Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [152]
He blinked in astonishment. 'Hated? Su Rhys? Not at all. How could I have hated the poor woman? I will admit,' he stammered, 'I do think ... I didn't think her quite worthy of your friendship, once you were grown women.'
His wife's eyes were small bits of glass. 'You thought she made a bad choice, when she married Cob Saunders, and she deserved her punishment.'
He didn't know what to say.
'But sometimes, Thomas, sometimes punishment just happens.'
All of a sudden her face was running with tears. In two leaps he was there; he was wrapped around her like ivy. 'What is it, my love?' he kept saying, as her whole body shook with her sobs. 'What is it?'
'The baby.'
He thought he must have misheard. He put his ear closer to her mouth. 'Which baby?'
'The last one.'
He held her in his grip while she cried and cried. He waited.
Eventually Jane Jones sat up and wiped her cheeks with the heels of her hands. She made a face that was supposed to be a smile, he imagined. She held in her sobs and kept her voice low. 'I lost it in May,' she said. 'I'm sorry now I didn't tell you.'
All the air was punched out of him.
'It only lasted a few months, this time. I don't know if it would have been a boy or a girl.'
Her husband found himself kneeling on her skirt, gripping her elbows. 'We must try again,' he said very fast. 'The Maker will reward us in the end. We must trust in his justice.'
She shook her head over and over. 'Thomas,' she whispered, and then, more firmly, 'Thomas. We have a daughter.' She stopped, as if to gather her strength. 'We have each other.' Another pause for breath. 'That's our lot.'
They stayed pressed together in that awkward shape. His solitary leg went numb under him, and then his arms, until at last he couldn't tell his body from hers.
The church of St. Mary's was empty. Mrs. Jones knelt at the back and offered up a prayer of thanks for the recovery of her maid.
In her pocket, dragging her down on one side, a stockingful of coins. She'd counted it again this morning. She flushed as her fingers sorted out the gold and silver. Her heart was clanging like a horseshoe on an anvil. Where in the world? was all she could think. Where in the world did the girl get it ?
Now Mrs. Jones pressed her head against the cool back of the pew. Her mind was moving in tight little circles; confusion was like a fog across the road. To make someone confess a crime, she'd read somewhere, you cut the tongue from a living frog and laid it on them when they were sleeping; they'd speak up in their sleep as honest as a child.
Nonsense. She should simply have demanded of Mary Saunders where she'd got the money, asked the question over and over during her fever and her convalescence, till she'd got her answer. But she hadn't dared. There was so much she didn't want to know. Whatever the truth turned out to be, at the very least she'd have to throw Mary Saunders out into the bare countryside. Mrs. Jones's heart quailed at the thought. She'd come to rely on Mary—too much, she quite saw that now. She'd been weak. She'd made an intimate of a servant, a half-grown girl. She'd confided things to her maid that should only have been said to her husband. She'd trusted herself to a deceiver.
Well, she knew what to do with the money, at least. She'd brought it here to slip it into the Poor Box. Charity was the highest virtue, wasn't that what Cadwaladyr was always saying in his sermons? Blessed are those who give. Mrs. Jones could do with some blessing.
Cadwaladyr would never know where the eleven-odd pounds in the Poor Box came from; he'd marvel at such goodness, and wonder which of the local rich had made such a gesture. Then, afterwards, if anyone ever asked about money found in Mary Saunders's room Mrs. Jones could deny all knowledge. It was dirty money, to her, until it went into the Box. At least now it could feed some of the town's landless and jobless unfortunates for a few months, or pay for a dozen paupers' funerals.
As Mrs. Jones stood up she felt the