Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [84]
Daffy shoved back his chair and stood up. 'I'd best deliver those hats,' he told Mrs. Jones.
When the door had shut after him Mary looked round with wide eyes.
The master reached down for his crutches. 'It's as well for Daffy to be with us, learning a clean trade,' he added gravely, 'but I don't like to interfere between father and son.' He said no more before going off down the corridor to the stays room.
'What did I say?' Mary asked her mistress.
'Ah, there's bad blood there,' murmured Mrs. Jones, shaking her head.
Some afternoons Mary sneaked upstairs and lay on her bed for a few minutes, just to get away. She couldn't bear to be so thickly set around with people who knew her name and could make demands of her. In the shifting crowds of St. Giles, it had somehow been easier to be alone. She lay on her side on the narrow bed and turned the greasy pages of the Ladies' Almanack she'd paid ninepence for at the last Bartholomew Fair. On the cover, young Queen Charlotte looked out glumly, despite her fur-lined cape. Mary shut her chilly eyelids for a moment and conjured up that exquisite fur around her throat.
'Mary?' The mistress's voice, like the sharp cry of a blackbird. 'I've need of you.'
The girl remembered London as a place of infinite freedom. Now it seemed she'd rented out her whole life to the Joneses in advance. Service had reduced her to a child, put her under orders to get up and lie down at someone else's whim; her days were spent obeying someone else's rules, working for someone else's profit. Nothing was Mary's anymore. Not even her time was hers to waste.
'Coming, mistress.' She stamped down the stairs.
Whenever Hetta managed to escape from her nurse, she liked to follow the new maid round, clutching at her skirts. The child's questions followed each other like waves. 'What colour is this called?'Is it dinner time yet?' 'How old are you?'
'Guess,' panted Mary, shovelling ash out of the grate.
'Are you ... ten?'
'No. More.'
'Are you a hundred?'
'Why, do I look it?' said Mary, laughing despite herself as she wiped ash off her cheek with the back of her hand. 'I'm fifteen, and that's the truth.'
'My brother was nine. My brother Granz.'
'Was he,' said Mary, casting the little girl a curious glance.
'He got skinny and went to heaven in a chariot.'
'That's right.'
'I'm not skinny,' Hetta remarked, a little guiltily.
Mary swallowed a smile. 'I should hope not.'
'Mrs. Ash calls me a porkish little glut.'
This made Mary laugh out loud, despite herself.
'Do you really have no mother?' asked Hetta suddenly.
Mary stopped laughing. 'That's right.'
'She's gone to heaven?'
'I hope so,' said Mary grimly, picking up the bucket of ash.
The afternoon was the longest stretch of work, but at least Mary was generally sitting down in the shop. She snoozed over her needle, hemming the skirts and bodices of the better families of Monmouth. Tannery owners, cap merchants, and iron-masters, that was all; not a viscount among them. Beside her, Mrs. Jones used her great curved scissors to cut confident shapes in silks and brocades, turning every now and then to consult one of the pattern dolls John Niblett had brought her last week in the back of his wagon. Their aprons were two inches long; their skirts were no wider than cabbages. With their twiggish arms and thick necks, Mary thought they looked like rats dressed up as duchesses.
Mrs. Jones could go on for hours about the latest romance she was reading. Sometimes she even talked about the boy she'd lost the previous summer, her Grandison—named, of course, for Mr. Richardson's best novel. Privately, Mary thought it just as well the boy hadn't had a long life, bearing the weight of such a name. Now, to hear Mrs. Jones talk, you'd have thought he'd been the kindest, cleverest young fellow that ever reached nine years of age. But when Mary had asked Daffy about him, the manservant admitted that he'd once caught the boy holding a cat's tail in the coals.
Now she let out an enormous yawn.
'You're not used to working such hours, are you?' asked