Disguised as a boy to retain male freedoms, Mary has found a solution to hiding her periods — a last gift from the mother who abandoned her. But something else could still give her away if she's not careful.
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The Demolition of Pity is Fruitless
A year on from that bolted door, I think of our mother much as I think of the cottage in Broxholme: somewhere cold and hard on the bones. Not somewhere to return to. The attic room in Albemarle Street is more of a home to me. Jim more of a family. A whole year of full moons spilling their light across the slope of my ceiling has made me an old campaigner. Having secured some sponges as my mother suggested, I have kept my bleeding a secret. Just as some soldiers have wounds that never heal, I have mine, which opens as regular as the moon opens its face to the sky, and tears a hole in me, and lets me know I am a soldier in my own manner. And I will call it a wound, too, should it ever betray me. I have thought of a story for it, a terrible fall onto a piece of agricultural ironwork, the kind of accident no man or boy would like to think too much upon, to make them move swiftly past the question of it.
They say that women are by nature damp, and men by nature fiery, and that though a man’s fire is a constant gift that can be put to good use whether in parliament or battlefield, a woman’s dampness must be released from her in the form of blood, lest it drown her (and she drown the world) with her tears. I had feared bleeding would make me more womanly, but it has steeled me to be more courageous.
Are women truly the weaker sex? I do not know any man who would march themselves through days of bleeding and belly ache without complaint as I have done. Nor bear the pain as other women do of passing a baby’s skull, which is the size of a gourd, through a part of their body no larger than their bum-hole. If men did such a thing they would award each other medals for doing so, but women are told it is natural and no particular miracle, and that men are far stronger than they could ever be, when the only manner in which that is true is because of the muscles that Nature has bestowed on them. I would like to see a man nurse a baby out of his own bodily fluids with hard little teeth champing down on his delicacies, or carry lullaby-cheats on front and back and one in each hand as he goes about his business. What is the strength freely gifted to men by Nature when compared to the strength of inner endurance that every woman must develop to the endless chipping and crushing that men impose upon her for the sheer fact of her having nothing like a sausage on her body?
Oh, women must bear patiently what men would yowl at, and swallow in silence what any man would think it well within his rights to vomit back on the world: the hammers aimed at our thoughts, our cleverness, and any small ambition we ever had to be considered useful for more than being their servants in bedroom and scullery. Regrettably I must include even Jim in this, not only for his between-legs equipment, but because I have heard him speak about passing women as though they are fruit or vegetables on stalls, to be appraised and measured and perhaps squeezed. When once I said that there was probably some woman who had written a poem in response to the late Mister Dryden’s lines about a woman’s counsel that was far truer and perhaps quite rude, Jim laughed and replied that a woman who could write was an abomination and he would wager no poem a woman wrote would be called a poem by any man who could understand it. He might be right in that, only for the wrong reasons. Which is to say any man who could understand a woman’s poem written in response to Mister Dryden’s lines would be obliged to condemn it, for the fact it would condemn his sex, just as I condemn Mister Dryden’s ‘The Cock and the Fox’ for condemning mine. Jim cannot help that he is raised in this soup of men who all say the same things, and the whole country is one big vat of the same opinion on women, even among the women. Nevertheless, it strikes me that in hiding my monthly pain I am exactly as stoical as women always are, to men’s advantage. Every bit as brave as a man is meant to be.
For years I thought myself no different from a boy. I saw no reason why a person should be thought weaker or more foolish than another on the basis of what hangs, or doesn’t hang, between their legs. But I didn’t know then about the tides that grown women are prey to: pulled damply towards the moon just like the sea is, with such awful tenderness and predictability. What if the balance of humours in my body, which up until now has tiptoed childishly along the border between boy and girl, bundles me up and drives me forcefully where I do not want to go, into the country of women, like a highwayman might commandeer a stolen carriage? With my humours tipped, how easily might I fall prey to womanly thoughts? What if, no matter how much I hide my curves in clothing, or contain my blood, my thoughts themselves curve and warp and bleed out female enough to betray me? My aim is to resist this at all costs. To think as a man thinks, and to catch in myself any softness that comes upon me and stamp on it as fiercely as I would stamp on a cockroach.
My fears are not unfounded. When the moon waxes, I find myself softening to the world as butter on a spring windowsill. Last month, returning from seeing Jim for a smoke and a talk about the dangerous machinations of the French (whose plans are the talk of all the barrow boys of London), I caught myself melting at the sight of a hand-sized kitten mewling at the window of a house. An icy downpour had soaked me into a sense of communion with this kitten, shut out and spiky with rain. The womanly part of me took over my heart for some moments, hurting for the tiny creature. But in order not to end up hopelessly blasted like that kitten, I must reject the tender indulgences of women. So I swore at the dumb creature for letting itself be locked out, despite every ounce of its prettiness.
For prettiness, I already know, is worthless. Prettiness is all that women are praised for, and is more often their downfall than any other characteristic except that of believing the lies that men are prone to tell them. Prettiness is what pulls men towards them like so many idiot moths, to have their purses burnt providing yet more props to it: the lace, silk and feather adornments, the perfume and jewels. Women are the idiot candles, unaware of how easily the flame of prettiness will be snuffed when they surrender to a man’s ardour and get fat with his children. If they do not die in the begetting of them, their prettiness is ruined through the care of them, through the worn-down daily tasks of being mother and wife, of running a household, of being wider and older than the girl he courted. If prettiness survives motherhood, age will cut it down anyway, blade after blade, until the whole waving harvest of beauty is barren, nothing left but pitiful gleanings and stubble fit for burning.
While an ageing woman will be deemed a hag or a crone, an ageing man is thought handsome even after his hair greys and his eyes crease, and no matter how many wives he has killed in the bearing of his children, he may marry another one young enough to be his daughter, and destroy her too, and no one will think the worse of him for doing so. Women’s prettiness will last little more than the useful span of a good hackney horse, while men’s handsomeness, believed to exist in parity with oak trees, is in any case never thought as important as the fatness of their pocketbook or the pureness of their lineage or the usefulness of their trade. Thus I eschew prettiness. I am grateful that no one sees it in me.
Kate, whether hanging laundry, or beating a rug, is undoubtedly pretty. She hawks her prettiness by walking with one foot slightly crossing the other, drawing attention to her hips and behind, the place where a baby will sit when that space is rented out to one. Whether she knows her prettiness will be gone before the crabapple pip she planted in the garden becomes a tree bearing fruit, I cannot tell. Demoiselle, too, behaves as though her looks will be hers until the end of days. She plays suitors against each other, holding them all at arms’ length, provoking each one (for they are all aware of each other) to raise stakes like gamblers at a table. Yet the pot at the end of her rainbow, which each suitor claims would bring them the deepest joy, is a leprechaun’s trick, which will vanish almost as soon as they empty themselves into it.
I school myself fiercely in the art of pitiless thinking. Close to Demoiselle’s house the pavements are clear of beggars but around Covent Garden there are unfortunates of all kinds. Many are men come home from the old wars without bits of themselves, who hobbled their way into London hoping those powdered-wig and sprung-carriage buffoons might cast off sufficient scraps to keep an old soldier alive, not knowing there is a whole army of blasted apart infantry already pitched there, hawking their war wounds for pennies and beer. Any womanly feeling I might have for them is easily scratched out by my knowing they have widowed wives and orphaned children in their former employment.
The women on the streets are harder. They have not killed. Are not old soldiers except if they have fled from the battlefields of marriage. I tell myself they are not my concern. My only concern, if I am to survive without any family to care for me, is myself. But the children? The children are worse than kittens. They stare out of their skulls as though they cannot believe the world would make and unmake them so readily. Women crouch down to pet them, and to press a fat penny into their hands, and crunch the child’s fingers around it. I tell myself they are better out of this world. I work to make them as ordinary and unfelt as a front door step or a kerbstone.
There are other reasons to harden oneself. A new war has begun. Our land heats up again with ferocious talk about foreigners. It is said that Louis of France wants to take over all of Europe. Now that his grandson is the Spanish king, some say if we do not take measures, we will all be speaking French by Christmas, and eating nothing but onions. I don’t believe the half of it, since it seems there is always a good reason for wealthy people to throw poor people into muddy fields to butcher each other. The last war has only been done for as long as it took me to grow out of a pair of boots, and now we have a new one, declared by a queen so new herself she must scarcely know her way around her palaces.
The market boys talk about it with great excitement. Two of them, Willy and George, are old enough to take the king’s shilling — or I suppose it is the queen’s shilling now — except it is not a shilling but ‘two whole pounds!’ Willy says this with eyes as wide as a whore’s cunning. He adds,
‘I could almost buy myself a farm for that!’
And Jim says,
‘Only if you’re not planted first, for there are whole fields in Holland waiting to be fertilised with soldier boys.’
But Willy’s not to be knocked off his pretend horse (so sure he is that he will be accepted for the cavalry for the fact he has ridden a donkey) and George says even if the end of the war has them buried in Paris itself it will be a far better adventure than standing out in all weathers getting folk to buy vegetables from them before they get spotted and rotted.
‘One thing about oranges, says Jim, is they are hardy as fleas — for everyone knows a flea cannot be crushed no matter how hard you squeeze it — they can be thrown and rolled without a bruise, and a three month orange looks very much like a three day orange, except for a little thinning of the rind, which you will never see until it’s bought and peeled.’
‘And I will get myself a red coat,’ says George, ‘and be proud to wear it.’
‘And get yourself some new farting-crackers while you’re at it,’ says Jim, because George’s breeches are none of the best.
‘Oh yes, the red coat!’ says Willy.
‘Hides the blood lovely,’ says Jim.
Yes, day after day, the talk around the barrows and stalls is all of the Grand Alliance, which makes a great difference, they say, from being only a soldier in the English Army. To be a soldier in the Grand Alliance is to fight with your comrades in other countries, and make peace in Europe by driving the French back to their own country.
Jim and I hold the same view, which is that there is no profit to be had in living through a war, and even less profit to be had in dying for it, but among Jim’s friends there is hatred of the French that goes back through fathers and grandfathers, consisting in all kinds of small and large grievances, from being orphaned by a Frenchman to believing that Frenchman compromise the virtue of English ladies, to not approving of their food. I decide I will not feel pity for any of those who run to war to kill the French, even if that is Willy and George, and nor will I feel pity for those Frenchmen who have similarly decided to gamble their lives in the field. And the less pity I feel, the more I understand the tug that Willy and George feel to go marching and murdering for money. They have no thought of being murdered themselves. They only want license to rampage through a crowd of strangers, hacking them to pieces.
By St Nicholas Day, Willy and George have joined up and gone to train in winter quarters. The market is not quieter for them, as there is always another boy to come and pipe his lungs behind a barrow, though where those boys come from I don’t know. From between a woman’s legs of course, but between then and the time they arrive with their barrows one could only give a part of the city as an answer. They rise and burst into market song like bubbles in a soup that’s coming to the boil. Birds are the same come spring time, arriving and calling side by side with no thought to the racket they are making.
I see Ma near the year’s end. She has the look of a wax candle that has its wick burned too short and cannot be lit again. I only see her from across the street, and I don’t believe she sees me, or if she does, she pretends not to. She has another purple-yellow print on her cheek. Crocus colours, I think, like Mrs Read’s cushions, but turned inside out, purple at the centre and yellow at the edge. She is swollen, too, and I imagine there will be another foundling on somebody’s doorstep before too long.
But I am wrong.
Our mother took a paddle to my legs many times, and the flat of her hand more, and a fist once or twice, and in all those times I never saw how she would meet her own end. I was not inclined to see it. The moment the fury came upon her I would avoid her gaze, which as you know, was so much like being stabbed that it could almost kill you on its own. I thought I might sense if she were dead, though I never loved her as I loved you, brother. But it seems she could be chopped into pieces, rinsed in a colander and fried in a good batter and wouldn’t have the smallest sensation of it. Because it is a surprise to me when I come to find Jim one early evening in February as he is packing up in the closing dark, and he tells me the bent-nosed crone from the brothel has been by, and recognising him, apprised him that my mother has been buried for more than a week, and another baby too, though they’d had to wait for the ground to unfreeze to admit them. He feeds this news to me with great care, as though handing me a thing that might break, but the words just whistle through me like air through an open door. I am not sorry to think of how our mother ended, or even the baby who in all innocence killed the both of them, because it seems to me that both are better out of it.
And as I lie awake in the attic of this creaking house it seems to me the same is true of all of us, and that I should not be so concerned about death as I have been until now, because it will come when it wishes, like it or no, and will flatten out our fortunes at a swoop, making each of us the same: just a body in the soil.
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