'What's heart-wringing about all that?' he asked, pulling his night-shirt on over his head.
'I'm coming to it.' Mrs. Jones leaned closer to the narrow candle. 'If you, old frend, perform so Christian an act as to take my poor motherless dauter into your servise, I have no apprehension that she will do anything to forfet yor trust, and yor reward will be in heaven.' Her voice grew muffled. 'Pray dear Jane let my spirit rest easy, knowing my onlie girl is safe in your hands.' She brushed her knuckles against one eye.
'Come to bed now, my dear,' he said, arching his tired back.
'Aye, presently. You know, the girl's not got a penny. She hadn't eaten since Cheltenham! I told her to order chops at the Robin Hood and say the Joneses would be good for it.'
He nodded again, fitting his nightcap over his stubbled scalp.
His wife held the letter stiff, poring over the uneven lines. 'Yor obedient sarvant and eternal frend Mrs. Susan Saunders, Rhys as was,' she murmured. Then she folded it up very small. 'Such an awkward scribble, for her that was the neatest of all us girls at dame-school. Do you remember how neat in her person Su Rhys was, my dear?'
He nodded.
'Saunders, I mean. How fine she looked on her wedding day, do you remember?'
'I wasn't one of the party,' he reminded her. 'I didn't come home from my apprenticeship in Bristol till the year after.'
'Of course.' Mrs. Jones smacked her temple. 'I have my memories but they're jumbled up like laundry.' She looked down at the folded note, and shut her hand over it. 'I wrote Su a letter when I heard she was widowed, I think, and then another to tell her about her father passing on, but nothing since. I kept forgetting, in the press of business. There's always so much to be doing—'
'Aye, that's true,' he said gently. 'The years pass faster than a person can count.'
'She didn't make the bargain I did, poor Su.' Mrs. Jones's voice was quivering again. 'To think of that clown Cob Saunders leaving Su to scrape a living from shoddy piece-work!'
Her husband let out a little grunt of contempt. 'She picked a weak beam there.'
'But how fast a body can come down in the world! Never married again, it seems, just wore herself out tending the little girl. Just exactly six months my junior, Su was, remember?'
'Was she?'
'And bones in a London churchyard now.'
Mr. Jones watched his wife, bent over the candle. Was she crying, or was it only the light that wavered? He smoothed the cold blanket over the clean line of the stump below his left hip.
'Only think of it, though, Thomas.' His wife's voice shook like a rope. 'To feel your dying come upon you, and your child to be cast adrift on the world. That must be near as bad as, as—'
He couldn't let her go on. 'Maybe it's time you had someone to help you,' he remarked, 'now our busy season's coming on us.'
Her face turned towards him, outlined in yellow light; he couldn't see whether it was wet.
'Has she Susan's hands?' he asked, for something to say.
Her voice brightened. 'She has. Fine thumbs for a needle, I took particular notice. But surely, Thomas, we can't afford a fourth servant?'
'We wouldn't have to pay her till the end of the year,' he improvised, 'and by that time we ought to have got some very profitable orders. The Morgan girl's coming-out trousseau, for instance.'
'Oh, tush!' said his wife shyly, 'they might go to Bristol for that.'
'But Mrs. Morgan looks very favourably on your work. Besides, my dear,' he added with a small shrug, 'if we're ever to expand our trade and attract the attention of even greater names than the Morgans, we must take a chance or two. He who would succeed must first aspire,' he quoted.
Mrs. Jones sucked in her breath with pleasure. Her cheeks were the faint tinge of apple-flesh. At times like this, the decades fell away and he caught sight of her old unobtrusive loveliness. As if her hoity friend Susan had ever been a patch on her!
Privately, Thomas Jones thought it was Cob Saunders who'd made the fool's bargain. In their boyhood Cob had been the champion of the schoolyard, but it was his crippled friend Thomas who'd come top of the class. Cob was a pleasant fellow, but he never could tell a wormy apple from a whole one. Any man who'd pick Susan Rhys over Jane Dee could be said to have deserved what he got: blundering into a riot and dying of gaol fever. A quarter of a century ago, when Thomas Jones had come back from Bristol a new-made tailor, and found Jane Dee unaccountably still single, he'd been convinced it was an instance of the Divine Plan, and he held to that belief today. It was yet another way the Maker meant to reward him for the loss of his left leg.
His wife had that fretting look on. 'And if we found we couldn't afford the girl after all, but?'
'We could pay her what she's owed and turn her off at once.'
'To be sure. How right you are, Thomas, as always. Shall I send Daffy to the Robin Hood tonight, so, to tell her to come in the morning?' she added in a rush.
Mr. Jones inclined his head. 'It will benefit the trade.'
'Do you think so?'
He never answered questions twice. He smiled slightly.
His wife knotted the strings of her nightcap under her pointed chin. 'I feel badly now, that we told Daffy we couldn't take his cousin.'
'But Gwyneth is a farm girl.'
'That's true.'
'What would we have done with her?' he asked patiently. 'Haven't we Mrs. Ash for the child, and Abi and Daffy for everything else? Whereas this Saunders girl, she could sew for you and lend a hand with the patrons. An educated London girl will give an air of bon ton.
His wife could always hear when he was trying out a new phrase, picked up from the Bristol Mercury. And he could never deceive her, he knew, when he did her a favour and called it reasonableness. She smiled over her shoulder, forgetting to cover the gap in her teeth. 'You won't regret this, husband.'
He patted her place in the bed. She blew out the candle and took off the rest of her clothes in the smoky darkness.
He lay beside her, very still. It was safer not to touch his wife. He knew he couldn't put her through all that again, not six months after the last catastrophe. There was a limit to what the frailer sex could endure. So he stretched his leg out very quietly and listened to his own breath. Gradually Thomas Jones was getting the mastery of himself.
Then his wife turned over and laid her soft hot hand on him.
The light of a frosty morning silhouetted the Robin Hood. In the yard of the inn, Daffy Cadwaladyr introduced himself. 'Short for Davyd,' he said pleasantly.
The Londoner looked as if she'd never heard a sillier name in her life.
He heaved the bag onto his shoulder; its contents rumbled. 'What have you got in here then, cobblestones?'
Now she stared at him as if she'd been kicked. Her eyes were black as mineshafts, and her face was all angles. She was too bony to be handsome, he decided; a man needed a bit of flesh to get a hold of.
'Only asking a civil question,' he muttered.
Mary Saunders made no answer to that. She followed a few paces behind, all the way up Monnow Street, as if she feared he'd make off with her precious possessions. The worn soles of Daffy's boots skidded on the icy stones. He'd been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he'd come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might last ten years, at best, but knowledge was eternal.
It was Mrs. Jones who'd sent him down to carry the stranger's bag, though why a servant should start off by being treated like a lady, Daffy couldn't tell; if she hadn't the strength to hoist her own baggage she wouldn't be much use in the tall skinny house on Inch Lane. Nor had anyone informed him why there was suddenly to be a new maid in a family where none had been needed, a fortnight back.
Scraps of meat and paper were frozen to the cobbles. Peddlers were drifting in, bent under their loads. There were cages of old goats and six-week kids, and the fishmongers who came every Friday to sell salmon to the Papists were setting up their stalls already. 'Market Square,' he said
over his shoulder, without stopping.
'This?' Mary Saunders's voice was deep and hoarse.
'Aye.'
'It's not a square,' she protested, 'it's a crude sort of diamond.'
Daffy turned to stare at her. Did London folk all talk in such a croak? Her dark hair was pulled back under a cap and her creased kerchief was tucked up to her neck, as tight as a noose. She had the look of a prude about her, except for that gash of a red mouth. 'It's only a name,' he said coolly.
'Also, I was wondering,' she called after him, 'why is the water so brown?'
'It's from the coal pits,' Daffy told her; 'they stain the streams. But it won't do you a tittle of harm.'
She looked as if she doubted that very much; as if there were poison creeping through her veins already.
Daffy hurried on down Grinder Street. He was mightily tempted to carry on to the Quays, duck between the piles of sacking and the wine barrels, and lose her there. Instead he turned down between the narrow walls of Inch Lane and stopped under the blackened sign that said Thos. Jones, Master Staymaker on one side, and Mrs. Jones, Purveyor of Fine Clothes to the Quality on the other. The Roman letters were splendid, if he said so himself; he'd copied them out of The Signmaker's Sampler—borrowed from a painter friend down Chepstow way—and burnt them on with a poker.
The girl's lips were pursed as she stared up at the sign.
'Can you read, then?' he asked, with a spurt of fellow-feeling.
'Can't you?'
The snobbish vixen! 'I'll have you know, I own nineteen books fully bound,' growled Daffy, 'as well as parts of many others.'
'So that's how you get those sunken eyes,' observed Mary Saunders.
He decided not to resent that remark, because it was true. He reached one numb finger under his wig for a scratch. 'So have you any books in this weighty bag of yours?' he asked as he mounted the stairs before her.
'Reading's for children who've nothing better to do.'
Daffy decided to pretend he hadn't heard that. In the attic, he dropped her bag with an almighty thump at the foot of the narrow bedstead. 'You'll share with the maid-of-all-work, Abi.'
The girl nodded.
'I should warn you, she's a blackie,' he remarked, moving towards the door. 'No harm in her, though.'
The girl looked down her pointed nose at him. 'You forget I'm from London, fellow. We have all shades there.'
Again, she made the temper flare up in his chest like a pain. 'So what brings you to Monmouth, then?' he asked pointedly. He was sorely tempted to suggest that Niblett's coach could take her straight back tomorrow, and he'd even throw in a shilling of his own to speed her on her way.
'My mother came from these parts.'
'Who's that, then?'
'Susan Saunders,' she said unwillingly.
'Born Rhys?'
A wary nod. 'You knew her?'
'I'm only twenty,' Daffy protested.
She gave a little shrug, as if to say it mattered little to her whether he were nine or ninety.
'No, your mother must have gone off to the City years before I was born,' he added, 'but I've heard my father mention her. There are no more left of the Rhys line now, I think? Nor the Saunderses?'
'No,' she said decisively. 'None living.' And then the girl sat down on the very edge of the bed, and her eyes were so hard, like a gull's, that he realised she was trying not to cry.
That was a tactless thing he'd said, reminding the girl that she was alone in the world, with not a soul to acknowledge her as kin. He tried to think of a civil way to change the subject. 'Was it a bad journey you had from London?' he asked.
Mary Saunders blinked once, twice, then sat up straighter. 'Vastly uncomfortable,' she said. 'Your roads don't deserve the name.'
Daffy gave up. He wiped his hands on his loose nankeen jacket and turned to go.
He'd reached the door by the time she went on—as if she couldn't bear to be alone—'We almost drove into a hole that was ten feet deep. There was a horse and rider drowned in it. The man was all green, still sitting in the saddle.'
Daffy nodded briefly before he turned away. He wouldn't call her a liar, not on her first day.
Mrs. Jones had always known she wasn't a lady. Her patrons—as her better-born customers preferred to be called—would probably have described her as a very good sort of woman. Most genteel for her station, all things considered. Today she was a little breathless. She showed her friend's daughter round the narrow house, trying to remember all the things a mistress should say to a new maid.
Winter light pried into the girl's dark irises, and her breath made a little cloud on the air. She must have got those eyes from her father, thought Mrs. Jones, and her height too. She had her mother's neat ear lobes, though, as well as the seamstress's thumbs. Her dusty blue gown and broad neckerchief suggested she didn't expect to be looked at, but she drew a person's gaze all the same.
Mrs. Jones tugged her apron straight, and in a moment of weakness wished she'd worn the one with the lace edging. Just to make an impression on the girl. To make her authority felt from the start. If she and her husband were ever to rise in the world, she had to learn how to be a good mistress, kindly but firm. 'Ten pound paid at the end of the year,' she told Mary, 'and a suit of clothes every Christmas, with bed and board too. Are you a great eater?'
Mary Saunders shook her head.
'Not that we'd wish to starve you,' Mrs. Jones added hastily. 'You look a little sickly.'
Mary assured her she was only pale from the journey. 'It was vastly cold.'
'Why, this is nothing!' said Mrs. Jones merrily. 'The winter I turned twenty, the birds were frozen to the branches. The price of bread was so high we had to...' Then she recollected herself, and folded her hands on her stomacher. She should have worn her good brocaded one. Oh Jane, for mercy's sake! 'You know how to wash and get up fine linen, I think, Mary, and do plain-work? I seem to remember your mother said that in her letter.'
'Yes.'
Mrs. Jones thought a maid should have said, 'Yes, madam.' But it was only a little thing, and the girl was new to service. 'Any household affair you may be ignorant of,' she swept on, 'I can soon instruct you. You have only to ask. For now you'll help our maid Abi with cleaning and such, as well as working with your needle alongside of me. All I require is that you be diligent, and neat, and...' She strained for another word. 'Honest,' she finished with satisfaction.
The girl inclined her head.
Mrs. Jones remembered a line from one of her novels that had an impressive ring to it. 'I can't abide deceit or any such nastiness,' she assured the girl, 'for if I catch a servant in a lie, you see, I can never depend on them again.'
Another nod.
'Oh, and I was forgetting, I have a book for you—' She scrabbled in her hanging pocket, and drew the worn volume up through her waist seam. 'The Whole Duty of Woman,' she pronounced, putting it into the girl's hand. 'Most improving.'
Before Mary Saunders could thank her, a small child ran through the doorway, and Mrs. Jones scooped her up. Briefly she dipped her face into the child's buttermilk hair. 'This is Hetta, our darling,' she said, and then regretted the word.
The new maid smiled guardedly.
'Muda?'
'What is it, child?'
'Can I go out in the Meadow?'
'Not today, Hetta. It's still thick with snow. I named her Henrietta for the heroine of Mrs. Lennox's romance,' Mrs. Jones confided, turning to Mary Saunders and shifting the plump child to her other hip. 'I was reading it all through my confinement. The full of a fortnight in bed I was...' But then she remembered she was speaking to a girl of fifteen; she blushed faintly, and rested her chin against her child's hot round face. Hetta struggled in her arms; Mrs. Jones let her slither down her skirts. She straightened up and pressed her fists into the small of her back. 'Say good-day to our new maid Mary, cariad.
At four, Hetta was generally wary of strangers. But when the London girl bent and extended one hand, Het
ta seized and shook it. Mary Saunders's mouth loosened into a smile, and for a moment she was the dead spit of Su Rhys.
'You must be a good girl for Mary, my dear,' Mrs. Jones told her daughter gently, 'since she's just lost her mother. Can you imagine that?'
Hetta's grin slid away; she mirrored her mother's grave face.
'Gone off to heaven, the poor woman has,' added Mrs. Jones.
'In a chariot, like my brother?'
Mrs. Jones winced imperceptibly. 'That's right, my dear.' Turning to Mary she lowered her voice and asked, 'Your mother didn't suffer long, did she?'
The girl shook her head, mute.
Mrs. Jones covered her mouth with her hand for a moment. Listen to her, harping on the girl's grief. 'Well, my dear, if you be half as worthy a creature as poor Su, we shall get on very well together. Let you come downstairs now and meet Hetta's nurse. Mrs. Ash is ... a very Christian woman,' she added uncertainly.
The girl's thick eyebrows lifted; there was something almost ironic about them.
On the stairs, Mrs. Jones racked her brain for any further advice suitable to the occasion. 'Oh and snuff, Mary.'
'Snuff?' repeated the girl.
'I must warn you against it. A very costly habit and pernicious to the health.'
The girl assured her she never touched snuff. Was that the ghost of a laugh, behind those strangely familiar lips?
Mrs. Jones always heard her knees creak on the steep staircase. She moved faster. Forty-three wasn't so very old.
'Hetta is your only child?' asked Mary.
Had the girl read her mind? 'That's right,' answered Mrs. Jones lightly.
She still bled, sometimes. Forty-three wasn't impossible. There had to be the kernel of another child inside her. There had to be a son.
It was the longest morning of Mary's life. Dogged and straight-backed, she moved through her tasks in the order allotted. She'd never lived anywhere like this. Everything in the high, narrow, terraced house was to be cleaned over and over, it seemed, week after week. Susan Digot had never managed to ward off dirt this way, in their basement on Charing Cross Road where ants came up the walls every summer.