Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [156]
Spoiled, all spoiled.
So then she took a firmer grip on the slippery cleaver and struck again. This time the thick blade lodged in Mrs. Jones's neck. She was on the floor. Blood rose like a fountain, like a firework.
Mary met her mistress's eyes, and now she couldn't tell who was falling, who was bleeding. It all seemed like some peculiar play. Mrs. Jones tried to speak. Mary tried to answer. Their lips barely moved. They addressed each other like beasts in a language neither understood.
The dying woman saw her maid drop to her knees in front of her, saw her lips open, but all she could hear was a great roaring. There was no pain, only a blurring of the lines. Mrs. Jones couldn't comprehend what had happened; she knew only that something was very wrong. There was puzzlement and sorrow and the candle going black. Something she'd forgotten to say or to ask, and where were the children? What was it that she had to remember to do before nightfall? There was red everywhere, and who was to clean it up? She couldn't go to sleep yet. She couldn't let go of the day until everything was done.
Mary had no idea which was the moment of death. The small eyes never did shut. Hours seemed to pass. She couldn't measure time except by the spreading of the tide of blood towards the place where she squatted. When her hem was heavy with red, she staggered to her feet.
The mistress's eyes were staring. Mary leaned across the darkening pool and shut one with her finger. It left a streak of blood from eyebrow to cheek; a mummer painted up for Twelfth Night. Mary stared down at her dress, polka-dotted with scarlet. Cold water, and a rub of lemon, Mary; that's what it needs. She couldn't bear to touch the other eye. It watched her as she backed away across the floorboards. She feared to turn her back, as if on royalty, or a demon.
She grabbed an armful of clothes at random, without looking at them. Her feet left sticky patches on the floor in the passage. She moved too slowly; she fumbled with the latch. With a tiny fragment of her mind Mary knew she was an outlaw now. But she couldn't really believe that there was anyone left alive in the world.
'Mistress?'
When Abi opened the door to the shop the breath was shocked out of her.
She stood at a careful distance so the pool of blood wouldn't mark her. But then she saw it on her arm, a long smear of red. From the door, maybe? She began to shake. She backed out of the room without a sound.
Waiting in the passage, Abi shut her eyes, tried to unsee what she'd seen. She felt nothing for the dead woman, yet; she was too busy making plans. How was she to prove that she hadn't been here? Who could bear witness? She could run away now, this minute, to the other end of town, but what if someone saw her go?
For weeks now Abi had been haunted by Barbados. When she'd been called in to hold Mary Saunders for her whipping, that was what had started it. Not that any of the mistress's blows had fallen on Abi, but as she'd held the wrists of the so-called friend who had betrayed her, and borne her weight, and as the strokes of the birch had resounded through the girl's body into Abi's—she'd felt terror rise in her mouth like bile. She was back in Barbados, and not the sunlit, heavy-fruited island of her deceptive memory, but the place where she'd sweated away nearly twenty years of her life, and never felt safe from a blow, never for one moment.
And now, watching the pool of darkness spread from Mrs. Jones's cleft neck, Abi knew that her world had cracked apart all over again. Last time a master of hers had died, she'd got a knife stuck through her hand for punishment. What would they do to her this time?
Behind her, the crash of the front door. Daffy's whistle, a snatch of some dancing air.
Abi opened her mouth and began to scream. Screaming was what the innocent did, wasn't it? She did it mechanically, as if scaring off birds. Now she should run for the neighbours, that would look like proper behaviour for an innocent woman. She