Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [128]
Mary Saunders breathed heavily over the books. 'Do they balance?' he asked.
'Not yet.'
She was at her most handsome when she was concentrating, her lips pursed and dark from biting, her eyes on her work. His wife assured him the girl was not even a woman yet, which he found hard to credit, but she believed that grief, such as Mary's for her dead mother, might well delay the matter. He hoped she wouldn't leave them for a good ten years, for all her daft ambitions about going on the stage or catching a rich husband. Some local journeyman would marry the girl in the end, perhaps, or even a glover or stockinger. Women should not spend all their very best years in service, drying into spinsterhood. Look at poor Mrs. Ash; who would believe she was four years younger than his wife?
His eyes throbbed as he tried to follow the figures under Mary's pen. They would never add up. Drapers charged early, and patrons paid late, or never, and even in good months there was a scarcity of coin, which was all the fault of the Dutch. Sometimes he was amazed there was dinner on the table every night. His wife was such a capable manager, she never complained. She never told him her troubles anymore; not for months now. Instead she entrusted them to this chit of a girl. He heard the two of them murmuring like bees over their work in the shop, but if he walked in he could never tell what they were talking about. The chosen confidante was a stranger to the family who had none of his experience of the world, who could offer no comfort—who, above all, didn't love Jane Jones as he did.
What was it that women had between them that made the words flow as easy as milk? What was it that his wife couldn't say to him?
One afternoon, by bad luck, Mrs. Harding and Mr. Valentine Morris both sent their carriages to Inch Lane with last year's suits, demanding an inch let out here and two inches there, and could Mrs. Jones kindly give the collar a more modish cut, and have the whole pressed and returned in time for the May Ball? Mr. Morris's German valet and Mrs. Harding's French maid swore at each other in narrow hall.
'I don't know at all, Mary, it's a whirling world,' said Mrs. Jones, letting her head sink back against the wall of the shop for a moment. Her heart was thudding, and she felt as heavy as oak, though her shape hadn't changed at all yet. 'New patterns every year, stitches so tiny I can hardly see them, names of stuffs I can't so much as pronounce ... Is there no end to it all?'
'Haven't fashions always come and gone?' said Mary Saunders.
Mrs. Jones shrugged her shoulders to ease their ache. 'It seems faster, these days. Sometimes I think of what my grandchildren will wear to church, and I might not even know the words for it.' Her hand rested on her belly, still flat, and she gave the girl a tiny smile.
Hetta was fractious; she insisted on playing with the needle box, and after Mrs. Ash had come into the shop three times to tell her she'd drop it, finally she did. The nurse took the child out of the room by the ear, muttering, 'This is what comes of having a name out of a storybook,' which of course was aimed at the mother. Mrs. Jones got down on her knees beside Mary to pick up the tiny needles.
'Hetta hates her,' whispered Mary conversationally, 'and do you wonder at it?'
'Oh, Mary.' Mrs. Jones dropped the needles back in the box. 'If you could find it in your heart to be a little kinder to poor Mrs. Ash ... She won't be here forever, you know.'
The girl's eyes widened. 'You mean—'
'This time is different, isn't it?' murmured Mrs. Jones, glancing down at herself. 'We'll be needing a wet-nurse, see.'
Mary nodded delightedly. 'So Mrs. Ash will have to go.'
'Well,' said the mistress helplessly, 'I must start looking out for a place for her, that's all I mean.'
'I hear they need females in Virginia...'
'Mary Saunders!' She smacked the girl on the wrist, swallowing her smile. It faintly troubled Mrs. Jones that she couldn't make herself feel very sorry at the prospect of losing Mrs. Ash after all these years