Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [14]
She climbed down into a ditch at last and slept as soon as her face touched the cold ground.
She woke to pain like a long knife in her guts. Her smock was up around her waist and the night had got in. There was something on her back, a beast, its scalding breath on her neck, and laughter far away like the shreds of a dream. When she twisted her head, the beast's teeth met in her ear. Mary screamed then, belatedly, the way she should have done five months before, in the alley. She found her voice, the depth and fury of it, and what she roared was 'No!'
But the man—because now she was awake she could tell that this was nothing but an ordinary man—he hit her in the jaw, harder than she'd ever been hit in her life, and again, and again. This time wasn't quick or simple like it had been with the peddler. This man didn't want relief; he wanted to crush her entirely. He pulled her head back by the hair and banged her face into the cold ground, then held it there until she couldn't make a sound, couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything but feel his pain inside her.
The laughter, Mary realised soon enough, was coming from the other soldiers, who were leaning on their bayonets, waiting their turn. Afterwards she could never be sure how many of them there'd been.
A lifetime later, Mary woke to fingertips on her eyelids. She cringed, but the hand didn't go away. Light came under her lids like a needle. She twisted, but the probing fingers followed. She bit blindly.
A screech of laughter. 'None of that, you nasty thing!'
Mary was so numb she barely knew she had a body. Only when she began to curl up on her side did she recognise this stiffness as cold. A stranger's silhouette stood above her, blocking the watery sun. Mary tried to sit up, but then the shaking started.
The stranger was sucking her bitten finger. She took off her cloak and dropped it over Mary. 'I'll be wanting that back, mind,' she remarked, as if they were in the middle of a conversation.
The world swayed round Mary as she dragged herself to her knees. Her bundle of clothes was gone. The smock she wore seemed made of mud, stiff and dented as a shield. The spire of St. Giles winked down at her. In the morning light everything was laced with frost: the railings, the cobbles, the nettles that edged the ditch. She could feel the print of dirt like a complicated map across her face. And deeper, under her frozen skin, in her nose, beneath her jaw and ribs and above all between her legs, the pains massed like an army.
'Ain't you a sight.' The stranger grinned down and her scar crinkled in the terrible light.
It was her, the harlot with the red ribbon in her powdered wig, the one who was to blame for making Mary think there could be more to life than work and sleep. At that moment Mary felt rage like a spike running through her.
'Fancy a bite of breakfast?'
Mary started to cry.
The harlot was called Doll Higgins. Mary followed her up stair after stair, half-dragged by the girl's hot hand, to a dark room at the top where Mary lay until the mattress beneath her face was soaked through. There was a pain inside her that moored her to the floor. She tried to say where it was but her voice came out like a rook's caw.
'Been made a woman of, ain't you?' said Doll.
Mary woke and thought the room was on fire. The light was dim, but colour poured down the walls. She blinked until she had convinced herself that these were only clothes, hanging on rusty nail-heads that protruded from the walls. Only gauzes and silks; nothing but jade and ruby, amber and aquamarine.
A warm, yeasty smell beside her. A face on the pillow, softened in sleep and obscured in brown wisps of hair. At first Mary didn't recognise Doll without her silver wig. Finally she managed to open her dry throat and whisper. 'Where