Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [131]
Finally Abi understood, and all at once was overcome with sorrow.
She'd known a few slave girls who got hired out by their plantation masters to make a bit of cash when times were hard, but she'd never before met a woman who sold her body of her own choosing. Not one who had a job, and food, and a roof over her head. It crushed her spirits to realise that even Mary—the bold, the careless Mary Saunders, the Londoner with high ambitions—wasn't a free woman.
She decided to risk asking. 'Mary. You do it for money?'
There was a terrible silence. Abi wished she'd kept her mouth shut. Then she heard a delicate letting out of breath and Mary said, 'I don't know any other good reason.'
Abi couldn't answer that. She hadn't lain with a man in so long she could barely remember what it felt like. The last must have been the doctor who'd brought her to England, she supposed. He'd woken up hard on the ship every morning and ridden her first thing, with the sea rolling past their cabin porthole like a green monster. One day he had peered at her cunny afterwards, calling it most interesting; he said English women were not shaped so. He even made a drawing of it to put in a book he was writing. Abi's legs shook with cold, but the doctor told her to hold still for the sake of science. After days of labour he had proudly showed her the drawing, and she had howled in panic. There was no face, no body, just a fruit axed open, leaking across the page.
'You won't tell a soul?' asked Mary in the darkness.
Abi answered that with a contemptuous puff of breath, which seemed to reassure the girl. 'After I come live on Inch Lane,' said Abi reflectively after a minute, 'I lay wake up here, waited for master to send for me.'
'What, Mr. Jones?' said Mary with a tight giggle.
The woman shrugged. 'Masters are like that with house girls. Then after while I thought maybe Mr. Jones lose more than leg.'
Mary's laughter rose and filled the air.
'Now I think things just different in this country.'
They lay side by side, silent. 'Do you miss the business?' asked Mary at last.
This was hard for Abi to answer. 'Maybe the end bit,' she admitted at last. She thought of heat and wet cupped inside her, those times she'd been put to breeding with the big field slave, though it had come to nothing. All peaceful,' she said, remembering, 'no more noise, no more jigging about.' Nothing more being asked of her, nothing she'd done wrong, nothing to guess at or say sorry for.
On Saturday night Mrs. Jones went to bed early, complaining of backache again. Her husband wondered if that was just another excuse for going to sleep before him. He sat up over his Bristol Mercury, the words almost indistinguishable in the candlelight, till everyone else had gone to bed too. He was restless tonight; the May air coming through the window was scented with flowers. For the first time in years, he felt like going to a tavern. He reached for his crutches.
By the time he reached the inn by the Meadow where the crow's nest stirred in the mild breeze, his bladder was troubling him. He hopped around the back of the building. And there, of all people, was Mary Saunders, leaning against the stable wall.
'Mary?' he said blankly. 'I thought you were abed.'
Her hand shot up to hide her face, then fell. Her eyes were tarnished coins on white leather. Mr. Jones wondered, was the girl sick, or astray in her wits? 'Mary?' he repeated, making sure she was the same person who'd sat next to him at supper. 'Whatever's the matter?'
'Nothing, sir.' Her voice was salty and peculiar.
'But what in Heaven are you doing here so late?'
'I don't know, sir.'
What a fool you are, me old muck-mate! How quick you lose your head in a tight spot! Mary thought she could hear Doll Higgins open her throat and laugh. There were so many lies she could have told her master, if she hadn't been so shocked to see him. That she was stretching her legs while Cadwaladyr filled Mrs. Jones's jug, for instance. Or