Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [172]
In times of trouble remember your namesake, Mary. That voice in her head, mild as milk. The girl could almost believe it was Mrs. Jones. She could almost feel her mistress's soft hand in hers.
Let the Queen of Scots be a lesson to you to keep your head high.
She would. She'd jump higher than the spire of St. Mary's Church.
Come along now, girl.
The townsfolk would cover their faces and gasp, to see her swing like a dark angel.
It's time, my dear.
Soon she would be rid of the whole business; soon she'd have left this messy and cumbersome self behind.
Mary. This way.
The hangman's whistle, almost merry. The cry of a child, tugged out of the way.
Mary?
That sound of the hangman's hand on his horse's rump, so intimate, so familiar.
Coming, mistress, she said in her head.
Mary staggered to her feet on the jolting cart as the noose tightened its kiss on her neck. She leaped into space, high, higher than she'd ever been in her life. She came down with a clean snap, and the crowd scattered like birds from the swing of her feet.
Note
SLAMMERKIN IS a fiction, inspired by the surviving facts of the real Mary Saunders's life, which are disputed and few. She was a servant in the employment of one Mrs. Jones in—or just outside—the town of Monmouth, which at the time was in England but now is in Wales. On 13 September 1763 she killed Mrs. Jones with a cleaver. She was held in Monmouth Gaol until the Assizes on 7 March 1764, when she was convicted of murder. On 21 March 1764, at the age of sixteen or seventeen, she was either hanged, or burned, or both.
Some other real people make brief appearances in this novel: Mrs. Farrel, who squeezed a fortune out of her twenty lodging houses in St. Giles; the Metyards, a mother and daughter who killed their apprentice Nanny Nailor and were executed by Thomas Turlis on 19 July 1762; James Boswell and Samuel Johnson; the prostitutes Alice Gibbs, Elizabeth Parker, and Ann Pullen (alias Rawlinson) who was charged with stealing her mistress's clothes in January 1763; at the Magdalen Hospital, Matron Elizabeth Butler, and the Reverend William Dodds, who went on to be hanged in 1777 for forging Lord Chesterfield's name.
Doll Higgins is an invention, but several women were found starved and frozen to death in London in the terrible winter of 1762-63. The character of Abi is inspired by the case of an anonymous woman who was enslaved in Angola and brought to Barbados, then Bristol, and whose genitals were displayed in a fold-out engraving in a book published by Dr. James Parsons.
What little contemporary commentary there was about the murder of Mrs. Jones suggested various motives. The Gentleman's Magazine claimed that Mary Saunders had planned the crime carefully in order to get hold of her mistress's savings. But, according to a broadsheet, The Confession and last Dying-Words of Mary Saunders, the girl did it because she longed for 'fine clothes.'
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Reading Group Guide
Why do you think an author would choose to set a novel in the past rather than the present? Should novels like Slammerkin be put in the category of historical fiction, or does that make them sound formulaic? Does a story set in the past have to be absolutely true to the facts of history? Which aspects are most important for a realistic writer to get 'right': the physical surroundings, the dates of events or inventions, the dialogue, the mindset of the characters? Might those also be the ones that have been the least documented?
As authors often do, Donoghue has created a protagonist with many unlikeable qualities. What did you find hardest to tolerate about Mary Saunders? What about her character or situation made you keep reading?
According to one of Donoghue's sources, the real Mary Saunders killed for the sake of 'fine clothes'. In the novel, two of the whores' rules are about dress: 'Clothes make the