Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [72]
Lindsay and Mansfield both left Dido substantial sums of money, and Mansfield took the precaution of confirming in his will that she was free. After his death she left Kenwood and probably married a Frenchman, because in 1794 she was listed in the family accounts at Hoare's Bank as Mrs. Dido Elizabeth Davinier.
The Necessity of Burning
Adrift in a boat made of butter on a sweet milk sea, she glimpses a castle on the horizon, a stately palace built of cheese and ornamented with curds of whey...
Margery Starre wakes from a dream of fat. Her mouth is as dry as a sack. Late afternoon sun prises the shutters apart.
For the first time in her forty-seven years it occurs to her not to get up. June fifteenth, a Saturday, a working day like any other and the Widow Starre was only having half an hour's shut-eye but now she's inclined to press her face back into her mattress and wait for the old straw to tickle her back to sleep. Let her neighbours on Bridge Street think she's fallen sick; let the Cam flow green and sluggish below her window; let this day, out of the too many days she has laboured through on this earth, wind into evening without her.
She scratches a bite on her hip. No, it's not straw she can smell, it's trouble. There's been whispering at corners and proclamations against unlawful assemblies. The peasants' army has crossed the Thames, or so they say. Kent's risen against the poll tax, and Essex too; Bury St. Edmunds, St. Albans, and Norwich, even. Troubles on its way across the Fens like a flood of brine. She can hear it coming now outside her window in the hiss of geese being driven across the bridge after market, and the wooden soles of the goose maid, in the clop of a horse and the complaining wheels of the cart it pulls, in the banging of Ned Smith's hammer three houses up the hill, in the mewing of the new baby two floors above the room where Margery Starre lies, facedown, wishing this long afternoon over. Trouble has got into her own head, too. There's a treasonous rhyme going round; she picked it up this morning in the Market where she was buying a pig's trotter for her dinner:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then a gentleman?
But she gets up and goes about the last business of the day, of course. The Widow Starre wouldn't have lasted forty-seven years and outlived most of the people she's ever known if she was in the habit of forgetting her business and opening her door to trouble.
Five o'clock. She sips the ale and lets it linger on her tongue; faintly sour, or is her mouth still full of sleep? For supper she eats old cheese and onions off a trencher of dark stale bread. Licking her knife clean, she puts it back into the sheath that hangs from her girdle.
Then Margery goes into the back room. Edgy, she checks everything twice. She rakes her fingers through the barley, oats, wheat, and malt, looking out for weevils or worms, peering into the barrels in the angular light. She sniffs at the pungent mash vat, checks the coolers and the rudders and the great copper kettle that's big enough for a woman to climb in and lie down. She's promised this batch of ale to the owner of the Pig and Parrot for Wednesday; a halfpenny a gallon she'll get for it.
In her time, Margery Starre has made hay and cheese, built walls, and tended pigs. Back home in her village she used to run a tavern out of her own kitchen, but she wouldn't try that in this town. Such troublemakers as the scholars are, with their pointed shoes and their high laughter. They'll swap jokes in Latin and Greek all night, then throw the trestles in the river. The worst of it is, you can't say a thing against them because they're under the protection of the University. Town hates gown, and no wonder.
It's not the King's Sheriff but the University's Chancellor who's the real master in this town. It's he who