Slammerkin (20 page)

'No,' she said decisively. 'None living.' And then the girl sat down on the very edge of the bed, and her eyes were so hard, like a gull's, that he realised she was trying not to cry.

That was a tactless thing he'd said, reminding the girl that she was alone in the world, with not a soul to acknowledge her as kin.
He tried to think of a civil way to change the subject. 'Was it a bad journey you had from London?' he asked.

Mary Saunders blinked once, twice, then sat up straighter. 'Vastly uncomfortable,' she said. 'Your roads don't deserve the name.'

Daffy gave up. He wiped his hands on his loose nankeen jacket and turned to go.

He'd reached the door by the time she went on—as if she couldn't bear to be alone—'We almost drove into a hole that was ten feet deep. There was a horse and rider drowned in it. The man was all green, still sitting in the saddle.'

Daffy nodded briefly before he turned away. He wouldn't call her a liar, not on her first day.

Mrs. Jones had always known she wasn't a lady. Her patrons—as her better-born customers preferred to be called—would probably have described her as a very good sort of woman.
Most genteel for her station, all things considered.
Today she was a little breathless. She showed her friend's daughter round the narrow house, trying to remember all the things a mistress should say to a new maid.

Winter light pried into the girl's dark irises, and her breath made a little cloud on the air. She must have got those eyes from her father, thought Mrs. Jones, and her height too. She had her mother's neat ear lobes, though, as well as the seamstress's thumbs. Her dusty blue gown and broad neckerchief suggested she didn't expect to be looked at, but she drew a person's gaze all the same.

Mrs. Jones tugged her apron straight, and in a moment of weakness wished she'd worn the one with the lace edging. Just to make an impression on the girl. To make her authority felt from the start. If she and her husband were ever to rise in the world, she had to learn how to be a good mistress, kindly but firm. 'Ten pound paid at the end of the year,' she told Mary, 'and a suit of clothes every Christmas, with bed and board too. Are you a great eater?'

Mary Saunders shook her head.

'Not that we'd wish to starve you,' Mrs. Jones added hastily. 'You look a little sickly.'

Mary assured her she was only pale from the journey. 'It was vastly cold.'

'Why, this is nothing!' said Mrs. Jones merrily. 'The winter I turned twenty, the birds were frozen to the branches. The price of bread was so high we had to...' Then she recollected herself, and folded her hands on her stomacher. She should have worn her good brocaded one. Oh Jane, for mercy's sake! 'You know how to wash and get up fine linen, I think, Mary, and do plain-work? I seem to remember your mother said that in her letter.'

'Yes.'

Mrs. Jones thought a maid should have said, 'Yes, madam.' But it was only a little thing, and the girl was new to service. 'Any household affair you may be ignorant of,' she swept on, 'I can soon instruct you. You have only to ask. For now you'll help our maid Abi with cleaning and such, as well as working with your needle alongside of me. All I require is that you be diligent, and neat, and...' She strained for another word. 'Honest,' she finished with satisfaction.

The girl inclined her head.

Mrs. Jones remembered a line from one of her novels that had an impressive ring to it. 'I can't abide deceit or any such nastiness,' she assured the girl, 'for if I catch a servant in a lie, you see, I can never depend on them again.'

Another nod.

'Oh, and I was forgetting, I have a book for you—' She scrabbled in her hanging pocket, and drew the worn volume up through her waist seam.
'The Whole Duty of Woman,'
she pronounced, putting it into the girl's hand. 'Most improving.'

Before Mary Saunders could thank her, a small child ran through the doorway, and Mrs. Jones scooped her up. Briefly she dipped her face into the child's buttermilk hair. 'This is Hetta, our darling,' she said, and then regretted the word.

The new maid smiled guardedly.

'Muda?'

'What is it, child?'

'Can I go out in the Meadow?'

'Not today, Hetta. It's still thick with snow. I named her Henrietta for the heroine of Mrs. Lennox's romance,' Mrs. Jones confided, turning to Mary Saunders and shifting the plump child to her other hip. 'I was reading it all through my confinement. The full of a fortnight in bed I was...' But then she remembered she was speaking to a girl of fifteen; she blushed faintly, and rested her chin against her child's hot round face. Hetta struggled in her arms; Mrs. Jones let her slither down her skirts. She straightened up and pressed her fists into the small of her back. 'Say good-day to our new maid Mary,
cariad.

At four, Hetta was generally wary of strangers. But when the London girl bent and extended one hand, Hetta seized and shook it. Mary Saunders's mouth loosened into a smile, and for a moment she was the dead spit of Su Rhys.

'You must be a good girl for Mary, my dear,' Mrs. Jones told her daughter gently, 'since she's just lost her mother. Can you imagine that?'

Hetta's grin slid away; she mirrored her mother's grave face.

'Gone off to heaven, the poor woman has,' added Mrs. Jones.

'In a chariot, like my brother?'

Mrs. Jones winced imperceptibly. 'That's right, my dear.' Turning to Mary she lowered her voice and asked, 'Your mother didn't suffer long, did she?'

The girl shook her head, mute.

Mrs. Jones covered her mouth with her hand for a moment. Listen to her, harping on the girl's grief. 'Well, my dear, if you be half as worthy a creature as poor Su, we shall get on very well together. Let you come downstairs now and meet Hetta's nurse. Mrs. Ash is ... a very Christian woman,' she added uncertainly.

The girl's thick eyebrows lifted; there was something almost ironic about them.

On the stairs, Mrs. Jones racked her brain for any further advice suitable to the occasion. 'Oh and snuff, Mary.'

'Snuff?' repeated the girl.

'I must warn you against it. A very costly habit and pernicious to the health.'

The girl assured her she never touched snuff. Was that the ghost of a laugh, behind those strangely familiar lips?

Mrs. Jones always heard her knees creak on the steep staircase. She moved faster. Forty-three wasn't so very old.

'Hetta is your only child?' asked Mary.

Had the girl read her mind? 'That's right,' answered Mrs. Jones lightly.

She still bled, sometimes. Forty-three wasn't impossible. There had to be the kernel of another child inside her. There had to be a son.

It was the longest morning of Mary's life. Dogged and straight-backed, she moved through her tasks in the order allotted. She'd never lived anywhere like this. Everything in the high, narrow, terraced house was to be cleaned over and over, it seemed, week after week. Susan Digot had never managed to ward off dirt this way, in their basement on Charing Cross Road where ants came up the walls every summer.

Not that Mary told Mrs. Jones that. She let the woman assume that Mary and her widowed mother had lived together in a quiet, respectable way until a sudden fever had carried off Su Saunders before she could make any provision for her dearest daughter except the letter she wrote her old friend. Whenever Mrs. Jones's questions probed too far, that first morning, Mary bent her head as if grief were welling up inside her.

The wretched woman seemed to feel that the best cure for a motherless girl was to be kept busy every minute of the day. There were so many petty rules to learn. At nine o'clock—after they'd all been up and working for two hours already—Mary was to ring the little bell for breakfast. She couldn't see the need for it, in such a small house, but 'the master prefers it,' Mrs. Jones explained; 'he says it raises the tone.'

On Mary's way to breakfast Mr. Jones overtook her in the passage, moving as lithely as any man. He swung into the tiny parlour and took the head of the table, next to the Chinese tea-kettle bubbling over its tiny flame. His oiled birch crutches lay under his chair like dogs. Mary had never eaten with a one-legged man before. She had to resist the temptation to bend down and look under the table at his stump, as if she were at a freak-show.

Brown curls escaped from the edges of the little manservant's short wig. At least Daffy was less unpleasant to look at than the dried-up wet-nurse Mrs. Ash, who hunched over the table to examine the newcomer. Mary glanced down nervously at her blue holland gown; she'd brushed the dirt out of it as best she could.

'Do maids wear hoops, then, in London?' enquired Mrs. Ash.

Mary swallowed her tea with difficulty. 'I was never a maid in London.'

'I see.' The words appeared like frost.

Mr. Jones tapped the table with his fork. 'Now, now, good Mrs. Ash.'

Good Mrs. Ash's grey skirts sagged as much as her breasts. Her chest resembled a salt-barrel, Mary decided. She couldn't be more than forty, but she had the manner of an old woman.

'We must all make Mary welcome,' the mistress added quietly. 'She's never set foot in her own town before, can you imagine?'

Mary tried to look grateful.
Her own town;
what nonsense. As if this misbegotten spattering of streets meant anything to her. And she'd be damned if she'd give up wearing her improvers, just to fit in with these country-dwellers!

Abi brought in the porridge, moving like a sleepwalker. Hetta babbled on about wanting toasted crusts instead, but the maid-of-all-work didn't seem to hear the child. She gave no sign of understanding English, in fact. How strange for her to have ended up here in Monmouth; she was the first dark face Mary had seen since the Strand. Mary watched Abi sideways as she served them, the coal gloss of her standing out against the whitewashed walls. She had cheekbones you could cut butter with. She disappeared back into the kitchen as soon as all the porridge was ladled into their bowls. Would she eat afterwards, alone?

'Is Abi an African?' asked Mary, once the door had shut.

'Oh, I don't think so,' said the mistress, sounding a little alarmed.

'On the contrary, my dear,' said Mr. Jones to his wife between two spoonfuls of porridge, 'Angola is in Africa, you remember?'

She slapped her head in reproach for her forgetfulness.

'We believe Abi's origins are Angolan, you see,' said Daffy, addressing himself to Mary, 'but she was brought up a Barbadian.'

What a strutting little scholar he was! What was it Doll used to say about bookish men?
Much learning, little prick.
Mary had to hide her smile. She tried to clear her mind of the thought, in case it might show on her face. All that was behind her now, she told herself. These days she had to think like a maid, in every sense of the word.

'Barbarian,' said the nurse suddenly.

'I must correct you, Mrs. Ash,' said Daffy politely, 'the word is Barbadian. From the land of Barbados.'

'And I said barbarian,' Mrs. Ash repeated. 'I've said it before, but it's no less of a sacred duty to say it again. No good can come of keeping a heathen at such close quarters with a Christian child.'

Hearing herself mentioned, Hetta bounced in her chair. As Mary watched, Mrs. Jones's face suddenly sagged with fatigue. 'Please, Mrs. Ash—'

The nurse interrupted her mistress. 'It's not my place to complain, madam, but I can't help but observe it causes perplexity and
confusion. The child is all eyes and ears. She ran in to me the other day, asking what colour our Lord might be!' Mrs. Ash's pale eyes stood out in her face.

Mrs. Jones's lips moved as if formulating an answer, but her husband put his hand over her own.

'I compassionated the woman at first, as was my duty,' Mrs. Ash ran on, 'but when I heard Daffy's father had offered to baptise her, and she'd stood out against it—'

The door opened and Abi drifted in with a tray to take away the bowls. The silence tingled. 'We do appreciate your concern, Mrs. Ash,' said Mr. Jones thoughtfully after a minute, 'and we'll speak of this again.'

Mary checked Abi's face to see if she had heard anything, but the maid's lashes were lowered.

'Yes, sir,' said the nurse, almost meek.

There was silence, then, after Abi had gone back into the kitchen. Mary watched the family avoid each other's eyes. It was like sitting down to a game of brag where she was the only stranger, and had no idea what cards were in play.

Mrs. Ash took out a tiny dog-eared Bible now. It was just like the ones given out at the Magdalen, but Mary pushed that memory to a distance. Her eyes caught those of the master.
(Is the leg all he's lost?
Doll wondered lewdly in Mary's head.) He smiled, but she didn't trust herself to smile back, in case it looked flirtatious. She made a mental note to practise the smile of an innocent orphan in front of the mirror.

The porridge sat on her stomach like stone.

A new rule of the house was that no matter what task Mary might be engaged in, she had to answer the door. Having a London girl in a lace-edged apron to greet the patrons clearly delighted Mr. Jones: 'It'll give such a genteel impression that no one will raise an eyebrow at our prices!' So even if he happened to be right behind the front door when he heard a knock, he would call in to Mary and duck back into the Stays Room.

But the first time she answered, that morning, it was not a patron at all, but a crowd of farm boys. They made the most peculiar noises as they dragged a dirty great machine, decked with white ribbons. Mary's first instinct was to shut the door on them, but Mrs. Jones hurried along the hall to stop her. 'It's Plough Monday, my dear; had you forgotten?'

Mary stared at her.

'Didn't your mother ever tell you about it?' said the mistress amazedly.

Mary watched Mrs. Jones hand a farthing to every stripling who had his muddy hand held out. One of them was done up in a skirt and apron, and was that rouge on his cheeks? What a strange part of the world this was, where mollies walked the streets in broad day! Another boy called the painted one Bessie. They started singing some bit of nonsense and pushed the molly-boy forward to give Mrs. Jones a kiss. Stranger still, it seemed to Mary—she let him.