Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue

  Mary remembered a big storm from her first winter on the streets, the elms broken down in Hyde Park, the drifts that blotted out doors and windows, that family that starved to death on Bedford Street before they were dug out. And the smell of chestnuts, hot in her hands, as she and Doll thudded along the frozen banks of the Thames.

  These days her master and she looked anywhere but at each other. He hadn't told yet, she was sure of that, but it could mean he was busy preparing his story. The mistress would surely have noticed something was wrong with him except that she herself was a walking ghost. It felt to Mary as if winter were knotting itself around them all again, and wouldn't be shaken off.

  On the last evening in May, when Mr. Jones had gone out to his tradesmen's club, Hetta begged for the Queen story. 'But that's a winter tale, my love,' said her mother mechanically.

  'It's cold enough for winter, Muda,' objected Hetta, squatting by the fire.

  So Mrs. Jones shut her prickling eyes and conjured up the details. 'The Queen of Scots wore a black velvet dress,' she recited as if from her own memory, 'all buttoned up with jet acorns, set with pearl.'

  Darning beside her, Mary nodded with professional appreciation.

  'Her veil was long,' Mrs. Jones told her listeners, 'and lace-edged like a bride's.' It soothed her to think of it, she found.

  'White?' asked the child, from Mrs. Ash's bony knee.

  'What else would a bride wear?' Mrs. Jones smiled at her daughter. 'Her shoes were of black Spanish leather, her stockings were clocked with silver, and her garters were green silk.'

  'How do you know?' asked Daffy suddenly.

  Mrs. Jones stared at her manservant.

  'I mean to say,' he explained in some confusion, 'how could—how was it possible for—for anyone to see her garters?'

  A snigger from Mary. Mrs. Ash made a choking sound. 'Shouldn't the fellow sit in the kitchen?'

  'He means no harm,' said Mrs. Jones.

  'Such a question to ask!' hissed the nurse.

  'The garters are a matter of public record,' Mrs. Jones hurried on, gathering her forces. 'Perhaps her ladies wrote everything down afterwards. Well now. They disrobed the Queen when she reached the centre of the hall, don't you know. She stood there in her petticoat—crimson velvet, with a crimson satin bodice, and red sleeves they tied on her to match.'

  'The colour of blood,' said Mary.

  'Indeed.' Mrs. Jones flicked an uneasy smile at the girl. 'And after the Queen had forgiven her executioner—and paid him too—she blindfolded herself with a white cloth embroidered in gold, and she covered up all her auburn hair.' She paused for a moment, so they could imagine the fiery hair being snuffed out. Mrs. Ash, Scriptures open on her lap, was pretending not to listen. Mrs. Jones's voice gathered force. 'Then the good lady knelt down, didn't she, keeping her back straight as a rod, and she placed her little white hands on the wood for a moment to get her balance.'

  'Was it all gory?'

  'Was what, Mary?'

  'The wood. After the last person.'

  'Would you let the woman tell the story?' barked Daffy from his corner.

  'That's all right, Daffy. I suppose the wood must have been a little stained.' Mrs. Jones stared into the embers, imagining the stains.

  'Go on, Muda,' said Hetta. 'What did Queen Mary do next?'

  'You know this bit,' said the mother with a faint laugh. 'Show us.'

  The girl slipped away from her nurse's side. She flung her head forward and her arms back, making the shape of an arrow.

  'Just so,' said Mrs. Jones approvingly. What a sharp girl her child was growing up to be. Gratitude, that was what was called for now. She wasn't childless, was she? Many had been taken but one had been spared.

  Hetta crouched at her mother's feet. One milky curl had come out of her cap; Mrs. Jones took it between her fingers for a moment before tucking it away.

  'Did they really chop off her head, then, Muda?'

  'It took three blows,' said Mrs. Jones, nodding seriously. Some said you should protect children from such knowledge, but in a world as cruel as this one they had to find out about such things sooner or later. And then the strangest thing happened,' she said, digging up a forgotten detail. 'The executioner threw her cap off and held her head up by the hair, and the next thing it was bouncing on the floor, but the hair was still in his hand.'

  Mary shuddered and turned her face away.

  'Her head fell out of her hair?' asked Hetta, her voice rising to a squeak. 'You never said that before.'

  'It was a wig, don't you see, cariad? A fine red wig to hide her poor head, which had lost its hair after all those years in prison.' Mrs. Jones could feel her voice break with the sudden sorrow of it. After all that, to end up bald!

  'I read in a history that they picked her head up again,' said Daffy quietly, 'and her lips kept moving for a quarter of an hour, but no one could tell what she was saying.'

  Mrs. Jones had never heard that before. The image disturbed her; those regal lips reduced to miming gibberish. 'All I know,' she said, 'is that Queen Mary went to the axe with grace.'

  'Like the first King Charles,' suggested Mary, 'wearing two shirts so as not to shiver on the scaffold.'

  'Exactly, my dear.' Mrs. Jones reached out for the girl's cold hand and squeezed it.

  'That Queen of Scots was a Papist, though,' objected Mrs. Ash.

  'Well, she was a brave lady, for all that,' said Mrs. Jones uncomfortably. 'And it's all a long time past now,' she added after a minute.

  'It was a bad cause she died for,' said the nurse under her breath.

  Sometimes Mrs. Jones couldn't imagine how she'd lived with this harridan for so long. 'To my way of thinking, Mrs. Ash,' she said quietly, 'the manner of her death is a lesson to us all to keep our heads high in times of trouble. Especially you, Mary Saunders,' she said, taking up the girl's chilly fingers again. 'When disaster comes you must remember your namesake.'

  'Which disaster?' asked the girl, a little nervously.

  'Ah, it comes to us all,' Mrs. Jones told her, with a little wheeze of laughter. 'It's only a matter of when.'

  When the mistress stood up she felt grief settle over her again like a cloak of lead. She went to close the parlour shutters and found it had been snowing all evening. As she watched, the air came apart, splitting into small diamonds which spiralled down as if glad to have loosed their bonds. For a few seconds each flake was unique and free, before it settled onto another and became part of the blanket of white the field was drawing up over itself. Every outline of an ungainly fence or rusting plough was smoothed over; every morass of mud and cinders was blotted out. Even the ruts John Niblett's wagon left on Grinder Street had turned ornamental; the snow picked them out like curls.

  That night in bed Mrs. Jones lay dreaming of snow. In this dream, all her work was done, and she lifted the latch of the kitchen door, letting herself out so quietly that not an ear pricked after her. She left her slippers behind; her bare feet were exhilarated by the snow, it sharpened their edges. Her new glass soles took her down the garden, following no path but the eddy and shift of the falling flakes. She paused to pluck a frozen apple from the tree; she ate it, filling herself up with sweet cold.

  Then she was sleepy and lay down behind the tree where every surface was cushion and sheet, pillow and blanket, below and above and around her all at once. She could feel veil after veil alight on her, weightless, sealing her in. Sleep burned along her arms and legs. She had never felt so pristine, so safe. Now she could sleep.

  In a little while, snow would have filled up her footprints; she'd left no trace. And this was the part Mrs. Jones wouldn't let herself remember in the morning, no matter how often she had this dream. It was morning and they were looking for her everywhere; everywhere a woman might be, but they didn't think to look at the bottom of the garden, where the snow was deepest behind the apple trees, where it had formed into drifts curving like white breasts out of the field.

  CHAPTER SEVEN
>
  Punishment

  THAT LAST freakish snow of May melted away overnight, and June came in warm and humid. At the Morgans' select card-party for the King's twenty-fifth birthday, it was said the ices melted to slop before they were served.

  All through June the weather was hot and still. Mary Saunders stayed at home every evening and waited for the end.

  What was there to stay for, in this wretched town, she asked herself? Daffy hated the sight of her. Mrs. Ash always had. Mr. Jones was wearing a face like a dented shield, and any day now he might break down and tell his wife what kind of girl Sue Rhys's daughter really was. Mary's nerves jangled in dreadful anticipation, and several times a day she thought of packing her bag and running away.

  But she found she couldn't do it. For one thing, she had nowhere else in the world to go. Absurd though it was, the fact remained that this was the nearest she had to a family. For another, she couldn't walk off of her own free will, not since she'd found Mrs. Jones down on her knees, bleeding out her last hope into a chamber pot. The woman was thinner these days, almost translucent. She needed Mary more than ever.

  As the weeks went by, Mary gradually let herself conclude that her master hadn't breathed a word, and wasn't going to. Whatever had happened between him and his maid, that night, he was evidently determined to forget it. He wouldn't be the first man who could wipe his memory clean of such things. But in any case Mary was unspeakably relieved.

  'Cider,' she reminded her white-faced mistress; 'you need some strengthening now or you'll be no use to your family.' So Mary went down to the Crow's Nest almost every night. There were plenty of travellers in summertime who wanted a quarter of an hour with Sukie in the room above the stables. The stocking under her bed was growing as heavy as a skull.

  For the whole month she and Mrs. Jones worked away on Mrs. Morgan's velvet slammerkin, trying not to stain it with their sweaty fingers. The silver thread glittered on the white, forming tiny hard apples and convoluted snakes. 'Wherever did she find the pattern?' asked Mary. 'I never saw anything like it.'

  'Oh, it's my own,' said Mrs. Jones easily. 'Mrs. Morgan asked for something on the theme of Paradise.'

  That afternoon Mrs. Partridge sent her footman down to say she had to have her paduasoy bodice and sleeves reversed and freshly ribboned in time for Midsummer.

  'But that's Wednesday, isn't it?' Mary asked Mrs. Jones. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, careful not to wet the needle. 'However will we finish the quilling on Miss Fortune's new petticoat too?'

  Her mistress's face was as pale as the belly of a fish these days, but she let out a faint laugh. Her thin hand lifted to rest against Mary's cheek for a moment. 'That's city time, my girl. You're still thinking like a Londoner. In the Marches we reckon our dates by the Old Style, which means true Midsummer's not for a fortnight yet.'

  Mary stared at her. 'You mean ... it didn't happen here?'

  'What didn't?'

  'The change,' she said in confusion. 'The new calendar. When I was a child—'

  'Oh, that,' interrupted Mrs. Jones with a mild contempt. 'Yes, the dates were moved about right enough, as the Government ordered. But you can't change time.'

  Her eyes were on her tiny stitches, and the silver thread winking round her finger. She didn't see Mary's strained smile. The girl spoke to Cob Saunders in her head: So, Father, I've found your eleven days. They were here all along.

  It was black night by the time the men started lighting the Midsummer Fire on the Kymin. The Joneses and Mary watched from lower down on the hill; Mary stood beside her master and mistress, holding Hetta, who had insisted on coming to see what her nurse called heathen nonsense.

  'It's to bring on a good harvest. The spark to start the bonfire has to come from oak twigs rubbed together,' Mrs. Jones told Mary excitedly. 'The men use nine different kinds of kindling!'

  Mary nodded, jogging the heavy child on her hip. She watched the first banner of smoke rise and waver around the ears of the crude wicker giant. He was propped up on the mass of old wood and animal bones at the very heart of the fire. The girl was very aware of Mr. Jones standing behind her, looking the other way, down into the town.

  How red the flames were in the small heart of the bonfire; redder than they ever got to be in the little hearth at home. Flame shouldn't be contained in a little grate, Mary thought; it should always be lit on a hill. Let the giant stretch and uncurl all his arms, now. Let the many-headed dragon lick herself awake.

  Around the shoulders of the wicker man the white smoke billowed, caught on the wind. Hetta coughed and yelped in delight. 'He's burning!'

  'That's right,' said Mary.

  The fire seemed to want to fly away with the smoke; flames broke off and floated for a second until they lost their wings and disappeared. It was as if the flames couldn't remember how to burn without the bonfire, without the branches and old bones anchoring them down. The wind shifted, the clouds reddened, and Mary's eyes stung in the massive heat. She had a craving to leap into the fire's embrace and let it turn her all colours.

  'Look you now!' said Mrs. Jones, jogging her elbow and pointing. The woven giant was burning grandly, his huge head engulfed in fire, leaning back at a reckless angle on the heap of flaming rafters. His neck must have burnt away, because suddenly his head came loose and fell. Mr. Jones seized Mary by the sleeve; she jumped at his touch, almost dropping Hetta. He jerked them out of the way as the ball of fire rolled past them, down the hill, spitting out sparks.

  'Thank you, sir,' Mary muttered, but her words were drowned out. The cider-scented crowd was cheering madly; it was as if some invisible St. George had beheaded the monster. The head moved brokenly now, setting the long grass on fire in places; three men ran forward to stamp it out. If they weren't careful the whole hill might go up, thought Mary. Now there'd be a fine sight. She imagined every withered blade of grass lighting its taper at the next, till the whole Kymin was one glorious flaming mound, a beacon that could be seen all the way to London.

  The drums had taken up the pipe's rhythm. Despite everything Mary felt a wild happiness rise up inside her; she began to jig on the spot. Hetta whooped with pleasure. 'Dance! Dance!'

  Mr. Jones's crutches dug a purchase in the soft grass of the hill as he moved up to his wife. His face was set in a rather ghastly grin. He dropped the crutches and began to hop in time to the drums, graceful as a hare. Mary watched him with wide eyes. Mrs. Jones let out a laugh without any mockery in it. She took his hands into her own and bobbed on the spot. 'Aye,' she called to Hetta, 'your Fafa was always a good dancer.'

  Hetta flung out her arms out to her parents. Mary moved over and set the child down. She took her mistress's hand, which was soft and damp from exertion. They were all dancing like a chalk circle round the child, keeping the night at bay. Mary took a chance and reached for Mr. Jones's free hand. She stopped when she saw his eyes, raging red in the firelight. All of a sudden he stopped dancing and bent down to pick up Hetta with one hand and his crutches with the other. He embraced her as if she were treasure. 'Time this child was in bed,' he said gruffly.

  'Oh, but Thomas, it's only once a year—'

  'Stay,' he told his wife. 'I'll take her home.' And without another word he was off down the hill, oddly graceless on one splayed crutch. Hetta clung round her father's neck, and stared almost drunkenly over his shoulder.

  Mrs. Jones stared after him troubled. 'I do think the child might have stayed up a little longer.'

  Beside her, Mary stood with her face in her hands. Her teeth were chattering as if with cold. What had she done to this family?

  'Mary, sweetheart, what is it? What ails you?'

  'I—I have to tell you,' the girl said all in a rush, sobbing.

  'Yes?'

  But confession was impossible, Mary discovered between one breath and the next. There was nothing she could say that wouldn't hurt her mistress worse than anything she'd already done. 'I'm not the girl you think me,' was all she could come out
with, hoarsely.

  Mrs. Jones's narrow face was entirely innocent. The bonfire crackled and roared behind her.

  'My mother ... I fought with my mother,' blurted Mary, improvising. 'Before she died. She never liked me. She never loved me,' she went on, a tear dripping into her collar. 'I wasn't the daughter she wanted.'

  'Oh, Mary.' The woman's face screwed up and Mary thought perhaps she was shocked, but then Mrs. Jones started to laugh, in a weak sort of way, holding her stomach as if it still hurt her, as if she was still bleeding inside. 'Oh, Mary, my love. We all fight with our mothers before they die.'

  'Do we?' she asked stupidly.

  'Of course. We only remember the fight because of the dying, see?'

  Mary's face was wet with misery.

  Mrs. Jones pulled the girl into her arms on the smoky hillside. 'There, there, cariad. Look now, I'll tell you a secret to make you laugh, will I?' she whispered into her ear.

  In this embrace Mary felt entirely safe.

  'Something not even Thomas knows?'

  The girl nodded, her face against Mrs. Jones's cool neckerchief.

  'Cob Saunders—your father—courted me long before he ever looked at your mother.'

  Mary looked up in shock.

  Mrs. Jones was wearing a little shamed smile. Her hand almost covered her mouth. 'He was all for marrying me and sweeping me off to the great city—but I was fearful. For all Cob was a charming fellow, you couldn't be sure of him. And when I let myself think of all that dirt and noise, and the thousands and thousands of strangers' faces—' Her spiralling voice broke off.

  Mary shrugged, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand. 'London's just a place like any other.'

  'Well, I'm only glad it wasn't me who went. Because while I was dithering, you see, didn't Cob take up with Su!'

  The girl let herself think about that. Was there no friendship in the world without treachery hidden at the heart of it?