Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [24]
It was the way the world was. It was the bargain most women made, whether wife or whore, one side of the sheets or another. 'Don't you see?' slurred Doll one night on Oxford Street, seizing the bottle from Mercy Toft and draining it. She chucked it at the fresh-painted door of a four-story house, and clapped her hands with glee to hear it smash. Then she remembered her point, and turned on Mary. 'You've got a thing, ain't you, that any man, from a beggar to a baronet, will pay to lay his hands on.'
She started hoisting up her skirts for illustration, petticoat by petticoat. Mercy Toft was laughing so hard she couldn't stand upright. Only Mary saw the door of the great house open; she grabbed Doll's skirts before she could show her snatch to the whole neighbourhood, and shoved her into the road.
'It's true, frig you!' bawled Doll. 'You can take his own weapon—see—and turn it in his face.' That mime was even more obscene. Mercy's laugh turned into a violent cough. They never noticed the pair of footmen hurrying down the marble steps to investigate the matter of the broken glass. Mary had to hook her arm into Doll's and Mercy's and haul them off down Soho Street before they all got their heads broken. They giggled all the way to St. Giles.
The winter was a wet and cold one, but Mary and Doll bought fourthhand fur-edged muffs to keep them warm, when ale and wine and gin wouldn't do the trick. Most of the girls picked a beat and worked it, but Doll said that was tedious stuff. 'The whole city's our bawdy-house, my lass,' she crowed. Mary was coming to learn that men were easy, in the end; not worth being afraid of. Doll showed her where to find them, and when they were ripe for the picking. Mary took strangers against walls, in taverns, in rented rooms; clerks blind with drink on the Strand; rich Bishopsgate Jews restless after sunset on Saturday; young bucks reeling out of Almack's after losing hundreds at brag.
Mary was a free woman now, with more money in her pocket than she'd ever seen in her life before. She dressed in the brightest colours she could find on the stalls of Monmouth Street—pinks and purples and oranges—and never cared if they clashed, so long as the cullies kept looking. She knew herself to be wanted. She wore her rouged face like a carnival mask.
One grey morning she thought of the Mighty Master for the first time in months. 'Are we going to hell?' she asked her friend, suddenly doubtful.
Doll let out a dry chuckle. 'I'm a Roman, ain't I?'
'A what?'
'You know, a Papist, same as my parents before me. I take the sacraments every Easter, rain or shine,' Doll added proudly. 'When I reckon my hour's come, all I'll have to do is send for a priest and get myself absolved.'
'What's that, then?'
'Scrubbed clean, soul-wise.'
Mary considered this image. 'But what about me?' she asked, troubled.
Doll shrugged. And then, more kindly, added, 'They ever told you about the Magdalen in that school of yours? Mary the Magdalen?'
The girl thought she remembered the name.
'Well, she were a whore, and she did all right in the end, didn't she?'
At Twelfth Night Doll took her to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, 'to teach you how to cheek the fellows in the grand style,' as she put it. They paid a shilling each to squeeze into the gallery—the price of a fuck, Mary thought, trying out the new word in her head. Doll gazed round critically and guessed there were no more than a thousand and a half in the house this afternoon. The hum of talk rose like bee song.
Mary felt sick with anticipation. The play was said to be a new one, adapted from the French: The Game of Love. Her mother had always kept