Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [113]
'So, in the case of your own daughter, you admit they might do harm?'
This girl had a dreadfully teasing manner, sometimes. Mr. Jones bit down on a smile. 'Hetta might do well enough with a little pair in canvas, kept loose. I have always discouraged my wife from lacing too tight.'
Mary Saunders glanced down at herself. His eyes followed hers. Under her blue bodice her chest was as taut as a sapling. For fifteen, she was a full-figured woman. 'Where did you get that pair?' Mr. Jones asked professionally.
'London.'
'But what shop?'
Her dark eyes clouded over. What had he said? 'A friend left them to me,' Mary answered finally, 'when she died.'
He returned his eyes to his work. 'Its a simple set,' he said briskly, 'not much force to them, but the line is true.' His hands dithered over the white fragments of whalebone, then seized the one he wanted. 'You're not the kind of customer I like, though,' he muttered under his breath.
'No?' asked Mary.
'Not enough needs fixing,' he said neutrally. 'A girl like you might as well wear a sack.'
He didn't look up, in case she was blushing.
'So you prefer ugliness?' she asked a little hoarsely.
'In a sense,' Mr. Jones told her. 'That set of stays I made for Mrs. Leech, for instance—now there was a challenge. You realise, Mary, I can mould the female form into whatever I like. I aim for an effect of harmonious symmetry, much like the architectural designs of Mr. Adam, I like to think.' He thought this allusion was probably wasted on the girl. 'I might go so far as to call myself a maker of women,' he explained.
'So you improve on the work of the Maker?' she asked cheekily.
His blade slowed as he pondered this remark. 'Continue it, rather. I use what He has provided us with to bring His creations to the height of perfection.' Mr. Jones lifted a curved slip of white bone up to his eyes for inspection. 'But I have a liking for stays themselves, quite apart from fitting them to their wearers. The intricacy of them, you know; the strength.'
'Yes?'
'How they hold everything in place.'
Mary Saunders smiled. Her mouth was really too wide, her master decided. Her lips had too much blood in them. What was that old rhyme?
Men's Tools according to their Noses grow;
Large as their Mouths are Women too below.
Head bent, he blushed faintly over his work.
The manservant came in then, with a stack of boxes. He brought a faint tang of the outdoors with him; the smell of hard work in the fresh air.
Mr. Jones glanced up just then, to ask Daffy something, and saw the manservant standing there, arms by his sides, looking at the maid, and the maid staring back at him. Mary and Daffy, the master said to himself, turning away; Daffy and Mary. Like an old rhyme.
He heard Hetta squeal in the passage, and Mrs. Ash's stern tones, drowning her out. He waited for the quick steps that meant his wife, and her voice, soothing the child and the nurse too.
What Mr. Jones had seen had locked his throat, and made him turn a little sick. His hand was shaking, so he laid down the blade. He felt old, and crippled. A pain started up in the leg he'd lost a quarter of a century ago.
Nance Ash woke with a sense of weight on her hands and face. After a few seconds, she remembered that this was Easter Sunday. The Lord is risen. She waited to feel her spirits lift, but nothing happened.
Easter was her favourite festival, as a rule. It had few of the frivolities of Christmas. It was concerned with pain, and the purposes of pain, and pain's triumph and consolation. But this morning her heart was shut up like a tomb, and the great stone was too heavy to move aside.
On the floor below she could hear the quick steps of her mistress. A woman of whom Nance Ash would have to say that she was fond, even if Mrs. Jones had thwarted her on many occasions over the years (most recently and disgracefully in the matter of those cloth scraps), and had an unfortunate tendency to place her trust in false friends such as Mary Saunders. A kind enough mistress; better than many, no worse than some.