Fair Fight (23 page)

‘I knew you’d come in,’ she said.

‘Then you should’ve just bid me enter,’ I said.

‘I’d not rob you of your little joy in disobeying me,’ she said. Her voice was made soft by gin. She’d been left by Mr Dryer these last days, the same as Tom and I.

‘Mr Dryer’s sent a cart for us,’ I said. I came a little closer and stood near the end of the bed. Dora looked as weary as I’d ever seen her. That unshakeable babe was giving her a rough time.

‘For us?’ Dora struggled to sit up.

‘For Tom and me.’

‘Oh,’ she slumped back down. ‘Climb on it, then.’

‘He’s taking us to live in a cottage on his land.’

‘I know, he told me he would. You’re luckier than you deserve to be.’

‘I’ll come back,’ I said. I sounded quite usual. I might’ve been telling my sister I was going to The Hatchet, not leaving the only home I’d ever had.

‘Do what you will,’ she said, and closed her eyes.

‘He’ll come back to you soon, mind, and he won’t like to find you so bedraggled. I’ll tell one of the girls to come and make your mug nice.’

My sister neither moved nor spoke. I turned to leave, feeling as though I’d like to strike her or bring up the contents of my belly or both.

When I’d crossed the room and had my hand upon the door she said, ‘Take the gown I took from Lizzy before she died; she pinched it, in any case. It’s too dull for me, and Lord knows you’ve nothing respectable.’

I turned around. Dora still had her eyes shut. She waved one arm toward her clothes press. I crossed to it.

‘It’s the blue muslin thing,’ she said, ‘and there’s an apron for it. You may as well have the plain shift, while you’re there. I never use it. Don’t slam the door when you leave.’

She turned over with a little breath of effort at moving her bulk and pulled the blankets over her head.

The press was full of Dora’s silks, all of them bright, a rainbow of sliding cloth. Beneath them lay a gown I’d never seen before, in bluish-green silk and devilish old-fashioned. It wasn’t the kind of gown I expected my sister to have, but I thought the cloth was good. I lifted it carefully, and there was the blue dress. It was a lovely thing, good muslin with green sprigs upon it. I picked it up as carefully as if it’d been glass. It was indeed respectable. No wonder it’d lain unused.

Dora didn’t move as I crossed the room to go. I should’ve thanked her but I found I couldn’t and in the end it was easier to just close the door soft, and let the quiet click speak for me.

The staircase up to the garret was beginning to sag. I climbed it as careful as I could, keeping my left hand upon the wall to stay steady.

However frail Ma grew, she never lost her hold over my nerve. I, who could stand up against a miller twice my weight and send him to the ground with one blow to the windpipe, now I knocked upon Ma’s door – which had been my own – and felt as creeping as I had as a babe. A noise came from within which might, or might not, have been meant to bid me enter. I put my good hand upon the door and swung it wide.

The smell of the place was truly, cruelly foul. It was thick as flommery: night soil and medicines and Ma’s own flesh rotting from her frame. It crept warm into your nose and throat. You could taste it; you could near enough see it. Tendrils of it came down into the rest of the house but nothing could prepare you for the experience of opening that door and walking into it as though it were a bath. You might as well climb into the pit beneath the privy – perhaps it was worse even than that. I stood for a moment on the threshold, just to firm up my nerve.

The window didn’t open, but we might’ve taken Ma out every month and cleaned all we could with lye or burned sweet herbs. Instead she lay up there and the most we did was send Jacky up with broth and medicine. I couldn’t have said when last I’d climbed up there to see her; I wondered if Dora ever did. It was Jacky who brought the pot down in the mornings to empty. He lived up there in the stink, scuttling about the attic like a white rat.

He put his head up now from beneath the bed, and I thought again what a bird’s nest his hair was. Mr Dryer being so occupied with Tom, he’d not called for Jacky as he would’ve in the usual course of things. No one in the convent would brush Jacky’s hair without Mr Dryer to brush it for. Jacky gave me one of his queer, cutty-eyed looks and disappeared again. God alone knew how he fit under there, the bed was that low. He must’ve been flat on his belly.

Ma was shamming sleep, in case my footsteps should be Dora, coming to vex her. Her face, once handsome enough to earn her the name ‘Twelve-penny Helen’, was grown queerer than ever. She was lumpen as a potato, all curious bumps and sores. The quilt was wet with her spittle. Someone had left a filthy bucket beside the foot of the bed, filled with yellow water. A rag floated in it like a dead fish.

‘Ma,’ I said, ‘I know you ain’t sleeping. You never sleep.’

‘Indeed I never can,’ her eyes cracked open, ‘or these girls would poison me in a moment. They’re witches all.’

The chamber was small and poky, filled too close with Ma’s furniture. It was all old hulking stuff, dark and heavy, making the air more stifling still: a dresser, a clothes press, a chair with a high, curved back. The only thing that was missing was her bed; Dora had taken that. Ma slept in the straw-pallet bed that Dora and I had shared as girls. Perhaps Jacky curled up there too. There was nowhere else, unless he took the hearthrug.

I sat in the wooden chair beside the bed; near, but not too near. There was a book beside the chair, very much worn about the binding.

‘Did you hear me, Ruthie?’ Ma said. ‘They’ll see me cold if I sleep for a moment. I’d let them, too, if I didn’t think they’d use me ill, afterward.’

Her hands were in fists on the quilt. Her knuckles were so swollen as to look nearly as sore as my own.

I couldn’t think how to make Ma a goodbye she’d understand. Instead I picked up the book. There was an engraving on the inside cover which showed a lady looking upwards with a look of rapture, as an eagle swooped down upon her. The bird looked about to tear her heart from her breast, with its terrible beak open and its talons poised before it. The lady thrust her breast toward the bird as if offering a gift.

I turned the page and stared at the letters there. Dora, I knew, could read a little; Mr Dryer had taught her. Perhaps she’d left the book. Did my sister climb that narrow stair and sit in the cloud of rotting flesh, reading to the woman she’d so gladly confined there? It was a strange notion. And surely, I thought, Dora couldn’t read so well as this; all these words printed so small, and in such great numbers?

Dora had started, once, to teach me the letters of my name; I thought I knew them still. When I tried to pick them from that great block of ink, I found they jumbled up in my head and I couldn’t be sure that I remembered rightly. Soon I grew vexed at my own stupidity and threw the book down. Ma had closed her eyes again. Her breathing rattled as wet as if she were drowning.

I could hear the sounds of the convent starting up; the cullies came in, the girls came down, they went up again together, the door closed, the creaking began. Ma must lie here night after night, listening to the play beneath.

At last I simply said it. ‘Tom and I are leaving. Mr Dryer’s given us a house.’

If I’d thought her asleep I was mistaken.

‘That man’s a devil,’ Ma said. ‘He brings devils and surgeons. They’ll sell me to the animists.’

‘Anatomists, not animists.’

‘They will, I tell you. They’ll sell me before I’m dead, to be cut up and poked about.’

‘You’re too raggedy for a surgeon, Ma. You’ll turn to dust before you die, so slowly are you taking it.’

‘The man brings them in, to look at me,’ Ma insisted. ‘I’m too old for this work, I told them, but they take their pleasure on me, whether I gives them leave or no.’

Her clawed hands began to twitch on the counterpane. It was a quilt that Dora and I had made by turns as girls, to a twelve-patch pattern. You could see the patches I’d made; I was always clumsy with a needle.

‘No one’s taken their pleasure on you in years,’ I said. ‘Who was this cull, a suicide?’

I began to tell her about Tom’s being trained for Champion of England. When next I said Mr Dryer’s name she shouted out,

‘I seen that gentleman! He meant to have taken us all,’ so loudly that I had to leave off my story.

‘Hush, you know Mr Dryer. Hush, now.’

Ma wouldn’t quiet. She writhed about in the bed and drummed her painful fists upon the quilt in a spasm. Her face, always bulging now, seemed readying to scream. Her eyes were wide and her breathing came quick. Her lips drew back to show gums black as a hound’s, hung with cords of spittle that took light from the lamp like dew-dropped cobwebs.

Jacky’s head poked back up beside the bed.

‘God alive,’ I said. I’d forgotten he was there.

Jacky gave me a sidelong glance and then took up a bottle from beside the bed and filled a spoon. He fed Ma as gentle as if he were the mother and she the child. She took it, her lips covering his fingers as well as the spoon. Jacky prised his white fingers free and wiped them on the quilt’s edge. Then he crawled back under the bed. I could hear him there, whispering to himself. Or perhaps it was Ma he whispered to. She’d not release the spoon long after it must’ve been empty, sucking on it as a babber will suck on your fingers if the breast is dry.

When she opened her mouth at last, the spoon fell onto the quilt trailing such a high quantity of drool that I determined I’d leave it where it fell. It formed a dark puddle across a patch that Dora had stitched, scarlet flannel with a border of white.

Ma’s eyes had gone dull and dreaming.

‘She’ll sell me if she can,’ she said, slowly, ‘and so she should, she says, I sold her so many times over.’

‘Hush,’ I told her. I’d have patted her hands if I could’ve borne to.

‘You tell your husband to take all he can from the gentry. They’ll take all they can from him.’ Her head tipped back, while her mouth stayed open.

I was surprised to hear her say anything so sensible; I’d not thought her listening.

‘I will,’ I said. ‘I know it well enough.’

‘Give them what you must and not more.’ She held out her hand, her face still turned to the eaves. If her eyes were open, I couldn’t see them.

‘Take it,’ she said, gesturing with her closed hand. ‘It’s less than you’re owed. Take it, and don’t tell Dora.’

At first I thought it was an empty fist, but when her swollen fingers uncurled there was a tooth lying on her palm, a pitiful blood-streaked thing. I didn’t take it, but neither could I stop looking at it.

Her hand dropped back to the bed. The tooth rolled out and came to rest in the wet patch.

‘They’ll take all they can,’ Ma told the rafters. ‘Take it, and tear it, and get their fingers in it.’

I rose then and closed the door upon the sour stink of her like someone escaping from a tomb.

14

T
he sour-faced old goat came back dead upon the hour. He looked as ill-tempered as before; it would’ve been comical if we’d not been to climb up beside him. Of course, as Ma always said, Christ himself came down amongst the whores and blessed them all; this fart-catcher wouldn’t even step down from his cart to help us with the trunk. The trunk wasn’t so heavy, in any case. I knew we’d not much, but when it was packed it seemed even less, and shameful. How easily our lives could be loaded into a dogcart. Tom carried the whole from door to cart in one journey.

I settled myself in the back, which smelled of dogs and straw, holding on tight to the basket I’d packed myself with the only things I called precious the lilac dressing gown and the cigar box which held the feathers Tom had brought me, and one more thing – wrapped in the old, stained dressing gown was the little portrait of the girl in mourning. I wondered how long it would be before Dora noticed I’d whipped it from the parlour. She might even beat one of the misses as having stolen it. The blue muslin she’d given me I’d put in the trunk, so that I’d not dirty it on the road.

The convent stood above us, its eyes blank in its narrow face. Not a soul came to the window to see us leave, though the neighbours all came out and called, ‘Got yourself a coach and driver now, have you, Tom?’ and the like. Of the convent folks, you’d never know they were there. I’d not been fashed to wake the misses to bid them farewell; let them find us gone. They’d likely be relieved to hear it, Dora being fond of using me as her bullying arm. Only the new lad on the door was there to wave to us, and he’d known us least time of all.

Tom climbed in beside me, cheery and full of ginger, waving to all the folks watching in their doorways. He leaned back on the wooden trunk, his long legs bent up, looking as easy as a man resting under a blue sky. You’d never know he was going somewhere unfamiliar, to chance all he had against a dream. He looked as though we were going on a picnic. I couldn’t play-act that I felt as merry as he, and Tom, seeing this, poked out his tongue at the liveried back of the old bastard driving us, and looked to see if he’d made me smile.

My belly had the shakes as we drove away; bile rose at the very notion of the road ahead. I found I couldn’t look back. I’d been born in the convent, and I suppose I’d thought I’d die in that dark house, with its constant footfall. It wasn’t that I wanted to stay; more that I couldn’t imagine where we were going.

As we neared the end of the street Tom said, ‘There’s Jacky, look. I swear he’s crying to see us leave. I never saw the whelp cry before, a day in his life.’

I turned to see his slight frame standing at the convent door. Perhaps there were tears upon his mug, though more likely they were shadows. To my eye his face was as blank as the windows.

As Tom raised a hand to him and cried out, ‘Be a good boy, now, Jacky,’ he stepped back into the dark of the hall and shut the door against Tom’s goodbye. Tom laughed and dropped his hand.

‘He can’t have been crying much,’ was all he said.

The haughty jackanapes at the reins hardly said a word to us, and I couldn’t have told you what position he held in Mr Dryer’s house; I was as green to it all as that liveried smatchet would’ve been, had he been asked to give a sermon on the running of the convent. In any case, once we were away on the road he whipped up the horses and drove for a good two hours. Tom and I jolted around in the back, holding onto the wooden sides and trying to keep steady the trunk and basket. I could only hold the side with my one good hand, and had devilish work to keep the other hand steady – it jumped about with every hole in the road, and made the bones thrum wickedly.

When once the road began to unroll before us and we passed through streets we didn’t often walk and then into countryside proper, Tom couldn’t keep his face steady; so many feelings crossed it that it almost seemed to ripple. I could see how excited and fearful he was, and I couldn’t say I felt differently. I’d barely been outside the city before in my life, except once to visit Tom’s father and brothers at Coalpit Heath, and a few times to the prize-fights at Lansdown. At Lansdown it was always dark when we arrived and all I knew of the place was a vast crowd gathered and a quantity of gin in my hand. The small grey mining village of Coalpit Heath was the only picture of a place outside Bristol that I had clear in my mind and it would keep popping up whenever I thought of the word ‘cottage’ – a little house with coal-dust about it, and barefoot children coming to see us draw up.

There I was, travelling into the country, to be wife in a cottage. It was so unlikely that I couldn’t take hold of the idea; it slipped about in my mind like an eel in a bucket. I’d never been mistress of my own home, nor anything you could call respectable. The future was grown so queer that I felt as numb as in the moments between taking a fib and feeling the pain of it.

At last, when there wasn’t a comfortable position I could sit in and my arse was grown as numb as my heart, we began upon a lane closed in by tall hedgerows that seemed to go on forever. Every now and then the hedgerow was broken by a gate leading into a field, and then I could see the countryside stretching away so far it took your breath, with never a house nor man. I preferred the blinkered lane, though it was a little like travelling a tunnel. When finally the cart drew to a halt I thought it a mistake. We’d arrived beside a pair of towering gates, each one topped with a brass lantern. The road behind these gates stretched away, up a hill and out of sight. It was like the entrance to a kingdom, except that I could see nothing beyond the gates but road, and on either side of it, fields of stubbly yellow grass. The roof of the house that stood beside these gates didn’t even reach the lantern’s tops, but still I thought it so grand I hardly liked to look at it. This wasn’t what I’d brought to mind at the word ‘cottage’. It was as elegant as a Bristol merchant’s house, only not so large, with its leaded arched windows and curly bits all about the roof. It was tiled with black slates, shining with recent rain. The walls were of pale yellow stone and smooth as butter, the front door painted blue. There were curtains at the windows. It was clean all over, as though someone had scrubbed the whole with a bucket and brush.

I only stared at the towering gates against the sky, and that hedge-tunnelled lane, and the golden stone of the cottage, which wasn’t a cottage. Behind it lay that road, winding through the stubble of the fairy kingdom and over the hill. It was all too strange; I couldn’t believe we were meant to climb out here and go inside. I wasn’t sure even that I wanted to.

‘This is never the place,’ I said.

Tom looked worriedly at the golden walls of it and shook his head a little.

‘Sir,’ he called to Old Pious, sitting straight-backed in front of us, ‘is this the place?’

Sour-face turned, nodded once and turned back again. Tom shrugged and climbed down. He reached out for the trunk and I laid down my basket and moved to help him. Once moving, it was easy enough to keep doing so. I pushed the trunk out, making sure he had hold of it and then I climbed down myself, holding my basket close.

Old Pious didn’t turn to look at us but stared down the lane as though he could see something interesting beyond the hedge. He must’ve been peeking though, for the moment my boots touched the ground he whipped up the horses and off he went, with only a raised hand for farewell.

‘What, off so soon?’ Tom called out after him, and to me, ‘There goes the most obliging cull I ever thought of throttling.’

‘He barely waited till I was down from the cart,’ I said. ‘He must’ve felt your hands a-twitching.’

‘A moment more and I’d not have been able to stay them,’ Tom said. ‘I’d have found his neck in my hands before I bid them go there. He did give me the key, mind,’ and here he reached into his pocket. ‘That’s the only thing the piss-licker did for us.’

I kept my eyes upon his dear face, but at his words I felt the scrubbed front of the cottage behind me and I’d never felt so filthy in my life. My skirts were dusty from the road, the hem turned quite black, though that was nothing new at all. The sole of one of my boots I’d mended myself with a nail, and wasn’t quite straight.

‘It’s never the place,’ I said again.

‘How come I to have the key, then?’ Tom dangled it in front of me by a piece of string. It was just the key for that place, as curly as the roof-edge and shined up bright.

‘I’d say you pinched it,’ I said, not in any seriousness.

‘Then would that hedge-preacher have brought us here?’ Tom was beginning to smile. ‘Come, my love. I should carry you across the threshold, by rights.’ He held his arms out to me.

‘We’ve been wed six years,’ I said, but I could see I was spoiling his fun, so I shrugged and put my basket down with great care, and then reached out to be lifted.

‘We’ll have to come back for our trunk, now,’ I said, though I was glad of how strong he was just then. I could bear to be carried across that scrubbed step in my husband’s arms, where perhaps my own dusty feet would’ve needed pushing.

‘You’re the best thing I own,’ Tom said, and made a great fuss of fitting the key into the lock, while keeping me steady. It turned as smooth as anything, as newly oiled as you would expect of a door so shining as that one.

He pushed the door open with one great fist.

How to describe what scene met me then, without running on into raptures? For a girl not raised as I’d been no doubt it was a common enough house, but to me everything in the place seemed too good, too clean to touch. There was a good-sized grate, all swept out, and a fire laid ready. There were two three-legged stools beside the hearth, where we might sit and warm ourselves. The mantel held a teapot and two mugs, all in tin, and with the dents beaten out near perfect, so that only where the light caught them could they be seen at all. Above this was hung a picture prettier to my eye than anything Dora had at home, all in needlework, of a boy and a girl holding hands beside a stream. There was no hearthrug, but that was the only thing wanting, I thought, in the whole of the house. Beside the window was placed a round table with curved legs, and two chairs, not matching, but quite as pretty. One, that had a heart-shape about the back of it, I thought especially nice. The other, more sturdy, I thought Tom could sit upon without fear of snapping it beneath him. Everything in the place was nicely done. It was respectable, that was the word. The floor was of grey flags, as clean as anyone could wish. The curtains had a pattern of yellow leaves upon a blue ground, and only when I examined them close could I see that they were faded; the inside of the folds was a deeper hue than the outside, which always had the light upon it. The curtains were lined with something soft, in cream. A bracketed shelf was upon the wall for what few things we had.

Tom set me on my feet, as quiet as I; it was a powerful thing, to be in that place and try to imagine it ours. I walked around careful as a priest in a bawdy house, my hands behind my back so that I’d not be tempted to touch. I could barely breathe with the particular niceness of it. Even things that might’ve seemed quite ordinary in the convent, an iron boot-scraper beside the door, a basket of faggots beside the hearth, here seemed neater, more special, than anything I’d laid eyes on before. True, Dora had silken gowns in the brightest shades imaginable, and oil lamps, and lace. But those things were coloured by the house that held them, and here – I’d not have been surprised to find that the furniture wouldn’t cast shadows.

‘You look like a straw man in a forge,’ Tom said, ‘afraid to touch anything. Look, this is all ours, Ruthie. Ours for a good while, at least. We’ll starve if you’re too afraid to bring your hands from behind your back.’

I drew my hands out, and looked at them. They were lumpen claws. The house wouldn’t like to have such hands upon it.

Tom came and took them in his own pug’s hands. His knuckles were near as bad as mine now and like to get worse, big hands being injured more often, as a rule, than small. His rough thumbs stroked my palm.

‘Here, I know what we should do now – let’s find the pantry,’ he said. ‘Mr Dryer talks all the time of how I’m to build my strength and how he’s to have sole charge of my diet; I’ll wager he’s left us something. Are you hungry, Ruthie?’

‘I’m always hungry,’ I said, suddenly so happy that I began nearly to laugh, ‘and I’ve always wished to be fed up strong by some rich swell.’ I felt as though we’d fooled him, right and true. Look at this house he’d given us! Tom would’ve fought for pennies a day, and here we were to be fed and coddled. It was beyond anything.

‘Come then, let’s see what we’ve got,’ Tom said, and kissed me, and I kissed him back, quite as firmly.

I began to laugh in earnest when once I saw the pantry. It was one thing to be awed silent by the polish of a table, but meat – meat was too real to be taken for a dream, and here it was. There must have been nearly half a side of bacon hanging on a hook, and cold mutton under a cloth. There was a cheese, also wrapped in cloth, a jug of milk, an earthenware jar of oats, another of flour, and little lidded jars of sugar and tea. Two loaves of bread – and the price of flour what it was – bread baked by someone else, and brought here for us to eat. Besides that were four eggs in a dish, a good bit of butter and a basket of potatoes, carrots and turnips. I’d never seen the like. Tom and I stood and laughed at that pantry like madmen. And then we took down the cold mutton and the bread and Tom hunted out a knife and two plates, calling out all the while,

‘Where’s a knife? Here it is, look! Here’s plates, for me and my wife,’ he span around as though he were dancing, ‘here’s a roast mutton dinner, here’s a big bit of pig,’ and he slapped the bacon.

‘Here’s the Champion of England,’ I said, and kissed him, and Tom turned pink with the pleasure of it, for I’d never said such a thing before.

‘You light the fire, then,’ I said, and took the knife from his big mauler.

The meat was lovely stuff, marbled with thick fat and seasoned with something – I knew not what – by some unseen cook’s hands in Mr Dryer’s kitchen. I cut careful slices, far neater than I’d have carved had I been in the convent – and carried them through to where Tom knelt beside the grate.