Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [171]
Vinegar might shift it, Mary, or a rub of salt.
Her mistress's voice. Mary's pulse was suspended for a second.
The master's eyes rested not on her but on the cart. He didn't shout out, this time. It was as if he couldn't see her, wouldn't see her, until he saw her dead.
He had hoisted his daughter onto his shoulders for a better view, Mary saw. This was one lesson the child wouldn't be taught in school. Mary looked away, for fear of meeting Hetta's eyes. Do you really have no mother? the child had asked her, in her first week in the house on Inch Lane, her pupils full of astonished sympathy.
Afterwards, Mary supposed, the father and daughter would walk home hand in hand, and Mr. Jones would never let the name of Mary Saunders be said in his house again. From now on, thought Mary, the child would assume this was the way of the world. She'd always expect the people she loved to kill each other.
It was Hetta's eyes, more than anything else, that made the salt tears start to fall. They rushed down Mary's face, blinding her.
The crowd swayed round Mr. Jones like waves against a rock; the people of Monmouth were tired of waiting for the spectacle to begin. Mary stared blurrily down at her filthy shift. Would they burn it too, she wondered, or sell it scrap by scrap for souvenirs? She knew it was a petty matter, but she would have given anything to be hanged in black satin. How vanity endured to the end! Clothes being no protection, she told herself, folks might as well cast them off and go naked across the world.
Terror squeezed her like a rag.
Halfway down her stays, Mary's bound hands found the ribbon. Faded to the colour of beetroot, Doll's red ribbon. She wound it round her numb fingers, tight enough to hurt. Nothing could have scared Doll, not even a gallows. Chin high, me old muck-mate.
All at once she remembered the way out. If you were about to hang and you had no friend in the world to haul on your feet, then there was only one way to escape a slow strangulation: jump. She remembered the Metyard woman at Tyburn, who'd cheated the crowd; that stony face, that leap into space. How innocent Mary had been in those days; she'd thought the people who committed murder were a different species. She'd assumed that they hated the people they killed, if they were capable of emotion at all. She would never have guessed that such things could happen as easily as sickness, or weather, or love.
Her thighs tensed like branches in a high wind now. She had to bide her time; she mustn't show her intentions. She had to wait till she knew the end of the rope was knotted to the scaffold. Till the hangman pulled the white bag over her face, and climbed down from the cart, and slapped the horse's rump. That would be her cue to jump. If she tried too early, she'd make a mess of it, and they'd haul her back into the cart.
Mary's heart was smashing against her ribs with fear and excitement. She felt the rope around her neck begin to move; her head whipped round, but the hangman was only unwinding the coils, heaving the end over the scaffold, like any sailor about to make for open sea. He pulled the knot tight around the wood. A scattering of applause.
He came up to the cart, then, the little white bag in his hand. He swung himself up like a child playing on a fence. 'Forgive me,' he muttered formally to Mary.
Her last chance for a touch of human skin. She obeyed her impulse and kissed the man on one bristly cheek, below the mask. His skin was warm. He jerked a little, but didn't shudder or wipe it off. He lifted the white bag, and dropped it over her head.
The light was blotted out. The cart shook as he jumped down.
Sackcloth, coarse against Mary's nose; her temples itched. She'd never thought to take a last look at the world. She should have stared up at the sky while it was still there. A little light filtered through the floury cloth. Mary gathered all her forces and waited to hear the hangman slap the horse's rump. What if the noise of the crowd drowned the little