. He wouldn't laugh so loud if he knew how little she had in the rolled-up stocking she used as a purse; a bare fifteen shillings, after buying the blue holland gown. She had no idea how her money was going to stretch to food and lodging on the road, as well as Niblett's fare at eightpence a stage—but she couldn't afford to worry about that now. Her numb fingertips felt for her bag under her skirts. Niblett had offered to put it up behind, but Mary wouldn't hear of it. She'd weighted it with two cobblestones to make herself seem like a woman of substance, but she feared he might hear the stones lurching about beneath her folded dresses.

The wagon jerked feebly. Opposite Mary sat a merchant, his belly bulging out of the front of his fur-edged coat; he planted his knees on either side of hers and grinned. A pair of farmers, husband and wife, were folded together like nutcrackers, beside a runny-nosed student and three underfed journeymen. Riding up top with Niblett, saving his pennies and freezing his arse off, was a fellow with the lean chalky look of a schoolmaster.

As the coach turned up Pall Mall, a sedan chair cut across its path, borne by two footmen sweating into their liveries. Shoppers lingered on the street as if they'd forgotten what they needed, and blinked and stepped aside only when Niblett cracked his whip. And there, outside a milliner's, was the carriage of Mary's dreams: a butterfly in green and gold, resting on gigantic wheels. She pressed her face against the window to catch a glimpse of the rouged, wide-skirted creature descending from the step. She stayed in that position, though it made her neck ache.

Through the thick muddy glass she caught fragments of arches, grassy squares, pale columns, and marble window-sills. The merchant cleared his throat and pointed out new houses off Piccadilly. 'They say the Duke of Devonshire's is the
nonpareil.
He leaned
forward to point out Berkeley Square, and his other hand hovered just beside her knee, brushing against it when the wagon hit a stone. Mary shot him a frozen stare. He withdrew it, as if a mousetrap had snapped his fingers. It worked, she thought with amusement, this acting the prude.

As they creaked past Hyde Park, Mary glimpsed frozen water, and a pair of lady riders in tricornes trotting along its rim. When they passed the Tyburn Tree she made sure to observe it blankly, as if she didn't know what it was; as if she'd never bawled and cheered, never bought an inch of hangman's rope for the price of half a fuck.

'Madam?'

The merchant was speaking to her. Mary tried to remember if she'd ever been called that before in her life:
Madam.
He was leaning forward again with a sheepish smile, offering a small green bottle. Mary flinched. Had she let the mask slip? Had he guessed what she was?

'A sup of port, to ward off the chill?' he said.

She shook her head before the words were out of his mouth. And then she sat there with her eyes shut, taunted by the warm whiff of wine on his breath. She could have drained the bottle in one go.

Even when the road was clear in front of them, the wagon moved at the pace of an old man; this was clearly the best these spavined animals could do. She'd be quicker walking all the way, Mary thought grimly. But when she opened her eyes next, London was beginning to ebb away. She'd always had the impression that the city went on more or less forever, but already there was nothing left but a quilt of muddy gardens. The villages they passed were puny: Paddington, Kilburn, Cricklewood. Mary shut her ears to the merchant's chatter about population and trade, and kept her eyes on the world outside the brownish windows.

One day she would come back. She was sure of that much. One day when she'd nothing to fear from Caesar or hunger or the freezing night air. She'd ride into London again, not in this filthy cart
but in her own gilt coach behind a pair of black mares to match her hair, with her own liveried men running alongside with torches, and trunks full of finery lashed on top. She'd live in a brand new pale-faced house in Golden Square; she'd look down from a window so high that people in the street would have to strain their necks to catch a glimpse of her.

'My dear Lady Mary,' he'd call her. A Jewish merchant, maybe, like the one in
Harlot's Progress
prints; they were said to make the most civil keepers. (The first time Mary'd had a Jew-man, she'd laughed out loud in surprise to see his yard all bare-headed.) Or she might have a husband by the time she got back to London; you never knew. She tried to imagine herself on the arm of a husband. Somehow she couldn't see it. But one thing was sure: she'd never have to empty her own pot.

Idle fantasies kept Mary going for the first few days, as the roads began to crumble and the wagon shook its passengers as if they were falling into fits. As the smell of bodies filled up the air, Mary shut off all her senses and breathed through her mouth. She lived in a dream of classical colonnades. Beyond the window the mud stretched away in silence, streaked with ice. On the third afternoon they passed a gibbet on a hilltop. Mary peered through the glass at the tarred body swinging in its iron cage, and tried to work out which bit had been its face.

Every morning she expected some hint of thaw; the passengers talked of little else but when the weather would break. Never in her life had Mary known such cold. Always before she'd been within reach of a source of heat: a tavern hearth, a cup of hot negus, a handful of roast chestnuts even. But this wagon inched across the country as naked and unprotected as a cow. Mary couldn't walk around or stamp her feet; she could only sit still. Her legs went numb from the toes up, till she had the impression they'd disappeared, and if she lifted up her skirts there'd be nothing there.

A peculiar memory nagged at her. When Mary was a child, in the worst of winter, her mother used to heat a stone in the embers, wrap it in a rag, and give it to her to take to bed. Once the child put it between her thighs, and after a moment bliss began to fill up her body like water in a cauldron, and a tiny fish leaping. But she must have made a sound, because her mother asked what she was doing, and she said, 'Nothing,' and shoved the stone down to her feet.

Occasional fliers clattered past the wagon, now; Mary watched them speed into the distance.

'It's well for some as can change horses every sixty miles,' said a journeyman sourly.

'If Niblett put the whip to his,' muttered Mary, 'we might move a bit faster.'

'You should rightly be on the other coach, then, if you're in a hurry.'

'What other coach?'

The journeyman let out a laugh that showed his browned teeth. 'The one as gets to Monmouth in three days.'

Niblett always took the slow road, Mary learned, to her immense irritation. And not because of the age of his mares, but his itch for trade. Stuffed under that sacking at the back of the wagon was London ware: patent cordials, printed cottons, ballads and books. The fellow stopped to haggle in every petty town along the way. He always bent and roared in the window to tell his passengers where they were, but the names meant nothing to Mary. She sat in the corner and chewed her lip furiously. Her money was draining away like water in a sieve, and it was all that buffoon's fault for taking the slow road.

She queried the tavern bill at Northleach and got two shillings knocked off it; she stopped handing out the usual tips to cooks and chambermaids. In consequence she slept on damp pallets and ate lukewarm dinners. At Oxford the silent student gave his nose one final wipe on his black cloak and got down. The inn there was the dirtiest Mary had ever seen, and when she asked—in a discreet
murmur—for whatever was cheapest, they served her a leg of fowl so grey that she was running to her pot all night. The maid who came to empty it in the morning held out her cupped hand out pointedly, but Mary stared right through her.