Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [17]
'But I have nothing else.' Mary's voice began to quiver at the thought of going down into the streets with nothing but a linen shift to cover her.
Doll waved expansively at the clothes hanging on the nails. 'Take your pick, my darling.'
Mary stared over each shoulder. Such clothes, such colours, on her? She wouldn't know herself.
Doll let out an impatient puff of breath. 'You can start with my spares,' she said, bending to root in a corner.
The stays were stiff and stained. As Doll tugged the strings tight at Mary's back, the girl began to gasp with fright.
'Ain't you ever laced before, then?' asked Doll.
She shook her head and bit on her lower lip. She thought her ribs would crack.
'Fourteen years old, and never in stays!' Doll marvelled. She loosed the strings infinitesimally, and Mary sucked in a mouthful of air. 'High time you learned to dress like a grown girl. A female without boning ain't nothing but a sack of corn.'
Doll lent Mary two petticoats and a pair of steel improvers, which sat like buckled birdcages over the girl's narrow hips. Mary picked the least outrageous clothes: a pale blue skirt, a pink bodice, and a pair of sleeves to match the skirt, buttoned on tight at the shoulders. Doll showed her how everything fitted together, and how the pockets hung down from the waist seam. Then she stepped back and thrust a triangle of mirror in Mary's face.
Mary stared at this festive bruised creature, a child in the clothes of a woman twice her age. She didn't recognise herself, not even when she tried to smile.
She could walk upright on her own, but when they went downstairs she still leaned on Doll's broad milky arm, gasping for breath. Mercy Toft's door was shut, and from behind it came a repetitive groan in a deep bass; Mary knew what that meant, even before Doll nudged her.
As they stepped out of the cracked front door of Rat's Castle, the noise of the city hit her as hard as the cold wind. The improvers made her vast skirt surge and sway like a boat in rough seas.
Doll was her sainted saviour and her only friend in the world. She told everything and asked nothing. She brought Mary all over the city, that day and many other days, as October gave way to a chill November. Doll had no sense that there was any border to her territory. She even marched Mary into the new white-stone squares of the West End, where the locals were so rich they hired linkboys to walk ahead of them with flaming torches so they'd never step into a pile of dirt. Ladies had themselves carried round in sedan chairs, with their tasselled skirts spilling out the sides.
On Carrington Street in Mayfair, Doll pointed up at a fresh-painted apartment and said, 'That's the famous Kitty Fisher's.'
'What's she famous for?' asked Mary.
'Don't you know nothing yet?' Doll gave a pleasurable sigh. 'She's only got six lovers in the House of Lords, that's what for!'
'Six?' repeated Mary, staggered.
'They say one night she was entertaining Lord Montford, who's a shrunken little man, you understand—when up the stairs marched Lord Sandwich. So how do you think Miss Kitty smuggled the pygmy out?'
Mary shrugged to show she had no idea.
'Under her skirt!' shrieked Doll with mirth, slapping Mary's hoop to make it hum. 'They say her fee is a hundred guineas,' she added more reflectively.
'A year?'
'A night, you dupe!' crowed Doll. 'And once, at breakfast, when a gentleman gave her nothing but a fifty-pound note, she took such offence, she put it between two bits of bread and ate it.'
Mary stared up at the high rectangles of glass, hoping for a glimpse of Kitty Fisher, the famous mouth that could eat money. But the footman at the arched door was giving her and Doll a frozen stare. Mary dropped her eyes, suddenly seeing what he saw and knowing what he thought. To him there was no difference between the two of them. Harlots, she thought to herself, trying out the word. Seven-Dials strollers, Misses, trulls.
But Doll blew the footman a fat kiss. Doll never minded who looked at her or how.