Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [114]
It would never occur to Nance Ash to question His will. He had given her masters who had kept her on long after her milk dried up, out of charity. The word was a dry crust in the mouth, but then, what else had she to swallow? For the thousandth time, Nance Ash steeled herself to obey. And the Angel of the Lord said unto Hagar, Return to thy Mistress, and submit thyself under her Hands.
All this could be borne. Worse than this could be endured. In hopes of a resurrection in the end.
She dressed the same way as she had every day of her life. Dolling herself up for Easter would hardly impress the Risen God. On a turn of the stairs she almost ran into the Londoner and the manservant, who were standing deep in conversation. Their faces were not a foot apart. At the sight of Mrs. Ash they backed off. Guilt on the air, like dust motes catching the light.
'Good morning, Mrs. Ash,' said Daffy, very sprightly. 'May I be the first to offer the felicitations of the day?'
'The resurrection of our Lord is not a carnival,' she told him, brushing past. She didn't look behind her to see the girl's face; she knew just what mixture of impudence and lasciviousness it held. The cheek of her, to come into this household and set herself to distract a young man from his duties! It seemed to Mrs. Ash now that Daffy had been an excellent fellow until Mary Saunders fixed her dark eyes on him.
Well, they had better be careful, the pair of them. She wasn't going to turn a blind eye to smuttiness in corners, whatever others did. What they were feeling—oh, Nance Ash remembered it well enough from the days of her engagement, that unholy knot of excitement in the stomach—it could bring them down like a hurricane in the end.
For Easter dinner the Joneses were going to have hare pie, thanks to Daffy, who'd come home with two of the creatures over his shoulder. Mrs. Jones smiled to herself as she brushed egg across the pastry lid. The Lenten days were over.
That was twice recently that Mrs. Morgan had commented on their absence from church; it was time for the whole family to make an appearance. At St. Mary's, the women sat in a row at the back of the right-hand pews, packed in like fish. Mrs. Jones had put her teeth in, for the occasion, so she was trying to remember not to smile too wide, for fear the pewter settings would catch the light of the candelabra. On her left was Mrs. Ash, down on her knees from the moment she'd entered the church, head on her hands; her mistress swallowed a wave of irritation. Out of the corner of her eye she could see her husband and Daffy, over on the men's side. Daffy was looking up at the ceiling as if something miraculous were happening among the spiders there. Her husband had his hands knotted in his lap in a perfectly orthodox fashion. No one would guess his conviction that, as he'd put it to her only the other night, the Church of England was as corrupt as a dead dog, and not at all a suitable place for addressing the Divine.
Mrs. Jones took a long breath and began to enjoy herself, despite the feeling of too many teeth in her mouth, eating her up. All around her she recognised clothes she'd sewn herself. She elbowed Mary when Miss Theodosia Fortune went by in that taffeta cape with the festooned hem that had caused them so much trouble. Then she craned to see past Mrs. Halfpenny, asleep in her butterfly cap, delicate snores rising. Over on the other side of the church, Mrs. Halfpenny's husband, the town clerk, had got something tucked inside his prayer book, she noticed; his lips moved as he read.
Mrs. Jones toyed with the notion that the ladies of