Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [9]
'And if you turned out vastly handy, Mary, and why shouldn't you with those fingers the very spit of mine, well couldn't I get you out of this filthy city? Maybe I could even send you to Monmouth.' Susan Digot's voice had a hint of light in it, as always when she said that word. 'My friend Jane Jones that's a dressmaker, I could write to her. Wouldn't she take you for apprentice in half a minute?'
The pigeon bits clung to Mary's fingers. She shook them into the pot one by one. They didn't amount to the size of an egg. How were they meant to make a nice spiced ragout for four?
'A fine place it would be, Monmouth, for a growing girl,' said her mother longingly. 'Such clean civil people as they are, and the greenness all around, and the quiet of the streets.'
Mary conjured it up in her mind as best she could: a muffled, pristine little city. 'I don't like quiet,' she said.
'As if you know what you like, child that you are!' said her mother, astringent again. 'Besides, the main thing is to find you a trade.' Her voice softened again, and her hands stilled on the cloth. 'Once you're trained you could come back and work alongside of me. Partners, we'd be.'
Mary looked into her mother's shining eyes, observed the dampness of her lower lip. Her guts tightened. So now she knew what was really going on. A trouble shared is a trouble halved. Maybe she'd been bred up for this very purpose, to stand as a buffer between Susan Digot and her fate. Like mother, like daughter. With ruthless love Susan Digot was offering her child all she had, all she knew: a future that went no further than this dank cellar. Mary would inherit it all in the end: the Digot men, the bent back, the needles, the scarlet eyelids.
'I'm sorry,' she whispered.
For a moment she thought her mother knew what was unspoken between them, the delicacy of their mutual betrayal. For a moment it seemed that they might come to some kind of understanding.
But then she saw that Susan Digot hadn't heard her, would never hear her. 'Or would you rather go into service?' said the woman coldly. 'Speak up, which shall it be?'
'Neither,' said Mary clearly, scraping the knife on the edge of the pot.
A hawking cough from the corner; William Digot was awake.
'Then what'll you do with yourself, so?' his wife snapped. She held her needle like a weapon, aimed at her daughter.
Mary nibbled her lip as she set the cooking pot over the coals. A thin strip of skin came away in her teeth with the sweetness of blood. 'I don't know. They're both wretched trades.'
'And where did you ever get the idea, Miss,' spat her mother, 'that you were marked out for anything better? Such greed! Such wilfulness!'
Her husband roused himself with a hunch of the shoulders. 'Does the girl think we'll feed her forever?' he asked hoarsely.
Mary looked away so the man wouldn't see her face. She poked at the hissing pigeon pieces with her knife.
Answer your father,' snapped Susan Digot.
Mary kept her mouth shut, but looked her mother in the eye as if to say that she would have, if her father had been there.
Susan's small slate-blue eyes, so unlike Mary's, blazed back at her. 'What do you propose to make of yourself?'
'Something better,' the girl said between her teeth.
'What's that?' said her stepfather.
A little louder: 'I have a wish to be something better than a seamstress or a maid.'
'A wish!' William Digot roared, wide awake now, his blackened nails digging into his breeches. 'Your mother and I drudge all day to put food on the table, but that's not good enough for Milady Saunders, is it? And what might Milady Saunders have a wish for, then?'
She was tempted. She was on the verge of turning and saying: Any smell but the stink of coal dust. Any trade but the cursed needle. Any place in the wide world but this cramped cellar.
Her mother put down her sewing. Her callused hand gripped Mary's jaw before the girl could say any of that. Dry fingers sealed Mary's mouth, almost tenderly. Save me, Mother, she wanted to whisper. Get me out of here.
'We're each of us born into a