Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [96]
'Well. The lad within on his truckle bed, he bawled out so the whole street could hear, "Look you, Mother, I'll not die yet, not for a long while. Bring me in the axe and I'll chop it off myself!"'
There was that disbelieving look in the girl's eyes again. Where had such a young creature picked up such an expression? London had to be a very hardening place. 'I tell you, Mary,' said Mrs. Jones urgently, 'you've heard nothing like the sound, outside a sawyer's yard.'
'So Mr. Jones cut off his own leg?'
She shook her head impatiently. 'Dai Barber did it, with his saw. He put Thomas out with gin, but the boy still screamed through his dreams. None of us on Back Lane got a blink of sleep that night.'
Mary, bent over her needle, looked revolted. Then, in a curious tone, she asked, 'You used to live down Back Lane?'
There was no use pretending any different. Nothing could be hidden from servants, Mrs. Jones knew that much. 'Oh, aye,' she said lightly. 'Thomas and I both grew up there, only two doors apart.'
She could see Mary absorb the new knowledge and store it away. At such moments the girl had the same thoughtful look as Su Rhys used to wear. 'But go on about the leg,' said Mary.
'Well, they dipped the stump in salt water, and it healed up clean as your elbow. Within a month the boy was hopping along like a one-legged rooster.' Mrs. Jones let a smile crease her face.
They stitched their way along another foot of ruched silk. Mrs. Jones released her breath in a little puff, blowing tiredness out of her way.
'So he didn't die of it, then, for all his mother's fears,' observed Mary.
'No, thank the Maker,' said Mrs. Jones with a shocked laugh, 'or where would I be now?'
'Here.'
She stared. Sometimes this girl gave the most peculiar answers. 'Monmouth, maybe, I grant you, but I wouldn't be Mrs. Jones.'
'What if you'd married Ned Jones the baker, madam?' asked the girl in a sly murmur.
'Ah, what indeed?' Mrs. Jones gave the girl's arm a little shove with the heel of her hand. 'I wouldn't be this Mrs. Jones, would I? Up to my eyebrows in flour I'd be then, so you wouldn't know me.' She rather liked this image of herself: unrecognisable, chalky white. She sewed on, faster.
It struck her that anyone seeing the two of them together would think them friends, or mother and daughter. Mrs. Jones knew she lacked the carriage of a mistress. It wasn't that she was ignorant of how to behave. All the advice books warned about keeping a proper distance, and a romance she'd been reading only the other night illustrated the dangers of befriending the lower orders. Intoxicated by any Degree of Familiarity, they soon fall into Impertinence. The heroine ended up being compromised by a duke.
But what was Mrs. Jones to do? She forgot all the advice once she and Mary sat down with their needles and fell into conversation. The girl might be penniless, because her shiftless father had died in gaol, but wasn't she Su Rhys's daughter still? Couldn't she read and write and cast account better than Mrs. Jones herself, if it came to that? The mistress shifted a little uncomfortably on her stool. It struck her as strange, suddenly, that she who'd grown up shoeless on Back Lane was now lording it over the daughter of her best friend. How arbitrary were the ups and downs of the world. And how could she not grow a little familiar with the girl, while they bent together over the same piece of silk, which pulled back and forth between them like a bird on warm air?
'Does it hurt him still?'
Mrs. Jones was startled out of her reverie. Mary was staring at her own bare elbow, its curious knob emerging from the grubby lace.
'The leg? Only the old itch in the winter. Thomas always says it did him good.'
'Good?' Mary's voice was appalled.
How could she explain it to this girl, who was only fifteen years old, whole in body and spirit, with her life spread out in front of her like an untouched feast? 'He knows he's been through the worst,' said his wife gently. 'He's nothing more to fear.'
Mary's private plan