Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [162]
Daniel Flyte had assured her that she'd be safer in London, but she was to look out for the slave-catchers, especially if there was a hue and cry printed about her. He had read her one or two from the newspapers, his voice shaking with indignation. Run away from her master on the 15th of September, hers might go, one Abi Jones, about 30 years of age, with a scar through her left hand. Whoever brings word of her to Mr. Thomas Jones by the Robin Hood tavern in Monmouth, shall have 2 guineas reward for his pains.
But there would be other black faces in the big city, she knew, and the generality of white folk couldn't tell the black ones apart. Daniel Flyte had given her some addresses of houses that might take her in for the night, sympathisers with what he called the cause.
Abi had no idea what she would find in London. At every turn she expected to be robbed, raped, left for dead. But she knew this much: there was nothing to stay here for now. A voice in her head shouted, Run.
Mary's dress was a ragged brown thing they'd given her when she'd first arrived at Monmouth Gaol. She wondered where it came from; some woman who'd sold it for the price of a drink, or died in it, maybe? Clothes outlived people, she knew that. Clothes were more of a sure thing. She wondered what they'd done with the white velvet slammerkin. There was good stuff in it, too good to throw away. Had someone tried to wash the blood out of it, or at least to cut good unstained scraps of embroidered velvet out of the train for salvage?
The wet air of autumn blew right through the day cell: in one window and out the other. There was no time, up here above the town, only weather. Mary overheard the odd mention of dates, and remembered what they used to mean, but the calendar was only a childhood story to her now. At Hallowe'en, bonfires scented the air. On the day of All Souls, Mary pictured the people of Monmouth piling new evergreens on all the graves at the back of the church. Mrs. Jones's grave would look almost like the others by now. Was the point of the All Souls ritual to hide the dead away under moss and slime, to speed up the process of forgetting, until memory was only a marsh and all hard things were buried and smoothed over in the wet ground?
She tried not to remember things, but there was nothing else to do. Her whole short past came running at her, the day the purse-snatch tried to take her red ribbon. During the day she could look out of the window, at least. The fields had turned rusty with the coming of winter; she'd never seen earth this colour before. Had her crime stained the whole world?
Images waited for Mary in the night room, where all the prisoners were packed in like bruised fruit and the darkness was absolute. There were no rules here at all. Even survival wasn't obligatory. Those who wanted to might turn their faces to the wall. Sometimes when she woke in the darkness and smelt the bodies all around her, she was briefly deceived into thinking she was back in the Rookery, waiting for Doll to come home. She had found her old self again, the lawless one. She couldn't imagine ever having been clean, or ever having been part of a family; those chains were broken for good.
She stood beside the window of the day room and listened to the crows. One bird sounded harsh, like a crack in the sky. Five together were restless, circling. But more than ten, and the sounds smoothened out in the distance, until the twilight air began to shimmer and vibrate. Finally Mary was coming to understand why the crows cried so unceasingly: to prove they were here.
Two forgers were gaoled in December. They offered to give Mary a great belly, so she'd escape the noose. She told them she was barren, but they weren't listening. They took her on the floor, with a bit of coal sticking into