Mary, disguised as a boy both for survival and its freedoms, has found a close friend in the barrow boy Jim Coker. She binds her growing breasts and smokes to deepen her voice — but puberty is relentless.
The Secret of Bleeding is to Bleed in Secret
Wrongness wakes me. Wetness. Sleepily, I send a hand down to touch it, bring it out, like catching a fish. Black in the dawn light, but I already sense what colour it means to be. Wide awake now, I keep my bloodied hand held high, struggle out of the blanket onto my feet and pull bedclothes away to reveal a wide map of red.
Am I murdered? Stabbed by some assassin and not yet sensible to the pain? Has Cook, finally, lost all reason and patience with me? Moved from spoon to knife? She has two good knives would do this, fillet me out of my skin.
On the sheet is written the whole country of me. How I began and how I end. Mercy yes, so much blood in my bed I must surely be on my way out of this world. With my unbloodied hand, I feel my belly for an injury. No break in the skin. Did the bucket hit me so hard that something inside has been severed? That would count as foolish as the King of England dying from a molehill. Must I die of a bad catch?
But you’re already wise, are you not? You know how common it is for a person to bleed who has been cursed with a certain kind of innards. Cursed is the word that now comes to calm me: cursed I am, indeed, for this mess is the curse of Eve. Which thought sits me down, less horrified, on the edge of that ruined mattress, to contemplate what to do.
The curse of Eve, as I have understood it on my short time on this earth, is a great nuisance to all women, but especially so to those women who choose to live outside their sex, as I do. Nevertheless I will not have the course of my life undone by some ancient minikin’s urge to eat fruit. The problem of the bloodied bed must be solved, and I must solve it with nothing but my own ingenuity. A mole may end the life of a king, but I shan’t have mine overturned by a bloody sheet. I strip it off and see the problem goes deeper: blood has soaked into the mattress, staining the ticking and soaking inside to the straw, which will go mouldy and rancid if washed or mopped, unless I can find some manner of drying it. Those parts that would betray the secret of my sex are as much on the inside as the outside. I will not be saved by cold water and salt. I put the sheet back as it was, peel off my stained nightshirt, mop the floor with it (for I have dripped there too), and place it over the red map on the sheet, with all the bloodied part of it hidden beneath. Then I fold the unbloodied blanket over sheet and shirt, and say a small prayer that it is not laundry day and Kate will not be up to strip my bedclothes in an hour.
I sponge off my body, pinking the water in the washbowl. Pour the contents very carefully out of the window onto the sloping shingles of the roof, already slick with drizzle. Then dress and go downstairs. My first task is to liberate some clouts from the linen cupboard without being seen. Back in my room, I tuck one into my breeches which are tight enough, I think, to hold it in place. I am asked to run a message to Picadilly, and though it is out of my way, I beat a path to Jim Coker, who knows far more about the world than I do.
Am I undone? Will I be cast out on the streets? It is like opening a box of snakes to let myself think such things. I am half down the street before I must stop because I cannot breathe for sobbing. Worse, the running has shifted the clout I stuffed between my legs and I will have blood down my breeches if I cannot adjust it. I take myself off down an alley and walk until I can breathe and at least half think. When there is no-one one about, I put my hands into my breeches enough to position the clout where it needs to be. I will bandage it to me in the future, but for now I must walk with my thighs somewhat pressed together.
I know this bleeding has something to do with having babies. I dread swelling up like my mother, because there would be no hope of staying a boy then. But then I recall how I was got upon my mother with a clonk to the head in the stairwell, and that it always takes a man to put a baby in a woman, and I have never been close enough to a man to be clonked (excepting the sort who wouldn’t clonk me: you, Mister Lampard, Mister Rotard, Adisa, and Mister Thomas). Nor have I done the twining thing that prostitutes do around men in doorways, which I sometimes walk past at a pace, which must be the start of it or a part of it. Since I have known neither clonking nor twining I must be safe from growing a baby in my belly, at least for now. But I am not safe from being found out. I breathe quieter and quieter, and shut all feeling away again, until I have a notion what I might say to Jim.
Jim is learning a new trick to do with dislocating his shoulders. Or looking that way, anyway, so he can slide himself through small spaces, he says, and when I ask him what small spaces he laughs, ‘a lady’s cunning place,’ and then pokes me on my arm, as if I am supposed to laugh too. I say to him it just so happens I have a question about a lady’s cunning place and does he know about the bleeding of them. He asks why with a twist on his eyebrow, and I say no reason. You mustn’t go near a lady’s cunning place when it’s bleeding, he says, because the blood is poisonous, and can shrivel you where you would not want to be shrivelled, and burn like caustic, and he has heard it can blunt a knife blade too, and kill vegetables where they grow, and make the ground barren for seven years, and why, do I have a sweetheart now? And I say no, Jim, I am only asking because I heard about it. Is it often? As often as the moon is full, he says, but only when the woman is not with child, or suckling one, so not so often once they are married.
‘As often as the moon is full?’ I ask. ‘And at the same time?’ (The moon will be full tonight).
‘Why do you ask?’ he says, and then, ‘There is a sweetheart —’
‘No,’ I say, ‘no. Only — if there were a sweetheart —’
‘Ha!’ he says and spins all the way round on his heel, and whistles at the same time, and lands back in my face. ‘I knew it. Who is she?’
‘Nobody you know,’ I say. ‘Actually, less of a sweetheart and more of a — cousin.’
‘A cousin?’ He is suddenly larger in all directions, like a bird that fluffs its feathers up.
‘Yes, a cousin. And I let her stay with me —’
‘Am I to meet this cousin?’ He jerks his big head in several directions, as if looking out for a worm.
‘Listen —’ I say, but we are interrupted by a customer. Jim serves her with charm and complete attention, but the moment she has the oranges in her basket, he is right back on the scent.
‘Can I meet this cousin? Where is she?’
‘Gone back to my aunt,’ I say, and he deflates immediately, though his smile is still there like a smear of jam on his lips. I ask him, ‘And you are gone to Lady-heaven, are you?’
‘Coming back now,’ he says.
‘This cousin,’ I say, ‘I let her stay in my bed.’ He perks up and I add quickly, ‘Because there was nowhere else she could sleep. But Jim —’
‘No!’ he says having reached the end of my thought.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘There is blood in my bed.’
‘How much blood?’
‘A lot of blood.’
‘Tell Kate. Kate will clean it. She’s a good girl. She’ll know what to do.’
‘I can’t tell Kate. I can’t tell anyone. I secreted the girl into my room, and it will not be looked on kindly.’
‘Hmmm.’ He curls his shoulders and looks at the ground until it gives him an idea. Then he takes two oranges off the stall and puts them in my hands. ‘Stay here,’ he says, ‘juggle these.’
But I cannot juggle, so I just stand with two oranges in my hands while he goes off and talks to his friend George. After a while, coming back with a hop and skip,
‘Make water on it,’ he says.
‘You mean —’
‘Piss on it,’ he says. ‘That’s George’s suggestion.’
‘Does that remove blood?’
He laughs, ‘Who knows! It will dilute it at the least and at the most there’ll be something for Kate to clean that you can more easily explain.’
I say, ‘Is that the best you can do, Jim Coker?’
He says, ‘Tell them the truth and take the beating. It cannot be as bad as lying in a girl’s blood or your own piss.’
I deliver the message (some order of provisions) to Piccadilly, and run back as fast as I can. Which is not so fast. Physical exertion makes the cramping in my belly far greater, so I cannot keep a pace, and twice I have to find somewhere to stop and reposition the clout. I return to Demoiselle de Vaucresson’s house feeling utterly defeated by my body, which must make liquid at all costs, it seems, including smartly wiped away tears when Cook shouts at me for taking longer than I ought. All afternoon I do what is required of me by Mister Thomas, despite the dragging and clawing of some kind of demon inside me. All the while I am thinking what to do, but every path I think along ends badly. Part of me is so tired, so ready to lie down, that I would confess my sex if only that wouldn’t mean I would have no bed to lie upon. Through supper I use every ounce of myself to hold to a polite and interested face despite my sense of doom and the clawing in my belly. Long after the other staff have gone to bed, I stay in the scullery, busying my hands in some voluntary polishing in preparation for the return of the mistress in the morning and hoping the answer will arrive. The dragging ache doesn’t leave me any more than the memory of what is waiting for me when I get back to my room.
Sure enough, when I pull back the blanket, there it is - the now crusted brown nightshirt and the blood mapped out in its own horrible continent. Standing on one foot and then the other, I pull off my stockings, keeping an eye on it, but it doesn’t move. I stand there barefoot in the sad light of my own candle, staring. Lift the nightgown and take the candle closer to it to inspect how the blood has dried in — how cracked the gathering at the neck, and how impossible it will surely be to remove now. Then I don’t know what possesses me, besides something like divine guidance. Lifting the nightshirt up to my eye with one hand, I drift it into the candle in the other, and it starts to catch. To burn. The flames lick up it so quickly that I must drop it onto the bed — onto the patch indeed, that must most urgently be obscured, and is now being obscured by flame.
I watch for a moment, suffused with wonder. Before realising that this salvation of flame will be my ruination too if I don’t quickly put a stop to it. Though Kate sometimes forgets, the jug by my bowl has blessedly been refilled and I clutch it to my waistcoat. When I am sure that every last trace of blood has been burnt blacker than a pirate’s heart, I throw the water over it. But it doesn’t go out. The flames are dampened down in the centre, but at the edge, they are still burning. ‘Fire!’ I shout. ‘Fire!’ And here comes Cook in a very uncomely dressing gown, and Mister Thomas in his shirt tails. Cook has instinctively grabbed her wash jug on the way. She slooshes the contents onto the flames in small splashes, just where it is needed — Cook, I suppose, is the one of us most familiar with the ways of fire. Kate enters, belatedly, her hair all done up with rags, like she is preparing for her wedding day.
‘What’s the boy done now?’ she asks.
‘Only gone and burnt his own bed,’ says Cook.
‘Well he’s not having mine,’ says Kate.
‘No he’s not,’ says Cook, and they’re both of them talking over me as if I’m just as vanished as that part of the bed where the blood used to be. ‘He’ll be sleeping on a blanket on the floor tonight, and we’ll see what the mistress has to say about it in the morning.’
We stand gazing at the smoking, blackened hole in my bed.
‘What happened, boy?’ asks Mister Thomas.
‘My candle,’ I say. ‘It fell.’
‘It fell?’ says Cook, raising an eyebrow. She wafts her hand in front of her face and I notice the smoke in the air for the first time: how it has thickened and greyed the whole room.
‘I dropped it. I was startled.’
‘By what?’
I look about. There is so little in the room that there is almost nothing to blame. And then I see, on my own foot, a drop of dried blood. Sitting on my toe like a ladybird. I must tear my eye away from it before they see what I am seeing, and I throw my gaze to the floor in the far corner where I find, with relief, an answer. A couple of tiny droppings on the floorboards.
‘By a mouse!’ I say, with such relief that I fear I have made myself implausible. Cook says,
‘You really are some kind of ridiculous boy if you are startled by a mouse.’
Kate shakes her head and shuffles out, yawning.
Cook follows with a backward look that means to cut through me but I am wearing an expression that I know says nothing, no guilt and no knowledge. It is the look I learned to wear when Ma was drunk and accusing and I knew she’d take her hand to me no matter what and only this look would save it from being a birching. It’s a good look, well practised, and Cook sees in it only ignorance and sorrow at having nowhere to sleep and so she leaves Mister Thomas in there with me, trying to persuade the window open so that the smoke might have somewhere to stay the night, too, that isn’t my room.
‘Now it might be cold,’ he says, ‘but it’s better than breathing burnt straw. There we are. You leave that open for now. I’ll get you a new blanket.’
I move not a muscle. As though I am shocked, and in some ways I am, as I had no plan to burn my bed and might have put myself sorely in danger by doing so. And yet I did not feel my heart thump horribly, was not frightened and now have no feeling but victory, a victory I am trying not to allow to grow inside me, for fear it would crack a smile onto my face, which would never do, a smile being most inappropriate to one who has just cremated her mistress’s furniture to hide the fact she is hiding her sex. But when Mister Thomas at last returns with not one but two warm blankets, and one of them clearly the softer sort that the mistress herself uses on her bed, and shuts the door very tenderly as if not to startle me, I let myself dissolve into tears. I curl up next to my charred mattress. I do not sleep. Cannot, for wondering how to prevent my body from betraying me, or threatening to betray me, every month. And there is the more immediate problem of tonight, and tomorrow, and as many days as it takes for my excess fluids to be drained from my body. I disposed of one bloody clout in an alleyway and another in the fire when Cook left it unattended for a few moments. I have another, wrapped in brown paper, curled up on itself like a dead animal in the bottom of my trunk. I cannot run through Kate’s stock in this manner and must find some way of washing and drying my own, or stealing some stranger’s or God knows what.
Some time after midnight, I rise to pack a clean clout between my legs, and stand for many minutes looking out at the moon spilling its silver light over the rooftops, hardly noticing the chill of the open window until I begin to shiver with it. How do women bear this? Why, they speak to each other. Share secrets. But who will share secrets with me? The answer comes to me very coldly. There is only one person in the whole of London who knows I am a woman, and will not reveal me.
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