Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [95]
'Your maid pinches my sister,' barked Miss Maria.
The maid was so very sorry. The mistress was even sorrier. The room was getting hotter. The pink stockings, clocked with gold thread, wrinkled in Mary's fingers and wouldn't stay up.
'Fetch my sister's pannier, girl,' said Miss Maria. Mary ran to the closet and emerged with the most enormous hoop she'd ever seen, from thirty years ago. Between them, she and Mrs. Jones stretched it out for Miss Elizabeth to step into. They fastened it with tapes around her waist; it bobbed, it swayed, it bulged a little on one side. Finally Mary abased herself on hands and knees and crawled inside.
Encased in the odorous canvas, she fought with a knotted tape. How ugly were the inner workings of elegance, she thought. The voices came through very muffled. When Miss Elizabeth shifted from foot to foot, the whalebones creaked like a ship. Jonah, thought Mary, remembering her schooldays.
At last she heaved up the edge of the hoop and wriggled into the air. Miss Elizabeth was grinning at herself in the long glass like a child. Mary dusted herself down unobtrusively.
'Vastly vulgar,' pronounced Miss Maria.
Her sister's face plummeted.
'Take it off, Elizabeth. You know I'm right.'
Ladies couldn't be expected to think of the time, Mary knew, as they didn't dine till six. Her stomach growled like a captive animal. But she watched, and listened, and curtsyed every chance she got, and did everything the Misses Roberts asked and other things before they'd thought to ask, and finally she won a little soft smile from Miss Elizabeth.
'Your maid is a capable girl,' Mary overheard Miss Elizabeth tell Mrs. Jones.
'That's the truth, madam. I don't know how I ever managed without her.'
That bit was spoken in Mrs. Jones's ordinary voice; there was no gush or falsity to it. Listening, with her back turned, Mary felt her skin tighten and glow.
'Might madams be pleased to bespeak any clothes today?' suggested Mrs. Jones.
They would not. Nothing quite suited. But they might send for her and her maid again.
'He's a good man, right enough,' Mrs. Jones told Mary as they sewed their way towards each other round the four-yard hem of Mrs. Harding's new lavender robe à la française. 'He's never raised his hand to me, you know, not like'—her voice went down to a murmur—'Jed Carpenter, who takes a horsewhip to his wife.'
'So how did he lose his leg, madam?' asked Mary.
Mrs. Jones smiled at her. The fact was, this was one of her favourite stories, though she never told it outside the family. 'I tell you this, Mr. Jones is the bravest fellow. He was only a wee boy of nine years old, see?' Her eyes never lost their grip on the tiny stitches. 'He was helping the ostler down at the Robin Hood for thrupence a day. This coach and four came through on the way to Gloucester, and the gentleman, he hopped down outside the inn, and didn't poor Thomas run in to take the reins, and the near horse trod on him.'
'Kicked him?'
'No, no, just lifted up as gentle as you please, and stood down on the boy's bare foot.' Mrs. Jones could see the scene as clear as an engraving, with the colours put in by hand: the glossy brown of the flank, the red mark in the snow. 'Mashed it to mush he did.'
'Pugh!' said Mary, her mouth wrinkling up.
Mrs. Jones's hands had stilled on the linen. 'It rotted black as your boot, I don't mind telling. Up to the knee the next day, and along the thigh the next.' She marked out the stages of putrefaction on her dusty black skirt.
'Does it go that fast?'
'Like mould on fruit,' said Mrs. Jones with relish. She resumed her sewing, faster than before. 'So Dai Barber came to cut it off. But Thomas's mother—a good woman, our neighbour she was—we heard her tell Dai, "Put away your saw. My boy'll die with all his limbs on."' She paused to thread her needle again, squinting against the dregs of the afternoon light. Her eyes weren't what they were.
'And what happened next?' Mary Saunders stretched