Slammerkin - Emma Donoghue [99]
Most evenings she stole ten minutes before supper to look through her scraps. She had a tiny piece of everything she'd worked on so far: champagne satin from Mrs. Tanner's night robe, green watered tabby from Miss Partridge's pleated petticoat, and a dozen others besides. Now that she knew what good cloth felt like, she realised what nasty rubbish was most of the stuff hidden in her bag under the bed. The fabric was no good, to start with: dull-napped and limp, with cheap dye that faded in sunlight or after one wash. That open robe with the salmon scalloped petticoat she'd thought so fine when she found it on a stall on Mercer Street—she fingered its patchy sheen now and blushed to think she'd paid four shillings for the thing. The royal blue had seeped off the back of her jacket-bodice already. Trash. And as for the cut of most of her dresses, it appalled her to think she'd been strolling round for so long with all her seams slightly askew.
Her new scraps were only leftovers, slipped into her pocket at the end of the day; Mrs. Jones never even seemed to notice they were gone. But already Mary had sewn herself a handkerchief from six triangles of best white cambric, with an edge of blue ribbon, and some evenings she took a half-inch of candle up to her room after dinner and worked on a little scarf, from a strip off the end of that silvery gauze they were using for Miss Fortune's overskirt. Not that she had any call for finery, in her present life, but someday—
It was still Mary's firm belief that service was a fool's game, and no way to make a living. But for the moment she couldn't seem to think of another. Her old trade seemed inconceivable. The Seven Dials life sounded like a lurid drama, acted out with puppets against a black sheet.
In the back of Mary's mind was one tiny anxiety: surely somebody in the house would wonder why she didn't have monthly courses like other girls. She even thought of getting hold of some pig's blood to wrap up in rags. But one day as she passed Mrs. Jones in the narrow hall, each carrying a bale of cloth, the mistress rested a hand on the girl's shoulder and murmured that she knew Mary was only a young thing yet.
Mary gave her a puzzled smile.
'And I didn't start till my seventeenth year, myself. But whenever your time comes on you ... if you should ever find your small-clothes stained,' the older woman said in her ear, 'just you come to me at once.'
Mary kept her face straight. 'Yes,' was all she whispered.
'At such times,' said Mrs. Jones, 'a girl needs a mother.'
Mary watched her out of sight. She felt giddy with swallowed laughter. To think that she'd got the belly business over and done with at fourteen, down in Ma Slattery's reeking cellar, but in this house she was considered a chit of a girl who hadn't even begun!
Suddenly she wanted to weep.
Deceiving the Joneses was all too simple. Easy as pissing the bed, as Doll used to say. Decent people only saw what they were expecting to see. She was reminded of a purse-snatch called Mary Young who'd had a pair of artificial arms, or so the story went. Young used to sit in church with her straw-filled gloves folded demurely in her lap, while her real hands were busy picking pockets left and right. She'd had a good long career before they carted her off to Tyburn.
Even Hetta trusted Mary. She was always asking for a splash of the maid's Hungary water on her dimpled wrists, and she begged to learn the clapping games that London children played. At dinner, Hetta often wriggled over to stand beside Mary, till the maid gave in and lifted her onto her lap. Why the child had taken a liking to her she couldn't tell, except that anyone would be a relief after that old poison ivy of a nurse.
These days Mary went about her duties like someone who'd never been out past midnight. A little sharp-tongued, perhaps, but a good girl on the whole. The