Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [18]
'Why did you take me in?' Mary asked her on the walk home that evening. Then she wished she could swallow the words again, because she feared they would make Doll turn cold and scornful, or tell her that her time was long up and she owed a pretty penny, by the way.
But Doll gave a peculiar smile, almost sheepish. 'When I stopped to look at you in the ditch, that morning, I was just curious,' she began. 'I was all set to walk on to the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street for my breakfast. But then you bit my hand, and I liked that.'
'You liked it?' asked Mary, bewildered.
'Showed some spirit,' said Doll with satisfaction. 'That's what I'd have done myself.'
But Doll never said if she'd ever been there herself: face down in a ditch, left to rot. She never said much about the past at all. It seemed she'd always been and always would be what she was: a Miss. That was their favourite word for themselves, Doll said, though whores would be more honest. The men who hired them were called cullies. Men came in all shapes and sizes but they all wanted much the same thing, Doll explained to Mary.
The girl was amazed to learn the Misses were not a distinct population, set apart from the mass of womanhood. A stroller by night might be a herring-seller by day. As well as the half-timers, as Doll rather scornfully called them, there were many others—especially the wives—who'd only stay in the trade for a year or two, while times were at their worst. 'Your whores for life, now, like myself, we're as rare as black swans,' she boasted; 'the aristocracy of the trade, you might say. I was even in Harris's List, back in '55.'
'What's that?'
Doll rolled her eyes, as always when Mary displayed her ignorance. 'The List of Covent Garden Ladies, don't you know. It's a sort of circular, published every year for the gentlemen's benefit.'
'And do you know what it said about you?' asked Mary.
'Every word. I paid a boy to read it out to me till I'd learned it by heart. Miss Dolly Higgins, Doll quoted, 'fifteen and full-fleshed, of a cheerful disposition. Application should be made at the Sign of the Moor's Head.'
So Doll was still only twenty-one, Mary calculated, appalled. That face looked so lived in.
'She is guaranteed to please the discerning beau,' Doll went on, 'who need have no fear of consequences.' She let out a hoarse laugh. 'Of course, I was clapped to the hilt already, no less than yourself. It sounded well, though.'
'But I think I'm clean now,' Mary told her.
Ah, once it's in your blood it never quite leaves you,' said Doll professionally. 'A visitor for life, is Madam Clap. Next time you lie with the fellows, wash in gin first, if you can spare it, or in piss if you can't.'
'I won't be lying with any fellows,' said Mary coldly. Her hands began to shake at the thought of it, and she folded them behind her.
Doll let out a hoarse ripple of laughter. 'How d'you mean to get your bread, then?'
'I'll think of something.'
Now that Mary was getting to know the wider city, she could tell that there were more trades for women than she'd ever heard of. Not every girl had to end up a servant or a seamstress. There were cooks and milkmongers, fishwives and flower hawkers, washerwomen and gardeners and midwives and even the odd apothecary. Women kept schools and asylums, pie stalls and millinery shops. Mary made herself ask questions of strangers, everywhere she went. All she needed to know was, how could a girl of fourteen make her own way in the world?
But the answer in every case was that Mary was too young. Too ignorant. Lacked a cow, a barrow, a shop. Had no money to buy an apprenticeship, no husband to inherit a business from. Lacked knowledge of the world, trades, customers.
On her own, Mary would have clawed herself a little piece of some market in the end, she knew that. If she'd had to, she could have sold dripping, old newspapers, used tea-leaves—the detritus that never went to waste. On her own, she would have learned how to live off ha'pennies and made herself wear plaincloth all year round—if only to defy her mother's prediction