Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [64]
He nodded.
'Saunders, I mean. How fine she looked on her wedding day, do you remember?'
'I wasn't one of the party,' he reminded her. 'I didn't come home from my apprenticeship in Bristol till the year after.'
'Of course.' Mrs. Jones smacked her temple. 'I have my memories but they're jumbled up like laundry.' She looked down at the folded note, and shut her hand over it. 'I wrote Su a letter when I heard she was widowed, I think, and then another to tell her about her father passing on, but nothing since. I kept forgetting, in the press of business. There's always so much to be doing—'
'Aye, that's true,' he said gently. 'The years pass faster than a person can count.'
'She didn't make the bargain I did, poor Su.' Mrs. Jones's voice was quivering again. 'To think of that clown Cob Saunders leaving Su to scrape a living from shoddy piece-work!'
Her husband let out a little grunt of contempt. 'She picked a weak beam there.'
'But how fast a body can come down in the world! Never married again, it seems, just wore herself out tending the little girl. Just exactly six months my junior, Su was, remember?'
'Was she?'
'And bones in a London churchyard now.'
Mr. Jones watched his wife, bent over the candle. Was she crying, or was it only the light that wavered? He smoothed the cold blanket over the clean line of the stump below his left hip.
'Only think of it, though, Thomas.' His wife's voice shook like a rope. 'To feel your dying come upon you, and your child to be cast adrift on the world. That must be near as bad as, as—'
He couldn't let her go on. 'Maybe it's time you had someone to help you,' he remarked, 'now our busy season's coming on us.'
Her face turned towards him, outlined in yellow light; he couldn't see whether it was wet.
'Has she Susan's hands?' he asked, for something to say.
Her voice brightened. 'She has. Fine thumbs for a needle, I took particular notice. But surely, Thomas, we can't afford a fourth servant?'
'We wouldn't have to pay her till the end of the year,' he improvised, 'and by that time we ought to have got some very profitable orders. The Morgan girl's coming-out trousseau, for instance.'
'Oh, tush!' said his wife shyly, 'they might go to Bristol for that.'
'But Mrs. Morgan looks very favourably on your work. Besides, my dear,' he added with a small shrug, 'if we're ever to expand our trade and attract the attention of even greater names than the Morgans, we must take a chance or two. He who would succeed must first aspire,' he quoted.
Mrs. Jones sucked in her breath with pleasure. Her cheeks were the faint tinge of apple-flesh. At times like this, the decades fell away and he caught sight of her old unobtrusive loveliness. As if her hoity friend Susan had ever been a patch on her!
Privately, Thomas Jones thought it was Cob Saunders who'd made the fool's bargain. In their boyhood Cob had been the champion of the schoolyard, but it was his crippled friend Thomas who'd come top of the class. Cob was a pleasant fellow, but he never could tell a wormy apple from a whole one. Any man who'd pick Susan Rhys over Jane Dee could be said to have deserved what he got: blundering into a riot and dying of gaol fever. A quarter of a century ago, when Thomas Jones had come back from Bristol a new-made tailor, and found Jane Dee unaccountably still single, he'd been convinced it was an instance of the Divine Plan, and he held to that belief today. It was yet another way the Maker meant to reward him for the loss of his left leg.
His wife had that fretting look on. 'And if we found we couldn't afford the girl after all, but?'
'We could pay her what she's owed and turn her off at once.'
'To be sure. How right you are, Thomas, as always. Shall I send Daffy to the Robin Hood tonight, so, to tell her to come in the morning?' she added in a rush.
Mr. Jones inclined his head. 'It will benefit the trade.'
'Do you think so?'
He never