Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [62]
'Hush. Hush now.'
'How dare you try and buy me off?' she screamed in a whisper. Then, slipping into tragic mode, 'See what you've reduced me to! And all because I trusted in a Welshman's honour.'
That hit home. As he was fumbling for his purse, Mary spotted a reddish stain on the sheet. It had to be wine, because she hadn't had her courses since Ma Slattery's. But this fool mightn't know the difference. She pointed one trembling finger and burst into fresh tears. He'd give ten shillings for a virgin, whether he meant to or not.
The man seized her wrists. 'I swear I'll make it up to you, if you'll only be quiet.'
Mary writhed in his grip. 'And what if there should be a child?' The word came out like a whip.
His white eyebrows almost met.
Mary left the room with a pound, and a giggle in her throat.
All day in the coach she played red-eyed. The Welshman sat cramped in between two dusty masons, staring at his boots. His scratch wig was on crooked, and stubble covered his cheeks.
Today the roads were as rough as fields. They passed a pothole so deep that the farmer insisted on getting down to look at it. Climbing back in with wet boots he reported that there was a donkey drowned in its hollow. 'What an ass,' he said to Mary, working for a laugh. She pretended not to have heard him. She had money in her pocket and a bag full of clothes; she glowed all over.
John Niblett's face appeared upside down in the window. 'Only an hour to Monmouth, now,' he called cheerfully.
But this didn't look to Mary like the sort of landscape a city could emerge from. She'd always thought of the world as flat, but this countryside rose and fell, rumpled and wrinkled, as if a restless giant were sleeping under a blanket of frost. Apart from the track of other wheels under their own, there was no human mark on this hill they were skirting. What troubled her most was the crows. Mary could hardly believe there were so many of them in the world. The outskirts of a city should have been speckled with sparrows, should have echoed with the shriek of gulls, but for the past hour Mary had seen and heard nothing but the choking cries of crows.
As the wagon lurched past a field of stones, before the light quite faded, she let out a painful sniff and asked to borrow the Welshman's writing things. He handed over his box of quills, ink, and paper at once. Was he surprised she knew how to write? As Mary began her laborious task, leaning on her knees which heaved when the wagon did, she was aware of the Welshman's uneasy eyes. My deer old frend, she wrote. Let him sweat. Let him chew his fingers over the possibility that she was going to swear a rape against him. He'd been hot enough and no questions asked last night; let him do his fretting now.
The road was more like a ditch, really. Niblett got off to lead the horses down a woody hill; the coach leaned over to one side, and Mary feared it might break through the trees like a hunted animal. She clung to the pen. My deer old frend Jane, I rite you this leter on what may be my death bed. Mary could spell pretty well, but she doubted Susan Digot could, and it was as her mother, her imaginary, dying mother, that she wrote now. She felt queasy from the motion and lifted her head. A skinny doggish sheep was nosing at a stream that ran across their path; the water was brown.
She returned to her letter. The favor I ask of you for the sake of frendship is not small. As they edged down the valley past a number of furnaces, the smell of hot metal thickened. They overtook a shepherd, huddled in his sheepskin cloak; man and beast clearly wore the same cover in this part of the world. The wagon jerked towards a solid bridge of stone arches over a rushing river; this was the Wye, the farmer told Mary. It was almost twilight now, that bare hour before darkness when the last brightness was sucked out of the sky. On the far side of the bridge she could just make out a cluster of houses, seamed with whitened wood. This had to be the very edge of the city.
She