Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [102]
'And I see here the Prime Minister has warned the American colonists that if they push the Redskins any further west it will come to blows in the end.'
'Imagine,' said Mrs. Jones vaguely, her eyes on her needle.
'There's news of a great fire in London, Mary,' the master added, peering at the bottom of the page. 'A street called the Strand; do you know it?'
It was all Mary could do to keep from crying out. She imagined the great porticoes, three times the size of anything in Monmouth, blackened by flame, and the Misses racing along the gutters, their light skirts pocked with ash. 'I do,' she said faintly.
Mrs. Jones looked up from her needle, blinking. 'What's London like, then, Mary?'
Where to begin? 'Well, all the streets are lit up, all the time,' Mary told her mistress. She knew she was exaggerating, but she had to, or she'd miss the truth by a mile.
Mrs. Jones grinned as if she'd heard a very good joke.
'Such a waste of candles,' said Mrs. Ash severely from her corner.
Mary didn't turn her head. 'No, they're oil lamps on poles,' she boasted. 'And the flames are every colour of the rainbow.'
'They can't be,' observed Daffy.
'Well, they are,' she said cheekily. 'Have you been there, that you know so much about it?'
'No,' said Daffy, very calm, 'but I'd wager I know more than you about the chemical processes of combustion.'
Mary rolled her eyes. Did he hope to dazzle her with syllables? What a curious fellow he was. They'd shared a house for more than a month, and had it ever occurred to him to so much as kiss her? Not that she'd have let him, but it did seem strange that he hadn't tried. Mary still wasn't used to being around men who showed no sign of wanting from her what all the others had wanted.
Mrs. Jones was still marvelling over the street lamps. 'Just to think of it!' Her small pupils held pinpricks of light.
Mary's lies got wilder after Daffy had gone off to his basement room with Botanical Curiosities of the Island of Britain and half an inch of candle. The others would never know the difference, she decided, so she could tell them anything. She had the impression she was conjuring London out of the hot musty air of the little parlour. She claimed, among other things, that the streets were so choked with Dutchmen, Mohammedans, and Indian princes that you could walk for half a day and never see a plain English face.
'Mohammedans, really?' asked Mr. Jones with interest.
'Thousands of them!' Mary added that fine ladies wore trains ten yards long, with spaniels taught how to carry them in their mouths. Fighting bucks duelled every hour of the day in St. James's Park, so the air rang loud with their steel, and the grass was dark with blood. She even did the street cries for the family's entertainment, in her best Cockney accent: 'Noo great cockles, sprats, lamprils!'
'Foyne warsh-ball, come buoy!'
'Cherry roype, red pippins!'
'Ave ye any corns on y'toes?'
She made them laugh, all except Mrs. Ash, who'd gone off to bed in the middle of Mary's description.
'London's not half such a place in my romances, though,' said Mrs. Jones puzzled. 'There it's all paying calls and buying gloves.'
Mary gave her a startled glance. She should have remembered Mrs. Jones was a novel-reader. Lying about her past had become such a habit, Mary found it hard to stop. She let out a contemptuous puff of breath. 'Pugh! Authors!' she said. 'They don't see the half of it, cooped up with their pens all day.'
'Very true,' said Mrs. Jones, nodding. 'I can almost see why your father and mother took themselves off to London. It must have been a thrilling sort of life, at times.'
Mary almost wanted to slap her for her foolishness. Why did the woman believe everything she was told?
She tried to imagine them together, her grim-faced mother and this woman whose voice was always rippling up and down, whose small pointed face never stopped moving. But for that Mary would have needed to picture them before their lives had split like two paths in a wood. To see her mother as she'd been when she was a girl