Slammerkin Read online

  But Doll blew the footman a fat kiss. Doll never minded who looked at her or how.

  'Why did you take me in?' Mary asked her on the walk home that evening. Then she wished she could swallow the words again, because she feared they would make Doll turn cold and scornful, or tell her that her time was long up and she owed a pretty penny, by the way.

  But Doll gave a peculiar smile, almost sheepish. 'When I stopped to look at you in the ditch, that morning, I was just curious,' she began. 'I was all set to walk on to the Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street for my breakfast. But then you bit my hand, and I liked that.'

  'You liked it?' asked Mary, bewildered.

  'Showed some spirit,' said Doll with satisfaction. 'That's what I'd have done myself.'

  But Doll never said if she'd ever been there herself: face down in a ditch, left to rot. She never said much about the past at all. It seemed she'd always been and always would be what she was: a Miss. That was their favourite word for themselves, Doll said, though whores would be more honest. The men who hired them were called cullies. Men came in all shapes and sizes but they all wanted much the same thing, Doll explained to Mary.

  The girl was amazed to learn the Misses were not a distinct population, set apart from the mass of womanhood. A stroller by night might be a herring-seller by day. As well as the half-timers, as Doll rather scornfully called them, there were many others—especially the wives—who'd only stay in the trade for a year or two, while times were at their worst. 'Your whores for life, now, like myself, we're as rare as black swans,' she boasted; 'the aristocracy of the trade, you might say. I was even in Harris's List, back in '55.'

  'What's that?'

  Doll rolled her eyes, as always when Mary displayed her ignorance. 'The List of Covent Garden Ladies, don't you know. It's a sort of circular, published every year for the gentlemen's benefit.'

  'And do you know what it said about you?' asked Mary.

  'Every word. I paid a boy to read it out to me till I'd learned it by heart. Miss Dolly Higgins, Doll quoted, 'fifteen and full-fleshed, of a cheerful disposition. Application should be made at the Sign of the Moor's Head.'

  So Doll was still only twenty-one, Mary calculated, appalled. That face looked so lived in.

  'She is guaranteed to please the discerning beau,' Doll went on, 'who need have no fear of consequences.' She let out a hoarse laugh. 'Of course, I was clapped to the hilt already, no less than yourself. It sounded well, though.'

  'But I think I'm clean now,' Mary told her.

  Ah, once it's in your blood it never quite leaves you,' said Doll professionally. 'A visitor for life, is Madam Clap. Next time you lie with the fellows, wash in gin first, if you can spare it, or in piss if you can't.'

  'I won't be lying with any fellows,' said Mary coldly. Her hands began to shake at the thought of it, and she folded them behind her.

  Doll let out a hoarse ripple of laughter. 'How d'you mean to get your bread, then?'

  'I'll think of something.'

  Now that Mary was getting to know the wider city, she could tell that there were more trades for women than she'd ever heard of. Not every girl had to end up a servant or a seamstress. There were cooks and milkmongers, fishwives and flower hawkers, washerwomen and gardeners and midwives and even the odd apothecary. Women kept schools and asylums, pie stalls and millinery shops. Mary made herself ask questions of strangers, everywhere she went. All she needed to know was, how could a girl of fourteen make her own way in the world?

  But the answer in every case was that Mary was too young. Too ignorant. Lacked a cow, a barrow, a shop. Had no money to buy an apprenticeship, no husband to inherit a business from. Lacked knowledge of the world, trades, customers.

  On her own, Mary would have clawed herself a little piece of some market in the end, she knew that. If she'd had to, she could have sold dripping, old newspapers, used tea-leaves—the detritus that never went to waste. On her own, she would have learned how to live off ha'pennies and made herself wear plaincloth all year round—if only to defy her mother's prediction that she would end up in the workhouse.

  But she wasn't on her own, of course. She had Doll, strolling along in silks at her side and laughing at the notion of any trade honester than her own. Under her tutelage Mary tasted rum from Barbados, French wine, lemons from Portugal, and a pineapple so sweet she thought her head would explode. 'That came from a glasshouse out Paddington way,' Doll told her, 'and do you know what it grew in?'

  'What?'

  'Our shit!' Doll howled with laughter. 'I swear to the Maker, they buy fresh London shit from the night-soil men and grow pineapples in it!'

  With Doll came gin and merriment, a great randomness, a feeling that you never knew what the day might hold. Decisions edged out of Mary's reach; the future slid out of her grasp.

  And there was another thing: her belly. Mary felt its contours every morning, and for all her bleak hopes, she had to admit it now: the swelling had never gone down. Somehow what was growing inside her had survived the soldiers, and the ditch, and even the dirty fever. It was a little bigger every week. At night she lay in her shift with her back to Doll. She crossed her arms and pressed down on the bump till she thought she might burst.

  But a fishwife she got talking to about the oyster trade gave Mary's borrowed bodice a knowing look and remarked, 'You could always put yourself out to nurse, if your own didn't live.'

  Mary was too shocked to answer. She walked away without a word.

  She knew she had to tell Doll. It was just a matter of finding the moment, and the right words. But when did Doll ever need telling about anything?

  'High time you rid yourself of that,' she remarked to Mary one morning with no preamble, as she staggered in the door of their dark garret.

  Mary stared up from the straw mattress, unblinking. Her hands were joined across her stomach. 'You mean—'

  'Lud, didn't they teach you nothing at that school?'

  Mary stared down at her belly.

  Doll let herself down on the mattress with a vast sigh. She smelt like a fire in a gin-shop. 'Now don't turn spleenish,' she yawned. 'I'm only saying what's sense, devil take me if I'm not. You can't tell me you want to bear it?'

  All Mary knew about childbearing was gleaned from her brother's birth, when her mother had kept her shut up in the second room. All she remembered was a terrible panting, and stained sheets hung over the dresser to dry afterwards. And William Digot, blind drunk, roaring, 'A boy! A boy! We're a proper family now!'

  Any case,' added Doll, 'it'll be born clapped. Had you thought of that?'

  Mary's eyes were wet with panic, but she blinked until she could see. She hadn't known that. She let herself think of a baby, pushing out from between her legs, diseased before its first breath. Nausea rose up in her throat. 'Tell me, then,' she said rapidly. 'Tell me how to stop it.'

  Doll let out a massive yawn and pushed herself up on one elbow. 'Well, looks like it's too late for coffee berries, though I've known a brew of tamarisk to work at a pinch ... Sit up,' she ordered.

  Mary sat straight; her belly pushed out in front of her, now she wasn't trying to hold it in. They both stared at it.

  'When did you get it? July, August?'

  'May.'

  Doll counted on her fingers and tutted. 'Six months! You're such a skinny thing, I didn't reckon you were so far gone. Well, you'll have to pay a call on Ma Slattery, that's the only thing for it. But she charges a full crown.'

  'I don't have it,' said Mary after a few seconds, wetting her lips with her tongue. 'I don't have a—'

  'I know that,' said Doll. 'But don't keep letting on you can't think of a single way to get it.'

  Mary turned her head away.

  'Listen,' said Doll in a hard voice, 'if you intend to keep laying about here forever—'

  'I don't,' interrupted Mary. And I'm vastly grateful—'

  'Gratitude's not needed. And besides, it won't pay the rent.'

  The silence lengthened.


  'You got anything else?' asked Doll softly. 'Anything to pawn? Any friends you haven't mentioned?'

  'No.'

  'Then use what you've got, I say. Sell it while you're young and the market's high.'

  Mary's head swung from side to side like a pendulum. 'I can't,' she said. 'I just can't bear the thought of it.'

  There was a long silence. Doll Higgins seemed to be looking at her from a great distance.

  'Maybe,' Mary began pathetically, 'if you could possibly see your way to lending—'

  But the rage had flamed up in the older girl's eyes, and Doll's hand thumped the mattress between them, making the dust leap from the straw. 'So it's all right for me to go out whoring, but not for the Charity Scholar?' she bawled. 'I'm to dirty my hands to keep Madam's clean? Well, let me tell you, little Miss Precious: in this world, what you need, you pay for. You lost your virtue at the end of an alley like any common slut, and it ain't ever going to grow back. You're clapped and carrying, in case you hadn't noticed. You're one of us now, like it or not.'

  After Mary had cried her eyes dry, and said how sorry she was, for everything, and, 'Yes, all right, yes, yes,' then Doll was very kind to her. She wiped her face with a handkerchief dipped in Hungary water, and the sharp lemony smell cleared Mary's mind.

  'Young thing like you, fresh as lettuce,' said Doll, 'virgin goods, practically—you should get two bob a throw.'

  Mary tried this new mathematics. Two bob by three throws— she didn't let herself think what this harmless word covered—meant a crown plus a shilling left over. (And she had done it before, she reminded herself. It couldn't possibly be as bad as what the soldiers did to her in the ditch.) 'Just this once,' she muttered at last.

  'That's right.'

  'As soon as it's all over'—glancing at her hard belly—'I'm going to find another trade, even if it pays less.'

  'Of course you will,' murmured Doll.

  She was already pulling on Mary's stay-strings; she tugged them so tight that Mary cried out. But Doll was already leafing through the layers of clothes that hung on the walls. 'No, no,' she said under her breath, 'too quiet by half.' Finally she plucked out something in orange silk.

  'But it doesn't even button up.'

  'It's not meant to, dolt. It's a slammerkin.'

  Doll hustled her into the long dress, tying it at the waist. 'Look, it cuts away and shows a mile of petticoat. The cullies love an open gown. And see how the train flares out behind you! That's another word for us, by the way.'

  'What is?'

  'Slammerkin. A loose dress for a loose woman. Ever noticed the words for us all sound drunk?' Doll put on an intoxicated slur. 'Slovenly, slatternly sluts and slipshod, sleezy slammerkins that we are!'

  Mary realised Doll was trying to make her laugh, to relieve her panic, but she still covered her face with her hand.

  Doll ignored that, and threw her a pair of worn red shoes. 'A girl needs to stand out, on the streets. No use fading into the wall!'

  'But I don't know how to do it.'

  'What's to do?' asked Doll, slapping dust out of the orange slammerkin's skirts.

  'The words,' stammered Mary. 'What do I say?'

  'The clothes will speak for you, won't they?' said Doll cheerfully. She found a carved wooden busk and slid it down the front of Mary's ribboned bodice where it narrowed cruelly, tapering to a point.

  Mary stared at herself in the bit of mirror she held and blushed scarlet. Her small breasts poked out on top of her stays, as white and hard as elbows. The gaudy silk ruffled at her neck and shoulders; grubby blue lace dangled at her forearms. She looked half dressed. She looked like the whore she was tonight.

  'See,' said Doll, giving her bodice a lewd tug, 'these lines lead the fellows' eyes directly down to the spot. And your big curved flounces,' she added, snatching at Mary's skirt, 'they're meant to make them think of tits and arses. We loop one bit of the train up to your waist, see, and that's a sign that you're in the trade—in case they haven't guessed!'

  'My face is still wrong,' said Mary gruffly, looking in the mirror. 'I look like a bony child.'

  'But the gentlemen like 'em young, don't you know? And you have your assets,' said Doll professionally. 'Good dark eyes, and you can wear your own hair, if we comb it high; black's very à la mode these days. That bump in your nose is no worse than the one I was born with. And the cullies like a wide mouth; it reminds them of the other one!' She let out an obscene laugh.

  Mary tried to join in.

  'Now all you need is a dab of powder'—Doll pulled out a box and puff, and set to work on Mary's face—'and a lick of ribbon red.'

  'Ribbon red?'

  Doll let out that little sigh that meant exasperation, but also a delight in her own knowledge. 'Quicker than carmine,' she said, 'and cheaper too.' She pulled down the end of her own scarlet hair ribbon and spat on the limp strip of satin, then sucked it. She rubbed it hard against Mary's lips as if polishing the tarnish off a teapot. She moved on to Mary's cheekbones and the warm pink spread, like a flush of health: magic.

  In the mirror Mary watched the mask take shape. This wasn't her anymore; this was some vivid, fearless puppet. She tried a smile.

  Doll stuck out her tongue at Mary: it was as red as a devil's from the ribbon.

  The girl laughed aloud. She was a quick learner, like Doll kept saying. Already she was picking up the language: words of spite and laughter, words she'd never heard at school or in the cramped rooms on Charing Cross Road.

  That night Mary stood at the Dials with one hip pushed out the way Doll had shown her, and tried to mimic her friend's crooked smile. Grease and powder lay like armour on her face, but her knees trembled under the petticoats revealed by the gauzy orange slammerkin. The bell shape of her skirt was full of icy air. She kept the fur muff over her stomach so her bump wouldn't show. Doll would have been with her, except that she'd passed out cold on the mattress after half a bottle of gin.

  Mary had only had a few gulps. The drink washed around in her stomach, warm and queasy. She remembered her instructions: coyness gets you nowhere. She would have to learn to think of every passer-by in breeches as a cully. How bold the other Misses were, accosting a stranger or laying a hand on his thigh. 'What d'ye lack, gentlemen?' called one woman in a felt bonnet.

  'Need of company?' asked another, linking arms with a soldier as he passed, but he shook her off.

  'A shilling for a glimpse of Eden!' cried a girl in a brown wig. Alice Gibbs, that was her name, Mary remembered; she was rumoured to let cullies go in her mouth. Mary was revolted by the thought, and looked away.

  She cleared her throat as a man in fine plush breeches hurried by. 'Fourteen and clean, sir,' she whispered.

  He gave her a brief stare, but kept walking. The corner swallowed him.

  That's what Doll had told her to say as her come-on. Fourteen and clean. Only half of it was a lie. It could have been a child's skipping rhyme. What was the one Mary had learned at school?

  Spick and span without, within,

  Soul and body cleansed of sin.

  'Trade's ever so slow tonight, ain't it?' said a fair-skinned girl in a silver-edged sack gown, and Mary nodded back. 'Have I seen you before?'

  'No,' said Mary nervously, and gave her name, before it occurred to her that now might have been a good time to change it.

  The Miss was called Nan Pullen. By day she was a maidservant on Puddle Dock Hill, she told Mary rather proudly, but as soon as she was sure her mistress was asleep, she borrowed a handsome dress from the oak wardrobe and walked the streets half the night. The fine clothes worked a treat; she was rarely short of trade. 'Quilting keeps the worst of the cold out,' she said professionally, slapping her heavy underskirt. And she always got home by four in the morning, to snatch a little shut-eye. 'Saving my shillings, don't you know.'

  Are you?' said Mary.

  'Someday I'm going to have my own lodging-house,' boasted Nan, 'and be beholden to nobody.' She left soon after that, s
aying she had an instinct the cullies were all hanging round the Piazza at Covent Garden tonight. 'I follow my nose,' she said, tapping it. She waved at the other Misses as she swept off, her fine gown scattering the dust.

  A while later, a man hurried by with his hands in his pockets. 'Take me under your cloak, my dear,' bawled the red-haired woman who was leaning against the shutters in the shadows that hid her age. According to Doll, Mary remembered, she was the wife of an Indian footman who'd crushed his fingers and couldn't work anymore. A scrivener's clerk with his sleeves full of papers came up the street now. The redhead pulled her skirts up as far as her garter. 'How does Mr. Cock stand tonight, sir?'

  Mary blushed at the words, but the clerk passed the woman as if he hadn't heard. He walked by Mary too, then paused, and looked back at her.

  She stood a little straighter, pushing out her small chest but trying to suck in her stomach. She began to shake. Just this once, she promised herself, just this once. When all this was over, she'd find another way to earn her bread: there had to be something to make, or mend, or sell.

  Now the clerk had taken hold of her sleeve and was pulling her into the light. She wanted to turn her hot face to the wall. She wondered whether he'd start with a compliment, or a request that she might not understand. She wondered when to mention that her rate was two shillings.

  'Ninepence.' The man said it calmly, as if he were standing at a gingerbread stall.

  And though she could feel tears pricking her eyes, what could Mary say but yes? If she refused this cully, who was to say when she'd get another?

  They stood in the shadows. It was all very peculiar, Mary thought. It wasn't like the other times. This was no rape; she was letting it happen, making it happen, in fact. She helped the clerk unbutton his thin breeches; she wanted it over fast. His long sleeves full of papers creaked awkwardly. He looked down at his yard, and so did she. It was the first time she'd actually seen one close-up; the thought started a giggle in her throat. Such a pale, peeled thing it was. The clerk put her hand on it so she started to rub it, as if cleaning a plate, and all of a sudden she felt it growing like a marrow in her hand. Such power she tasted, then!