Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [70]
'The harvest?'
'The plough must go round all the houses for a blessing before the spring sowing starts, you see, or the grain won't thrive.'
Mary couldn't help letting out a little giggle. 'You don't really believe that, do you?'
'Well,' said Mrs. Jones, stiffly.
Mary knew she'd gone too far; she was going to lose her place on her first day. Her stomach sank.
'I couldn't say, for sure, if it does much good.' The mistress fiddled with the string of her apron like a child, then her small eyes brightened again. 'But it does no harm, surely!'
'Surely not,' echoed Mary. She went back to the parlour where she'd been scrubbing rugs with damp tea-leaves. There was no reasoning with country folk. They would hold to their charms and customs till the Last Trumpet. Now she thought of it, Susan Digot always used to throw salt over her shoulder, even when they couldn't afford to buy more. And once, Mary remembered, when she'd dropped a tiny mirror and cracked it, her mother had knelt down on the floor and wept for the seven more years' bad luck.
The world was changing, Mary was confident of that much; already it was not the same one as her mother had grown up in. But in a backwater like Monmouth they'd clearly never heard about the changes, and wouldn't believe in them even if they had.
Her breath rose as she scraped up the dirty tea-leaves; her ribs protested against her tight-laced stays. Mrs. Ash was right about one thing: hoops were a hindrance when you were down on your knees. But since when did a young woman dress just for comfort, like any dog or cat?
She shook a stray lock of hair out of her eyes, and saw Abi in the doorway, standing like a pillar. She hadn't heard her come in; the maid-of-all-work moved from room to room like a ghost. Perhaps she was only newly arrived from the plantations? She seemed a mute lump of a creature.
'Mistress send me for help you,' said Abi at last. She had a heavy accent but at least she spoke English. Her voice was not a girl's, Mary realised; she had to be thirty at least.
'Very good,' said Mary with a civil smile. It was best to take charge from the start, she decided all at once. This woman was twice her age, and might prove difficult. Mary saw herself as a higher sort of maid—an apprentice dressmaker, really—and even if some of her duties overlapped with those of the maid-of-all-work, there was to be no confusing them. So she pointed to the biggest rug, a brown square heavy with dust.
There was a pause. Abi's lip curled a little, and then she knelt down at the edge of the rug.
The two laboured away on their hands and knees in silence, but sometimes when Mary turned her head to ease her stiff neck, Abi was watching her with those huge white eyes. Her stays were leather; Mary could glimpse them through a hole under her arm. The maid's skirt hung so flat, she mustn't have so much as a petticoat under it, the poor wretch. Her left hand had a pink gash in the middle of the brown, Mary noticed—right through from front to back. 'What happened to your hand?' she asked.
No answer.
Mary tossed her head. She wasn't so desperate for conversation with this sulky creature anyway.
Back in the scullery, Abi immersed her hands in the basin of kettle water and let out a slow gasp. The relief of the heat filled her like a pain, from the knuckles up. She'd been more than eight years in this country, but she would never get used to the cold till the day she died. Already this month the mistress had started talking about the whiff of thaw in the air, but Abi couldn't smell it. All her nostrils caught was snow and dirt outside, fire and bodies in the house. At each daybreak, Abi was too immersed in work to notice what the air smelt like, and before she got around to looking out a window, it seemed, the afternoon's portion of light was used up and it was night again. As far as she could tell, this country was locked in perpetual winter. Even in the season they called summer, the sun was thin and watery; it never soaked into her skin.