Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [157]
It was like a procession, but much faster. Something ancient and costumed, with rules and rituals no one understood, Daffy thought, as he cantered up Stepney Street after the shifting lights of the older men. He was gaining on them. Their shouts echoed like fragments from an obscure festival that hadn't been celebrated in their lifetimes.
'Stop her,' bawled one.
'Hold her,' screeched another.
Daffy saved his breath for running. Monnow Street stretched like a worm, all the way to the moonlit river. At the head of the weaving chase he could see his father, his wig slipping off, running faster than any of them. Daffy's feet pounded the pavement, and slipped briefly on a bit of old fruit. Ahead of them all, Mary Saunders reeled like a drunkard. Her white gleaming train dragged in the mud. She squeezed a load to her chest like a baby; a flap of lace fell down, and she bent to save it from the dirt.
On the long straight street their movement seemed preordained. There was nowhere else to go. The street was empty but for the quarry and the hunt and a few startled faces at windows. The girl ran straight for the bridge, its stone gap narrowing to the eye of a needle. Cadwaladyr was the length of a man behind her. No, she wasn't going to jump in the river, realised Daffy. She still imagined she'd get away.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As the Crow Flies
ALL NIGHT Thomas Jones was in the kitchen with his wife. He had her in his lap. When the door started to creak open, and Mrs. Ash slid her head through the gap, he cursed her with a Welsh phrase he thought he'd forgotten.
But the weather was warm for September. The burial couldn't be put off.
Mr. Jones came out of his house in the glare of noon and walked down to bang on Dai Carpenter's door. His breeches were rusty with blood. His crutches weaved and scraped through the dust. In his pocket he had coins amounting to two guineas—part of the moneybag recovered from the prisoner—for a good beech coffin.
Afterwards he did something he'd never done in his life: he climbed upstairs in the middle of the day and lay down. Lay on his back in the empty bed and had no idea where he was; the world whirlpooled around him. If he stopped thinking, there'd be silence, and that would be the worst thing. So he asked himself questions, loudly enough to fill his head, like a child throwing stones at a sleeping dog. When would he find the time to finish that pair of satin stays for Mrs. Greer? Had Mr. Jenkins ever paid the last shilling on his summer cloak? How much sausage was left in the pantry, or had it gone off?
Grief was a pricey business. Before darkness he knew he would have to go down to Rhona Davies on Wye Street—the town's only dressmaker, now—to order mourning weeds for himself and the child, and the servants too. Then the house would have to be filled with drink and meat for the Watch. Not that he had any desire to invite the neighbours in to gawk all night at his wife's body, but that was how these things were done.
Pain, obscure and tentative, in his leg. Not his real leg but the one the barber had cut off forty years ago. What had they done with that blackened limb, Thomas wondered now. Was it buried somewhere, maybe in the vegetable patch behind the old house on Back Lane? What he remembered was the sound of the saw skidding against the bone. And his boy's mind racing, then as now, full of plans and queries: What trade could I follow that doesn't need two legs? How will I make up for what I lack? And, ticking away in his childish heart, the real question: Oh Lord, how will you repay me?
After dinner, when Abi had taken away his untouched plate, Mr. Jones let his eyes meet his daughter's for the first time. In her soft fat face, her eyes were so like her mother's. How could he never have noticed?
'Fafa,' she said warily, 'where did Muda go?'
The silence pulled them all