Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [10]
'And look what came of it,' said William Digot with satisfaction.
Mary broke away. The door crashed shut behind her. She could hear the boy send up his thin scream.
The sky was covering over with darkness like a rind on cheese. All down Long Acre the lamps spilled tiny circles of yellow; the oil released plumes of smoke. In the distance the Covent Garden Piazza was a dazzle, loud with the sound of violins. But Mary wanted to stay out of the light.
Once she turned up Mercer Street the shadows thickened where the lamps had been smashed. In the parish of St. Giles, it was said, the locals didn't like a spotlight shone on their doings. Mary's breath came quick and shallow as she ran along the slippery cobbles. She was glad she hadn't worn her shoes; she told herself that she had nothing worth stealing, nothing worth anyone's while to hurt her for.
At the Seven Dials, there were only a few harlots standing about on this warm May evening; the girl with the scarred face wasn't there. Mary stood against the central pillar and scraped her hands till the grease and down of the pigeon was gone. The stone left lines on her palms. Nobody paid her any attention. Her hollow stomach folded in on itself. Faint light leaked from a nearby cellar, along with the click of dice. The damp air was falling round her; it must be nearly nine o'clock. Round and round the pillar she went, craning up and counting the seven blind dials, until she lost count.
Mary had nowhere to go but home, so she set out in the opposite direction. Her stomach rumbled; she was filling up with rage again. If her mother thought Mary was going to settle for the same sort of gritty-eyed, bleached, half-buried, half-life—
The peddler was leaning in a doorway off Short's Gardens. Mary only recognised him when she came up close. She was almost as tall as him these days, she noticed with a shock. A reek of gin clouded him, and he made a skewed sort of bow as she came up close.
He lifted his huge eyebrows and took a drink from the dark bottle in his hand. 'The schoolgirl,' he said with a wet smirk.
'Is it still a shilling?' Mary's voice came out hoarse as a crow's.
'What?'
'The ribbon, sir. The scarlet,' she repeated stupidly.
The man opened his coats as if to remind himself of the one she meant, but without a light there was no telling one colour from the next. He pursed his lips; he seemed to be trying to remember. 'One and six,' he said at last.
Mary's eyes stung from straining through the twilight. 'But you said—'
'Times is hard, my dear. Getting harder every day.' He leaned on the word. It sounded like a riddle, but Mary couldn't think what the answer might be. 'One and sixpence,' the peddler repeated, letting his coats fall. 'Or a kiss.'
She blinked at him. He grinned back, his teeth faintly white.
Then the girl Mary Saunders had never known herself to be took a step closer.
The old man's tongue pushed past her lips as if looking for something, a buried treasure. It tasted like a burnt thing. It thrashed like a dying fish and bruised the roof of her mouth. She thought she might choke.
When he backed her against the wall, Mary didn't scream. What surprised her was the dull absence of surprise. 'Hush now, hush now,' he slurred in her ear, and she thought she remembered her father saying the same words, one stifling night when she couldn't sleep. Now the peddler's hands were full of her skirts and his bristling face was grinding into her forehead as if to leave a secret mark. The darkness covered them like smoke. Mary held her breath so she wouldn't make a sound. Somehow she knew that she'd stepped beyond the point of screaming. Somehow she knew that no one would save her now. 'Hush,' said the old man, more urgently, as if to himself.
She didn't whimper even when a stone in the wall pierced the skin of her shoulder. It was over in minutes. Little pain, no pleasure. Just a sudden vast stretching and