Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [38]
The Magdalen Hospital was an imposing block of stone. Hours after the line of Petitioners had formed, it still stretched along two sides of the building. There had to be forty girls here, Mary reckoned, and she was about halfway along. The downstairs windows were all shuttered—to stop the Petitioners from seeing what went on inside, maybe. A man in some kind of uniform walked up and down to keep them in order. He seemed like a servant, but they all bobbed their heads to him just in case he turned out to be important. Mary pulled her shawl so tight her shoulders turned in, and edged a little nearer to the railings. Was that Con March from the Rookery? Mary gave her a tentative nod, but the other girl avoided her eye.
Mary shifted from foot to foot in the cold morning air, her breath like a cloud around her. A huge cough went through her like an earthquake. It was lucky that she was used to standing round on street corners; how well she knew that feeling of sending down roots between the icy cobbles. Hadn't she often taken on a cully standing up against a frozen wall, or let herself be bargained down to ninepence just to get indoors?
She amused herself now by eyeing the other Petitioners. That tiny girl in carmine and a torn lace-edged trollopee, she was definitely your Covent Garden stroller. The one beside her looked poxed to Mary. If they spotted the disease, Doll claimed, they'd send the girl off to the Lock Hospital, where the food was the worst.
Mary's eyes moved down the queue, picking out Misses from Ruineds. ('That's what the good girls are called, Ruineds,' Doll had said derisively. 'Tell anyone who asks, you was pure as snow till some gentleman took advantage.') The Ruineds had a bruised, bewildered air about them. One wore a little pearl cross around her neck, and clutched it as if at any moment she might be transported to a better world.
By now the thin November sun was high in the sky, drilling into Mary's eyes. She should have worn a straw hat, but the only one she had was red, with a broken feather, and Doll said they'd never let her in with that on, so Mary had had to leave it behind in the garret with all her other favourite things. It wasn't that she didn't trust her friend, exactly; what troubled her was the thought of robbers, a fire, or any of the thousand things that could steal away her stock of glad-rags.
Dressing, this morning, Mary hadn't been sure whether it would be better to look like a respectable Penitent, or a wretched one. She'd put on the plainest jacket and skirt she had, but she knew she still had the mark of a Miss on her. Was it the satin shoes, with their worn points? Or just the way she stood, a little too practised, her hip too far out? She couldn't remember what innocence looked like. She tried to conjure up a memory of herself as a charity schoolgirl, her face blank as paper. No use: all gone.
A stir in the ranks; the tiny Miss in the torn slammerkin had keeled over in the gutter. Mary craned to see. After an uneasy moment, five women rushed to pick her up. Were they trying to prove their kind-heartedness, Mary wondered? Two porters in fat grey wigs walked out with a padded stretcher. They carried the little girl along the whole length of the queue. Her lips were blue. The great doors shut again behind her.
'That one's a sharper and no mistake,' muttered a sunken-checked woman in front of Mary.
Mary grinned and began to answer, but the cough doubled her over and took all the air from her lungs. That was a neat trick, fainting in the gutter; why hadn't she thought of that? Doll would have. Mary would have had nothing to fear if only Doll Higgins were with her. 'Why don't you come along too, then?' she'd complained, as she got up before dawn.
But Doll had lain back on their lumpy straw mattress and let out one of her cackles. 'Catch me letting them lock me up in there!'
Mary tried not