Slammerkin (48 page)

Late on Twelfth Night, darkness covered the whole sky like spilled pitch. The guards were drunk; they still hadn't come to bring the prisoners up to the night room. Mary was standing by the window, wrapped in half a blanket against the cold. The only light came from a lantern in the corner of the cell where prisoners were crammed around a game of dice. The yellow radiance spilled into the night and was lost. Mary couldn't feel her fingers; one hand was knotted in her blanket, the other was wound in and out of the bars. If she stayed here any longer the guards would have to tear her away like ivy, her brittle fingers snapping as they were pulled free.

She became aware at last that what she thought was the sound of sheep outside the town was a chorus of voices, almost erased by the wind. She heard men's voices, coming nearer, but couldn't make out a word of their song. Then the music broke off, and for a moment there was nothing but the shuffling of feet on the cold road below the gaol. Mary pressed her head against the bars, but couldn't see a thing in the darkness. The sky pushed against her eyes. There was a thumping on the door below.

What reared up in front of the window was a nightmare Mary had never had before. The horse was pure white, clothed not in hair but bone. Its teeth were bared in fathomless delight. Its body was a cloud, rippling in the night breeze. So it had come for her at last, thought Mary, the white horse in her dreams of riding triumphant through a crowd. The great jaw opened and shut with a clang of bone.

She must have screamed without hearing herself, because all of a sudden the window was full of prisoners, jostling for a view. Mary was crushed against the bars, her ribs registering their print. She
bent her foot against the wall, but the crowd wouldn't give. Her body swayed back and forward with each surge and shove. Barely an arm's length from her, the horse's glittering sockets held her gaze.

'It's the Mari,' cried an old man behind her.

And then the song rang out and was carolled back again, from behind her this time, all around her, in the hoarse voices of condemned men, and Mary could hear the bells and tambourines from below, the answering chorus. She didn't understand a word of it. It was as meaningless as the crunch of bone when the horse's jaw lifted and fell—on a stick, she saw now. Beneath the great beast's paper ears, green ribbons swung like reins, and its eye sockets were full of broken glass. It began to prance; suddenly she could distinguish the man inside it, his feet like an insect's beneath the bleached sheet trailing in the mud. He was surrounded by his fellows, mud-faced, bawling louder now, one with a fiddle, another dressed as a hag, all of them dancing in spirals like men pursued by bees.

When the song ended the mummers held up their caps, and pennies began to rain down from the prison's tiny window. Soon enough the singers drifted away. The crowd thinned and started moving back towards the town; the fiddle dwindled to a far-off squeak.

Behind Mary, the old man was pressing his head into her blanket. She turned and shook him off. His face was a riverbed of tears. He spoke to nobody in particular. 'Never thought it,' he whispered. 'Never thought I'd live to see them taking out the Mari again.'

Then the guards came to herd them into the night room.

The Saunders trial was set for the first day of the Monmouth Assizes in March of 1764. Mary hadn't been outdoors in almost six months; on the cart that brought her from the gaol into town, she kept her eyes screwed up against the white spring light. She hadn't slept or eaten for a few days; consequently she felt nothing but a numbness. The grass was wet under the rattling wheels. What was that prayer she'd learned at school?

Oh Lord who can all things renew,
Scatter my sins as morning dew.

Spring slid into Mary's nostrils; the fields were spread with dung.

The courthouse on Market Square echoed with voices and shuffling steps. When all the benches were full of respectable townspeople, the guards had to bolt the doors to keep out the rabble. Mary limped into court between two guards.

Only when she heard him did her head go up. Mr. Jones, on his feet, shrieking higher than a woman, his fingers pointing like icicles: 'Killer! Killer!'

The judge's hammer had no effect.

'Killer!'

The guards had to muscle him out. Mary watched mutely, but felt a spark of life start up in her chest. To be hated so much, that reminded you that you existed. She could hear Mr. Jones's screams leaking from the passageway.

The lawyers were most interested in the details of what they called
this most horrid crime.
Injuries on the neck of the deceased consistent with the infliction of two, three, or four blows? Five pounds, three and sixpence, confiscated from the prisoner; in what coinage?

Only late in the day did they get around to asking why. 'Turning now from means to motive,' said the judge on the right, clearing his throat with a phlegmy rattle. 'Mary Saunders, have you any justification whatsoever to offer for your heinous actions?'

Save yourself, you silly bitch,
urged Doll in her head. So Mary's mouth opened and she began to rant like a madwoman. 'Yes, sir. I do, sir. I am a poor miserable abused creature, sir.'

One white eyebrow went up.

She told the court that Mrs. Jones was the cruellest of mistresses; she'd whipped Mary raw, stuck needles under her fingernails, and stole her dead mother's legacy. Mr. Jones had forced her to lie with him every night, given her a foul disease, and threatened to chop her into pieces. Mary shrieked and wailed, telling the court
about all the horrors that went on behind closed doors on Inch Lane.

The crowd oohed and ahhed, but she could tell no one believed a word of it.

At last Mary sank back into numbness. She had nothing more to say.

The judge on the left suddenly woke up and rubbed his watery eyes to peer at her. 'Is there any respectable person of property to testify to the prisoner's character in court?'

She shook her head.

'Has the prisoner shown penitence?'

Mary knew this was her last chance. It was like Petition Day at the Magdalen. These men didn't want truth, they just wanted a sob story. But when they wrote down your life in their books, the terms were always theirs.

'Any shame, or remorse?'

Mary chewed her lips.

'Do you not hang your head and weep?' the judge asked her fretfully.

She cleared her throat. 'Sometimes.'

That was evidently not the right answer.

'When you weep,' he prompted, 'is it with true regret, or merely pity for yourself?'

'Regret.'

'What do you regret, then?'

Mary's neck hurt from looking up at him. She knew from gaol gossip that if you could only make them feel sorry enough for you, they might just commute your sentence to transportation to the Americas. But when she tried to imagine such a country, her mind went blank. She thought of Abi, bent double in the noonday sun, bundling canes. Her breath was shallow now. She spoke honestly, as if to herself. 'The slammerkin.'

'Speak up!'

'I regret the gown.'

'Which gown?'

'A white velvet slammerkin, with embroidery in silver thread,' said Mary slowly, pedantically.

'The one you were wearing when arrested? The one belonging to Mrs. Morgan?' asked one of the lawyers.

'Belonging to me.'

'How so? How so, belonging to you, prisoner?' he repeated.

'I embroidered it.' Her words ground themselves out slowly. 'I earned it.'

'You killed your employer for the sake of a garment?'

A long hiss went up from the crowd. Mary tried to remember the moment when Mrs. Jones had ripped the dress from her shoulder. She shrugged, suddenly too tired to explain.

'Was it for the money it would fetch?'

Her head was spinning from the bright lights of the candles on every wall. The lawyer blurred before her eyes. She was melting, draining away. He didn't understand. None of these moneyed men did. Their robes were trimmed with the finest fur and they didn't even notice. Mary hadn't spoken so many words in a row in months. She cleared her throat and made one last attempt, speaking gruffly: 'She shouldn't have tried to take what was mine.'

'Who is this person you speak of?'

Mary tried to say the name of the dead woman, but her throat closed on it. All she could repeat was, 'It was mine.'

Their faces were blank as coins. The lawyers and judges in their dusty black cloaks asked her no more questions. They squabbled like birds.

'Surely no one will dispute, gentlemen,' one began, 'that if a priest kills his bishop, or a wife her husband, or a servant his master, then the crime is accounted by natural law as a sort of treason, insofar as it reverses the natural order of authority. Thus the girl must burn.'

'But Mrs. Jones being not the master,' another objected, 'but only the wife of the master, the crime is simple murder, and the girl should merely hang.'

A yawn; the judge on the left had woken up again. A conciliatory voice emerged from a mass of chins. 'Gentlemen, what if she were to be hanged first, and then burnt?'

Judicious nods all round.

Mrs. Ash kept a tight hold of Hetta's hand, so as not to lose her in the crowd that was forming in Market Square on the morning of the execution. The child's fingers wriggled, but her nurse gripped them all the harder. She smiled tightly as she watched the narrow mouth of Stepney Street for the cart that would bring the prisoner down from the gaol. Mrs. Ash's lips moved in time with the Divine Word:

Her end is bitter as wormwood,
sharp as a two-edged sword.
Her feet go down to death;
her steps take hold on hell.

At least this death would have a meaning, unlike so many others, she thought. Its message would be spelled out as clear as the bold-print moral in a book of fables: justice was always done in the end.

The nurse's back was tired. The family had been waiting in Market Square since dawn. The family, meaning, what was left of them: herself, Hetta, and Mr. Jones. Daffy the manservant had got himself another position with indecent haste, and Abi the slave had run off without the least Christian compunction. In Mrs. Ash's view they should have published a hue and cry for her, but Mr. Jones couldn't be persuaded to take the trouble. 'Let her go,' he'd mumbled; 'let them all go.'

What was left of the family would wait the whole day if they needed to, so long as they saw the girl hanged in the end. Waiting was Nance Ash's strength. During the six months that had passed since her mistress's death—a time of shocks and losses—she had kept the little flame of hope burning. At least now she was waiting for a question to be asked, after so many years of simply waiting.

Under her sparse lashes, she looked up at the man beside her. Mr. Jones stood as rigid as a post; his crutches seemed to be leaning on him, instead of him on them. The child waited between the two adults. They formed a perfect triangle.

The words were very near, Mrs. Ash was convinced of it. They were building up, as if behind a membrane. Any day now Mr. Jones would put the question. It might come bluntly, or as a delicate hint; it might sound flat, or bring tears of relief to her scratchy eyes, but surely she'd recognise it when she heard it.

Or should she begin, she wondered? Men were such cowards.

Hetta wrenched her small hand out of the nurse's sticky grip and hid behind her father's leg. Mr. Jones glanced down, absently.

'She needs a mother,' remarked Mrs. Ash, seeing her chance.

Pain ran across the man's face like a lizard.

Briefly she regretted causing it, then pressed on. 'I'd not intrude on your grief, my dear Mr. Jones, but have you ever considered...'

Had he considered her? Ever? Had he for one moment of the years they had lived under one roof truly considered Nance Ash, noted her many inestimable qualities, her worth, beyond rubies?

She ploughed on. 'For the sake of your child. Of your children,' she faltered, 'not yet born.'

He stared at her, the skin around his eyes almost black. 'You think I should take another wife, Mrs. Ash?' he said, his tone indecipherable.

She nodded deeply. She couldn't let herself seem too enthusiastic. 'That may be God's hidden plan.'

Mr. Jones shrugged, as if his Maker's views were neither here nor there. His eyes had returned to the carpenter on the scaffold; he lifted Hetta high onto his shoulders to give her a better view. After a minute, he said, 'All I know is, I'm no good alone.'

Mrs. Ash's mouth curved into a smile, then she swallowed it. 'Have you given any thought—have you met with any woman who has the qualities you seek?'

Now. It had to come now.
The labourer deserves the fruit of his toil.

'As it happens, yes.'

A pause, a lifetime long.

'I've spoken to Rhona Davies. The dressmaker, you know,' said Mr. Jones flatly, his eyes on the scaffold. 'We're to wed in June.'

A sword in the heart.

Mrs. Ash turned her face away so he wouldn't see it break. Hetta stared down blankly.

Our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.

'Hush now, Hetta,' he told his restless daughter, letting her down for a minute and giving her another bit of gingerbread. Blinded by the crowd, she stumbled as they pushed against her, and gripped her father's crutch for support. Mrs. Ash, her face in her hands, didn't seem to notice. Surely she wasn't weeping for Mary Saunders? How strange, Mr. Jones thought: such misapplied tenderness in a dry old peapod like her.

Hetta still clung to his birch crutch, smoothing the wood with her thumb. Without this small sticky-faced child, he thought, there would be no purpose to anything, and he might as well go down to the banks of the Wye. It would be quite deserted; everyone was here in the Square this morning. He could let himself fall into the rushing river, let the weed drag him under the current.

Mr. Jones put that thought to one side and went back to making plans. He considered certain incontrovertible facts. Rhona Davies was twenty-seven years old, and a perfectly good seamstress, though not known for fine embroidery. She would in all likelihood make a perfectly good wife. It couldn't be easy for a woman to run a business on her own, he supposed; certainly she had jumped at the chance of a partnership with the widowed staymaker, said yes with no coyness or prevarication.