Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [44]
'Here before us,' proclaimed Dodds with a tender wave at Amy Pratt, 'we see a woman—nay, a very child—stripped by penury, enfeebled by hunger, and lured into depravity at an all too tender age.'
Sell it before you lose it, chanted Doll in Mary's head. Mary exchanged a tiny grimace with Honour Boyle, who was picking her nails with a splinter from the pew.
'But as Jeremiah instructs us, Then may ye also do good, who are accustomed to do evil,' the preacher recited in the rolling bass he kept for the Prophets.
Matron Butler, pinned on her knees at the end of the row, knitted up her lips as if she doubted that, somehow. Mary could sense the Matron's cool eyes on her, and she had to pretend to be looking at a painting on the wall. Mary's namesake in dusty oils, the Virgin, six months gone, stumbled across an arid field into the curved arms of her cousin. Mary imagined their big bellies meeting with a thump.
Dodds was bouncing up and down on his shiny toes as he recited one of the Hospital's own hymns.
Flee, Sinners, flee th' unlawful Bed,
Lest Vengeance send you down to dwell,
In the dark Regions of the Dead,
To feed the fiercest Fires of Hell.
He relished the rhymes; Mary suddenly suspected him of writing poetry in his spare time.
But Amy Pratt's faint sobs were swelling now. She burst forth in lamentation, gulping the air like a fish. Honour Boyle was giggling; she could never stop once she got started. Mary avoided her eye. The girls next to Amy Pratt were climbing to their feet one by one, infected by her shame, their tired legs shaking.
'Embrace the light,' Dodds urged them, gripping the glossy edge of his pulpit. Jill Hoop, eleven years old and unused to metaphor, cast an appalled glance at the chandelier that hung near the pulpit; she was clearly reckoning the distance. The older girls quivered in their pews. Who would be the first to faint tonight? Sixteen or seventeen, most of them, years older than Mary; ought to know better, she thought coldly. A bowl of proper tea to steady the nerves, that's what they needed. Or better yet, a slug of gin.
The Reverend managed to look distressed and gratified at the same time. Were those tears in his eyes, or just a glitter of candlelight? 'Be of good cheer,' he told the girls now in a buttermilk voice. 'Through the grace of God and his Son, you have been lifted from the Hades of the streets into this Elysium of sisterhood.' Upturned faces stared at him, bewildered by the allusions. 'This is no grim house of correction,' he carolled. 'It is a safe refuge from your miserable former circumstances—a happy home at last.'
But the girls had picked up grief like a fever; whimpers passed down the rows. The Ruineds were the most sentimental, Mary thought scornfully. Jane Taverner stooped down, heavy with tears; she was a vicar's daughter. Was it acceptable for a Presidor to remain dry-faced, Mary wondered with a slight start? She knotted her hands on the hard rim of her stays and dipped her chin, as a halfway measure. Her neck began to throb in time with her knees.
When she glanced up next, the velvet-coated blond man was whispering a joke in his friend's ear. She wished she could remember who he was; a lawyer, maybe? He was looking down most eagerly at the Magdalens. At least let him pay for it, thought Mary furiously. Why should we kneel here and let him gawk for nothing?
The lady with the ostrich feather was craning over the rail. Over a dark blue petticoat and bodice she was wearing a loose slammerkin in cream shirred silk; the light of every candle in the chapel was lost in its flounces. Her hair was dressed in such a heavy, flower-studded egg, it was always possible she might topple over the edge of the balcony and keep Honour Boyle laughing all year. Her pearl-ringed hands squeezed the pew cloth. Three of the Ruineds had worked the ivy leaves on that one, Mary