Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [31]
'Only in the crack,' said Doll with scorn; 'the rest of it's plain muslin. And those diamonds in her ears look like paste to me,' she added gleefully, 'and when she undoes those stays, I bet her bubs fall on her stomach.'
Mary gave her friend a shove. 'Jealous old trull!'
Doll sighed, hands on hips, making her white bosom swell like a wave. 'Mark my words, she'll get another few months out of him, and a few more presents, but never an annuity. And another thing,' she said, watching the couple hurry into the club, 'there's pocks as deep as your nail under those starry patches.'
'How do you reckon that?'
'I'd say she's barely over the fever; pale as puke, she is.'
Mary was learning everything Doll had to teach. She committed to memory that night's lesson: Clothes are the greatest lie ever told.
One mild afternoon in April she and Doll were strolling down Charing Cross Road. The younger girl began to tremble a little as they passed the door that led down to the cellar where she used to live, but Doll never noticed and Mary didn't say a word. She glanced down the steps, but she couldn't see anything through the dusty window. The place could be full of strangers now, or derelict for all she knew.
It came to her that she was utterly changed. What she had between her legs was not her only goldmine, she'd discovered; there was one in her mouth as well. Once she let loose, Mary was a cheeky thing, as skittishly rude as any man could fancy. It gave her great satisfaction to say sharp pointed things and call them merriment. If she wasn't careful, she sometimes thought, she'd end up a shrew.
Not that she'd have anything to say to the woman who used to be her mother, if she met her coming along the street. Anyway, Susan Digot wouldn't likely recognise her child-as-was, all gussied up in a flowered jacket-bodice and a worn silk skirt buoyed out by a pair of improvers. Mary looked like a woman of the town, these days. She smelled different, even, with the mouth-watering lemony reek of Hungary water.
What a fool Susan Digot had been, to think everyone in gold braid her better, and the wider the skirt, the higher the breeding! Mary had seen commoners walk as queens on the stage in Drury Lane. Doll was opening Mary's eyes to all life's shortcuts, back alleys, gaps in the walls. In these uncertain times, Mary was learning, a duchess was sometimes just a stroller who'd picked the right honourable cully.
In a four-story house in Golden Square lived a lady who'd once been known in the trade as Angel Arse. On the corner of Hyde Park was a new mansion the Duke of Kingston was building for Miss Chudleigh, who'd been his mistress for a dozen years already and he still hadn't tired of her. The famous Kitty Fisher was said to be about to swap all her lordly lovers for a rich husband from the Lower House. A bit of loveliness, a bit of luck; that's all a girl needed.
On long bright evenings, Mary sat on the grass in Lamb's Conduit Fields behind Holborn and watched the courting couples meander by. The air was full of the sounds of leisure: the archers' arrows hitting the target, the click of balls on the bowling green, or the distant roars of a dogfight or wrestling match. She was reading again for the first time since school. She bought crack-backed romances and memorised all the long words, in case she'd ever need them. The History of Pamela Andrews was her favourite. The crafty wench, to fend off her master all those times, then squeeze a proposal of marriage out of him in the end! She'd swapped her maid's apron for bridal satins and ended up as good a lady as any other, hadn't she? It all went to show, Mary thought. If a girl had her wits about her, nowadays, she could rise as high as she wanted, as sure as cream through the milk. Anything was possible.
In May, Mary turned fifteen. Doll gave her a cap with a soaring feather in it. Between her new life and her old one flowed a wide river.