Slammerkin Read online

  There were puzzles she couldn't begin to solve and horrors she could only guess at. Mary tramped on fast enough to keep her feet from going numb and tried to think of any door she could knock on at this hour of an October night. She had no relatives in London. Cob Saunders must have made some friends in the city, Mary supposed, but he'd never brought them home, and she'd have been too young to know their names.

  Her feet automatically led her the way she walked every morning, to school. Its narrow windows were black. Mary stared through the iron gates. Could it have been only this afternoon that she'd passed out through them freely, a child in uniform like a hundred others? There was no refuge for her here. The girls she'd known were all gone from London. And if she stood here all night, the teachers wouldn't take her in tomorrow morning, not even if they found her half-frozen on the step; not once they'd made her tell them why she had no home to go to.

  She clung to her bundle now as if it were a dying thing. She was lost; she didn't know the names of these streets. At a dark corner she tripped over something, and crashed to her knees; when she put out her hand, it met the icy hide of a dog, half hollowed out. Maggots between her fingers; she screamed, then, and slapped the hard ground to get them off her.

  A lantern, swinging by; in its narrow circle Mary saw a watchman with his club and rattle. It occurred to her to cry out for help—but what would she say? She crouched in the shadows and watched him pass. If she was sunk so low that her own mother wouldn't give her shelter, what use was it to appeal to strangers?

  On her feet, moving faster. There was the spire of St. Giles again, or was it another church? The moon had fallen out of sight, and Mary was so drunk with weariness she couldn't see where she was putting her feet. Mighty Master, she chanted in her head, Mighty Master, please. But if he was there, he wasn't listening.

  She climbed down into a ditch at last and slept as soon as her face touched the cold ground.

  She woke to pain like a long knife in her guts. Her smock was up around her waist and the night had got in. There was something on her back, a beast, its scalding breath on her neck, and laughter far away like the shreds of a dream. When she twisted her head, the beast's teeth met in her ear. Mary screamed then, belatedly, the way she should have done five months before, in the alley. She found her voice, the depth and fury of it, and what she roared was 'No!'

  But the man—because now she was awake she could tell that this was nothing but an ordinary man—he hit her in the jaw, harder than she'd ever been hit in her life, and again, and again. This time wasn't quick or simple like it had been with the peddler. This man didn't want relief; he wanted to crush her entirely. He pulled her head back by the hair and banged her face into the cold ground, then held it there until she couldn't make a sound, couldn't breathe, couldn't do anything but feel his pain inside her.

  The laughter, Mary realised soon enough, was coming from the other soldiers, who were leaning on their bayonets, waiting their turn. Afterwards she could never be sure how many of them there'd been.

  A lifetime later, Mary woke to fingertips on her eyelids. She cringed, but the hand didn't go away. Light came under her lids like a needle. She twisted, but the probing fingers followed. She bit blindly.

  A screech of laughter. 'None of that, you nasty thing!'

  Mary was so numb she barely knew she had a body. Only when she began to curl up on her side did she recognise this stiffness as cold. A stranger's silhouette stood above her, blocking the watery sun. Mary tried to sit up, but then the shaking started.

  The stranger was sucking her bitten finger. She took off her cloak and dropped it over Mary. 'I'll be wanting that back, mind,' she remarked, as if they were in the middle of a conversation.

  The world swayed round Mary as she dragged herself to her knees. Her bundle of clothes was gone. The smock she wore seemed made of mud, stiff and dented as a shield. The spire of St. Giles winked down at her. In the morning light everything was laced with frost: the railings, the cobbles, the nettles that edged the ditch. She could feel the print of dirt like a complicated map across her face. And deeper, under her frozen skin, in her nose, beneath her jaw and ribs and above all between her legs, the pains massed like an army.

  'Ain't you a sight.' The stranger grinned down and her scar crinkled in the terrible light.

  It was her, the harlot with the red ribbon in her powdered wig, the one who was to blame for making Mary think there could be more to life than work and sleep. At that moment Mary felt rage like a spike running through her.

  'Fancy a bite of breakfast?'

  Mary started to cry.

  The harlot was called Doll Higgins. Mary followed her up stair after stair, half-dragged by the girl's hot hand, to a dark room at the top where Mary lay until the mattress beneath her face was soaked through. There was a pain inside her that moored her to the floor. She tried to say where it was but her voice came out like a rook's caw.

  'Been made a woman of, ain't you?' said Doll.

  Mary woke and thought the room was on fire. The light was dim, but colour poured down the walls. She blinked until she had convinced herself that these were only clothes, hanging on rusty nail-heads that protruded from the walls. Only gauzes and silks; nothing but jade and ruby, amber and aquamarine.

  A warm, yeasty smell beside her. A face on the pillow, softened in sleep and obscured in brown wisps of hair. At first Mary didn't recognise Doll without her silver wig. Finally she managed to open her dry throat and whisper. 'Where am I?'

  'My room, of course,' yawned Doll with her eyes shut, 'in Rat's Castle.' Her breath made a cloud on the chilly air.

  'But where's that?'

  'The Rookery. Where else?'

  At first these words made Mary's heart pound. The Rookery was a lawless place where a girl could be robbed, beaten, raped. But then, with a little tremor like mirth, Mary realised that the worst was over and she had nothing left in the world to fear.

  Doll sat up on the straw mattress, and stretched her hands above her with a great creaking of muscles. Up close, she had rough edges, dusty hems, but still the loveliest face Mary had ever seen. 'Now then,' she said, all business. 'Where's home?'

  Mary shook her head, and felt tears press behind her eyes. She squeezed her lids shut. She'd be damned if she'd cry for the Digots.

  'You must have come from somewhere,' Doll pointed out.

  Mary let herself imagine the way back to the basement on Charing Cross Road. Ten minutes' walk, and an impossible distance. Today Mary was not the same girl who'd whimpered, Help me, Mother. Her soft stuff had been fossilised into something stony during the night in the ditch. Never again, she swore to herself, would she beg so feebly. Never would she let herself be thrown out like trash.

  'Well?' asked Doll impatiently.

  'I can't go back,' she whispered.

  Doll shrugged. 'Any friends, then? Any kind gentlemen?'

  Mary shook her head vehemently.

  'Well you can't stay here, Miss, so don't give it a moment's thought!' said Doll, almost laughing as she clambered out of bed. 'I'm as good a Christian as the next girl, and I don't hold it against you that you near bit my finger to the bone, but I don't go picking up strays.'

  Mary stared into the harlot's eyes.

  'It's every girl for herself, you understand?'

  She nodded as if she understood.

  The fact was, though, that Doll Higgins made no immediate move to evict Mary. Not that day, nor the next, nor even the next.

  Mary lay limply in her sleeveless shift, wrapped in blankets to ease the shivering. Her bruises were red and blue and purple. Her broken nose looked monstrous in Doll's triangle of mirror. 'A clean wholesome break,' the girl assured her; 'it'll heal with barely a bump.' Mary stared into the mirror and waited to see what her new face would be.

  As for her belly—surely what the soldiers had done to her would have disposed of that. She thought it seemed a little flatter already. Besides, there were signs. She knew it was all over for s
ure when she investigated the pain between her legs on the fifth morning. 'I'm leaking, Doll,' she whispered in the ear of the woman who lay snoozing beside her. 'Strange stuff.'

  'Yellowish, greenish?' asked Doll, rolling onto her back with a great heave that sent up a cloud of warm perfume.

  A shamed nod.

  'That'll be the clap.'

  The girl's eyes prickled at the word. She didn't know what it meant exactly, but she'd heard it before.

  'Comes to us all, sooner or later,' said Doll merrily. 'Just about every rogue in London's clapped or poxed or both, the dirty hounds! But your luck's in, if it's Madam Clap. Compared to the pox, you know, the clap's a doddle.'

  A tear slid down Mary's jaw. She blinked hard.

  'You'll live!' said the harlot, passing over her gin bottle.

  Mary stared through the brown glass at the oily liquid, then raised it to her lips. It went down her throat like a knife, and at first she choked. After a few more swallows she felt better.

  Doll Higgins was always saying brutal things as if they were jokes. But for all her talk about every girl for herself, she did let Mary stay in her room for a fortnight, sharing her mattress, and brought her the occasional plate of bread and Yarmouth herrings, and the odd basin of icy water with a rag to clean herself as best she could. Mary took everything gratefully. She had nothing of her own; she had lost her grip on the world. A girl that loses her virtue loses everything, repeated her mother like a wasp in her head.

  Rat's Castle was the biggest, most ramshackle house in the strange world that was the Rookery. There were four small rooms in the garret, and Doll's was the one with no lock. While Doll was out on the town, Mary lay curled up on the mattress and waited for her to come home. Down below, the third and second floors were occupied by a rabble of porters, chandlers, brandy merchants, and small-time thieves. The best rooms, on the first floor, were rented by bully-men who ran a stable of a dozen Misses each, Doll said. One of the dark ones, Mercy Toft, was a very civil girl, who'd been brought back from India by a Company man and abandoned when he went off to Holland. Down in the basement were thirty Irish, squeezed in with their donkey.

  It was a wizened Irishwoman who owned the whole lodging-house and twenty like it; half the parish of St. Giles drained into Mrs. Farrel's red hands. The rooms were always dim. When Mary asked why the windows were filled with balled-up brown paper, Doll explained it was because the old bitch Farrel was too cheap to glass them, 'and I'd rather the dark than the howling winds. Besides, night air is well known to be noxious.'

  'So does Mrs. Farrel ... is it to her you answer, then?' asked Mary confusedly.

  'What, does she pimp for me, you mean?' Doll's smile was scornful. 'Not at all. All I owe her is the rent. I'm a free agent, I am; I answer to no one.'

  The Indian girl, Mercy Toft—who put her head in the door once in a while to say good day to the newcomer—thought Doll Higgins was mad. 'It's a hard life without a madam or bully-man to drum up trade and keep you out of trouble!'

  Mary nodded weakly, as if she understood, and watched the inky tendrils that kept slipping out of Mercy's hair-knot. 'Have you lodged here long?' she asked hoarsely.

  'Half a year in Rat's Castle, and another six years hereabouts. But mind, the worst rogues in London are to be found in the Rookery,' Mercy warned her with a grin that showed her white teeth; 'they'll rob your legs if you stand still long enough!'

  How perverse, then, that Mary was coming to feel almost at home here, surrounded by the people her mother used to call riffraff, or simply, scum. She spent her days dozing on Doll's stained mattress, her fever rising and falling like a flame in her spine. She sensed herself to be strangely safe, as if she were floating far above the ordinary world.

  She could hear Doll's thumping feet on the stairs long before the door opened. Doll might stalk in at any time of night or day and let herself fall onto the thin mattress. She smelt like a fishmonger's and her pockets clinked, fat with shillings. 'Devil ride me,' she'd declare, 'if I ain't giving up this nasty trade.' But when Mary pressed her, she seemed unable to remember a time before strolling—that was her word for it—or any possibilities beyond its reach. It was like a country she lived in. To hear her describe life on the streets, everyone—man, woman, or child—prostituted themselves one way or another. When drunk on her favourite gin—blue ruin, she called it fondly—she'd breathe perfume in Mary's face and swear that there was no trade like a Miss's. It required no training, capital, nor premises, and the supply of customers would never run out till the end of the world. 'I defy you,' she would slur, 'I defy you to name me any other trade so merry.'

  Mary sometimes had to remind herself: she wasn't a harlot. Only the friend of one. Only a girl fouled and in trouble.

  After a fortnight, Mary's fever had died down, and the pains with it. Doll, who'd been most impressed to hear that Mary was a scholar, as she called it, sometimes got her to read pamphlets aloud in the long winter afternoons. Mostly they were bawdy political doggerel that bewildered Mary, about what Countess P___m got up to at B___h with the Honourable Member for W___r, but they made Doll cackle and roar. Sometimes she'd take the trouble to fill Mary in, telling her lurid and improbable tales, like the one about the King's old tutor carrying on with the King's own mother.

  One morning Mary felt strong enough to get up, and asked for her smock, but Doll let out an alarming laugh and said, 'That filthy thing? Gave it to the ragman and got no more than ha'pence for it.'

  'But I have nothing else.' Mary's voice began to quiver at the thought of going down into the streets with nothing but a linen shift to cover her.

  Doll waved expansively at the clothes hanging on the nails. 'Take your pick, my darling.'

  Mary stared over each shoulder. Such clothes, such colours, on her? She wouldn't know herself.

  Doll let out an impatient puff of breath. 'You can start with my spares,' she said, bending to root in a corner.

  The stays were stiff and stained. As Doll tugged the strings tight at Mary's back, the girl began to gasp with fright.

  'Ain't you ever laced before, then?' asked Doll.

  She shook her head and bit on her lower lip. She thought her ribs would crack.

  'Fourteen years old, and never in stays!' Doll marvelled. She loosed the strings infinitesimally, and Mary sucked in a mouthful of air. 'High time you learned to dress like a grown girl. A female without boning ain't nothing but a sack of corn.'

  Doll lent Mary two petticoats and a pair of steel improvers, which sat like buckled birdcages over the girl's narrow hips. Mary picked the least outrageous clothes: a pale blue skirt, a pink bodice, and a pair of sleeves to match the skirt, buttoned on tight at the shoulders. Doll showed her how everything fitted together, and how the pockets hung down from the waist seam. Then she stepped back and thrust a triangle of mirror in Mary's face.

  Mary stared at this festive bruised creature, a child in the clothes of a woman twice her age. She didn't recognise herself, not even when she tried to smile.

  She could walk upright on her own, but when they went downstairs she still leaned on Doll's broad milky arm, gasping for breath. Mercy Toft's door was shut, and from behind it came a repetitive groan in a deep bass; Mary knew what that meant, even before Doll nudged her.

  As they stepped out of the cracked front door of Rat's Castle, the noise of the city hit her as hard as the cold wind. The improvers made her vast skirt surge and sway like a boat in rough seas.

  Doll was her sainted saviour and her only friend in the world. She told everything and asked nothing. She brought Mary all over the city, that day and many other days, as October gave way to a chill November. Doll had no sense that there was any border to her territory. She even marched Mary into the new white-stone squares of the West End, where the locals were so rich they hired linkboys to walk ahead of them with flaming torches so they'd never step into a pile of dirt. Ladies had themselves carried round in sedan chairs, with their tasselled skirts spilling out the sides.


  On Carrington Street in Mayfair, Doll pointed up at a fresh-painted apartment and said, 'That's the famous Kitty Fisher's.'

  'What's she famous for?' asked Mary.

  'Don't you know nothing yet?' Doll gave a pleasurable sigh. 'She's only got six lovers in the House of Lords, that's what for!'

  'Six?' repeated Mary, staggered.

  'They say one night she was entertaining Lord Montford, who's a shrunken little man, you understand—when up the stairs marched Lord Sandwich. So how do you think Miss Kitty smuggled the pygmy out?'

  Mary shrugged to show she had no idea.

  'Under her skirt!' shrieked Doll with mirth, slapping Mary's hoop to make it hum. 'They say her fee is a hundred guineas,' she added more reflectively.

  'A year?'

  'A night, you dupe!' crowed Doll. 'And once, at breakfast, when a gentleman gave her nothing but a fifty-pound note, she took such offence, she put it between two bits of bread and ate it.'

  Mary stared up at the high rectangles of glass, hoping for a glimpse of Kitty Fisher, the famous mouth that could eat money. But the footman at the arched door was giving her and Doll a frozen stare. Mary dropped her eyes, suddenly seeing what he saw and knowing what he thought. To him there was no difference between the two of them. Harlots, she thought to herself, trying out the word. Seven-Dials strollers, Misses, trulls.