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  Slammerkin

  Emma Donoghue

  * * *

  A Harvest Book • Harcourt, Inc.

  San Diego New York London

  * * *

  Copyright © Emma Donoghue 2000

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval

  system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be

  mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887–6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  First published by Virago Press

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Donoghue, Emma, 1969—

  Slammerkin/Emma Donoghue.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-15-100672-5

  ISBN 0-15-600747-9 (pbk.)

  1. Saunders, Mary, d. 1764—Fiction. 2. Great Britain—History—George III,

  1760–1820—Fiction. 3. London (England)—History—18th century—Fiction.

  4. Women—England—London—Fiction. 5. Monmouth (Wales)—Fiction.

  6. Women murderers—Fiction. 7. Murder—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6054.O547 S58 2001 00-049867

  Text set in ACaslon

  Designed by Cathy Riggs

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Harvest edition 2002

  A C E G I K J H F D B

  * * *

  This book is for my agent

  and tireless ally, Caroline Davidson.

  * * *

  Contents

  Prologue • [>]

  PART ONE London

  1 Ribbon Red • [>]

  2 Magdalen • [>]

  3 Liberty • [>]

  PART TWO Monmouth

  4 The Whole Duty of Woman • [>]

  5 Thaw • [>]

  6 Bloom Fall • [>]

  7 Punishment • [>]

  8 As the Crow Flies • [>]

  Note • [>]

  * * *

  Naked came I out of my mother's womb,

  and naked shall I return thither.

  —THE BOOK OF JOB, 1:21

  Slammerkin, noun, eighteenth century, of unknown

  origin. 1. A loose gown. 2. A loose woman.

  Prologue

  THERE ONCE was a cobbler called Saunders who died for eleven days. At least, that was how his daughter remembered it.

  In the year 1752 it was announced that the second of September would be followed by the fourteenth. The matter was merely one of wording, of course; time in its substance was not to undergo any change. Since this calendrical reform would bring the kingdom of Great Britain in line with its neighbours at last, what price a brief inconvenience, a touch of confusion? London newspapers printed witty verses about the 'Annihilation of Time,' but no one doubted the Government's weighty reasons. Nor did anyone think to explain them to persons of no importance, such as Cob Saunders.

  He knew this much: injustice had been done. There were eleven days of chiselling shoe leather he'd never be paid for, eleven dinners snatched away before they reached his lips, eleven nights when he was going to be cheated out of the sweet relief of dropping down on his straw mattress.

  On September the fourteenth—New Style, as they called it—Cob Saunders woke up with a hammering head and knew that eleven days of his life had been lost. Stolen, rather; cut out of his allotted span the way you might nick a wormhole out of an apple. He had no notion how those days had been done away with, or how he might fetch them back; his head was fit to split when he tried to figure it out. He was a man eleven days nearer to his death and there was nothing he could do.

  But perhaps there was. When the Calendar Riots began—though Cob had no part in the starting of them—he joined in with all the breath he had, tossing his rage onto the general bonfire. The cry went up: Give us back our eleven days.

  The Government was merciful; Cob Saunders wasn't executed. He died of gaol fever.

  Christmas came eleven days early, that year. The clamour of church bells pulled the air as taut as catgut, and the cobbler's five-year-old daughter Mary knelt below the window, watching for snow that never fell.

  Eleven years later Mary Saunders was back on her knees, herself in gaol.

  Like father, like daughter.

  The night room in Monmouth Gaol was twenty-two feet long and fifteen feet wide. She'd measured it by pacing, her first night. Four walls and no windows: here the men and women awaiting trial at the Spring Sessions lived like rats. Some were chained up after sunset, but not necessarily the murderers; there was no rhyme or reason to it that Mary could see. Anything, she learned, could happen in the darkness. Rapes, and only a hiss for breath; blows, and no sound but the slap of meat. There was no straw provided, so shit piled high in the corners; the air was as thick as earth. One morning an old Welshman was found face down, unmoving. But nothing could shock Mary Saunders any more; she wouldn't let anything touch her now.

  It had been worse back in September, when mosquitoes sang in the night heat and the guards didn't bring any water. Once before dawn it had rained so hard that water leaked through the cracked ceiling, and the prisoners laughed like hoarse lunatics and licked the walls.

  Now it was Christmastide, and in the gaol's day room Mary Saunders sat on her feet like a carving, hour after hour. If she didn't move, she wouldn't feel. Her palms rested on the rough brown dress the gaolers had given her three months before; it felt like sacking, stiff with dust. Her eyes latched onto the barred square of window, followed the crows wheeling across the white frosty sky towards the Welsh border; her ears took account of their mockery.

  The other prisoners had learned to treat the London girl as if she weren't there. Their filthy songs were inaudible to her; their gossip was a foreign language. Their couplings meant no more to her than the scratch of mice. If thrown dice happened to clatter against her knees, she didn't flinch. When a boy stole the blue-edged bread out of her hand, Mary Saunders only contracted her fingers and shut her eyes. She was going to die in gaol, just like her father.

  Until the morning she felt a light tug in her chest, as if her heart were starting to unravel. Gin clouded the air. She opened her eyes to see a purse-snatch with only one sleeve stooped over her, delicately pulling a faded red ribbon out of Mary's stays.

  'That's mine,' said Mary, her voice hoarse with disuse. With one hand she seized the ribbon, and with the other she took hold of the old woman by the soft part of the throat. She tightened her grip on the grey jowlish flesh while the thief choked and wrenched herself away.

  Mary let her go, and wiped her hand on her skirt. Then she wound the ribbon round her thumb till it made a hard rusty-coloured ring, and tucked it back down her stays where it belonged.

  PART ONE

  London

  CHAPTER ONE

  Ribbon Red

  THE RIBBON had been bright scarlet when Mary Saunders first laid eyes on it, back in London. 1760: she was thirteen years old. The fat strip of satin was the exact colour of the poppies that grew in Lamb's Conduit Fields at the back of Holborn, where the archers practised. It was threaded into the silver hair of a girl Mary used to look out for at the Seven Dials.

  Mary's mother—known as Mrs. Susan Digot ever since she'd remarried, a coalman this time—had told her daughter often enough not to pass through the Seven Dials on her way back from Charity School. A pond for the worst scum in London, she called the Dials. But the warnings drew the girl like a hot fire on a winter's night.

  Besides,
she was never in a hurry to get home. If it was still light when Mary reached the family's two-room cellar on Charing Cross Road, she knew what she'd see through the low scuffed window: her mother shipwrecked in a sea of cheap linen, scaly fingers clinging to the needle, hemming and cross-stitching innumerable quilted squares while the new baby wailed in his basket. There was never anywhere to sit or stand that wasn't in the way or in the light. It would be Mary's job to untie the baby's foul swaddlings, and not say a word of complaint because, after all, he was a boy, the family's most precious thing. William Digot—the Digot man, as she mentally called her stepfather—wouldn't get home from work for hours yet. It would be up to Mary to stand in the pump queue on Long Acre till nightfall for two buckets of water so he could wash his face white before he slept.

  Was it any wonder, then, that she preferred to dawdle away the last of the afternoon at the Dials, where seven streets thrust away in seven different directions, and there were stalls heaped with silks and live carp butting in barrels, and gulls cackling overhead, and the peddler with his coats lined with laces and ribbons of colours Mary could taste on her tongue: yellow like fresh butter, ink black, and the blue of fire? Where boys half her size smoked long pipes and spat black on the cobbles, and sparrows bickered over fragments of piecrust? Where Mary couldn't hear her own breath over the thump of feet and the clatter of carts and the church bells, postmen's bells, fiddles and tambourines, and the rival bawls of vendors and mongers of lavender and watercress and curds-and-whey and all the things there were in the world? What d'ye lack, what d'ye lack?

  And girls, always two or three girls at each of the seven sharp corners of the Dials, their cheeks bleached, their mouths dark as cherries. Mary was no fool; she knew them for harlots. They looked right through her, and she expected no more. What did they care about a lanky child in a grey buttoned smock she was fast outgrowing, with all her damp black hair hidden in a cap? Except for the girl with the glossy scarlet ribbon dangling from her bun, and a scar that cut through the chalky mask of her cheek—she used to give Mary the odd smile with the corner of her crooked mouth. If it hadn't been for the jagged mark from eye to jaw, that girl would have been the most gorgeous creature Mary had ever seen. Her skirts were sometimes emerald, sometimes strawberry, sometimes violet, all swollen up as if with air; her breasts spilled over the top of her stays like milk foaming in a pan. Her piled-high hair was powdered silver, and the red ribbon ran through it like a streak of blood.

  Mary knew that harlots were the lowest of the low. Some of them looked happy but that was only for barefaced show. 'A girl that loses her virtue loses everything,' her mother remarked one day, standing sideways in the doorway as two girls flounced by, arm in arm, their vast pink skirts swinging like bells. 'Everything, Mary, d'you hear? If you don't keep yourself clean you'll never get a husband.'

  Also they were damned. It was in one of those rhymes Mary had to learn at school.

  The harlot, drunkard, thief and liar,

  All shall burn in eternal fire.

  On cold nights under her frayed blanket she liked to imagine the heat of it, toasting her palms: eternal fire! She thought of all the shades a flame could turn.

  Mary owned nothing with a colour in it, and consequently was troubled by cravings. Her favourite way to spend any spare half hour was to stroll along Piccadilly, under the vast wooden signs that swung from their chains; the best was the goldbeater's one in the form of a gigantic gilded arm and hammer. She stopped at each great bow of a shop window and pressed her face to the cold glass. How fiercely the lamps shone, even in daylight; how trimly and brightly the hats and gloves and shoes were laid out, offering themselves to her eyes. Cloths of silver and ivory and gold were stacked high as a man's head; the colours made her mouth water. She never risked going inside one of those shops—she knew they'd chase her out—but no one could stop her looking.

  Her own smock was the dun of pebbles—in order that the patrons of the School would know the girls were humble and obedient, the Superintendent said. The same went for the caps and buttoned capes that had to be left at School with the books at the end of every day, so parents wouldn't pawn them. Once Mary tried to smuggle The Kings and Queens of England home for the night to Charing Cross Road, so she could read it under the covers by the streetlight that leaked into the basement, but she was caught going out the school door with the book under her arm and caned till red lines striped her palms. Not that this stopped her, it only made her more resourceful. The next time the teacher forgot to count the books at the end of the day, Mary tucked A Child's Book of Martyrs between her thighs and walked out with stiff small steps, as if in pain. She never brought that book back to school at all. Her favourite illustration was of the saint getting seared on a gigantic griddle.

  As well as her daily dress Mary had a Sunday one—though the Digots only went to communion at St. Martin-in-the-Fields twice a year—but it had long since faded to beige. The bread the family lived on was gritty with the chalk the baker used to whiten it; the cheese was pallid and sweaty from being watered down. If the Digots had meat, the odd week when Mary's mother finished a big batch of quilting on time, it was the faint brown of sawdust.

  Not that they were poor, exactly. Mary Saunders and her mother and the man she was meant to call Father had a pair of shoes each, and if baby Billy didn't learn to walk too fast, he would have a pair too, by the time he needed them. Poor was another state altogether, Mary knew. Poor was when bits of your bare body hung through holes in your clothes. Poor was a pinch of tea brewed over and over for weeks till it was the colour of water. Falling down in the street. That smell of metal on the breath of that boy at school who collapsed during prayers. 'Blessed are the meek,' the Superintendent was intoning at the time, and she stopped for a moment, displeased at the interruption, then continued, 'for they shall inherit the earth.' But that boy hadn't inherited anything, Mary decided. All he'd done was fainted again the next morning, and never come back to School again.

  Yes, Mary knew she had much to be thankful for, from the leather soles under her feet, to the bread in her mouth, to the fact that she went to school at all. Dull as it was, it was better than mopping floors in a tavern at eight years old, like the girl in the cellar beside theirs. There weren't many girls who were still at school when they turned thirteen; most parents would call it a waste of education. But it had been Cob Saunders's fondest whim that his daughter should learn what he never had—reading, writing and casting account—and as a matter of respect, his widow saw to it that the girl never missed school. Yes, Mary was grateful for what she'd got; she didn't need her mother's sharp reminders. 'We get by, don't we?' Susan Digot would say in answer to any complaints, pointing her long callused finger at her daughter. 'We make ends meet, thank the Maker.'

  When Mary was very young she had heard God referred to as the Almighty Master, and ever since then she'd tended to confuse him with the man her mother quilted for. The delivery boy would arrive with a sack of linen pieces every week or so, and dump it at Susan Digot's feet: 'The Master says to get this lot done by Thursday or there'll be hell to pay, and no more stains or he'll dock you tuppence on the shilling.' So in the girl's mind the Mighty Master owned all the things and people of the earth, and at any time you could be called to account for what you had done with them.

  These nights, in Mary's dreams, mustachioed Frenchmen knelt before her, and she hid her face behind a stiff fan of lace. The scar-faced harlot from the Dials shook her head like a silver birch in a high wind, and the red ribbon slid right down into Mary's hands, as smooth as water.

  'Get up now, girl,' came her mother's cry first thing in the morning. Mary had to empty the Digots' brimming pot into the gutter, and blow on last night's fire, and toast crusts on a blackened fork. 'Make haste, now. Your father can't dawdle here all day.' As if he was any father of hers; as if his kindness to Mary had lasted any longer than it took to court the Widow Saunders. 'Come now, can you not hear Billy boy whining?' As if Mary cared. br />
  A boy was worth ten times as much as a girl, Mary knew that without ever being told. Since the girl's half-brother was born, though, Susan Digot had not looked more content, but the opposite; her elbows sharper, her temper shorter. There seemed a kind of fury about her sometimes when she looked at her daughter. 'Four mouths to fill, I have,' she muttered once, 'and one of them a great useless girl's.'

  While Mary was waiting at the corner for the milkmonger each morning—and especially if he'd bittered the milk with snail juice to make it froth as if fresh—she took refuge in her best memories: the time her mother had taken her to watch the Lord Mayor's Procession, or the sky-splitting fireworks on Tower Hill last New Year's Eve. As she hugged her pint basin of tea and soaked her crusts to soften them, she conjured up a luxurious future. She dwelt on how she would have her maid wind a scarlet ribbon into her plaits every morning; how its gaudy stain would make her hair gleam like coal. The sounds of her future would be foreign ones: flutes, and galloping horses, and high trills of laughter.

  All day at school Mary thought of gaudy colours as she copied out Precepts and corrected the spelling of the girls in the neighbouring desks. None of the tasks set demanded more than a fraction of her mind, that was the problem. The Superintendent called her proud, but Mary thought it would be nonsense to pretend she didn't know she had quick wits. As far back as she could remember, she had found her schoolwork ludicrously simple. Now she busied herself with fantasies of hooped gowns with ten-foot trains as she stood—a full head above the younger girls—reciting the Principles of Goodness:

  Put upon this Earth to work

  None but wicked children shirk.