Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [140]
'Hush,' her mistress was murmuring in her ear. 'Don't cry, cariad, never you cry.'
The girl let grief rise up in her like a well. Such luxury.
Mrs. Jones rocked her, stroked her hair, whispered in her ear. 'Amn't I a mother to you now?'
Alone in the kitchen one hot Sunday morning in July while the Joneses were gone to service at St. Mary's, Abi felt the house close in on her. In one corner stood a great pile of breakfast dishes to be scoured with sand; in another, a half-jar of butter going sour. Only the surreptitious scratchings of the mice interrupted the silence.
A minute later she was halfway down Monnow Street, heading away from the sound of the church bells and the town ladies with their enormous skirts and hard faces. Abi rarely went out of the house, and when she did she always remembered why she didn't. A child stopped across the street, open-mouthed. A bigger one, behind him, scooped up a handful of last year's leaves. 'Blackie,' he shrieked as he threw them. The warm wind arced the leaves back into his face.
Abi walked on, faster. The ground slid away under her feet. She had the impression that now she'd started she'd never stop. She'd walk across the world and no one would stand in her way. She might even reach the sun—the real sun, not the watery image of it that hovered over this country. She remembered Sundays on the Island, lying in the shade of the huts, too tired to move, with music like a dream of fever on the air.
'If the mistress won't listen to talk of wages, you could always try the Quakers,' Mary Saunders had said a few nights ago, casually. 'Why?'
'It's well known, that's all,' said Mary with a huge yawn; 'they've a liking for blacks.'
All Abi knew about the handful of townspeople known as Quakers was that they were freakish folk who wore grey and went hatless. How they might help improve her condition, she could hardly imagine. As she filled the irons with hot charcoal, or stirred the lettuce soup, she fretted over what that phrase might mean: a liking for blacks. Was it the sort of liking that men had for Mary, the men who paid her all those coins she hid under the bed when she thought Abi was asleep?
Sometimes Abi wished Mary Saunders had never come to the house on Inch Lane, never shaken Abi out of her long somnolence, never said words like wages, or liberty.
It was the sticky restlessness in the air today that was prompting her to seek out the Quakers. Mary had said she thought they met upstairs at the Robin Hood, at the end of Monnow Street. The landlord cast Abi a curious glance now, as she crossed the sawdust-clotted floor of the Robin Hood, but he didn't say a word to stop her. The stairs creaked under her shoes. She put an ear to the door at the top, to hear what was going on, but there wasn't a sound. At first she thought the meeting was over. Then she heard a throat clearing, and another. It was as if the people behind the door were all waiting for someone important to speak. She stayed there, her ear pressed damply against the wood, for what felt like an hour, but nothing broke the silence.
When at last she heard chairs being pushed back, Abi fled. She wasn't going to be discovered on the stairs, like some kind of spy. She waited under a tree across from the Robin Hood for another long stretch of time. Leaning on the parapet of the bridge she stared down into the hurry of the water. She didn't care if there was trouble when she got home. It was good to have empty hands, at least; to have nothing to fold or cook or wash, just for an hour.
Finally grey-frocked figures began to emerge in twos and threes from the side door of the Robin Hood. Abi's heart pounded. She waited for one of them to look up or catch her eye, but their heads were all bent. At last the trickle of people died away, and she knew she'd missed her chance. Then she cursed herself for a snivelling coward who deserved the life she'd got.
One more: an elderly wigless gentleman with a thick file of papers under his arm. Abi shook off her paralysis and