Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [8]
In May of the year 1761, Mary turned fourteen. After school that day she passed through the Seven Dials and caught a glimpse of the back of the scarred harlot. On an impulse, she followed the girl up Mercer Street, past St. Giles-in-the-Fields. What was it her mother said? Every man in St. Giles who's not a beggar is a thief. But Mary scurried on after the white wig with its cheeky red ribbon. When the girl stopped at a gin-shop Mary hung back; then her quarry reemerged, swinging a bottle.
At the Holborn warren she'd heard called the Rookery, Mary stopped, afraid to go any further. The harlot disappeared between two buildings which leaned drunkenly on each other across a street no wider than the span of Mary's arms. Courts cut the nearby streets, yards cut the courts, and yards conspired briefly in crannies. Mary had heard that no one chased into the Rookery by a watchman or even a Bow Street Runner ever got caught. Two Indian sailors passed by then, and one of them winked his white eye at her. Mary ran half the way home.
Susan Digot looked up from her stitching and rubbed her damp forehead with the back of the hand that held the needle. Her coppery hair was turning grey. 'Ah, Mary, at last. I got us a pigeon. It's very high, look you, but in a good spiced ragout we'll hardly taste it.'
The quills were loose in the pigeon's skin. The girl plucked fast, to get it over with, shuddering a little. The big feathers flared in the fire, but the small ones clung to her fingers. Her knife laid the pigeon's entrails bare. She thought of what it meant to be fourteen.
Susan Digot watched her daughter, and licked the thread as if she were thirsty for its flavour. 'You'd have quick fingers for the work.'
The girl ignored that.
'High time you learned a trade, now you're a grown woman.'
Mary concentrated on getting all the dirty innards out of the pigeon. She hadn't thought her mother had remembered her birthday.
'Plain work, fancy work, quilt work ... A girl won't ever starve as long as she's a needle in her sleeve, Mary.'
The girl turned and stared into her mother's eyes; they had always been the dirty blue of rain clouds, but recently she'd begun to notice the red around their rims. They were ringed as sure as targets and speckled as if by darts. How many more years would they last? Mary had seen a pair of blind seamstresses that lived in a garret in Neal's Yard; you could count the bones in their arms. So she shook her head and turned back to the flattened pigeon. She scooped up its guts on the edge of her knife and flicked them into the fire.
For a moment she thought it was going to be all right; silence would fill up the little room as the last light gave way to evening shadow. When Digot woke for his dinner, the talk would start up again, and Mary knew how to steer it onto harmless topics: the mild air, or how strong Billy's arms were getting.
But Susan Digot pushed her fading hair back from her face and let out her breath as if it hurt her. 'All this reading and writing and casting account is well and good, and when Cob Saunders insisted you go to the Charity School I never said a word against it, did I?'
It was not a question that required an answer.
'Did I stand in your way?' she asked her daughter formally. 'I did not, even though many told me so much schooling would be wasted on a girl.'
Mary stared mutinously into the fire.
'But it's time you thought of getting your bread, now. What do they say about it at school?'
'Service.' The word came from the back of Mary's throat. 'Or sewing.'
'There now! Just as I say! Isn't that right, William?'
No answer from the man in the corner. Mary let her eyes slide over. Her stepfather was nodding, halfway asleep, his head repeating its coal-dust mark on the wall.
'And if it was the needle, couldn't I start training you up myself, Mary?' her mother rushed on.
She sounded fond of her daughter, for a moment. Mary was reminded of the years when there were only the two of them, the Widow Saunders and her child, and they shared