‘And Mab, I suppose, stayed to mind the birds at Putney?’
‘Birds was not in Mab’s line. An’ she couldn’t abide the country — bad enough Putney, let alone Suffolk. She come up there with me once. I fixed a bivouac inside a field, in the shelter of a ’edge, an’ cooked ’er a nice supper of larks. It was no go all the way. She ’ad it against the blessed grass for wettin’ ’er feet.’
‘What was Mab’s line?’
‘She were a cress-seller. She lodged with folk in a court off ‘Oborn, to be in good time for Farringdon Market, where she bought ’er cresses off the dealers, early. Then she’d go hawk it door to door, damaged stuff mostly, a girl like ’er in business on ’er own.’
Since recovering his tongue he was anxious to use it, and inclined to prattle. It detracted from his stature, she felt, what she remembered of Ulappi the dancer and Jack Chance the escaped convict. She might not have entrusted herself to a babbler. She came of silent stock; and Mr Roxburgh ever judicious.
Listening to this light-coloured voice telling about his girl, she asked, ‘How did she look? Was she tall? And of what colour? Was Mab pretty?’
Well, it was only right to take an interest in this poor cress-seller, rising early in the court off Holborn (she knew how the girl’s hands must have looked) to hawk her inferior wares from door to door.
‘She was black — like you,’ he began reconstructing carefully. ‘Dark lips. On frosty mornins’ I’d tell ’er she looked like she’d had a feed of cherries — the juicy black uns. She was big-built, too. You’re not more than two parts of Mab, Ellen.’
‘I was never thought small. I’m above medium, wouldn’t you say?’
He might not have been giving it thought, when suddenly he surprised her. ‘Big enough. And pretty.’
From what she had been taught she should have resented his licence, but in the circumstances, was more displeased with herself.
They had lost their inclination to talk. She listened to the cart grinding its way in and out of ruts, and the squeak of a wheel which needed greasing. It was a lopsided vehicle, though gay-painted, the little horse a sturdy bay with hairy fetlocks. She could smell the dew from the fields beyond the hedgerows. She loved to rise early, and go outside their bivouac without her shoes, and feel the dew on the soles of her feet.
She did not think she could stomach the dish of larks. (If pigeon, why not lark?) Nor birds moping and dying in captivity. Some of them huddled tragically from the moment they were snared, and in the jolting cart, pressed together, their plumage filthy with their own dirt.
‘I can imagine’, she said, ‘Mab’s feelings — when you was sentenced.’
He did not answer. It sounded as though he was breaking a stick into little pieces.
‘Is your term a long one?’
‘Life.’
He spoke so flat and matter-of-fact, sympathy was not called for. It shocked her none the less.
‘Her term is no shorter than yours.’ She knew it was herself of whom she was thinking. ‘I can understand her suffering.’
‘Nobody ’as suffered without they bit the dust at Moreton Bay — least of all Mab. Mab, anyways, is dead.’
She lay crying as soft as she could so that her ‘rescuer’ might not hear. Beyond the thatching of twigs and leaves, stars were reeling and melting, to mingle with her tears and blind her. A person, she supposed, might choke on grief if she did not take care.
She was prevented from dwelling on this morbid and precipitate possibility. Jack Chance was touching her arm; he was stroking her wrist, she realized. If she did not withdraw, it was because her body for the moment seemed the least part of her, or because it might never have been touched, not even by her husband Mr Austin Roxburgh, dead these many years.
He continued stroking.
‘Why do you cry, Ellen, when it isn’t no concern of yours?’
‘Oh, it is! But it is! Mine as well as yours and hers.’
When he kissed her thigh through the loops and trailers of vine-leaves she twitched so violently that she rammed her knee against what must have been his face.
He cursed, not necessarily Mrs Roxburgh, or not as she heard it; it was a curse against mankind in general.
‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘did I hurt you?’
‘I reckon nothin’ could hurt me but another taste of the bloody cat.’
Her hand went out to make amends. ‘That will never happen, because I’ll not allow it,’ Mrs Roxburgh said. ‘You can rest assured, Jack.’
Was she so sure of herself? He must have felt her hand trembling on his forearm in a gesture which was meant to comfort him.
For his part, he no longer wavered. He began to handle her as though she had been a wheelbarrow, or black woman, for she had seen the head of her adoptive family take possession of his wives after such a fashion, in silhouette against the entrance to the hut. The breathing, moreover, had grown familiar.
‘No!’ she whinged; was she not after all Mrs Roxburgh?
He dropped her and lay beside her.
After a while he breathed in her ear, ‘If I am to trust you, Ellen, you should trust me. Two bodies that trust can’t do hurt to each other.’
She was not entirely won because, according to her knowledge of herself, she was not entirely trustworthy.
At the same time she longed for a tenderness his hand had begun again to offer as she lay moaning for her own shortcomings.
She allowed him to free her of the girdle of vines, her fringe of shed or withered leaves, which had been until now the only disguise for her nakedness.
‘What’s this?’ he asked her.
‘What?’ Although she knew.
‘This ring.’
‘It’s my wedding-ring.’
He made no comment. He was, as she had always suspected, a decent man at heart.
But suddenly she was taken by a panic. ‘If I lose it I am lost!’ Whereas she knew it was this man on whom she depended to save her.
She began such a lashing and thrashing, her broken nails must be tearing open the wounds which had healed in his back. It was this, doubtless, which decided him to return her aggression.
He could not press her deep enough into the dust. Yet with aroused hunger rather than anger or contempt. It became a shared hunger. She would have swallowed him had she been capable of it.
Then lay weeping, ‘Tchack! Tchack!’ Now it was herself had to find her way back inside a language.
While he asked too blatantly, ‘Can you love me, Ellen?’
They had to protect each other at last from demands with which neither might have been able to comply, encircling, caressing with a feathered tenderness. They must have reached that point where each is equally exalted and equally condemned.
She had lain an instant or an age when she experienced a twinge. ‘Aw, my life! I ricked my neck! Rub on it a little, cusn’t tha?’ But he had dropped off, and where she had been stroked with feathers she was now encased in a sheath of rough, unfeeling bark.
In the course of this encircled night she thought to hear, ‘… both of ’em dabsters … truss th’ pigeon ’sthe pigeon — trussed … never let on … not a word … I wouldn’ of ef she hadn’… is Ellen who’ll … maybe … shave us Lord …’