Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [136]
'Was what, Mary?'
'The wood. After the last person.'
'Would you let the woman tell the story?' barked Daffy from his corner.
'That's all right, Daffy. I suppose the wood must have been a little stained.' Mrs. Jones stared into the embers, imagining the stains.
'Go on, Muda,' said Hetta. 'What did Queen Mary do next?'
'You know this bit,' said the mother with a faint laugh. 'Show us.'
The girl slipped away from her nurse's side. She flung her head forward and her arms back, making the shape of an arrow.
'Just so,' said Mrs. Jones approvingly. What a sharp girl her child was growing up to be. Gratitude, that was what was called for now. She wasn't childless, was she? Many had been taken but one had been spared.
Hetta crouched at her mother's feet. One milky curl had come out of her cap; Mrs. Jones took it between her fingers for a moment before tucking it away.
'Did they really chop off her head, then, Muda?'
'It took three blows,' said Mrs. Jones, nodding seriously. Some said you should protect children from such knowledge, but in a world as cruel as this one they had to find out about such things sooner or later. And then the strangest thing happened,' she said, digging up a forgotten detail. 'The executioner threw her cap off and held her head up by the hair, and the next thing it was bouncing on the floor, but the hair was still in his hand.'
Mary shuddered and turned her face away.
'Her head fell out of her hair?' asked Hetta, her voice rising to a squeak. 'You never said that before.'
'It was a wig, don't you see, cariad? A fine red wig to hide her poor head, which had lost its hair after all those years in prison.' Mrs. Jones could feel her voice break with the sudden sorrow of it. After all that, to end up bald!
'I read in a history that they picked her head up again,' said Daffy quietly, 'and her lips kept moving for a quarter of an hour, but no one could tell what she was saying.'
Mrs. Jones had never heard that before. The image disturbed her; those regal lips reduced to miming gibberish. 'All I know,' she said, 'is that Queen Mary went to the axe with grace.'
'Like the first King Charles,' suggested Mary, 'wearing two shirts so as not to shiver on the scaffold.'
'Exactly, my dear.' Mrs. Jones reached out for the girl's cold hand and squeezed it.
'That Queen of Scots was a Papist, though,' objected Mrs. Ash.
'Well, she was a brave lady, for all that,' said Mrs. Jones uncomfortably. 'And it's all a long time past now,' she added after a minute.
'It was a bad cause she died for,' said the nurse under her breath.
Sometimes Mrs. Jones couldn't imagine how she'd lived with this harridan for so long. 'To my way of thinking, Mrs. Ash,' she said quietly, 'the manner of her death is a lesson to us all to keep our heads high in times of trouble. Especially you, Mary Saunders,' she said, taking up the girl's chilly fingers again. 'When disaster comes you must remember your namesake.'
'Which disaster?' asked the girl, a little nervously.
'Ah, it comes to us all,' Mrs. Jones told her, with a little wheeze of laughter. 'It's only a matter of when.'
When the mistress stood up she felt grief settle over her again like a cloak of lead. She went to close the parlour shutters and found it had been snowing all evening. As she watched, the air came apart, splitting into small diamonds which spiralled down as if glad to have loosed their bonds. For a few seconds each flake was unique and free, before it settled onto another and became part of the blanket of white the field was drawing up over itself. Every outline of an ungainly fence or rusting plough was smoothed over; every morass of mud and cinders was blotted out. Even the ruts John Niblett's wagon left on Grinder Street had turned ornamental; the snow picked them out like curls.
That night in bed Mrs. Jones lay dreaming of snow. In this dream, all her work was done, and she lifted the latch of the kitchen door, letting herself out so quietly that not an ear pricked after her. She left her slippers behind; her bare feet were exhilarated by the snow, it