He laughed. “How many times a day do you say ‘feck’?”
“As many as I feckin’ can.”
She paused at the door.
“I suppose you’d like me to join you?” she said.
”Well, I—”
She humphed in a dismissive way.
“Just leave the feckin’ tray outside the feckin’ door,” she said, picking up the rest of his clothes and closing the door hard.
He ate desperately, jamming the bread into his mouth, taking bacon in his fingers. Thinking: Mary Burton. Thinking: Who are you, girl? Thinking: Why do you talk worse than a sailor? Mary Morrigan moved in his mind, smelling of the forest, whispering the old tales. He saw the perfumed breast of Bridget Riley in the Earl of Warren’s bed. Then Tomora, gazing with her liquid black eyes from the blackness of her jail. Then the door opened again and Mary Burton came in, holding a steaming bowl of water. She placed it on the bureau.
“If you wait two days to feckin’ wash,” she said, “we’ll be dead of the stink.” She put a piece of gray muslin and a sliver of soap beside the bowl. “And don’t tell that bitch Sarah I took you some soap. She’ll add thruppence to the feckin’ account.”
With that, she was gone again. Cormac finished eating and then stood up naked, using the soap and the muslin cloth to wash his face and neck, armpits and balls and feet. He felt at once filled and purged, his stomach full, his flesh scoured. He then put the dirty dishes on the tray and laid them outside the door. The corridor was empty. He heard smothered female voices from below. Then male growls. He locked the door. He shoved his bag between bed and wall, with the small leather pouch inside containing his mother’s spiral earrings. He laid the sword under the thin mattress and strapped the money belt to the small of his back. Thirteen pounds. His mother’s spiral earrings. His father’s sword. They were all that he truly possessed, which was a lot more than most. All of them with him now in this room in America. The rain whipped the windowpanes, and he fell asleep.
42.
In the dark, Cormac heard the muffled sound of a fiddle and thought he was still on the ship. But nothing rocked or creaked, no seaborne timber cleaved water. He was in a room. On land. With dim light leaking through crooked shutters. He rubbed his eyes, and the room emerged dimly, in dark gray tones. He stretched, felt the sword through the mattress and the straps of the money belt digging into his flesh. He unbuckled the money belt and rubbed his skin. Then he sat up naked. And stepped into the chill, and felt for the candle and wooden matches on top of the bureau. He snapped a sulphur head with a thumbnail, lit the wick. Almost reluctantly, yellow light revealed the room. From beyond the door, the unseen fiddler played a melancholy tune.
His suit was not in the room. He cracked open the door and peered into the darkened hallway. The sound of the fiddle was louder now, but no less melancholy. And there was the suit, neatly hanging on a rough hanger hooked upon a wall peg opposite the door. He took it in behind him. Again, he washed his face and armpits with the chilly water and dried himself with the coarse, damp cloth, dressed quickly, buckling the money belt under his trousers, and went out, locking the door behind him and pocketing the key.
He followed the sound of the fiddle down two flights of stairs to the blue door in the back of the entrance hall. The melancholy tune ended, and the music shifted into an up-tempo reel, which was greeted by a loud, growling, masculine roar of approval.
He opened the door and stepped into another world: a lowceilinged, smoky room crowded with white men and Africans, some of them up and jigging madly to the music, the floor shaking, laughter pealing, some of the black men doing wild parodies of the white men’s dances. One white woman was dancing with two black men, laughing and taunting them. And from the side came Mary Burton, all rosy in the light of lanterns. She grabbed Cormac’s forearm.
“The feckin’ suit looks better now,” she said.
“It does. Thanks very much.” He smiled. “And thanks for the water and soap.”
“You must smell a lot better,” she said. “Can you jig?”
“No.”
“Well, try anyway.”
She jerked him into the center of the dancing men, her back straight, her arms rigidly hanging at her side, her breasts bouncing to the music and the movements. The room roared. Dance it, Marymouth. Do it, do it… She glowered at Cormac until he stepped in and tried to match her moves, feeling clumsy and oafish, his legs like lumber. Until one of the Africans shouted at him.
“Don’t think, boy. Move.”
And so he did, surrendering to the music, and the packed heat, and the smoke, and the open mouth of Mary Burton, her lips shifting as he stared, and the music pulsing, and her breasts pushing against the cotton blouse, and she was Mary Morrigan and she was Bridget Riley, and his head started seething and he felt himself hardening and her hand brushed his hardness while other dancers bumped against him, closing the tight space around Mary Burton, and she ran a tongue over her mouth in a teasing way. And then it was over. Everyone cheered. And then Mary Burton embraced him, pressing into him, pushing her small breasts hard against his chest.
“Ah, that was feckin’ grand,” she growled, suddenly turning and shoving her way through the crowd to the bar. He followed her. From the jumble of excited talk he kept hearing Marymouth, Mary-mouth, at once affectionate and charged with lust. She pushed an African aside and reached for a plate. The bar was covered with jugs and glasses and mugs, and platters of ham and venison and bleeding beef, potatoes, turnips, and cabbage, bread loaves and a butter tub, and a kind of porridge called sappaan. She heaped food on a plate. Behind the bar stood a tall, unsmiling, fleshy man with skin cratered by smallpox. His body was still, but his hands moved quickly: uncorking bottles, pouring drinks, gathering coins, and dropping them into the pockets of his greasy apron. His eyes were as soft in their own way as his body. But to be sure, Cormac thought, I’ve spent so many weeks with men made lean and hard by hunger that almost everybody else in the room looks soft.
“John,” Mary Burton said, “this is your new boarder, Mister O’Donovan, he says his name is.” Then to Cormac: “John Hughson. He owns this feckin’ dive.”
Hughson’s mouth smiled, but his eyes remained soft and disappointed.
“Welcome,” he said. “Have a drink, lad.”
He glanced at Mary Burton.
“Maybe you’ll be the one to land Miss Mouth,” he said, opening a bottle of porter.
“Oh, shush, John. Let the man eat.”
“That’s sixpence,” Hughson said, as Cormac fumbled for change. “You must be just in from the sea. You’ve got that ship hunger on you. Ah, well, you’re not alone. Some of ’em come in here ready to eat the bloody furniture.”
“The feckin’ furniture might taste better than some of your food, John,” Mary Burton said.
“Don’t give the lad a bad impression, wench.”
He turned to a foot-wide opening in the wall behind him, beyond which was the kitchen, and shouted something Cormac couldn’t hear under the sound of another kind of music. The fiddler bowed a few bars, and then the Africans joined him, using rattles and gourds and polished wooden bars that made a klawkklawk-klawk sound. Some chanted together and were answered by others. The voices were taunting, bragging, laughing, sharing the close, dense, happy air of the place to which they’d been taken at gunpoint. Cormac understood only one large thing: He was hearing Africa.