Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [67]
Mary Saunders shook her head.
'Not that we'd wish to starve you,' Mrs. Jones added hastily. 'You look a little sickly.'
Mary assured her she was only pale from the journey. 'It was vastly cold.'
'Why, this is nothing!' said Mrs. Jones merrily. 'The winter I turned twenty, the birds were frozen to the branches. The price of bread was so high we had to...' Then she recollected herself, and folded her hands on her stomacher. She should have worn her good brocaded one. Oh Jane, for mercy's sake! 'You know how to wash and get up fine linen, I think, Mary, and do plain-work? I seem to remember your mother said that in her letter.'
'Yes.'
Mrs. Jones thought a maid should have said, 'Yes, madam.' But it was only a little thing, and the girl was new to service. 'Any household affair you may be ignorant of,' she swept on, 'I can soon instruct you. You have only to ask. For now you'll help our maid Abi with cleaning and such, as well as working with your needle alongside of me. All I require is that you be diligent, and neat, and...' She strained for another word. 'Honest,' she finished with satisfaction.
The girl inclined her head.
Mrs. Jones remembered a line from one of her novels that had an impressive ring to it. 'I can't abide deceit or any such nastiness,' she assured the girl, 'for if I catch a servant in a lie, you see, I can never depend on them again.'
Another nod.
'Oh, and I was forgetting, I have a book for you—' She scrabbled in her hanging pocket, and drew the worn volume up through her waist seam. 'The Whole Duty of Woman,' she pronounced, putting it into the girl's hand. 'Most improving.'
Before Mary Saunders could thank her, a small child ran through the doorway, and Mrs. Jones scooped her up. Briefly she dipped her face into the child's buttermilk hair. 'This is Hetta, our darling,' she said, and then regretted the word.
The new maid smiled guardedly.
'Muda?'
'What is it, child?'
'Can I go out in the Meadow?'
'Not today, Hetta. It's still thick with snow. I named her Henrietta for the heroine of Mrs. Lennox's romance,' Mrs. Jones confided, turning to Mary Saunders and shifting the plump child to her other hip. 'I was reading it all through my confinement. The full of a fortnight in bed I was...' But then she remembered she was speaking to a girl of fifteen; she blushed faintly, and rested her chin against her child's hot round face. Hetta struggled in her arms; Mrs. Jones let her slither down her skirts. She straightened up and pressed her fists into the small of her back. 'Say good-day to our new maid Mary, cariad.
At four, Hetta was generally wary of strangers. But when the London girl bent and extended one hand, Hetta seized and shook it. Mary Saunders's mouth loosened into a smile, and for a moment she was the dead spit of Su Rhys.
'You must be a good girl for Mary, my dear,' Mrs. Jones told her daughter gently, 'since she's just lost her mother. Can you imagine that?'
Hetta's grin slid away; she mirrored her mother's grave face.
'Gone off to heaven, the poor woman has,' added Mrs. Jones.
'In a chariot, like my brother?'
Mrs. Jones winced imperceptibly. 'That's right, my dear.' Turning to Mary she lowered her voice and asked, 'Your mother didn't suffer long, did she?'
The girl shook her head, mute.
Mrs. Jones covered her mouth with her hand for a moment. Listen to her, harping on the girl's grief. 'Well, my dear, if you be half as worthy a creature as poor Su, we shall get on very well together. Let you come downstairs now and meet Hetta's nurse. Mrs. Ash is ... a very Christian woman,' she added uncertainly.
The girl's thick eyebrows lifted; there was something almost ironic about them.
On the stairs, Mrs. Jones racked her brain for any further advice suitable to the occasion. 'Oh and snuff, Mary.'
'Snuff?' repeated the girl.
'I must warn you against it. A very costly habit and pernicious to the health.'
The girl assured her she