Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [32]
There was one morning every month when the whores got up early: Collar Day.
It was hot July and the city smelled of vengeance. The Metyards were to swing at last, and evil women always drew a crowd. Mary and Doll had to pick up their skirts and push and shove in order to join the Newgate cavalcade when it passed the Rookery on its way to Tyburn. As always the bellman stood on the wall of St. Sepulchre's, exhorting repentance, but it was hard to hear him over all the festivity. Mary had grown even taller this summer, but still she couldn't see the prisoners as well as she wanted. She stood up on a barrel and craned her long neck. 'Lord have mercy on you!' came the bellman's faint cry as the mob moved up Holborn after the cart. Mary elbowed her way up until she was close enough to see the criminals' faces, and their pale necks, already circled by rope. They bumped along, backs to the horse, their hands knotted in their laps.
The cart was heavy. 'Six thieves to be collared today,' Doll bawled in Mary's ear, 'three forgers, a runaway soldier, a sodomite, and a girl that stifled her babby.' There sat Thomas Turlis the famous hangman, marked out by his little black mask. And in front of him, as if under special guard, those had to be the Metyards. No sign of penitence; the daughter seemed indifferent and the mother shook as if having a fit. Mary had a sharp stone in her pocket, and aimed at the daughter as the cart rattled on, but she missed.
Then the crowd surged on past. As Mary walked, she tried to imagine the two Metyard women as they'd once been, without the wild hair, squinting eyes, nooses, and tied hands. Without all the marks of Newgate. She pictured them as respectable haberdashers— decent folk, by all appearances, she thought in Susan Digot's grudging voice—who for years had earned the gratitude of the authorities by taking children off the parish and making apprentices of them.
Of course, what the Metyards had made of Nanny Nailor was minced meat. Mary had memorised every detail from the newspapers she read aloud to Doll in the drowsy afternoons. Nanny Nailor had run away from the Metyards the summer she reached thirteen, but she never got the chance to tell anyone what conditions she was running from. She never found a Doll Higgins to take her in. Instead the Metyards had tracked her down, brought her back to that attic, and tied her up in the heat without water. After three days they started telling the neighbours that they couldn't imagine what had become of poor little Nanny Nailor. Then they had chopped her in pieces and dropped them in a gully-hole.
Mary craned her neck for a glimpse of the Metyards in the cart now: mother and daughter, both limp, bumping along in their noose necklaces like puppets loosed from their strings. It made her laugh, really. They thought they could do what they liked with girls like Nanny Nailor; that such creatures were at the disposal of their mistresses—body and soul, quick or dead. As the years had gone by after Nanny's death, the Metyards had counted on the other girls being too fearful to say a word. They'd assumed they were unassailable.
'A glorious day, eh?' said Doll as they sweated and panted through the crowd at the cart's tail.
Mary grinned back.
'Still, this crowd's not a patch on the one for Earl Ferrers. The procession took three hours to go three miles, with the lord chewing tobacco and waving out the window all the way. White satin, he wore—'
'Yes, I know, and silver lace, you've told me often enough,' said Mary. Doll had never quite got over the excitement of watching a peer of the realm hang. But nothing could irritate Mary on a day like this, when every street, every balcony, every barrow for half a mile around was full of riotous faces waiting to see Nanny Nailor's killers swing. She could smell ginger cake and hear a baritone snatch of 'A Soldier Met a Silly Lass.' She was struck with amusement to see how the West End was growing around the brutishness of Tyburn. To think that the nobs kept shifting a little westerly every year, only to find their streets