Slammerkin Read online

  Mary was so used to these rhymes by now that she could join in with the chorus of voices while her mind was altogether elsewhere. Could chant the Five Requirements for Salvation, for instance, while deciding that once she was grown to womanhood she would never wear beige. She tried not to think about how empty her stomach was, or the Mighty Master in the sky, or what piece-work he was going to hand her, or how long a life she'd have to do it in. That Immortal Soul the teachers harped on so much—Mary knew she'd swap it quick as a blink for the merest inch of beauty. A single scarlet ribbon.

  In September, old King George dropped dead and young George was the new king. William Digot said things might take a turn for the better now. This fellow had been born on English soil, which was more than you could say for his dad and his grandad, 'and Lord knows we've had enough of those Germans and their fat wives.'

  When he fell asleep in his chair, Mary peered over his shoulder at the newspaper in his lap. She suspected her stepfather couldn't read one word in three; he just stumbled his way through the headlines and looked at the pictures. Under the title 'King of Great Britain, Ireland, Gibraltar, Canada, the Americas, Bengal, the West Indies, and Elector of Hanover' there was a full-length drawing of the young king; his expression a little nervous, his thighs in their velvet breeches as smooth as fish.

  Crouched by the window to catch the last of the daylight, Susan Digot nibbled her lip. Mary knew her mother took no interest in politics. All the woman had ever wanted was to be a proper dressmaker, shaping elegant skirts and jackets instead of quilting coarse six-inch squares twelve hours a day for dirt pay from a master she'd never met. She and Cob Saunders had both grown up in a faraway city called Monmouth before they'd come to London in '39. 'What was it brought you and my father to London in the first place?' asked Mary now, softly, so as not to wake the coalman.

  'Whatever makes you ask a thing like that?' Susan Digot's eyes were startled, red at the rims. But she didn't wait for an answer. 'Myself and Cob, we thought we'd better ourselves, but we should have bided at home.' Her fingers moved like mice across a hem, stitching as fast as breath. 'It can't be done.'

  'What can't?'

  'Bettering yourself,' said her mother bleakly. 'Cob didn't know the London cobblers had the trade all sewn up, did he? He never got the work he wanted, the fine skilful stuff. Patching holes with cardboard, that was about the height of it. Here, count these.'

  Mary went over and knelt at her mother's knee, lining up the squares stuffed with muslin. She imagined her father as a cross-legged fairy man, tapping nails into pointed dancing shoes with his tiny hammer. But no, that wasn't right, that was out of a story. When she concentrated, she could see him as he'd been: the great bulk of him.

  'Cob wouldn't have gone and got himself killed back in Monmouth,' added her mother, her mouth askew. 'There was never such bloodshed there.'

  Mary tried to picture it: blood on the London cobbles. She'd seen a riot go down Charing Cross last year: boots clattering past the basement window, and shouts of 'No Popery,' and the screech of breaking glass. 'Like the No Popery?' she said now, eager.

  Susan Digot sniffed. 'That was nothing to the Calendar Riots your father got mixed up in, nothing at all. The chaos and confusion, you can't imagine it.' She went silent, and there was only the scratch of her needle on the cloth. Then she asked, 'And what about me?' giving Mary a hard look as if she should know the answer. 'Wasn't I as neat a needlewoman as my friend Jane, look you, and here am I wearing out my fingers on squares like some iron machine while she was making costumes for the quality, last I heard!'

  That Mary could imagine more easily: costumes for the quality, sleek and colourful as fruit on a china plate. Scarlet ribbons threaded through hems, sleeves, stomachers. 'Why can't you be a dressmaker now, though, Mother?' she said suddenly.

  Susan Digot let out an impatient sound. 'Such impossibilities you invent, Mary. I never got the skills for more than hemming, did I? And where would I be supposed to get the capital to start up for myself, or the space for a shop likewise? Besides, my eyes aren't what they were. And isn't London choked with dressmakers already? What could possess anyone to hire me?'

  Her voice grated on her daughter's ears. Dreariness and complaint, that was all she ever spoke nowadays. Mary tried to remember the last time she'd heard her mother laugh.

  'Besides,' the woman added sternly, 'William provides for us now.'

  Mary kept her head down so her mother wouldn't see her face.

  She was sure there had been better times, when she was small and her mother was still Mrs. Saunders. There was a tiny picture in the back of Mary's mind of being weak after a fever, and her mother holding her in the crook of her arm, and feeding her warm ale posset with a pewter spoon. The posset was soft on Mary's throat, going down. The spoon must have been lost since, or pawned maybe. And she was sure she remembered Cob Saunders too, the vast shape of him against the light as he worked by the window, his hammer as sure as a heartbeat. The dark fuzz of his beard used to catch crumbs; after supper he'd lift his small daughter onto his lap so she could comb it with her fingers. Mary couldn't have made up a picture as vivid as that, could she? She knew it was from her father she'd got her height and her dark eyes and hair; all she had of her mother's was a pair of quick hands.

  Even the food had been better in those days too, she was sure of it. She thought she remembered a week when there'd been more than enough of everything, after Susan Saunders had made a big sale, and the family had fresh meat and tuppenny ale, and Mary was sick all down her shift from the richness and the thrill of it, but no one got angry.

  'How many is that, then?' said her mother, and Mary was jolted back into the present, the fading light of afternoon.

  She looked down uncertainly at the pile of pieces on her lap. 'Fifty-three, I think, or maybe fifty-four...'

  'Count them again,' said her mother. Her voice sagged like an old mattress. 'Maybe's no good when the Master sends for them, is it?'

  Mary started again as fast as she could, thumbing the pieces but trying not to dirty them, while beside her Susan Digot bent closer to her sewing. 'Mother,' the girl asked, struck by a thought, 'why didn't you ever go back to Monmouth?'

  The seamstress gave a little jerk of her shoulders. 'Cob and I, we didn't fancy crawling home with all our mighty plans demolished. Besides, he wasn't a man to give up hope. He had a liking for London,' she said contemptuously. 'It was his idea to drag us here in the first place.'

  'No but afterwards,' the girl said eagerly, 'after my father died.' She could see it like a tale in a book; herself as the little girl in her widowed mother's tender arms, the two of them costumed in black satin, jolting along in a plush-lined coach to the fabled city of Monmouth where the air smelt clean and the people smiled at each other in the street.

  Her mother shook her head as if there was a bee buzzing in it. 'You make your bed,' she quoted, 'and you lie in it. This is where the Maker has put me and this is where I'll stay. There's no going back.'

  And there was never any arguing with that.

  One damp November evening Mary had been sent in search of a shell-cart for tuppence worth of winkles when she bumped into the ribbon peddler coming out of an alley off Short's Gardens. He opened his coat at her like a pair of wings. Mary backed away in fright. His coat was old, blackened at the edges. But there, pinned to the lining, long and snaky and curled at the end like a tongue: the very match of the harlot's ribbon.

  'How much for the red one?' The words slipped out on their own.

  'A shilling to you, dear heart.' The peddler cocked his grizzled head sideways at her as if she had made a joke. His eyes were shiny.

  Mary ran on.

  It might as well have been a guinea he'd asked. Mary had never held a shilling in her hand. And when she stood at the shell-cart tonight and dug into her smock pocket for the two pennies William Digot had entrusted to her to buy the family's dinner, one of them was gone. There was a hole in the cloth, its edges soft as
Billy's eyelashes.

  What was she to do? A pennyworth of winkles would never stretch to four people, she knew, so she ran round the corner to the pieman on Flitcroft Street and asked him had he anything for a penny. The ham pie he gave her had a broken crust but it looked filling, at least. All the way home she kept her eyes on the ground to catch the winking of the lost penny between two cobbles or in a gutter overflowing with peelings and turds, but she never caught a glimpse of it. As if a coin would lie long in the dirt of Charing Cross!

  She hoped the Digots would be content with the pie, as it was hot and smelt wholesome. Instead, Susan Digot called her a liar. 'You spent the penny on hot lardy-cake, didn't you?' she said, rubbing her sore eyes with the heel of her hand. 'I can smell it off your breath.'

  Over and over again, as the hard end of the broom landed on her legs, the girl sobbed out her defence: 'I lost it! I lost the penny, I swear!'

  'Oh, Mary,' said Susan Digot, and hit her again.

  She'd been thrashed before, and harder, but somehow she had never felt so injured. What good was it to be a grown girl of thirteen, if she could still be put over her mother's knee and beaten for something she hadn't done?

  Afterwards she squatted in the corner and watched the Digots eat the pie, feeding the corners to little Billy. Her tears dried to salt on her jaw. Her stomach growled; she hoped they could hear it. Finally she stood up and turned her pocket inside out. 'Look,' she said, her voice shaking, 'there was a hole and I didn't know it.' She pushed her thumb through the gaping seam to show them.

  William Digot looked up from his dinner. 'You could have poked that there yourself,' he accused.

  His wife stared at the frayed pocket, and for a moment such a peculiar look strayed across her face that it almost seemed she might cry.

  'It wasn't thievery!' said Mary, almost shouting.

  Her mother's eyes flickered over her. 'Carelessness is just as bad.' Then she held out her tin plate with the crust of pastry on it, like someone feeding a dog.

  'She doesn't deserve it,' remarked her husband, eyeing the plate.

  'She's my daughter,' said Susan Digot, quiet and fierce.

  Was the woman raging against her child, or her husband, or the Mighty Master who had burdened her with such a family, and so little pie to divide between them? Mary would have liked to knock the crust onto the floor, or even better, to look away, quite indifferent—but she was too hungry for dignity tonight. She took the crust between finger and thumb and choked it down.

  The lesson she learned that night was not the one intended. The next time she was sent to buy dinner, she knew enough to lie about the price of the half-dozen oysters; she kept that penny, to pay herself back for the beating.

  Mary had bled two months in a row now. Susan Digot had wet eyes, the first time, and muttered about this being greatly early for it all to begin, even if Mary was taller than many a grown woman. 'I was a child till I was past sixteen, back in Monmouth,' she added aggrievedly. 'Everything moves too fast in the big city.'

  The pointed bones of Mary's elbows were wearing through her grey uniform, and she'd lost a button off the front where her chest was swelling. These days she wasn't paying attention at school. She forgot to join in with the chanted rhymes, even though she knew them all by heart. Her mind stretched and yawned like a tiger. She could read and write and make accounts better than any other girl in the school; what else could she learn here? The other girls her age had all left by now, one to become a washerwoman, another to be apprentice to a stockinger, and three more to hem piece-work. A girl that Mary had almost thought of as a friend was gone into service in Cornwall, which might as well be the end of the world. All these trades seemed to Mary to be wretched.

  Other girls seemed unburdened by ambition; most folks seemed content with their lot. Ambition was an itch in Mary's shoe, a maggot in her guts. Even when she read a book, her eyes skimmed and galloped over the lines, eager to reach the end. She suspected ambition was what was making her legs grow so long and her mouth so red. In the gap between day and sleep, when Mary curled her swelling body in the hollow of the mattress she shared with Billy, she was plagued by vague dreams of a better life; an existence where dirt and labour would give way to colour, variety, and endless nights dancing in the Pleasure Gardens at Vauxhall, across the river. Sometimes Mary's sense of grievance focused like a beam of light. Before dawn, when she woke up with a start at the sound of the first carts jolting by, or the wails and kicks of the boy lying at the bottom of the bed, it was as clear as glass in her head: I deserve more than this.

  The earth itself seemed restless this year. There was a quake in February, and another in March, when Susan Digot's last chinaware plate that had belonged to her parents slipped from the shelf and smashed itself to bits on the hearth. People took these to be warnings; some said a great quake was coming which would shake the city of London to bits. Preachers said God in his wrath meant to raise the waters of the Thames and drown all the sinful gamblers, drunkards, and fornicators.

  William Digot told his family it was all a lot of nonsense, but when the time came and Londoners began to flee to the outlying villages, his wife managed to persuade him that it would do no harm to move the family to Hampstead for the night. They sat on the heath looking down at the city. When nothing had happened by ten o'clock, they sought out the barn floor where they were to bed down in the straw alongside eleven other families. William Digot got in a quarrel with the owner about the exorbitant rates she was charging; she made him leave his best shirt as a surety for the money.

  The stink and the raised voices kept Mary awake. Later she got up and sneaked out onto the heath. Wrapped in her mother's shawl, she squatted beside the barn, staring down at the flickering lights of London. Mary thought of the masked balls and the all-night card parties, the satin-shod revellers who laughed in the face of the wrathful Almighty. It was a city full of glitter and glee, and it was all about to be destroyed before she'd had so much as a taste of it.

  She waited to feel the earth start to shudder, or the air to fill with the rising reek of the Thames. But there was no punishment, that night, only a long taut silence as the stars came out one by one.

  In May of the year 1761, Mary turned fourteen. After school that day she passed through the Seven Dials and caught a glimpse of the back of the scarred harlot. On an impulse, she followed the girl up Mercer Street, past St. Giles-in-the-Fields. What was it her mother said? Every man in St. Giles who's not a beggar is a thief. But Mary scurried on after the white wig with its cheeky red ribbon. When the girl stopped at a gin-shop Mary hung back; then her quarry reemerged, swinging a bottle.

  At the Holborn warren she'd heard called the Rookery, Mary stopped, afraid to go any further. The harlot disappeared between two buildings which leaned drunkenly on each other across a street no wider than the span of Mary's arms. Courts cut the nearby streets, yards cut the courts, and yards conspired briefly in crannies. Mary had heard that no one chased into the Rookery by a watchman or even a Bow Street Runner ever got caught. Two Indian sailors passed by then, and one of them winked his white eye at her. Mary ran half the way home.

  Susan Digot looked up from her stitching and rubbed her damp forehead with the back of the hand that held the needle. Her coppery hair was turning grey. 'Ah, Mary, at last. I got us a pigeon. It's very high, look you, but in a good spiced ragout we'll hardly taste it.'

  The quills were loose in the pigeon's skin. The girl plucked fast, to get it over with, shuddering a little. The big feathers flared in the fire, but the small ones clung to her fingers. Her knife laid the pigeon's entrails bare. She thought of what it meant to be fourteen.

  Susan Digot watched her daughter, and licked the thread as if she were thirsty for its flavour. 'You'd have quick fingers for the work.'

  The girl ignored that.

  'High time you learned a trade, now you're a grown woman.'

  Mary concentrated on getting all the dirty innards out of the pigeon. She hadn't tho
ught her mother had remembered her birthday.

  'Plain work, fancy work, quilt work ... A girl won't ever starve as long as she's a needle in her sleeve, Mary.'

  The girl turned and stared into her mother's eyes; they had always been the dirty blue of rain clouds, but recently she'd begun to notice the red around their rims. They were ringed as sure as targets and speckled as if by darts. How many more years would they last? Mary had seen a pair of blind seamstresses that lived in a garret in Neal's Yard; you could count the bones in their arms. So she shook her head and turned back to the flattened pigeon. She scooped up its guts on the edge of her knife and flicked them into the fire.

  For a moment she thought it was going to be all right; silence would fill up the little room as the last light gave way to evening shadow. When Digot woke for his dinner, the talk would start up again, and Mary knew how to steer it onto harmless topics: the mild air, or how strong Billy's arms were getting.

  But Susan Digot pushed her fading hair back from her face and let out her breath as if it hurt her. 'All this reading and writing and casting account is well and good, and when Cob Saunders insisted you go to the Charity School I never said a word against it, did I?'

  It was not a question that required an answer.

  'Did I stand in your way?' she asked her daughter formally. 'I did not, even though many told me so much schooling would be wasted on a girl.'

  Mary stared mutinously into the fire.

  'But it's time you thought of getting your bread, now. What do they say about it at school?'

  'Service.' The word came from the back of Mary's throat. 'Or sewing.'

  'There now! Just as I say! Isn't that right, William?'

  No answer from the man in the corner. Mary let her eyes slide over. Her stepfather was nodding, halfway asleep, his head repeating its coal-dust mark on the wall.

  'And if it was the needle, couldn't I start training you up myself, Mary?' her mother rushed on.