Slammerkin Page 9

  Worse than that: Doll had broken her own rule. She'd started pawning her clothes. She was often short, on rent day. 'I haven't your head for figures,' she'd complain. If Mary hadn't the money to cover for both of them, Doll would haul herself out of their fusty garret in the late afternoon with a bodice or shawl, go down to stalls on Monmouth Street and stroll back boasting she was rich again. She claimed she had enough in the way of silks and satins that surely she could trade a few in, at this stage in the game. Mary had never heard anything stupider. Even the sailors knew how much clothes mattered; that's why, if they wanted to punish a Miss for poxing one of them, they docked every scrap she wore with their knives.

  Sometimes Mary bought Doll's things back for her from the pawnbroker's the next week, at twice the price. Her friend barely noticed. 'A girl's clothes are her fortune, Doll, isn't that what you've always told me?'

  But Doll only laughed and said she looked better naked.

  One night, in the Royle brothers' cider cellar, Doll let slip that she had just turned twenty-two. 'When?' asked Mary, suspecting she was lying so the Royles would buy her drinks.

  'Yesterday.'

  'You said nothing.'

  Doll shrugged. 'I was soused; I've only just remembered.'

  Nick Royle was a cheapskate, so all he did was propose a toast and lift his glass high.

  'No toasts,' said Doll, wrenching at his arm.

  Nick got cider all down his sleeve. His brother squeezed the cloth and sucked it like a baby. Mercy Toft laughed, lunatic-style.

  'What's the matter with you?' hissed Mary to Doll.

  'No toasts,' said Doll grimly. 'Forget I said a word. Aren't we all dying fast enough?'

  In candlelight she stood as magnificent as ever, but at noon her face hung like pale leather. There were tuppence bunters on the street as old as thirty, Mary knew; one of them was half mad from the mercury she'd taken to cure her syphilitic pox. If you were still there at forty, it was under the ground, not over it. Mary wasn't going to stay past the age of twenty; she promised herself that much.

  That gave her five years. In the meantime she was spending every spare penny on clothes of her own. It seemed to Mary these days that there was nothing else you could place your trust in. Clothes were as lasting as money, and sweeter to the hand and eye; they made you beautiful and others sick with envy. On Sundays she went off to Hyde Park to see what the quality were wearing these days as they rode about showing themselves off; her eyes sought out the tiny details of pleats or buttons, the altered curve of a set of new hoops. Once she'd dragged Doll out of bed to come with her, but Doll had ended up making a scene and frightening a baronet's horse.

  Mary could hardly remember that she herself had ever been a shy girl. Now she could haggle with the best of them at all the stalls from the Seven Dials down to the Piazza at Covent Garden; the traders knew not to try their tricks with her. At night when she couldn't sleep, she consoled herself with the inventory of her possessions. She had sleeves, bodices, ruffles, and embroidered stomachers, a brown velvet mantua and a cardinal cape. She owned a spray of silk daisies and a black ribbon choker, one silk slammerkin in violet and another in dark green. Doll had taught her all she could, but Mary's taste was finer. She was saving four yards of oyster grosgrain she'd got cheap from the pawnshop; someday she'd have it made up into a wrapping gown any duchess would give her eye-teeth for.

  Something would turn up, for her and Doll both. You never knew. There was no use worrying over a future that might never happen, because the end could come as quick as a wink. The other night a warm wind had blown up and the sign of the Blue Lion fell down on Tilly Denton's head. Caesar had been her bully-man; he buried her handsome enough, as the girls agreed, and they all made sure to be at the graveside, as a mark of respect. (Not to poor Tilly, so much as to her pimp; you wouldn't do him an insult if you valued your skin.) But a decent burial wouldn't be much consolation, Mary thought, if you were snuffed out as quick as a taper.

  The cough came with the first frost in October. Mary ignored it. Soon it was her constant shadow, pressing on her chest when she walked uphill, nagging at her on and off all day, raising its voice at night. 'Shut your mouth,' moaned Doll, tugging the edge of the mattress round her head.

  Mary's voice had always been deep but it was huskier and darker now, with a hint of a growl. It made some cullies nervous. She tried to smile instead of speaking.

  It was going to be the worst winter in years. All the signs said so: birds, berries, the fortune-tellers' coffee-grounds.

  The Magdalen was Doll's idea. Weren't they all? 'Mary, old muck-mate,' she remarked one day, 'you'll not last the winter.' They were walking the Drury Lane beat, curtsying to gentlemen actors and pursing their lips at everything in breeches. Where Mary's skirts were tucked up on one side as the mark of the trade, cold wind dug in. She doubled over with a whoop and hawked up blood, red and yellow against the slithery mud of the street. Ugliness covered the world. She stared down at the mess, as if divining her future.

  Doll stood over her, hands perched on hips like hungry birds. 'You ought to take that to the Magdalen Hospital, so you should.'

  'I'm not so sick I'd risk my life in a hospital, thank you,' gasped Mary.

  'It's not a real one, lack-wit,' said Doll with a snort. 'That's just the name. It's meant for getting young chits off the town before they end up raddled old jades like me.'

  Mary grinned back at her, wet-mouthed.

  'Think of it!' said Doll. 'Free bed and board through the worst of the winter. Liz Parker went in like a bag of bones and came out fat as ham.'

  Mary tried to speak, and started coughing again. When she finally caught her breath she said, 'Doll-Doll, I'm no penitent.'

  Doll's eyes rolled, and she jerked her thumb over her shoulder at the theatre behind them on Drury Lane. 'So you ain't picked up nothing about acting, all those times I took you to the play?'

  The wind rose, and Mary pulled her taffeta scarf over her mouth. She turned for home.

  Doll ran along beside her. 'You can't say I'm not right.'

  'I'll think about it,' whispered Mary, holding in her cough.

  'You'll do it. I'll see you do. If I don't, may my next sleep be my last,' finished Doll triumphantly.

  Mary stopped and looked at her hard. 'And what about you?'

  'What about me, then?'

  'What about the rent?' Mary didn't know how else to put it. 'Mrs. Farrel's no liking for Misses. She'd put you out soon as look at you, if you fell behind.'

  Doll's gaze was icy. All of a sudden her face was an inch from her friend's. Mary tried not to look at the scar, frilled like lace, dusted with powder. 'Don't you fret about Doll Higgins, dear heart. Never needed you in the first place, did I?'

  So on the first Thursday morning in November, Mary wiped off every trace of paint before she set off—her stomach in a reef knot—to walk right across the city to Whitechapel.

  'Night-night,' mumbled Doll from her pillow.

  Mary didn't know what to say. She stood in the doorway, and waved her hand, but Doll's eyes were shut.

  Mary'd never gone quite so far out of her home beat before. She had to ask the way to the Magdalen Hospital three times, and she imagined the East Enders who gave her directions looked a little askance. What an odd thing, that posing as a Penitent shamed her more than walking the streets ever had.

  The Magdalen Hospital was an imposing block of stone. Hours after the line of Petitioners had formed, it still stretched along two sides of the building. There had to be forty girls here, Mary reckoned, and she was about halfway along. The downstairs windows were all shuttered—to stop the Petitioners from seeing what went on inside, maybe. A man in some kind of uniform walked up and down to keep them in order. He seemed like a servant, but they all bobbed their heads to him just in case he turned out to be important. Mary pulled her shawl so tight her shoulders turned in, and edged a little nearer to the railings. Was that Con March from the Rookery? Mary gave her a tent
ative nod, but the other girl avoided her eye.

  Mary shifted from foot to foot in the cold morning air, her breath like a cloud around her. A huge cough went through her like an earthquake. It was lucky that she was used to standing round on street corners; how well she knew that feeling of sending down roots between the icy cobbles. Hadn't she often taken on a cully standing up against a frozen wall, or let herself be bargained down to ninepence just to get indoors?

  She amused herself now by eyeing the other Petitioners. That tiny girl in carmine and a torn lace-edged trollopee, she was definitely your Covent Garden stroller. The one beside her looked poxed to Mary. If they spotted the disease, Doll claimed, they'd send the girl off to the Lock Hospital, where the food was the worst.

  Mary's eyes moved down the queue, picking out Misses from Ruineds. ('That's what the good girls are called, Ruineds,' Doll had said derisively. 'Tell anyone who asks, you was pure as snow till some gentleman took advantage.') The Ruineds had a bruised, bewildered air about them. One wore a little pearl cross around her neck, and clutched it as if at any moment she might be transported to a better world.

  By now the thin November sun was high in the sky, drilling into Mary's eyes. She should have worn a straw hat, but the only one she had was red, with a broken feather, and Doll said they'd never let her in with that on, so Mary had had to leave it behind in the garret with all her other favourite things. It wasn't that she didn't trust her friend, exactly; what troubled her was the thought of robbers, a fire, or any of the thousand things that could steal away her stock of glad-rags.

  Dressing, this morning, Mary hadn't been sure whether it would be better to look like a respectable Penitent, or a wretched one. She'd put on the plainest jacket and skirt she had, but she knew she still had the mark of a Miss on her. Was it the satin shoes, with their worn points? Or just the way she stood, a little too practised, her hip too far out? She couldn't remember what innocence looked like. She tried to conjure up a memory of herself as a charity schoolgirl, her face blank as paper. No use: all gone.

  A stir in the ranks; the tiny Miss in the torn slammerkin had keeled over in the gutter. Mary craned to see. After an uneasy moment, five women rushed to pick her up. Were they trying to prove their kind-heartedness, Mary wondered? Two porters in fat grey wigs walked out with a padded stretcher. They carried the little girl along the whole length of the queue. Her lips were blue. The great doors shut again behind her.

  'That one's a sharper and no mistake,' muttered a sunken-checked woman in front of Mary.

  Mary grinned and began to answer, but the cough doubled her over and took all the air from her lungs. That was a neat trick, fainting in the gutter; why hadn't she thought of that? Doll would have. Mary would have had nothing to fear if only Doll Higgins were with her. 'Why don't you come along too, then?' she'd complained, as she got up before dawn.

  But Doll had lain back on their lumpy straw mattress and let out one of her cackles. 'Catch me letting them lock me up in there!'

  Mary tried not to think about the locks. She tried to remember why she was here. For medicine for her cough. For food she wouldn't have to earn. For shelter in the worst of what was shaping up to be a brutally cold winter. The Magdalen was the only place in London a girl like her would be taken in, and all she had to do was persuade some do-gooders she was ashamed. That was all they asked.

  Her mouth filled with sour water. It occurred to her at this point to walk off, to give up the place she held in this four-hour queue and make her way back across the city to the Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street for a pint of small beer. Only the thought of Doll's face twisted with rage kept her feet frozen to the ground. 'All you have to do is keep your head down for a couple of months and save your damn skin,' Doll had told her, towards the end of their argument. 'You ever heard of a better bargain?'

  A rumour came down the line now: 'They're not taking but one in five.'

  Mary's mouth set in a hard line.

  Another message passed from ear to ear, faster this time: 'They like you barefoot.' Girls started plucking off their shoes and throwing them in the gutter. The woman in front of Mary was barefoot already; her toes stood out like worms on the hard ground. Mary glanced down at her own satin pumps. Five shillings she'd paid for them, at Bartholomew's Fair; they'd been practically clean, then. She was damned if she was going to throw them away before they had so much as a hole in them.

  As the queue inched its way between the high panelled doors, Mary listened hard. It was important to have a story, she realised; something for the clerks to write down, something that sounded well. Three women in a row ahead of Mary—Drury Lane Misses, the lot of them—all claimed to be ladies' maids whose masters had tricked them with promises of marriage. Others lifted their stories from ballads, French romances, and even a recent trial. Mothers were all dead in childbirth, it seemed, and fathers all at sea.

  The only honest words Mary heard were spoken by the woman just in front of her, who Mary reckoned was toothless from a mercury cure. Mary bent closer to hear what she muttered. The woman didn't bother acting. She told the clerks she'd always walked the streets, but at her age she couldn't earn her dinner anymore.

  The younger clerk gave her a chilling look. 'Is that all you have to say for yourself?'

  She nodded tiredly.

  The older clerk wiped his pen. 'Application refused,' he recited, writing in a huge leather-bound account book. 'Petitioner too hardened to reclaim.'

  The woman pushed past Mary blindly. She spat on the doorpost on her way out.

  Mary's chest was hammering. Her turn. She tried to cough, to exhibit her neediness, but she could only produce a faint clearing of the throat.

  'Name?'

  'Mary Saunders,' she said, before it occurred to her to lie. Her deep hoarse voice made the younger clerk glance up at her. She curtsyed, to soften the impression. She watched the older clerk scratch the words in the right column.

  'Age?'

  'Fifteen,' she said softly. It was true, but it sounded like a lie. Maybe fourteen would have been even better.

  'Reason for application?'

  'If you'd be so good as to put down whatever you think fit, sir,' she whispered.

  A pause. Then it worked; the words rolled out like a prayer. Most Gracious Governors,' the clerk murmured as he wrote, 'this Petitioner has been guilty of prostitution and is truly sensible of her offence. Her penitence is equalled only by her resolution to begin a better life.'

  The worst of it was the surgeon. Behind a thin curtain he laid Mary flat on her back and stuck his fingers in her privates, 'to discover your state of health,' he claimed, not paying a penny for the privilege. Nasty fingers, too, studded with warts.

  'Any itch? Any whitish running, or yellow?' he asked. Any stoppage of urine?'

  'None, sir,' she said, trying to sound as if she had no idea what he meant.

  He didn't believe her, she could tell. He went on peering between her legs and muttering. She didn't think there were any marks of her old ailment, though. She was tempted to kick him in the face, but she supposed that might damage her chances. Then he stood up and looked in her mouth, for mercury scars, she presumed. Thank God she'd never been poxed; that was harder to hide than the clap.

  Mary had a feeling they were going to take her. She could smell her luck turning.

  One week later, she lay in her narrow bed in the ward and reminded herself what a lucky slut she was. So why did she keep wanting to cry?

  If she had stretched out her arm she could have touched the sharp back of Honour Boyle in the next bed. Honour was a Devon girl; the Piazza used to be her beat till she had a child born half-formed, and she sickened of the trade. She wasn't a bad sort, but she was no Doll Higgins. This ward was the one for Misses of some education. They could all write their names, in here; not that they'd much call to.

  Steps in the corridor; Mary recognised Matron Butler's pacing feet. The Matron had sad eyes and such a high hairline, her forehead seemed to bu
lge with the burden of her knowledge. She didn't trust any of the Misses, which in Mary's book meant she was no fool. The Matron reserved her mercy for the hapless Ruineds, who got the occasional basket of fruit from Lady Subscribers and had the best ward at the top of the Hospital, with a view all the way across Goodman's Fields to Tower Hill.

  Mary had missed the Guy Fawkes bonfire. She hadn't been outside for seven days. She hadn't felt sun on her face except through glass.

  The Magdalen was the biggest building she'd ever lived in, and the cleanest. No matter how long she lay awake and listened in her bleached sheets in the scrubbed ward, Mary couldn't hear so much as the scurry of a rat. None of the clutter and filth of the city could get through the Magdalen's great doors. None of the news, even; none of the noise. This was a silent world of its own, sealed off from the real one. A convent, or a cage.

  The Penitents knelt in chapel every day and twice on Sundays, being preached at by the Reverend Dodds. As for their costume, Matron Butler explained that there was to be nothing in excess, nothing for beauty's sake, nothing to which any visiting Subscriber could take exception. Every girl wore the same low-heeled shoes, the same worsted stockings; even the dull green of their garters had to be hidden by the roll of stocking over the knee. Two quilted linen petticoats and one under-petticoat apiece; no more, no less. Their gowns, were all thin shalloon wool, the colour of dust; their aprons were bleached to muttonbone. The sleeves they buttoned on in the morning all had the same lawn ruffles at the elbow—one row only, for fear of vanity. Their long, fingerless mittens, their stocking purses, their needlecases, were all absolutely uniform. Decency, above all: the linen neckerchief had to be tucked into the stays so as to cover every inch of skin, and the cap had to seal off the hair dressed low in a bun, without a curl.