Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [39]
Her mouth filled with sour water. It occurred to her at this point to walk off, to give up the place she held in this four-hour queue and make her way back across the city to the Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street for a pint of small beer. Only the thought of Doll's face twisted with rage kept her feet frozen to the ground. 'All you have to do is keep your head down for a couple of months and save your damn skin,' Doll had told her, towards the end of their argument. 'You ever heard of a better bargain?'
A rumour came down the line now: 'They're not taking but one in five.'
Mary's mouth set in a hard line.
Another message passed from ear to ear, faster this time: 'They like you barefoot.' Girls started plucking off their shoes and throwing them in the gutter. The woman in front of Mary was barefoot already; her toes stood out like worms on the hard ground. Mary glanced down at her own satin pumps. Five shillings she'd paid for them, at Bartholomew's Fair; they'd been practically clean, then. She was damned if she was going to throw them away before they had so much as a hole in them.
As the queue inched its way between the high panelled doors, Mary listened hard. It was important to have a story, she realised; something for the clerks to write down, something that sounded well. Three women in a row ahead of Mary—Drury Lane Misses, the lot of them—all claimed to be ladies' maids whose masters had tricked them with promises of marriage. Others lifted their stories from ballads, French romances, and even a recent trial. Mothers were all dead in childbirth, it seemed, and fathers all at sea.
The only honest words Mary heard were spoken by the woman just in front of her, who Mary reckoned was toothless from a mercury cure. Mary bent closer to hear what she muttered. The woman didn't bother acting. She told the clerks she'd always walked the streets, but at her age she couldn't earn her dinner anymore.
The younger clerk gave her a chilling look. 'Is that all you have to say for yourself?'
She nodded tiredly.
The older clerk wiped his pen. 'Application refused,' he recited, writing in a huge leather-bound account book. 'Petitioner too hardened to reclaim.'
The woman pushed past Mary blindly. She spat on the doorpost on her way out.
Mary's chest was hammering. Her turn. She tried to cough, to exhibit her neediness, but she could only produce a faint clearing of the throat.
'Name?'
'Mary Saunders,' she said, before it occurred to her to lie. Her deep hoarse voice made the younger clerk glance up at her. She curtsyed, to soften the impression. She watched the older clerk scratch the words in the right column.
'Age?'
'Fifteen,' she said softly. It was true, but it sounded like a lie. Maybe fourteen would have been even better.
'Reason for application?'
'If you'd be so good as to put down whatever you think fit, sir,' she whispered.
A pause. Then it worked; the words rolled out like a prayer. Most Gracious Governors,' the clerk murmured as he wrote, 'this Petitioner has been guilty of prostitution and is truly sensible of her offence. Her penitence is equalled only by her resolution to begin a better life.'
The worst of it was the surgeon. Behind a thin curtain he laid Mary flat on her back and stuck his fingers in her privates, 'to discover your state of health,' he claimed, not paying a penny for the privilege. Nasty fingers, too, studded with warts.
'Any itch? Any whitish running, or yellow?' he asked. Any stoppage of urine?'
'None, sir,' she said, trying to sound as if she had no idea what he meant.
He didn't believe her, she could tell. He went on peering between her legs and muttering. She didn't think there were any marks of her old ailment,