Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [15]
'My room, of course,' yawned Doll with her eyes shut, 'in Rat's Castle.' Her breath made a cloud on the chilly air.
'But where's that?'
'The Rookery. Where else?'
At first these words made Mary's heart pound. The Rookery was a lawless place where a girl could be robbed, beaten, raped. But then, with a little tremor like mirth, Mary realised that the worst was over and she had nothing left in the world to fear.
Doll sat up on the straw mattress, and stretched her hands above her with a great creaking of muscles. Up close, she had rough edges, dusty hems, but still the loveliest face Mary had ever seen. 'Now then,' she said, all business. 'Where's home?'
Mary shook her head, and felt tears press behind her eyes. She squeezed her lids shut. She'd be damned if she'd cry for the Digots.
'You must have come from somewhere,' Doll pointed out.
Mary let herself imagine the way back to the basement on Charing Cross Road. Ten minutes' walk, and an impossible distance. Today Mary was not the same girl who'd whimpered, Help me, Mother. Her soft stuff had been fossilised into something stony during the night in the ditch. Never again, she swore to herself, would she beg so feebly. Never would she let herself be thrown out like trash.
'Well?' asked Doll impatiently.
'I can't go back,' she whispered.
Doll shrugged. 'Any friends, then? Any kind gentlemen?'
Mary shook her head vehemently.
'Well you can't stay here, Miss, so don't give it a moment's thought!' said Doll, almost laughing as she clambered out of bed. 'I'm as good a Christian as the next girl, and I don't hold it against you that you near bit my finger to the bone, but I don't go picking up strays.'
Mary stared into the harlot's eyes.
'It's every girl for herself, you understand?'
She nodded as if she understood.
The fact was, though, that Doll Higgins made no immediate move to evict Mary. Not that day, nor the next, nor even the next.
Mary lay limply in her sleeveless shift, wrapped in blankets to ease the shivering. Her bruises were red and blue and purple. Her broken nose looked monstrous in Doll's triangle of mirror. 'A clean wholesome break,' the girl assured her; 'it'll heal with barely a bump.' Mary stared into the mirror and waited to see what her new face would be.
As for her belly—surely what the soldiers had done to her would have disposed of that. She thought it seemed a little flatter already. Besides, there were signs. She knew it was all over for sure when she investigated the pain between her legs on the fifth morning. 'I'm leaking, Doll,' she whispered in the ear of the woman who lay snoozing beside her. 'Strange stuff.'
'Yellowish, greenish?' asked Doll, rolling onto her back with a great heave that sent up a cloud of warm perfume.
A shamed nod.
'That'll be the clap.'
The girl's eyes prickled at the word. She didn't know what it meant exactly, but she'd heard it before.
'Comes to us all, sooner or later,' said Doll merrily. 'Just about every rogue in London's clapped or poxed or both, the dirty hounds! But your luck's in, if it's Madam Clap. Compared to the pox, you know, the clap's a doddle.'
A tear slid down Mary's jaw. She blinked hard.
'You'll live!' said the harlot, passing over her gin bottle.
Mary stared through the brown glass at the oily liquid, then raised it to her lips. It went down her throat like a knife, and at first she choked. After a few more swallows she felt better.
Doll Higgins was always saying brutal things as if they were jokes. But for all her talk about every girl for herself, she did let Mary stay in her room for a fortnight, sharing her mattress, and brought her the occasional plate of bread and Yarmouth herrings, and the odd basin of icy water with a rag to clean herself as best she could. Mary took everything gratefully. She had nothing of her own; she had lost her grip on the world. A girl that loses her virtue loses everything, repeated her mother like a wasp in her head.
Rat's Castle was the biggest, most ramshackle house in the strange world that was the Rookery. There were four small rooms