Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [165]
Mary's neck hurt from looking up at him. She knew from gaol gossip that if you could only make them feel sorry enough for you, they might just commute your sentence to transportation to the Americas. But when she tried to imagine such a country, her mind went blank. She thought of Abi, bent double in the noonday sun, bundling canes. Her breath was shallow now. She spoke honestly, as if to herself. 'The slammerkin.'
'Speak up!'
'I regret the gown.'
'Which gown?'
'A white velvet slammerkin, with embroidery in silver thread,' said Mary slowly, pedantically.
'The one you were wearing when arrested? The one belonging to Mrs. Morgan?' asked one of the lawyers.
'Belonging to me.'
'How so? How so, belonging to you, prisoner?' he repeated.
'I embroidered it.' Her words ground themselves out slowly. 'I earned it.'
'You killed your employer for the sake of a garment?'
A long hiss went up from the crowd. Mary tried to remember the moment when Mrs. Jones had ripped the dress from her shoulder. She shrugged, suddenly too tired to explain.
'Was it for the money it would fetch?'
Her head was spinning from the bright lights of the candles on every wall. The lawyer blurred before her eyes. She was melting, draining away. He didn't understand. None of these moneyed men did. Their robes were trimmed with the finest fur and they didn't even notice. Mary hadn't spoken so many words in a row in months. She cleared her throat and made one last attempt, speaking gruffly: 'She shouldn't have tried to take what was mine.'
'Who is this person you speak of?'
Mary tried to say the name of the dead woman, but her throat closed on it. All she could repeat was, 'It was mine.'
Their faces were blank as coins. The lawyers and judges in their dusty black cloaks asked her no more questions. They squabbled like birds.
'Surely no one will dispute, gentlemen,' one began, 'that if a priest kills his bishop, or a wife her husband, or a servant his master, then the crime is accounted by natural law as a sort of treason, insofar as it reverses the natural order of authority. Thus the girl must burn.'
'But Mrs. Jones being not the master,' another objected, 'but only the wife of the master, the crime is simple murder, and the girl should merely hang.'
A yawn; the judge on the left had woken up again. A conciliatory voice emerged from a mass of chins. 'Gentlemen, what if she were to be hanged first, and then burnt?'
Judicious nods all round.
Mrs. Ash kept a tight hold of Hetta's hand, so as not to lose her in the crowd that was forming in Market Square on the morning of the execution. The child's fingers wriggled, but her nurse gripped them all the harder. She smiled tightly as she watched the narrow mouth of Stepney Street for the cart that would bring the prisoner down from the gaol. Mrs. Ash's lips moved in time with the Divine Word:
Her end is bitter as wormwood,
sharp as a two-edged sword.
Her feet go down to death;
her steps take hold on hell.
At least this death would have a meaning, unlike so many others, she thought. Its message would be spelled out as clear as the bold-print moral in a book of fables: justice was always done in the end.
The nurse's back was tired. The family had been waiting in Market Square since dawn. The family, meaning, what was left of them: herself, Hetta, and Mr. Jones. Daffy the manservant had got himself another position with indecent haste, and Abi the slave had run off without the least Christian compunction. In Mrs. Ash's view they should have published a hue and cry for her, but Mr. Jones couldn't be persuaded to take the trouble. 'Let her go,' he'd mumbled; 'let them all go.'
What was left of the family would wait the whole day if they needed to, so long as they saw the girl hanged in the end. Waiting was Nance Ash's strength. During the six months that had passed since her mistress's death—a time of shocks and losses—she had kept the little flame of hope burning. At least now she was waiting for a question to be asked, after so many years of simply waiting.
Under her sparse