Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [101]
Mrs. Ash hoarded the knowledge for a few hours. But when she passed the girl in the hallway, later in the morning, she held up one flat hand to stop her in her tracks. 'I know your crime,' she said, with no preamble.
Mary Saunders went a sickly kind of white.
'Shall I inform the mistress,' the nurse went on almost civilly, 'or would you rather make your own confession?'
The girl's jaw was jutting out. 'What have I got to confess?' Her voice shook with guilt.
Mrs. Ash stepped some inches closer. 'I know you despise us as peasants who've seen nothing of the world. You think yourself our better because you come from the City. As if we'd soil our shoes on the streets of that Gomorrah!' She found she was almost spitting; she paused for a second and licked her lips dry. 'But we're not so ignorant down here that we don't know the laws of the land.'
Mary tried to push past.
'Thou shalt not steal,' said Mrs. Ash in the voice of Moses.
The girl froze, and stared at her. 'Steal?' she repeated.
As if she didn't know that's what it was called! 'Doesn't the Scrap Act call it plain theft, to keep the odds and ends of any trade, whether for misuse or for sale? These'—and with a flourish Mrs. Ash dragged a fistful of bright fabrics out of the depths of her pocket—'these items belong to your masters, and well you know it. Silk, this is,' she said, flapping a triangle of bright blue, 'I know that much, and you can't pretend otherwise!'
The Londoner did something very odd, then. She didn't try to snatch the bits of cloth; she made no denials. Instead a look crossed her face that was something like relief. She put her head back and laughed like a girl who had no cares in the world. She had all her teeth, and they shone.
Mrs. Ash was left alone in the passage, her hands clenched as if with cramp.
In the wavering light of the candle, that night after supper, Mary's needle seemed to wink in and out of existence. Spots wandered across the worn linen, and for a moment Mary thought they were bloodstains. In the deep yellow candlelight an infinity opened between her eyes and the needle, and she couldn't remember which side of the cloth was up. To shake off this vertigo, she leapt to her feet to trim the wicks. She liked to do this before Mrs. Jones reminded her to. It gave her a flickering sense of being needed.
There was a knot deep down in her stomach. Nothing had been said about the scraps yet. She'd never heard of that wretched law—if it wasn't the nurse's malign invention. Had Mrs. Ash decided not to tell the mistress, or was she just biding her time, planning to expose Mary in front of the whole family? Mary could feel the nurse's eyes sweep over her, every now and then.
Mr. Jones read a paper in his shabby brown wing-chair; his eye-lids fluttered. Mary watched him from beneath the edge of her mob-cap. He sat so straight, so much like any other man might sit with his legs crossed, that it seemed to Mary not so much that his leg was gone as that it was invisible, tucked out of sight somehow. Her sore eyes felt tricked as they searched for the line missing from the picture. His muscled arms bulged at the cuffs.
Which bits of a man were necessary, she wondered? Mr. Jones seemed a whole man as he was, but what if he had no legs at all? Or no arms? If only his trunk remained, propped up on the couch, would he still be Mr. Jones? How much could a man lose and still be himself? What about his yard, she wondered; what would he be without that?
His eyes lifted to hers.
Hot-faced, Mary looked back at the candle she was trimming.
Mr. Jones cleared his throat with a great rumble and turned a page. 'These trading posts we're fighting the Frenchies for—I must admit I'm hard put to it to tell one from the other. Quebec, for instance; I wonder, is that one in India?'
'Such heathenish