Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [83]
'Does she get any wages?' suggested Mary.
'Well, no, but what would poor Abi do with wages?' Mrs. Jones looked at her in such confusion that Mary said no more about it.
Here in the Marches, she was coming to realise, folk had no idea that things could ever be different.
After three weeks in the house on Inch Lane, Mary could hardly remember any other life. The Seven Dials gauzes and taffetas she kept hidden in the bag under her bed seemed like relics from a former life, limp costumes from a play. She didn't recognise herself in her scrap of mirror. How shockingly respectable she looked, with her boiled white caps and her plain wool stockings and only the discreetest hint of carmine on her lips; how young! And how the St. Giles strollers would howl to see Mary Saunders now, scratching a living without opening her legs.
Her mistress intrigued her. Mrs. Jones seemed to have no vanity at all. Her face was only a little haggard; its lines were sweet, especially when she smiled. But the only time the dressmaker ever looked in the long mirror in the shop was when one of her patrons was standing in front of it, posing critically in a half-made gown. 'Why do you always wear black?' Mary asked Mrs. Jones now, teasing slightly. 'Is it for simplicity, or as a foil for the patrons?'
'Really, I couldn't say, Mary,' the mistress murmured over a difficult stitch. Then she looked up, into space. 'I went into mourning for my last boy, and I suppose I never thought to change back...'
It was the first time she'd mentioned the other children, the dead ones. Mary wanted to know more—their number and names—but something prevented her from prying into such a painful subject.
Mrs. Jones rarely stopped moving all day, and nor did Mary. Their window-lit corner of the shop was a chaos of fabrics, ribbons, spools, and scissors, but Mrs. Jones claimed to know where everything was, even if it sometimes took her half an hour to find it. For the whole month of January the two of them had worked on fat Mrs. Fortune's enormous riding-habit, made of grey wool so deep Mary's fingers sank into it. All the girl had to do was hem, but perfectly; it would clearly never occur to Mrs. Jones to let a little flaw pass.
The girl only got a chance to rest when she lingered for a moment in the passage between the stays room or the shop, or went out to use the necessary behind the house, her arms wrapped round herself to keep out the frigid wind. At such times she sometimes felt like leaving the back door to swing, and running down Inch Lane to find the nearest way out of this narrow town.
One morning hail fell from ten till half past eleven. Mary had never seen the like of it. There was no limit to weather, in this part of the world; there was nothing to contain it. She stood at the narrow window and watched the icy hail smashing down on the roofs. Daffy came home from market with blood all down his neck; his ear had a gash in it half an inch long. He told them about a rumour going round that a crow had fallen out of the sky with its head split open.
'I hear you used to work in your father's tavern,' Mary mentioned to the manservant at dinner. 'But I thought he was a curate?'
Daffy gave her an unreadable look.
Mrs. Jones chipped in to fill the silence. 'Oh, Joe Cadwaladyr could never be expected to keep body and soul together on what the vicar allows him.'
'That's right,' added her husband. 'If the poor fellow hadn't his inn as well he'd have starved by now!'
Mrs. Ash looked up from her tiny Bible, her mouth turned down. 'Ecclesiastes says,' she began, 'Better a crust with a quiet conscience than two hands full along with vexation of spirit.'
No one had an answer for that.
'Crow's Nest,' remarked Hetta.
'That's right, my clever,' said her mother, reaching down to part the child's milk-white hair, 'Daffy's father owns the Crow's Nest Inn.'
The manservant was squirming, so of course Mary couldn't let the subject rest. 'If you had a job in your father's tavern, what made you come to work here, then?'