Slammerkin Read online

  What a fool Susan Digot had been, to think everyone in gold braid her better, and the wider the skirt, the higher the breeding! Mary had seen commoners walk as queens on the stage in Drury Lane. Doll was opening Mary's eyes to all life's shortcuts, back alleys, gaps in the walls. In these uncertain times, Mary was learning, a duchess was sometimes just a stroller who'd picked the right honourable cully.

  In a four-story house in Golden Square lived a lady who'd once been known in the trade as Angel Arse. On the corner of Hyde Park was a new mansion the Duke of Kingston was building for Miss Chudleigh, who'd been his mistress for a dozen years already and he still hadn't tired of her. The famous Kitty Fisher was said to be about to swap all her lordly lovers for a rich husband from the Lower House. A bit of loveliness, a bit of luck; that's all a girl needed.

  On long bright evenings, Mary sat on the grass in Lamb's Conduit Fields behind Holborn and watched the courting couples meander by. The air was full of the sounds of leisure: the archers' arrows hitting the target, the click of balls on the bowling green, or the distant roars of a dogfight or wrestling match. She was reading again for the first time since school. She bought crack-backed romances and memorised all the long words, in case she'd ever need them. The History of Pamela Andrews was her favourite. The crafty wench, to fend off her master all those times, then squeeze a proposal of marriage out of him in the end! She'd swapped her maid's apron for bridal satins and ended up as good a lady as any other, hadn't she? It all went to show, Mary thought. If a girl had her wits about her, nowadays, she could rise as high as she wanted, as sure as cream through the milk. Anything was possible.

  In May, Mary turned fifteen. Doll gave her a cap with a soaring feather in it. Between her new life and her old one flowed a wide river.

  There was one morning every month when the whores got up early: Collar Day.

  It was hot July and the city smelled of vengeance. The Metyards were to swing at last, and evil women always drew a crowd. Mary and Doll had to pick up their skirts and push and shove in order to join the Newgate cavalcade when it passed the Rookery on its way to Tyburn. As always the bellman stood on the wall of St. Sepulchre's, exhorting repentance, but it was hard to hear him over all the festivity. Mary had grown even taller this summer, but still she couldn't see the prisoners as well as she wanted. She stood up on a barrel and craned her long neck. 'Lord have mercy on you!' came the bellman's faint cry as the mob moved up Holborn after the cart. Mary elbowed her way up until she was close enough to see the criminals' faces, and their pale necks, already circled by rope. They bumped along, backs to the horse, their hands knotted in their laps.

  The cart was heavy. 'Six thieves to be collared today,' Doll bawled in Mary's ear, 'three forgers, a runaway soldier, a sodomite, and a girl that stifled her babby.' There sat Thomas Turlis the famous hangman, marked out by his little black mask. And in front of him, as if under special guard, those had to be the Metyards. No sign of penitence; the daughter seemed indifferent and the mother shook as if having a fit. Mary had a sharp stone in her pocket, and aimed at the daughter as the cart rattled on, but she missed.

  Then the crowd surged on past. As Mary walked, she tried to imagine the two Metyard women as they'd once been, without the wild hair, squinting eyes, nooses, and tied hands. Without all the marks of Newgate. She pictured them as respectable haberdashers— decent folk, by all appearances, she thought in Susan Digot's grudging voice—who for years had earned the gratitude of the authorities by taking children off the parish and making apprentices of them.

  Of course, what the Metyards had made of Nanny Nailor was minced meat. Mary had memorised every detail from the newspapers she read aloud to Doll in the drowsy afternoons. Nanny Nailor had run away from the Metyards the summer she reached thirteen, but she never got the chance to tell anyone what conditions she was running from. She never found a Doll Higgins to take her in. Instead the Metyards had tracked her down, brought her back to that attic, and tied her up in the heat without water. After three days they started telling the neighbours that they couldn't imagine what had become of poor little Nanny Nailor. Then they had chopped her in pieces and dropped them in a gully-hole.

  Mary craned her neck for a glimpse of the Metyards in the cart now: mother and daughter, both limp, bumping along in their noose necklaces like puppets loosed from their strings. It made her laugh, really. They thought they could do what they liked with girls like Nanny Nailor; that such creatures were at the disposal of their mistresses—body and soul, quick or dead. As the years had gone by after Nanny's death, the Metyards had counted on the other girls being too fearful to say a word. They'd assumed they were unassailable.

  'A glorious day, eh?' said Doll as they sweated and panted through the crowd at the cart's tail.

  Mary grinned back.

  'Still, this crowd's not a patch on the one for Earl Ferrers. The procession took three hours to go three miles, with the lord chewing tobacco and waving out the window all the way. White satin, he wore—'

  'Yes, I know, and silver lace, you've told me often enough,' said Mary. Doll had never quite got over the excitement of watching a peer of the realm hang. But nothing could irritate Mary on a day like this, when every street, every balcony, every barrow for half a mile around was full of riotous faces waiting to see Nanny Nailor's killers swing. She could smell ginger cake and hear a baritone snatch of 'A Soldier Met a Silly Lass.' She was struck with amusement to see how the West End was growing around the brutishness of Tyburn. To think that the nobs kept shifting a little westerly every year, only to find their streets filled up again with mob every Collar Day! Mind you, some of them had a taste for it themselves; she could see three curtained carriages beside the stands, parked for a better view.

  For a penny each, she and Doll squeezed into the top bench of Mother Proctor's Pews; it was worth splashing out on such an occasion. The hangman's men had wheeled up the huge black triangle of the Tree already. 'It used to stand there all year round, you know,' shouted Doll in Mary's ear, 'but it blocked the traffic something awful.' There stood Thomas Turlis, masked and orderly, directing the men to hammer the scaffolding into place. 'A vastly educated fellow, so they say,' remarked Doll, 'though he's been known to squabble over tips.'

  The minister was saying a psalm now, but it was quite drowned out by the chants of the crowd. Mary joined in: 'Let them swing! Let them swing!'

  At last Turlis had checked that every rope was knotted to the Tree and every criminal sitting on the cart was bagged. The Metyard mother was stretched out in fits; he had a struggle getting the white bag over her head. Mary could feel her own stomach tighten like a sheet. It wasn't sympathy she felt, or not for the Metyards, at least. It was more like the feeling she got sometimes when a cully moved back and forth inside her for a long time, till she wanted to spit in his face.

  The hangman laid his whip to the horses then, and the cart began to trundle off. The ropes stood out like skeletal sails; bodies began to slide. And suddenly there was a disturbance: the younger Metyard woman had leapt off the side of the cart and broken her neck. Her body swung as heavy as a sack of potatoes.

  Turlis roared at his men, and the crowd growled. 'Damn her,' screamed Mary in Doll's ear, close to tears. 'That was much too easy!'

  Doll slung an arm around Mary's waist. The Metyard mother and all the others were dying now according to the slower, traditional method. As Turlis hauled on each rope in turn and fastened it tight, it seemed to Mary like a peculiar mummers' dance: the heads masked in sacks, the jigging legs, the sudden stink of shit, the friends and relatives and hired 'hangers-on' hauling on the feet to hurry death—but no one was let near the Metyard mother—and the carrion crows wheeling overhead. Mary fixed her gaze on the jerking limbs of Mrs. Metyard for as long as it took, till her eyes watered.

  As the bodies had to stay up for an hour, now was the time for the bringing out of picnics. Doll produced a sweetbread pie, and Mary ate her half with a good enough appetite, though she kept glanc
ing over her shoulder at where the Metyards hung, over the stained sawdust.

  When Turlis's men cut the corpses down smoothly—one man to support each around the hips, another to saw through the rope—there was the usual squabble. Bodies sprawled on the dusty ground, with ruby necklace-prints around their throats. The surgeons' boys, being entitled by law to all Tyburn cadavers, ran in while Turlis and his men beat the families off with sticks. Those in the crowd afflicted by warts snatched at the still-warm hands to rub them on their faces.

  Mary didn't want Collar Day to be over. She pushed through to where the Metyards had been cut down, and on a joyful impulse paid sixpence for an inch of the mother's rope.

  'Half a fuck, that cost,' said Doll with mild reproach.

  'As if you don't drink twice that every day of your life, and piss it out the next!' But Mary did stare at the coarse fibres in her hand. Which half had paid for the rope, she wondered—the pushing in or the pulling out?

  On the way home she realised she'd no money left for supper, and Doll was skint again. So Mary looked out till she found a country fellow with hay in his seams. She brushed against him in the crowd. 'Looking for a sweetheart?' she said, smiling like an angel.

  His eyes bulged; he was too embarrassed to say yes or no. So Mary led him behind some railings on Oxford Street, and convinced the poor blockhead afterwards that the going rate in London was three shillings. She got rust marks all down her pink sack gown, but Doll assured her they'd brush out.

  That long steaming summer she and Doll saw all the sights. They took a party of Dorsetmen to a club Mercy Toft knew where the dancing girls were all Africans or Indians—just to see the fellows' faces, really. The girls moved as fluidly as water. They were called things like Cleopatra, Cocoa Betty, Dusky Sal. Mary wondered what their real names were.

  Other times, Mary and Doll strolled past all the print shops on the Strand to look at the new pictures, laughing at the filthy ones. 'That'll come to naught,' Doll might say, tapping the glass; 'he'll never get it in from that angle.' They went to drink chocolate at Bedlam, and put their faces to the grates to see the lunatics dance. Another night, they watched a house burn in Cheapside, till a maid jumped out of a window on the third story and died of the fall.

  Some nights, some cullies left a foul taste in the mouth, but the answer to that was simple: drink another bottle. Gin blurred all the edges, perfumed all the foulness. 'This life's the only life, ain't it, Mary?' Doll would slur.

  'Yes, my dear,' Mary always replied, 'there's none other so merry.'

  One of the few men Mary ever felt hatred for was the barber who lived downstairs in Rat's Castle. When she begged him to draw out a tooth that was hurting her, that July, he insisted she lie down and pay him before he'd so much as take out his tools. She shut her eyes and squeezed tight to hurry him on. When he tried to kiss her she thought she would gag from the pain.

  By August, London was one great stinking armpit. At St. James's Palace a son was born to Queen Charlotte, 'a bare eleven months after Young Georgie set to work on her!' as Doll put it crudely.

  One sticky afternoon, Mary saw Mr. Armour on the Strand, arm in arm with a fat old fellow, and thought she might as well have a go. 'Three shillings for the pair, gen'men,' she murmured as they passed.

  The young Scot stared straight ahead as if he'd never seen her before in his life, never bent her backwards over the Bridge in broad daylight with the gulls egging him on. It occurred to Mary that he was ashamed; she could have laughed in his face. But the older gentleman turned around. His plump fingers were ink-stained, and he shook his heavy head. 'No no, my girl,' he said, 'it won't do.'

  Mary took two steps closer, as if she were about to curtsy, and gave him the finger. His face registered pain before Mr. Armour pulled him away. She watched the two of them hurry off. She was oddly shaken.

  What else was she meant to do, she should have asked the old fellow? What else was she good for?

  After Bartholomew's Fair in September, the heat began to drain out of the sky. It occurred to Mary that she never wanted to see a man drop his breeches again. 'Time for a holiday,' said Doll. 'Let's go to Vauxhall.'

  That evening a Westminster waterboy who couldn't have been more than ten rowed them across to the south bank in their best gauze slammerkins. Mary had never seen the Gardens before. There were neatly boarded walks, and seats with scenes from plays painted on their backs. Fiddle-players sat hidden high up in the trees, and lemon ice melted in glass troughs, and Mary and Doll strolled about and sat slurping their tea in an arbour swathed in honeysuckle, making much play of the ugliness of various lords and ladies. They recognised three purse-snatches from the Rookery, keeping their hands in, as it were. When the organ in the high wooden gallery blasted out its triumphant chorus, the crows lifted from the trees and wheeled in shock through the navy-blue sky.

  Much later, after the music was over, the night turned chilly. Mary found Doll with her head in a uniform's lap, helpless with gin, laughing so violently she seemed in danger of choking. 'Excuse us, soldier. Time we were getting home,' said Mary, hauling on Doll's hand.

  Her friend yawned and grinned guiltily. 'Got the fare for two, ducky?' she slurred. 'Because I must admit—'

  'Oh, Doll! Not again!' Mary looked pointedly at the soldier, but all he managed was to turn out his pocket, which held nothing but crumbs.

  So much for a holiday. Mary left them on the bench and went off down the long gravel walk, to where the lights ran out, and the path branched into a sort of maze, and gauzy figures stood around waiting. Trade was poor; it took her half an hour to find a cully. He had lace cuffs that hung to his fingertips, and a clammy, unhealthy look to his neck. But she got two shillings off him, which took herself and Doll safe home across the river with drinking money to spare.

  When Mary tried to be witty, these autumn days, it came out sour. Doll had taken to calling her Miss Crab. 'Have a go at Miss Crab here, but mind her claws,' she'd say, shoving Mary into some cully's arms; 'you might wake up missing a bit!'

  These days the pair of them didn't stroll the whole length of the river just for larks anymore. Instead, they'd taken to meeting for a snifter and a gossip in a dead-end alley behind Rat's Castle. There they could rest their bones on a heap of bricks and pebbles someone had hidden and never come back for. Mary and Doll ducked down that alley whenever they got word that the Reformation Society had sent out their men.

  The strollers had no fear of the city constables, who spent their time in exhausted pursuit of thieves and murderers, and rarely bothered a girl at her honest trade. But the Reformation bullies were hired by their Society to do nothing but stamp out vice, as they called it. One night in early October Mary didn't move fast enough. When the cry around Seven Dials turned into a chorus—Reformers, it's the bleeding Reformers!—she was engaged in finishing off a buttonmaker by hand, in a doorway in Neal's Yard. She tried to run, but the men cut her off at the top of the yard. They had sticks with metalled ends, and they were fast runners. They shouted at the cullies, calling them sinners and whoremongers, but they arrested only the girls. Mary was one of about twenty Misses rounded up; she went quietly, wary of the sticks.

  At the Dials, she couldn't see Doll in the crowd; she knew she should be glad of her friend's escape, but she could have done with her company. The rumour was going round that they were all to be committed to gaol. Panic locked Mary's throat. Some of the drunker Misses were whimpering already.

  Mary heard her friend before she saw her. 'Get your base paws off me, you scurvy rogues!' Doll Higgins was being dragged up Mercer Street, struggling in the grip of three Reformation constables like a sail in a rough wind. Her bodice was torn open, showing one creamy breast, and she had a fresh cut on her jaw, but she was enjoying herself hugely. 'Call yourself Christians?' she bawled. 'Don't make me laugh!'

  Mary was afraid for her and wanted to make her stop, but Doll was in full spate. 'There's girls here not thirteen years old,' she raged, sweeping her hand ove
r the crowd. Her finger alighted on Mary, and she gave her a wink. 'That skinny thing there, for instance; twelve years old and barely a week on the town, poor wench. Would you drag her off to Bridewell too, you filthy dogs?'

  The head Reformer stepped up to Doll, almost respectfully, and backhanded her. Mary heard the crunch of his knuckles against her cheek. Doll subsided into silence. She winced, and spat out a bit of tooth.

  Mary did get to go home that night; all the younger girls were let off. But those the Reformers called the hard cases were put in fetters and led off to the Bridewell, down at Blackfriars.

  For two nights Mary didn't go out on the streets except to ask for news, but there was none. She stayed in the garret and waited, chewing the skin off her thumb. Sometimes, she knew, girls came back from the Bridewell with slit noses as a perpetual mark of their crime.

  On the third morning in stumbled Doll Higgins, her back all scabby from the lash but her nose as pert as ever. 'You missed a bit of an adventure, my girl,' was all she'd say. Mary washed her friend's stripes with gin.

  All in all, Doll was the worse for wear these days. She gave every sign of running out of jizz. That scar that had once stood out bold and brash—when the child Mary used to watch out for the beautiful harlot at the Dials—now sank into her cheek like a furrow. Mary tried to get her to eat a good dinner, but Doll only had a taste for the old blue ruin. Mary feared her friend might end up like that woman they'd seen one night, staggering down Fleet Ditch in search of her children, too addled to remember where she'd left them, skidding on scraps of offal left behind by the tripe men. Last winter, Doll had stood between Mary and all harm, but now more often than not it was the younger girl who had to keep an eye out for the elder, if there was any trouble, and help her up the shaky stairway of Rat's Castle at four in the morning, the boards groaning as if they'd collapse any minute.