Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [35]
So much for a holiday. Mary left them on the bench and went off down the long gravel walk, to where the lights ran out, and the path branched into a sort of maze, and gauzy figures stood around waiting. Trade was poor; it took her half an hour to find a cully. He had lace cuffs that hung to his fingertips, and a clammy, unhealthy look to his neck. But she got two shillings off him, which took herself and Doll safe home across the river with drinking money to spare.
When Mary tried to be witty, these autumn days, it came out sour. Doll had taken to calling her Miss Crab. 'Have a go at Miss Crab here, but mind her claws,' she'd say, shoving Mary into some cully's arms; 'you might wake up missing a bit!'
These days the pair of them didn't stroll the whole length of the river just for larks anymore. Instead, they'd taken to meeting for a snifter and a gossip in a dead-end alley behind Rat's Castle. There they could rest their bones on a heap of bricks and pebbles someone had hidden and never come back for. Mary and Doll ducked down that alley whenever they got word that the Reformation Society had sent out their men.
The strollers had no fear of the city constables, who spent their time in exhausted pursuit of thieves and murderers, and rarely bothered a girl at her honest trade. But the Reformation bullies were hired by their Society to do nothing but stamp out vice, as they called it. One night in early October Mary didn't move fast enough. When the cry around Seven Dials turned into a chorus—Reformers, it's the bleeding Reformers!—she was engaged in finishing off a buttonmaker by hand, in a doorway in Neal's Yard. She tried to run, but the men cut her off at the top of the yard. They had sticks with metalled ends, and they were fast runners. They shouted at the cullies, calling them sinners and whoremongers, but they arrested only the girls. Mary was one of about twenty Misses rounded up; she went quietly, wary of the sticks.
At the Dials, she couldn't see Doll in the crowd; she knew she should be glad of her friend's escape, but she could have done with her company. The rumour was going round that they were all to be committed to gaol. Panic locked Mary's throat. Some of the drunker Misses were whimpering already.
Mary heard her friend before she saw her. 'Get your base paws off me, you scurvy rogues!' Doll Higgins was being dragged up Mercer Street, struggling in the grip of three Reformation constables like a sail in a rough wind. Her bodice was torn open, showing one creamy breast, and she had a fresh cut on her jaw, but she was enjoying herself hugely. 'Call yourself Christians?' she bawled. 'Don't make me laugh!'
Mary was afraid for her and wanted to make her stop, but Doll was in full spate. 'There's girls here not thirteen years old,' she raged, sweeping her hand over the crowd. Her finger alighted on Mary, and she gave her a wink. 'That skinny thing there, for instance; twelve years old and barely a week on the town, poor wench. Would you drag her off to Bridewell too, you filthy dogs?'
The head Reformer stepped up to Doll, almost respectfully, and backhanded her. Mary heard the crunch of his knuckles against her cheek. Doll subsided into silence. She winced, and spat out a bit of tooth.
Mary did get to go home that night; all the younger girls were let off. But those the Reformers called the hard cases were put in fetters and led off to the Bridewell, down at Blackfriars.
For two nights Mary didn't go out on the streets except to ask for news, but there was none. She stayed in the garret and waited, chewing the skin off her thumb. Sometimes, she knew, girls came back from the Bridewell with slit noses as a perpetual mark of their crime.
On the third morning in stumbled Doll Higgins, her back all scabby from the lash but her nose as pert as ever. 'You missed a bit of an adventure, my girl,' was all she'd say. Mary washed her friend's stripes with gin.
All in all, Doll was the worse for wear these days. She gave every sign of running out of jizz. That