Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [77]
She held the wide black skirt over Mrs. Jones's head—quality grosgrain silk, though dull, she noted—and helped her mistress wriggle into it. Then she picked up the matching sleeves and started buttoning them onto the bodice.
'Oh, Mary, you're very deft.'
'Thank you, madam.'
Her eyes slid back to the master. For a moment, when he stood up in his single leather shoe, the empty leg of his breeches swung. Then he snatched it up behind with one hand, and fastened it to his waistband with the little button his wife sewed on all his clothes. After that he dressed like any other man. The old-fashioned skirts of his frock-coat, stiffened with buckram, flared around his knee.
Mr. Jones's fuzzy head looked odd once the rest of him was dressed. He raised a cloud of blue powder when he clapped on his dishevelled wig.
'Should you like to have Daffy up to dress your peruke, my dear?' asked his wife.
He shook his head, sitting down at the mirror and taking up a comb.
Mary suspected the master would always see to his own wig, even if he had ten thousand pounds a year. She'd never yet heard him say the words I need.
After a week Mr. Jones decided that the new girl was settling in well. She had a slightly bold manner, at times, but that was only to be expected in a girl who'd grown up in the streets of the great city; impudence was endemic there, he'd heard.
As a rule Mary Saunders was to be found cleaning the house or helping his wife in the shop, but every now and then his wife sent her through to the stays room with a message or a query. The girl was acutely aware of his missing leg, he noted with amusement; sometimes she'd offer to fetch things so he wouldn't have to get up, dreading perhaps that he might trip on the edge of a floorboard! At such times Mr. Jones swatted her away, hopping across the room with his arms piled high with unfinished stays, his head almost touching the ceiling. 'Find someone who has need of you, girl,' he liked to say.
Once Mary Saunders came in when he was cross-legged at his work, the translucent plates of whalebone laid out in front of him on the little low table which was scored as if by a wild animal. He cut strips of bone with his knife, then whittled them down. Laid out in rays around him on the rush mat, they reminded him of the articulated skeleton of some star-shaped fish.
'How many bits of bone do you need?' Mary asked. 'Sir,' she added, a half-second too late.
He glanced up at her. 'Forty pieces,' he answered pleasantly. 'Forty at the least.'
She watched over his shoulder for a few minutes. He could feel her gaze on his hands. 'I thought they'd all be the same shape,' she remarked at last.
Mr. Jones looked up from his blade and laughed. 'Girl! Is the human form a rectangle?'
Mary blinked at him. Did she understand the word, he wondered? It was only female schooling she'd had, after all.
'Am I a mere box-maker?' he asked, more simply.
She smiled uncertainly.
He gave a little sigh, but the truth was, he loved to explain his trade. He took up the new stays for Mrs. Broderick that hadn't been covered yet. 'You need strong verticals to press the stomachs in, and diagonals across the ribs,' he told the girl, stroking the double lines of backstitch that went up either side of each ridge. 'Then these thin horizontals are required at the back to flatten those unsightly shoulder blades. Not forgetting the wide shaping bones across the front, to plump