Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [111]
Mary rolled her eyes. 'Mrs. Jones and I can cover skirts in glorious flowers, without any need to go out in the mud to see them.'
'Pugh!' he said rudely. 'Little neat stunted things, you embroider, all the same shape, and flat as thread. That's not nature.'
She shrugged, her collarbone moving like cream in the gap where her kerchief had loosened.
Daffy ran to and fro, picking flowers to fill her apron. Red campion, which wasn't red at all, he explained, but pink like the inside of a lip. Bugle, which sounded like music but was made up of little spikes of purple blue. After hooded vetch came a small pale thing he called cuckooflower, though some said lady's smock, and others, milkmaids.
'What need has it for three names?' she asked.
'What need have you for three dresses?'
'You mock me.' Mary walked along, staring down into her apron. 'Nine,' she said finally.
'Flowers?'
'Dresses. That's if I count a bodice and a skirt as one.'
He let out a whistle, mildly impressed. 'How did you amass such a fortune?'
She went a little pink. 'I got most of them very cheap, in London.'
'And why do you need all those dresses,' he teased, 'when the plants of the field have none?'
'Ach,' she said scornfully—it was a sound she had picked up from her mistress, he noticed—'we'd be poor paltry creatures if we walked naked.'
For an instant he let himself consider the image: Mary Saunders, walking buck naked across the top of the Kymin. Then he shook his head to clear it.
'Now the Master,' said Mary, 'he doesn't even need two legs.'
'Mr. Jones is a great man,' Daffy told her seriously. 'To overcome such a hindrance when he was only a boy—well, that's my idea of spirit.'
'Is he a model to you, then?' asked Mary in her teasing voice. 'Are you going to grow up to be a one-legged staymaker and marry a dressmaker, too?'
Daffy could feel a blush rise from his neckerchief, though he didn't quite know why. 'Mrs. Jones is ... the best of women. When I was a child, and my father was such a blunderer, she was the saving of us. She used to come by our filthy house with a basket of potted pears and clean linens, and my father's face would light up as if she were the Angel Gabriel.'
'Had he a yearning for her, do you think?' asked the girl. 'He speaks very highly of her,' she added slyly.
Daffy stopped short, disconcerted. 'You mean—when he was first widowed?'
'Or even before that, when they were all young together. Cadwaladyr didn't marry till late, did he? Long after Mrs. Jones did. And he never took another wife after your mother died, though he could have done with the help, it sounds like.'
'That's true,' said Daffy unwillingly.
'And if your father did have a longing for the mistress,' Mary went on with animation, as if telling a story, 'that would explain why he so resented your coming to work for Mr. Jones.'
'That wasn't it at all,' objected Daffy, his mind moving like mud. 'My father thinks the tavern—'
'Damn the tavern!' Mary's dark eyes glittered. 'It's jealousy, pure and simple. He can't bear to see you in service to the man who stole the woman he wanted!'
Daffy shook his head as if to get rid of a troublesome fly. 'You've read too many romances,' he said pointedly. 'You should try an encyclopaedia.'
'Romances are more educational,' she called back. She was almost dancing, now, circling ahead of him across the green back of the hill.
'They are not. They've misled you. Not all motives are low,' he insisted sternly. 'The human heart is not such a gutter as you think it.'
'Daffy,' she said, coming up very close to him and speaking softly. 'Take my word for this. I know more about the human heart than you'll find in all your encyclopaedias.'
Something in her eyes like bitterness, or sorrow. It shocked him. What had happened to these eyes, in only fifteen years of living? He wanted to reach out and shut them with his callused palm. He wanted to kiss Mary Saunders till the mountains wheeled around them.
She turned away, as if she could read his mind. 'What's the master's leg like, tell me?' she