The Don't Girls

by Octavia Cade

  “Purple or red?” said Whitechapel, interrupting her thoughts and holding up bunches of pansies for inspection. They were velvety and dark, the subtle fragrance almost drowned out by mud and smoke and the press of bodies, the meat packaged in brown paper and the yeasty deliciousness of warm bread.

  “Purple,” said Bluebeard’s wife, and tried not to roll her eyes when the other bought the red. “I’m sure Pandy said something once about a greenhouse. You cart the books back and forth, you could probably do the same for plants. I’m sure Sibby would like the pretty colors.”

  “It’s not for that,” said Whitechapel. “I want to lay some flowers for a friend when I’m done here. Over on Hanbury Street. It’s only a few minutes away—you can amuse yourself while I do, I’m sure. Wander round a bit, miss. I’d like to have something for the market, I would.” Something to ring round with books, something hard and stony to remind her.

  Bluebeard’s wife bought some of the purple pansies anyway, for Pandora, and when she tucked them safely in the box, so as not to get crushed, the building disappeared around her. Yet the market remained, open-aired now and mired in mud, and the woman who sold the flowers was older than before, and her features not quite the same though there was a certain similarity round the chin, and in the eyes.

  “You’ve overshot it, love,” she was saying, and she was speaking to the woman beside Bluebeard’s wife, a woman with skin darker than her own, with skin less perfect than Pandora’s. “By quite a way. Better retrace your steps.”

  “Thank you,” said the woman, and wrung swollen hands in her apron, distressed, darting hopeless glances about her as if expecting help she knew would not come. Bluebeard’s wife caught at her hand, impulsively.

  “Don’t be upset,” she said. “I’ll come with you. I don’t know where you’re going, exactly, but it’s better to be lost with a friend than by yourself.”

  “I didn’t mean to get so turned around,” said Mary. “I was so upset when I left—half driven out, I was, though it’s for the last time, the last time! And by the time I knew myself again, I just had to keep wandering until I saw something familiar.”

  “You’ve been to Spitalfields before, then?” said Bluebeard’s wife. “It’s my first time here, myself.”

  “No,” said Mary. “Not exactly. But it’s a market, and I know markets, I do.”

  Bermuda. Mary is dressed in the morning by her mother who, weeping, takes her by the hand, takes Mary and her two little sisters and leads them off to be sold at market herself. The master is preparing for a wedding, and that is why the girls are to be sold: to pay for a party, and he does not have the time to take away from preparations to do it himself.

  Mary stands with her sisters in the market, back against the wall of a large house where they can huddle together like geese, if geese had a mother sobbing beside them and could understand the comments of people come to buy for the table, who talk about the three little girls as if they were deaf and could not hear them. Then “Who is the eldest?” says the market master, and Mary is brought to front, is handled and examined and sold off to a different master from her mother, to a different master from her sisters, and she is given a moment to say goodbye to them.

  It is more than a goose would be given, but not much more.

  Their arms were linked as they walk along, and when Bluebeard’s wife, carrying the box, brushed Mary’s bare skin with her other hand, she got quick flashes of Mary’s life: glimpses of a harder life under a hotter sun. Glimpses of a life Bluebeard’s wife might have had with her own brown skin if the geography of her birth not been different. It was difficult, sometimes, to keep track of the conversation through the flashes. She felt Mary must think her a scatterbrain, but it couldn’t be helped.

  “I was looking for the bootblack,” said Mary. “He came to the house, sometimes, to do the shoes and sharpen the knives. I was going to see if him or his wife could take me to the Moravian church and they could help me. I know his wife, see—she’s a laundress, and we’ve done clothes together. Kind, they are, these English laundresses. They help me at tub, as I’ve got the rheumatism and my mistress—the one that was—never cared enough to let me off, though she knew it hurt me. They bought me, she says, so I’m to do as I’m told and no complaining.”

  “I know what that’s like,” said Bluebeard’s wife. She too had been sold, handed off by her father for a few handfuls of gold, no doubt, sold away from her cousins and her friends and the pigs, the little kitchen garden. Sold off to sharp lethality, ringed about as it was with silk and satin and servants, the pretty trinkets and the keys to the castle.

  She has an owner who beats his daughter as he does his slaves, but this is not the worst of it. He calls Mary often, calls her to come and bathe him, and she finds him stripped naked in his tub and waiting for her, waiting to be soaped and stroked and to accept her subjugation.

  Mary has bathed children before, on instruction, but her master is not a child and is little interested in childish things. She has no doubt that, if asked, he would say that he has ownership of her, of people like her, because they are inferior, little more than animals, and they need direction and care—but Mary has never seen a man call an animal to bathe him. He knows she is not an animal, but he has power that she does not and that is slavery for her, right there, in the tub and in the obedience to hard wet flesh.

  It is indecent. He is indecent. Mary prefers to be beaten than to come attend him in his bath, and it is not because she has been beaten so often she has lost the fear of it. It is a small choice, but it is her own, and there are some shames that she cannot live with. So when she hears the water splashing, when she hears him call for her, she does not come. It means being beaten, but slavery is learning to live with small choices.

  “I’m married,” said Mary.

  “Really?” said Bluebeard’s wife. “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to,” said Mary. “Because I loved him. He’s a free man, my Daniel. Bought himself out, he did, and he’s a cooper now. But he asked me and I said yes, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to. It’s not right, not being able to marry. My master and mistress would never have allowed it. So I kept my mouth shut and did it anyway. They weren’t happy, but no one can make me say I shouldn’t.”

  “I’m married too,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “Or I was. And it wasn’t any sort of picnic living with him, let me tell you.”

  “I’ve never lived with my husband,” said Mary. “I’d have needed permission for that, and of course they wouldn’t give it. Then they brought me here to England, all the way over the ocean, and I had to leave him behind. I’m free here, I suppose, but I can’t go back home, back to my husband, without becoming a slave again—and slaves can’t live with their husbands without permission. It’s a sad joke, I tell you.”

  “I hate to say it,” said Bluebeard’s wife, “but you might have gotten lucky there. Sure, they tell you marriage is helpmates and becoming one flesh, but when one person has all the power, they can do what they like and you’re just supposed to take it.”

  Mary looked up at her through long, dark lashes; a candid look, as if she could see something that Bluebeard’s wife could not. “You shouldn’t think that way,” she said, with her brutal life and her scarred back and her husband that she loved. “Not everyone is terrible.”

  “Not everyone is kind, either,” said Bluebeard’s wife.

  Mary is sent to work in the salt ponds on Turk’s Island. She stands and shovels knee-deep in brine, stands under the hot sun that leaves blisters on her skin, stands in salt water that covers her calves in boils that break until her flesh is weeping. On Sundays, after her work is done, she is allowed to fetch grass for her bed, for sleeping on bare boards is impossible when her flesh is open and raw.

  Some of the slaves have sores clear down to the bone. There is no treatment for them: any treatment would take them away from their work, and what use is a slave that cannot work?

  She is beaten when s
he cannot keep up—stripped and hung up and beaten with cow-skins and cart whips and rope. One man is too old to work fast, and he is whipped so often she sees maggots in the wounds that are never allowed to heal. An elderly woman, thrown into prickly-pear bushes for lagging behind, dies from thorn wounds. Mary looks at them and shudders at the thought of aging here, for if youth has its own problems she cannot imagine being left to grow old in the salt pans, when this is her future and her only hope.

  She endures, because that is the only option she has.

  “It took me a while to understand,” said Mary. “Even here in London, they wouldn’t let me go. Oh, one or other of them would lose their temper. She’d say ‘Fine, get out then if you want to, go starve in the streets’ and he gave me a letter saying I’d been let go for laziness, but they knew I couldn’t leave. Where would I go with no references? I can’t go home, even if I had the fare, not without giving them more power over me than they already have. The law says I’m theirs, there, and the law’s too much for them I think. They hate me and I hate them, but in this country they can tell themselves that I’ve got a choice. It’s a bad, no-good choice—them or the streets—but because it’s a choice they can tell themselves it’s as much on me as it is on them. They can beat and scream as much as they like then, ’cause I chose not to leave. But it wasn’t a true choice, not really. I couldn’t leave, and that was near enough to wouldn’t, and so that made it all right for them, see?”

  “Like you were all in it together,” said Bluebeard’s wife, remembering the press of a key in her hand. Remembering how her husband had closed her fingers over it.

  “But we weren’t,” said Mary. “We weren’t in it together at all. In the end, I just couldn’t take it anymore—and I thought, if worst is worst and it is the streets, then that’s better than them thinking that we were.”

  They arrive together at the bootblack’s, and Mary is greeted by friends and familiar streets, helped and comforted, and before she is led off to the missionaries, Bluebeard’s wife draws her aside and gives her the pansies, tucks the velvet petals behind her ear. The flowers are bright against her hair.

  She has just enough time to wander back to Spitalfields, to find the flower vendor and open her box, to buy another bunch from a woman with a young face in a new building. Just enough time, and Whitechapel is arriving for her, come back from her past and with a basket full of fruit and vegetables and brown-papered meat.

  “I have it,” said Bluebeard’s wife, standing while the market noises bloom around her: people and price-calling and produce, the chickens and the lambs and the tar-footed geese.

  The first day, the iron about the wrist of Bluebeard’s wife anchored her down; she was always aware of compensating her stance, of finding ways to rest her wrist and take the weight off it. The cold went more rapidly than she expected it to, the warmth of her body seeping into the metal and her flesh absorbing the chill in turn. Soon she could feel no difference between them—the iron held her warm as blood.

  “You don’t need to do this, surely,” Anne had said, distressed. “Is there nothing else you can use? There’s no lack of things to choose from.” And there hadn’t been: the ferric cabinet had offered up pyrite and pig iron and nails, meteorites and wheel rims and skillets, horseshoes and red ochre and long, snaking chains with cuffs on them.

  “That one,” Bluebeard’s wife had said, and held it up, feeling for weight and roughness and the hard, uncompromising feel of it against her flesh. She had snapped one end over her left wrist, wrapped chains around her forearm like snakes. “But it’s not ready yet.”

  The second day, the iron left welts on her wrist, and her skin was swollen and bruised. Anne brought liniment and soft clothes to use as padding, but Bluebeard’s wife did not let her use them. Pandora did not offer any form of amelioration, her expression set firmly into neutrality, but Whitechapel watched also, and if she too said nothing, her silence was somehow avid. Bluebeard’s wife would have found her disturbing if she were not waiting for the same thing herself.

  She lay in bed, her arm resting on a pillow in a failed attempt to help her sleep and studying her wrist as if it were her wedding band. In the first days of her marriage she had lain this way, holding her hand out in front of her, her arm propped up on pillows, admiring the pretty gold band, admiring how perfectly it fit her.

  On the third day, her skin was raw. Bluebeard’s wife busied herself with chores. She beat carpets and scrubbed floors, even got Pandora to bring her to the museum so that she could haul books for Whitechapel, fetching and carrying until her arms ached and her wrist burned, but still the skin did not break.

  “It fits too well,” said Pandora, trying to comfort her, and bringing a cool compress to put on the back of her neck. “Perhaps tomorrow.”

  “I can’t stand this another day,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “I won’t.” She took the iron circlet in her free hand and ground it down into her own hurt flesh, twisting and scraping until pain forced sobs from her and her skin tore beneath the metal, coating the shackle with the iron of her body.

  “There,” she said, hiccupping. The chain unlocked, and she threw it from her. “It’s done. Spitalfields Market.”

  “Spitalfields Market,” said Whitechapel, low and satisfied, retrieving the bloody scraps of iron and disappearing into the stacks, her own hands staining red.

  “Darling, your poor wrist,” said Pandora, coming to take it into her hands and blowing on it gently. “Come and let me take care of it for you.”

  “No,” said Bluebeard’s wife. “Thank you, but no.”

  “It will scar without proper treatment,” said Pandora.

  “Let it scar,” said Bluebeard’s wife.

  INTERLUDE the SECOND

  “I’m not sure that I like her hair like that,” said Anne, staring critically at Sibby’s newly green locks, styled into a mass of spikes on her little head.

  “I think she looks darling,” said Pandora. “That green just matches her dress perfectly. And you know Whitechapel will be changing it soon enough.” It was true, too. Disguising Sibby’s hair had become something of a hobby for the women, and they almost competed to find the most attractive style. Whitechapel was most successful—a product of her time on street corners, she said—and the former seamstress took great pleasure in mitigating her small charge’s fiery head.

  Sibby herself didn’t care a scrap. She kicked and gurgled and rolled over on her cushions, was nicely tempered through the petting and dyeing and spiking. The only time she ever tended to fuss was when Whitechapel was a mite too slow getting out her books before bedtime. “You must tell her the most wonderful stories,” said Anne, who herself passed on every childhood story she remembered, every lullaby and rhyme and folk-song from two countries.

  “She seems to enjoy them, milady,” said Whitechapel. She tried to direct Sibby’s attention to the chessboard by her knee, but only truly succeeded when she gave the baby a carved queen to suck on. “Can’t say as I ever had much of a chance to play before, but it’s not hard to pick up the basics once you start.” She and Sibby were still working through the Zs, and Whitechapel was currently reading to her from the books that made up a few paces of Fashion Street in her bibliographic map of London. The chessboard had been set up in illustration.

  “We’ve got a new book today, poppet,” said Whitechapel, after Anne had gone. “There’s this thing called Zugzwang, Sibby girl,” she said, sounding out the unfamiliar syllables. “Now they’ll tell you that it’s something to do with the game, but I know Zugzwang well, I do, and I’m not the only one, I warrant, and I never saw a chess board until I landed here. Most people have had it more than once, whether or not they’ve got one of those little carved dollies in their hands when they do. Zugzwang, Sibby, is when everything you do is worse, when everything you do takes you to a nasty bad place. Sometimes, you’ll be thinking, it’s better not to move at all, better to sit quietly and let the troubles pass you by, but you’re not always goin
g to have that luxury, my girl.”

  “I was at Zugzwang once,” she said, “though I didn’t know it. There I was, minding my business, and what happens but a knock on the door. Now I didn’t much care to answer it, understand, because I’d been having a long day and sometimes a girl just wants to put her feet up, but when someone knocks at your door, you have an obligation to go answer it, even if you don’t want to, but especially if the rent is due and you’re a shilling short and out of good options. And I was much, much less better off when I did move,” she concluded. “Though I will tell you, pet, that without that Zugzwang I wouldn’t be here, so perhaps it was for the best after all. Sometimes every choice is a bad choice, but you’ve got to take them as they come and get on with it anyway. So listen up, because I’m about to start. Ready? All right, here we go: Chapter One…”

  MAB, QUEEN OF THE FAERIES

  “Where are we going today?” asked Bluebeard’s wife, trying to sound enthusiastic although she was not really looking forward to it. Pandora had set up a small pool for Sibylle to splash in—“Just look at her, she’s a real little water baby!”—and Bluebeard’s wife would have preferred to stay in and play with them.

  “I’ve got errands to run in Dutfield’s yard,” said Whitechapel. “You are going to, well, it was a music hall, but it changed to a mission round the time I changed myself. But it’s the hall I remember best: Wilton’s Music Hall. There was dances and circuses and fairs, people singing and the girls there for the stage. And I used to think it would be so wonderful to be up there with everyone looking at me, all admiring like, pretending to be something I wasn’t. Instead I was doing all my pretending on street corners. ‘Aren’t you a handsome lad then—‘ that sort of thing. Not quite the same, hey?”