As Meat Loves Salt (51 page)

He nodded. 'Just don't lay hands on me.' He eyed my outstretched palms. 'I learnt from the gypsies ways of dealing with big men. They do it so well, they end up burying them.'

'I understand.' I got up on my aching legs.

He would go nowhere with me unless he chose the place himself. Despite the Puritans and the community of the Elect, there are so many of these holes round the docks it is a wonder the sailors keep any of their pay. We sat by ourselves near the window; I now remarked that he leant a little to one side. The only other customers were a weary-looking woman, perhaps a trull, and an elderly man with a basket of eels.

Zeb sat with his back to the wall and demanded wine. When it was served he raised a cup and bade me drink to brotherly love. He had put off the sheepskin, and in shirtsleeves, his hair curling round his face, he soon had the serving-girl simpering like an imbecile. I saw that his shattered rib had put hardly a crack in his beauty.

'Did you know that Mervyn is dead?' I asked.

Zeb's face lit up. 'Excellent! Killed in the fighting?'

I shook my head. 'Poisoned. Or drunk himself to it.'

'Would I could have nursed him!' my brother cried, and again I remarked a savagery in him that had not been there before.

'Zeb,' I said, 'ah, Zeb—'

My brother waited without speaking.

'Zeb - where did you get the earring?'

He laughed. "That's what all the world wants to know. Citizen Whore, and now you.'

'His name is Ferris.'

'And what does he call you? Husband? Ganymede?'

'I go by my own name.'

We drank a little more wine.

'So, the earring,' I tried again.

'He's told you it's a wedding ring, and so it is. Yours.'

I stared at the shining loop in his ear. "That ring was thrown away.'

'We found it in the morning and I persuaded her not to be a fool. Later she had it worked into an earring for me.' He sat back the better to observe my expression.

'Zeb, where are you living?'

'Here and there.'

'You're not with her anymore?'

'Before you start,
she
left
me.’

'Do you know where she is?'

He drank lazily. 'No. We parted company after coming to London.'

I shuddered inwardly at the thought of coming up against her in the street. 'Why did you part?'

He considered. 'That I won't tell you.'

Clenching my fists under the table, I stammered, 'Were you—? Were you, ah, did you—?'

He laughed. 'She fastened her wedding ring in my ear. Work it out for yourself.'

I covered my face; my shoulders heaved. I should never have sought out this shame and pain. He was more her husband than I. It seemed I could do nothing for Caro, and would not be permitted to do anything for Zeb.

'You don't deny killing Walshe,' he said at length. 'I knew that was it. By God, you picked your time to tell her.'

I lifted my head from my hands. 'That's past and gone.' I was not going to rehearse the boy's death with him. 'I hear that Izzy was whipped and turned out,' I added.

It was Zeb's turn to flinch and look away. I recalled something he had said earlier. 'Why did you say I beat you?' I demanded. 'I have never beaten you.'

'You've a short memory,’ he replied. 'When we were boys.'

'Never.'

'You near skinned me once. In the orchard.'

Memory stirred: the two of us, and a rod in my hand.

'You were standing in for Father, you said.'

'But why did I?'

'Aye, why did you?' He stared at me. "That's a thing I should ask your friend perhaps, your Herris.'

'Ferris,' I said and then stopped. The room seemed tilting; I could scarcely breathe.

'He's not as pretty as I was,' Zeb went on, as sickness spread in me. 'But slight - no match for you, eh? Are you rough with him?'

'I don't know what you mean,' I whispered.

'No?'

I was on my feet. Zeb's knife was out at once, but I wished only to be away from him and that room before I suffocated: chairs and tables barred my path to the door and I bruised my shins and thighs as I ran through them, furniture falling on either side of me like the Red Sea. I heard the girl call out something as I crossed the threshold. Out in the cold air I whirled round in case he had followed me, but I was alone.

I walked on more slowly, saw folk staring at me and realised I was groaning aloud like some baited beast. In this condition I stumbled back to Cheapside, seized from time to time by the dry heaves. To get home, to run to earth. I must get home.

I could not find my key. Ferris let me in, and was as gentle with me as I had been curt with him earlier in the day. Everyone else being out we sat together, his arms round me, as I told him some of what had passed. My hands were icy and from time to time I had shaking fits, as if poisoned.

Having heard that Zeb disowned me and had taken up with my wife, he patted my hand, and murmured, 'You need never see him again.'

'He knows this house! No—' in answer to Ferris's face, 'I didn't tell him, he knew it before. I am not safe—'

'Does he mean harm to you? To all of us?' Ferris asked anxiously.

'Not you, I think.' I met his clear kind eyes with a kind of terror lest he see the guilt in my own. 'It is me he hates, and in a— a brother's way.'

'We will soon be gone,' said my encouraging friend.

He had news of his own: Becs was come to him, and had said that she would keep silence. Upon his trying to thank her she had cut him short, and said she considered him the bigger Judas of the two, for that he had actually promoted the marriage, which was nothing but a cheat to get money and a place for his filthy darling (her very words), a trick that even his he-whore (her words again) had stood off from.

'But you hated the thought of it,' I protested.

'What could I say? In the end I told her that at the time I proposed the marriage to you, we were not— not in the same relation,' he went on. 'Dear God, was there ever such an explanation offered to a woman!'

'Never mind that, has she taken it?' I urged.

'She said she would not shame Aunt.'

'Otherwise she would see us burn?'

He smiled bitterly. 'Me, perhaps.'

'Not the he-whore?'

Ferris looked pityingly at me. 'She would have you tomorrow.'

I had passed all of the morning and eaten nothing since some bread at breakfast; nor could I eat now, though Ferris fussed over me as if sworn to act as Aunt's substitute. When he found I was adamant, he agreed to set out the material for cutting so we could look it over together. I swept a corner of the court and he brought down the bales of stuff from the loft.

'I lost badly on this,' he said, throwing it down. 'But there, I could afford it.'

I unfolded the first bale, which like the rest was a coarse linen, marked all over with green and the edges pulled uneven. It was some three yards wide. We looked at it, then at one another, and I opened the book given us by Dan's friend Robert.

'Where shall I start?'

'We must measure exactly,' said Ferris. He ran into the house and came out with Aunt's workbox, from which he took a tape and a fine pair of scissors. The book showed various kinds of tents, and we chose the simplest, with sloping sides and no decorations. I wrestled to expel thoughts of Zeb and attend to Ferris's instructions as we folded the stuff between us like maids folding bedsheets, snapping out the edges to straighten puckered threads.

'Spread it on the flags,’ said Ferris. He picked up a large beetle and placed the creature on the apple tree, out of the way.

'Now, if the weather holds, we'll get it done before night. Measure six feet, so,' and he stood back to let me get to the linen. 'No, not like that, you must go with the warp.' He showed me how to line up my shapes with the edge of the cloth.

Am I doing this, or are you?' I asked as he snatched the scissors from my hand.

'Don't be crabby. I've worked with the stuff, you haven't. Look, this is how you do it.'

I watched as he cut the first few threads and then ripped the open blades through the material as if impaling someone on a sword. 'You'll soon have the feel of it. Always cut straight.'

I marked and cut the next piece while he watched.

'Is that right?' I challenged, knowing it was.

'Like your other handiworks, Jacob: perfection. No, truly, very good,’ for I had caught hold of him and was dragging him towards the pump. We tussled, and I got the water flowing, but let him go without putting him under. After this foolery I felt happier. Panting, we came back and folded up the pieces completed so far; Ferris marked them with a pencil. The ground was uneven, so that we would have been better at a big table. However, we began to get on, and apart from the crouching, which made me feel my stiff calves, I enjoyed it. He showed me how to lay out two or more pieces at a time, and how to mark them showing the name of the part, which was the outside and which way was up.

'Can you make clothes?' I asked him.

'I never have. But I used to watch the maid do it when I was a child, and she marked her pattern pieces thus.'

'You could stand in for Roger Rowly, methinks.'

'Nay. You'll soon know as much as I do.'

The stuff was not broad enough to cut out all the pattern complete, and some parts had to be pieced. I watched fascinated as he took needle and thread and stitched them together.

'It is not very beautiful,' he said frowning. 'I wish we could have got Becs to help you.'

'She will never help me more,' said I. He hissed suddenly and I saw red from his hand stain the linen.

'Here.' I put the wounded finger in my mouth. He tasted of my tooth-drawing.

'If we start, it is better than nothing,' he said. 'We can tack it together for someone to finish off.'

'What's tack?'

'Put it together loosely, to see how it fits. Then you stitch it down good and tight.'

I watched, thinking that I had seen Caro and Patience work thus, but had never known what it was called.

'Get hold.' Ferris put the needle in my hand. 'In and up like this, and don't let the tail of thread get tangled. In and up. No, in and up.' I was clumsy and the linen was soon spotted with my blood as well as his.

'Ah.' He examined the bloodspots. 'Perhaps you should go back to cutting, and I'll join.'

We worked on peaceably. If this were the way of the colony, I thought, it would not be too bad, and I would never again meet Zeb. If only I were able to get to Ferris when I wanted. I reflected that work was no problem to me, for I had been raised to toil alongside others, from beating the hangings — but here I baulked at some obscure pain in the recollection, and fixed my mind instead on typesetting. I was quick to learn, had ample health and strength for labour, but I could not bear to work alongside him all day and lie apart at night.

'That's it,' said Ferris. His voice lilted with pleasure. 'The last one!' He held it up like a trophy before folding it on top of the rest. I saw he had made a neat workman-like pile of the linen pieces.

'Just in time,' I said, glancing up at the darkening sky. A drop fell on my forehead.

'The cloth!' Ferris wailed. We gathered all up in a frenzy and had barely got in our harvest when the rain fell straight down like a curtain. Ferris ran out in it to get the book and other things while I carried the unused material back to the loft. When I came down he had lit a lamp in the printroom and was laying the pattern pieces where he dried his prints. Yellow light swam over him and the cloth; drops ran off the ends of his hair. At my coming in he smiled up at me and his skin sparkled with the wet. Just then he was more beautiful than Zeb, and after I never lost that picture from my mind. It was burnt in for good, like his thin profile forming out of the darkness as he brought me back to life on the road, his return to me warm and living, though with a slashed cheek, at Winchester, and the sobbing sound he made as I took hold of him that first night, the night I found his letter.

We ate with Aunt that evening and there were no references to secret acts. Becs served us as quickly as possible — she never lingered these days — and I chewed silently on my salt pork and beans.

The other two talked of news. The last month had been one to excite, especially if a man were ignorant of the suffering that is war.

Chester had fallen some weeks back, having been reduced to a state of near famine, so that the citizens trailed at the heels of Lord Byron, begging him in tears to come to terms with Parliament before they were all starved to death. Even so, the city had endured until the third of February. With the Parliamentary troops safely installed, it became known that the King had raised three thousand Irish soldiers and would have landed them at Chester had Byron held out a week longer.

"The hand of God plain as anything,' said Aunt.

'Say rather the King's stupidity,' said Ferris.

She tutted. 'And Torrington? Was that the King's doing too?'