Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [59]
Occasional fliers clattered past the wagon, now; Mary watched them speed into the distance.
'It's well for some as can change horses every sixty miles,' said a journeyman sourly.
'If Niblett put the whip to his,' muttered Mary, 'we might move a bit faster.'
'You should rightly be on the other coach, then, if you're in a hurry.'
'What other coach?'
The journeyman let out a laugh that showed his browned teeth. 'The one as gets to Monmouth in three days.'
Niblett always took the slow road, Mary learned, to her immense irritation. And not because of the age of his mares, but his itch for trade. Stuffed under that sacking at the back of the wagon was London ware: patent cordials, printed cottons, ballads and books. The fellow stopped to haggle in every petty town along the way. He always bent and roared in the window to tell his passengers where they were, but the names meant nothing to Mary. She sat in the corner and chewed her lip furiously. Her money was draining away like water in a sieve, and it was all that buffoon's fault for taking the slow road.
She queried the tavern bill at Northleach and got two shillings knocked off it; she stopped handing out the usual tips to cooks and chambermaids. In consequence she slept on damp pallets and ate lukewarm dinners. At Oxford the silent student gave his nose one final wipe on his black cloak and got down. The inn there was the dirtiest Mary had ever seen, and when she asked—in a discreet murmur—for whatever was cheapest, they served her a leg of fowl so grey that she was running to her pot all night. The maid who came to empty it in the morning held out her cupped hand out pointedly, but Mary stared right through her.
These towns were handsome enough, Mary supposed, but they were only specks in a wilderness of heath and marsh and waste, ruled over by the occasional tar body hung up in its iron gibbet. Her problem was, she didn't believe in anywhere but London. Even having to name the city she'd left behind was new to her. When she'd lived there, it was simply where the world was, where life took place. London was the page on which she'd been written from the start; she didn't know who she was if she wasn't there. Not that she bore any sentimental attachment to the city, any more than she might have expressed a fondness for the mud on her boots, the air she breathed—or, rather, used to breathe. She didn't know what she was breathing these days, and she didn't know how she was to live on it.
Late one January afternoon Mary's lashes lifted, blinked away the cold dust. The coach had slowed to a standstill. She rested her temple against the icy glass to see what the matter was. Yet another top-heavy cart of grain, pulled by a pair of oxen, and, in front of the tangle of vehicles, rounding the curve of the narrow road, another cattle drove on its way to the fattening fields round London. It might take an hour for the hundreds of skinny cows to thrust past. She shut her eyes again, preferring not to meet their hungry gaze. The smell of fresh dung strengthened around the wagon; at least there was something that was the same as home, thought Mary, with a shadow of a smile. The animals were all around them now, bumping into the sides of the coach. The drovers made hoarse, incomprehensible bird calls. All the world seemed to be taking the slow road, but in the other direction, pushing down this stinking track towards the green pastures of the south. Mary couldn't shake off the feeling that she was going the wrong way, perversely pushing north-westwards against the tide.
Night was closing in now. She hadn't seen a street lamp since the Strand. The smell of that singed oil was fading from her memory already. Out here, in what Mary was beginning to realise was the real world, the greater part of this godforsaken country, the day came to an end as soon as