Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [130]
Most nights she found it effortless, being Sukie. It was strange to be dressed so respectably and have an unpainted face, and to work so fast and so surreptitiously round the back of the inn, but otherwise the trade was as familiar as an old glove. Once she was greeted by a queue of three Yorkshiremen outside the stable, quarrelling over who'd go first. Another night, a drunken Cornishman wanted to do it standing up but fell down on her and got mud all over her blue holland gown.
She offered no preliminary toying, unless the cullies needed it. It wasn't like the old times in London, when she had taken some sort of pride in pleasing, in luring customers back for more. No, these days she was in a hurry and all she wanted was her half of the two shillings it cost these men to get relief in the wilds of the Marches. Sometimes they grabbed her by the breasts, exclaiming over them. If she was face-on, she had to smell the men's beery breath; one lout even tried to kiss her, but she moved her mouth away. Mary preferred to lie face-down on the straw mattress and think about other things, such as the diamonded petticoat she was embroidering for Miss Lucy Allen, but which she would look much handsomer in herself.
Right at the end, when a cully was weakened, she sometimes put her mouth to his ear and told him that if he gossiped about Sukie to a soul in Monmouth, she'd come after him with a knife and make an opera singer of him.
She was always careful. As far as the drinkers at the Crow's Nest knew, she was just a maid who popped in for a pint of cider for her mistress every few nights, and never lingered to flirt or play dice. She never went round the back to the stables if there was anyone there to see her. And Cadwaladyr wouldn't blab, would he? Not as long as she kept paying him his poundage? But then Mary remembered his face, that first night he'd recognised Jane Jones's new maid as the girl who'd tricked him at Coleford: his eyes under their thick white brows, standing out with rage.
One cold evening an Irishman who stank of baccy, with a little worm of a yard, tried to bargain her down: 'Sixpence for you and the same for the innkeeper.'
'Why,' she asked, 'because you're only half-sized?'
He made her nose bleed. She walked home empty-handed, with some story of getting a sudden nosebleed in the lane.
'Did you see a black rabbit?' asked Mrs. Jones wisely.
Mary shook her head, and another red drop escaped her handkerchief.
'Ach, it's always the black rabbits that bring on bloody noses, don't you know?'
That was the only time Mary went unpaid. Most nights she was home in a quarter of an hour with a shilling or two in her pocket. 'What a good lass you are,' Mrs. Jones would say, taking a mouthful of her cider.
In the attic room, Abi was dreaming of plantation food: slithery mackerel, pumpkin and pigeon-peas, a gulp of rum if you were lucky. Coocoo, sapadillo, jambalaya: even the words warmed her mouth.
She floated up from sleep to find Mary Saunders stepping out of her petticoats by the light of a thin tallow candle. It was late. She caught a waft from the girl, and it reminded her of something. 'You been with a man?' she asked curiously.
Mary jumped, and turned on her. 'Of course not!'
'Only asking,' muttered Abi, putting her face in the pillow.
The girl continued folding her clothes across the chair as if they were royal robes.
Who could he be, Abi wondered? Not Daffy Cadwaladyr; he was going round with a face sealed up like wax these days, and spent every spare moment deep in An Historical Account of the Hebridean Isles, as if nothing was real unless it was written in a book. Could the girl have found herself another lover among the whey-faced men of Monmouth?
As Mary climbed into bed, Abi held onto the hem of the blanket. She heard a faint clink: a chain, or a necklace, or a coin on another