Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [104]
Devil take the man! Disappearing and turning up again like some kind of spectre. She hadn't caught a glimpse of him since they'd both got down from Niblett's wagon in the first week of January. Now here he was, landlord of the nearest tavern—and he knew her too, though she dropped her eyes at once and turned her face into her dark hood. Cadwaladyr's gaze burned against her cheek.
'She won't pay for the cider,' said the boy.
'Mark it down on the slate,' his master told him.
'I weren't to know which Mrs. Jones, was I?' he grumbled.
But Cadwaladyr shoved him away. 'There's a spill wants mopping in the cellar.'
Mary kept her eyes on the floor. All she could hear was the click of bone dice above the dull chatter.
Cadwaladyr stepped nearer as soon as the boy was gone. 'I know you, don't I?' he said very quietly.
She decided to go on the offensive. 'To my cost,' she said miserably.
The landlord leaned close, till his broad nose was only a few inches from her chin. His whisper was wet. 'No use playing the innocent with me, Miss. Not a week after Coleford but I came down with the clap!'
She looked back blankly. Her heart scrabbled like a rat in a cage. So it was true what Doll once said, then, that you could spread it long after your own symptoms were gone. 'Mr. Cadwaladyr, I have no notion—'
'You have something, though, because you set me afire with it,' he said in a rumble. 'I think you must be as arrant a poxy slut as ever walked the Strand.'
He couldn't know how close he'd hit. Mary's eyes scurried. She could have cursed this so-called clergyman for a lecher who'd deserved no better than he'd got, but she didn't dare provoke him. If he raised his voice to denounce her, she was ruined in this town. Already some drinkers were casting curious glances.
'That's a pound you owe me, for starters,' he added, a little louder.
Mary let her face pucker; her eyes glittered with tears. Frantically she searched for something that would make them spill over. She thought of Ma Slattery's cellar; of Doll, rotting in the alley. But still the water hovered behind her eyelids, as if these memories were only stories, horrors that had happened to some other girl. Until she thought of a night long ago, and said in the silence of her mind, Mother. Then tears slid down Mary's cheeks.
Her voice was choked; she leaned on the bar and spoke low in Cadwaladyr's ear. 'How dare you make such insinuations, after what you did to a friendless girl?'
She grabbed the tankard of cider and spun around before he could answer. She was out the door and halfway down the lane before she remembered her lantern was unlit. The night was black as tar; she had to fumble her way like a blind woman.
Her mind raced. Now Cadwaladyr knew that the girl who'd tricked and clapped him was living as a servant in Monmouth, surely he'd choose to speak out and ruin her? Perhaps the Welshman was passing on the story already, entertaining the bumpkins. Word would travel like plague in a primitive crow town like Monmouth, where there was rarely anything to talk about. The Joneses would probably get the news from the milkmonger, first thing in the morning
Damn, damn, damn the man.
She could lose her job, and worse. On the curate's word she could end up in the gaol on the outskirts of town, just for whoring.
If ever there was a time to run away, this was it. She knew she should have left with the first thaw. Now she'd have to pack her bag as soon as she got home, and slip out before morning to take the first cart going to Bristol. Time to start all over again.
Her feet were numb under the muddy hem of her cloak. A reluctance of the bones. Something weighed her legs down like a lead skirt; something quailed in her at the prospect of the journey ahead. Had her vision contracted that much, in the mere two months