Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [43]
Was that hard-hearted? Well, so what if it was. She'd been through enough to harden anyone. It was none of her choosing; all she'd done was clung on to her life like a spar from a shipwreck. Better to be hardened than crushed to nothing.
A wintry glance from Matron Butler made Mary bend her head and join in the 'Hymn on the New Year.' Tomorrow would be 1763; it had a new and alien ring to it. Who was to say Mary herself would live to see another Christmas? Her voice died away again in the middle of the verse. She felt an intolerable need to get out of this building. She held her thumbs tightly, like triggers.
Back down on her aching knees, Mary tried to keep her balance. She swayed a little forwards, a little backwards on the stone floor, like a giddy kite tethered to the ground. High in his walnut pulpit stood young Reverend Dodds, announcing the theme. 'Can the Ethiopian change his skin,' he quoted impressively, 'or the leopard his spots?'
Mary thought of leopards. She'd paid a ha'penny to see one at the Tower last winter; its spots were huge and lush, and it was the angriest creature she'd ever set eyes on. Sometimes it paced back and forth through her dreams.
'The thirteenth verse of the Book of Jeremiah,' Dodds went on, 'is a vastly suitable text for this, the last night of the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and sixty-two.' His cauliflower wig dipped over his bright cheeks. Mary eyed the puce breeches that embraced his thighs without a wrinkle: they must have cost five pounds if a penny, she reckoned. Her fingers itched to test the pile of the velvet.
The sermon-tasters in the front rows nodded along like pigeons, as if Jeremiah 13 was the very verse of the very book they would have chosen themselves. An ostrich feather nodded in the gallery, light as foam. A good house, thought Mary: a sprinkling of nobs, and plenty of country cousins up for the Twelve Days, seeing the sights, and none prettier than bad women made good.
The Reverend could be relied on not to weary the visitors with too much hard thought. He turned now to the distresses of the vulnerable young women of London, 'how like straying sheep,' he moaned, 'they fall prey to the ravening wolves of avarice and vice.' The Lady Subscribers sucked in their white and red cheeks. The gentlemen looked into the distance, as if they had never heard of such a phenomenon as 'the slavery of prostitution,' thought Mary with dark amusement.
Now Dodds began his rhapsody on the most humane, most merciful Magdalen Hospital. 'A hospital not for the body, no! but for the character—where these young women may return to the natural state of female virtue, and learn to grow the fruits of honest toil.' As his cheeks turned to juicy cherries in the heat of the packed chapel, Mary could almost see why the little girls swooned for the Chaplain-in-Extraordinary, which was his full title. Dodds rose on his toes now and extended one long white hand in the direction of the Penitents, shaking back a triple ruffle. Belgian lace, Mary reckoned, peering past the brim of her hat. And a fat diamond on the finger that pointed now at a girl in the front row, little Amy who'd fainted in the gutter on Petition Day. 'Though the Ethiopian will be black forever, according to the Divine plan, you, Amy Pratt, may yet be washed clean of your manifold sins!'
It is a sin
To steal a pin
Mary's head was full of detritus; the rhymes nailed into it at school were the hardest to shake out. Amy Pratt leapt to her feet, now, swaying with excitement. It occurred to Mary to join her, as an excuse to straighten her legs. Had the Reverend picked Amy quite at random tonight, or was it for her pink oval face, exposed now as she raised her eyes to merciful heaven and her hat swung back like a straw halo? The gentleman in the pigeon-wing