Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [105]
It shocked Mary, what she thought then. What she discovered, as she picked her way across the cobbles by the muddy radiance of the stars, was that she wanted to stay.
Every morning that week Mrs. Jones and Mary embroidered Mrs. Morgan's white velvet slammerkin, while the light was good and their eyes were fresh. The mistress had decided not to put the girl to help Abi with the housework, anymore; Mary's hands were too good to wear out on the back of a scrubbing brush. When the pair of them were working away side by side, hour after hour, Mrs. Jones had the curious sensation that they were not mistress and maid but equal helpmeets, almost.
Already they had their customary exchanges, their small jokes. 'Wherever did I put that needle, Mary?'
'In the waist of your apron, madam.'
'That's right!' Mrs. Jones plucked it out as if she'd never seen it before. 'What would I do without you, Mary?'
'Sit on a needle, madam.'
She said things to Mary that she'd never have thought suitable if she'd stopped to consider the matter. 'It was our neighbour Sal Belter told me how to get a boy,' she confided one morning.
'Didn't you get him the usual way, then?'
'Oh you cheeky thing.' Mrs. Jones felt herself going pink to the sharp tip of her nose. 'What am I doing, talking of such matters to a green girl?'
Mary kept her head down, making minute, regular stitches.
'I lay on my right side, look you now,' the mistress went on in a murmur, 'and I made Thomas lie on his left, and so the child was begot in the right-hand chamber and was a boy.'
Mary frowned at her sceptically. 'Did you not do that for Hetta, then?'
'Oh, I did indeed. I did it for them all,' Mrs. Jones assured her, 'when I remembered, any rate. Three of the others were boys.' She heard her own voice go bright and thin, like glass. At least I think it was three; one of them, you know, it was too early to tell. The first of our boys lived till he was six,' she added briskly.
'He did?'
'Then he caught a fever in the coal pit.'
'Where's that?' asked Mary after a minute.
'In the forest, beyond the pastures. Maybe I shouldn't have named him Orlando. It was a burdensome name for a wee boy.' Mrs. Jones stared at the point where her needle pierced the deep softness of the velvet. 'But Thomas blamed the bad air in the pit. That's why he never let our Grandison out to work. We'd lost all the others by then, you understand. Thomas said Grandison would be different,' she said, a little wildly. 'He would learn his lessons and preserve his health and grow up to be a gentleman and a credit to his family.' She was shaking slightly now, like a post in a high wind.
Mary kept on sewing, but looked up at her mistress after every other stitch. She reached out one hand and rested it on Mrs. Jones's skirt.
Mrs. Jones squeezed the girl's slim fingers. She looked at her with brimming eyes, and gave her a twisted smile. 'Don't mind me,' she said under her breath. 'I'm a fond and foolish woman.'
Mary changed the subject now, giving Mrs. Jones a chance to get hold of herself. 'What sort of a man is Daffy's father?' she asked casually.
'Cadwaladyr? Oh, I couldn't say.'
'I thought you knew him?'
'I do, Mary; that's why it's hard to sum him up in a phrase. Poor Joe,' she said with a little sigh. 'He's looking jowlish these days. Never had anyone to look after him, see. He didn't marry till he was past thirty—some woman from beyond Abergavenny, a stranger to us all—and then didn't she die in childbed the very first year! They had to cut the boy out of her, I heard,' she added with horrified relish.
'So Daffy never had a mother?'
Mrs. Jones shook her head. 'He and his father had to knock along together, though I did what I could for the mite, and had him in to play in the shop many a time. I fear that's where he got a taste for the business.'
'Ah,' said the girl. Mrs. Jones could see the rapid intelligence in her dark eyes. 'So when he grew up—'
'He announced he wasn't going to bide alongside his father in any smelly old tavern; he meant