Fair Fight (3 page)

‘Go at it,’ Ma said, when once the hat was passed.

What could I do then? I stepped to Dora and fibbed her on the cheek as hard as I could. As I did it I thought,
Now Ma will thrash me, for marking her face
. This thought only made me fight the harder. For Dora, that first blow seemed to clear her head. She’d been playing the nervous princess but we’d grown up fighting as often as we ate, which was one too much and the other not often enough. We fell to now as though we were alone in the garret, all feet and teeth and fistfuls of hair. I forgot the gents and Ma’s stick. I forgot the hat full of coins. I didn’t remember that we were in the yard till I had Dora down on her back, one knee upon her chest, and felt my other knee grow wet with mud. My sister’s throat was in my hands, her pulse beating hot beneath my palm. Her hands pushed at my face and raked my cheek but I only pressed my knee into her chest and kept my grip till she choked out, ‘Enough.’

I never got hold of the purse of pennies; Ma kept that, as I could’ve told you she would. I hardly cared, for my slice of bread was near as thick as Ma’s that night, with butter all the way to the edges.

‘Don’t you grow used to it,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine you’ll earn so much again.’

To Dora she said, ‘You’ll have a good slice too, but it will likely be the last for a while; you look like you’ve been through a mill.’

If anyone else had said so it would’ve been a jest, for ‘mill’ was a common word for a fight. None of us sitting around that table knew whether to smile; if Ma was punning it was the first we’d ever heard from her. In the end none of us laughed, only twitched anxiously about the mouth. Ma’s face was stern and she spoke as though Dora had begun the scrap herself, rather than begged to be spared it. Dora’s right eye was pinked, her lip was swelled and she had a scratch upon her cheek, which later would scab like a string of beads.

I made that slice last as long as I could, keeping each bite small and working my way about the edges to save the middle. Before I had done Ma said that if I didn’t get on and eat my supper she’d have it back from me as being too large, and then I had to eat that soft buttery middle in two hasty bites.

Now when I think back over it, I’m surprised that Ma treated me, seeing as I’d ruined Dora’s looks for a week. She liked to keep us unsteady, so that we never could predict how she’d turn, one minute to the next.

However good it was, that slice lasted only a few bites and soon I was hungry again and cold upstairs alone. Dora seemed to prefer the company of the other misses and I was left to do everything about the house, without company to speed the work. So, though I was fearful, I was glad with it when, a few weeks later, Ma called me out from where I was chopping turnips in the kitchen. I found her waiting with two gents in the hall. One of them was the sober young cully who’d set us to milling, the other a yellow-haired, stocky cull of the same age, eighteen or nineteen, with a shiny blue coat and a silver-topped cane.

‘Go with these gents, Ruth, and do as they tell you,’ she said.

The straw-headed gent was goggling at me quite openly.

‘She’s damned small, Dryer,’ he said.

‘I tell you she will suit,’ the sober one replied.

‘She’s as biddable as you please,’ Ma said, in the special voice she used for gentlemen.

I’d have chosen a thousand times to go off with strange cullies before I’d talk back to Ma, so I took off my apron with unsteady hands and went to them. Ma nodded.

‘She’ll do as she’s bid,’ she said. She turned away and began to climb the stairs.

‘Come along then,’ said the sandy cull, ‘Ruth, is it? I am Mr Sinclair. This is Mr Dryer – but he tells me you have met before.’

I was struck dumb; I could only nod. Why did they take me out of the house? I should’ve been far easier in myself if Ma had told me to take them upstairs.

Once I was out in the street the hand of fear closed about my bladder and I thought,
I can’t be sure if I’ll ever come back again; perhaps she’s sold me outright
. All about me was familiar excepting the backs of the two gents, and it was them I must follow, trailing behind as they strode on with long legs and sure steps. If I’d had more sense about me I might’ve been calmed by that; they didn’t expect me to run from them.

When I saw The Hatchet ahead of us I chided myself to be calm. We were to take a room, then. It was something indeed, to have two cullies to begin. The misses would want to hear it all; they’d crowd about me. I’d have bacon. The sober gent turned at the door to be sure that I followed.

‘Hurry up, girl,’ he said.

I felt my bowels bubble and loose. I’d not expected to be so anxious. I suddenly realised how ragged was my dress and wished Ma had given me silk.
I’ll have silk tomorrow
, I told myself.
I’ll have silk tomorrow, if I’m brave today
.

I felt as though my head was floating above my body.

The sober gent was talking in the ear of the innkeeper. Mr Sinclair, the yellow-headed one, came toward me and took me by the arm. His fingers were stronger than I’d have thought them.

‘We shan’t have use for a slow girl. Pick your feet up.’

All about me were culls and misses who’d come and gone through the convent rooms. In any usual case I’d have been bidding all the company a good evening, but now I could barely look at them. I was so awash with fear and pride that I didn’t know whether I hoped they’d marked me or not. The gent’s hand was hot upon my elbow.

He pulled me through the tavern, winding around the people. I stumbled after him, trying not to trip over feet and the legs of stools. It wasn’t till he stopped and turned to face the room that I realised that he wasn’t taking me to the little stairs that led upstairs to the chambers to hire, nor to any of the back parlours used for the same purpose. We were going toward the back door, where the beaten mud of the yard gave way to the low wooden stage roped round with cord.

Mr Sinclair turned and addressed the whole room. His voice was loud and as honking as a goose.

‘Come out now, and watch this little girl go against the butcher’s boy!’

‘All bets to me,’ called Mr Dryer.

Then we were pushed outside as the whole tavern tried at once to get out of the doors.

I was more fearful than ever I’d been when I thought I’d have to play the whore. There was a boy waiting up there with his chest bare and his fists bandaged and they pushed me up beside him. I knew his mug, though not to speak to. He didn’t say a word to me, but paced and puffed and put his maulers up, fibbing at the air.

Mr Dryer climbed up beside me.

‘You will fight in your shift,’ he said. ‘Take your dress off.’

It was the first word he’d said to me. I only looked at him, till he put out a hand and twitched at my sleeve impatiently. Then I slowly loosed my dress enough to pull it over my head. The men watching called and whistled.

‘All bets to me,’ he called again, and leaned over the ropes to take coins from countless hands.

I stood there, shivering and trying not to look at the crowd about me, till Mr Dryer came back to the middle of the ring.

‘Who will second the girl?’ he called out.

I couldn’t help but look now. A scattering of hands were up in the crowd. Mr Dryer pointed at one of them, a miss I thought I knew. She came climbing over the ropes and smiled at me. I felt a little better to have a second, even one not very familiar. She came beside me and patted my arm. She looked rough about the face, but kind – looked, in fact, like just the sort of miss I was most used to seeing. She took my dress from my hands and hung it carefully over the ropes at the corner, and then sank to one knee and put the other out before her.

‘Come on then,’ she said, below the calls of the crowd.

I sat upon her knee, just as a real pug sits upon the knee of his second, just like all the big-name pugs at the fairs. It was that, more than anything, which gave me courage. It made me feel at once that it was more real than any moment I’d lived and yet, more of a play. I felt a great calm settle over me. I looked at the butcher’s boy, now sitting on the knee of his own second, his breath still puffing in and out like a bellows. I thought,
I’ll drive that breath out of you, sonny
. I thought it so hard that he seemed to feel it and looked up at me. He stuck his tongue out. I only smiled, the same smile I used to tease Dora.

Mr Dryer called, ‘Come up to scratch!’

I walked there for the first time. The scratch in The Hatchet, the first I ever put my toe upon, was one of two lines painted white upon the wooden stage. All the lines I’d walk up to after that moment, some made in the earth with a stick, or chalk upon stone, or sometimes only agreed – the scratch shall be here, where the twig points – all of those lines have blurred one into the other in my mind, but my first scratch was a true one. I’ve always preferred a painted scratch. It can’t be argued with, nor scuffed.

I’ve a very clear memory of that moment, though I see myself in it, which can’t be real. It’s dusk, not yet dark but falling fast. Two torches burn in holders at The Hatchet’s door, lighting the crowd about them strangely. The crowd is a shifting mass of murmurs and hats. The straw-headed gent stands at the front of the crowd, so close to the ropes that he’ll take a kick in the eye if he’s not quick on his feet. I’m standing at the painted line, my fists bunched but hovering around my waist. My chest is flat, my stays too small, so that my nipples show clear under the flannel shift. My legs are bared shamefully high; my shift is too short. Already my legs are stocky and solid as a sow’s. My arms, too, are thick as logs, grown strong from the work of the house. My face is calm, my narrowed eyes fixed on the bobbing, puffing butcher’s boy. I’m willing him to die.

That’s what I remember. That, and I cut my fist on his teeth. I’d not learned then how to harden the skin and no one had thought to bandage them. His teeth pierced my hand and from then on each fib I landed left a mark of my own blood upon his chops, like paint upon the door of a plague house.

That night I ate a plate of oysters so juicy they burst in my mouth like berries. The girls asked me to tell them the story of the mill over and again, and each time I told them how I’d thought I was to have two cullies for my first time, they screamed with mirth to think of it.

2

M
r Dryer came calling for Dora more often, after that, till one evening I found him sitting in the parlour and fetched him a nip of rum, as I would’ve any cully, then. He took out his snuff box and took a pinch off the back of his hand, tipping his head back with little, fussy sniffs. Then he dabbed at his nose with a devilish fine wiper. I remember looking at the needlework about its edge and wishing it were mine. I’d a porridge on the stove and he didn’t seem about to talk of boxing so I turned to go, when he stopped me.

‘How long must I wait?’

‘I couldn’t say, sir, but I’d not say long,’ though I knew Dora liked to take her time between cullies, to make herself nice again.

‘I wish to see her now,’ he said, as though I could pull my sister from my pocket.

‘I’m sorry, sir.’ I didn’t know what other reply to make.

‘Sorry will not serve. What must I pay, to see her now? Tell me and I will pay it. I do not like to wait.’

I ran to fetch Ma. When we came back, Mr Dryer was standing in the hallway, gazing up the stairs with a look on his mug as though he’d a mind to run up and pull the other cully off my sister. Ma thought it too, for she pinched me.

‘Fetch Sam in from the door,’ she said.

I ran to fetch Sam then, excitement like beer brewing in my belly. Any little thing to change the shape of the day was welcome.

Ma was speaking softly to Mr Dryer. He shook his head. He’d grown even more sober, where another man would’ve grown wild. He brought out his purse. I couldn’t hear what was said, but now Ma was the one to shake her head. She put her hand upon his sleeve. He didn’t shake it off, but only stopped speaking and looked at it. Ma took it off him. The tone of their whispering grew fiercer. At last, Ma said,

‘Well, I hope it please you, after all this,’ and turned to Sam, the bully.

‘Sam, fetch that fellow out of Dora’s room and bid her clean herself. Tell him he can have his pound back if he’s not done, or have another girl, whichever he likes.’

That cull up there with Dora had paid nothing more than three or four shillings to lie with her and we all of us knew it but Mr Dryer.

Sam shook his head and began climbing the stairs. Mr Dryer said something to Ma and went back into the parlour and shut the door, just as if he were in his own house.

‘Sam,’ Ma called, ‘tell her be quick, mind.’

And that was how Mr Granville Dryer, young as he was, came to be Dora’s fancy man. He paid enough that no other cully need visit her. He was promised they never would, though of course they did, especially the black-eyed sea captain – Ma wasn’t one to turn away good coin, if she could be sure that Mr Dryer was otherwise occupied. He was occupied often with me.

He came to see my sister perhaps twice a week. Near as often he came to fetch me to The Hatchet, to have me stand up and mill before a crowd. A few times he took me to fight at other taverns, and twice I went to mill against stout, barefoot women in the fields at Lansdown. I preferred The Hatchet’s ring to any other. I always did fight better there.

Sometimes Mr Dryer brought straw-headed Mr Sinclair with him, sometimes another, dandyish cull, who Dora declared so handsome that she’d be tempted not to charge him. She’d no opportunity to charge him or otherwise, for he was always with Mr Dryer, and Mr Dryer guarded her as another cully would his wife. He was much the same over me. Whichever of the other two came to fetch me, Mr Dryer was always with them. When the culls in the crowd thrust nips of gin into my hands, Mr Dryer took them from me without a word and passed them to his friends. He let me drink cider, ale and sometimes wine. When a sailor turned lech on me one day and reached beneath the ropes to stroke my ankle, Mr Dryer took the man aside and spoke to him seriously. I near died when this same rough sailor came afterward to beg my pardon, and said he’d not bother me again. All this and yet Mr Dryer barely ever spoke a word to me unless it was to bid me follow him, or call me to come up to scratch.

After that first bout against the butcher’s boy, I went to bed only a little bruised up but I woke dizzy and sick from the hits to the skull. I thought I’d a fever, I was so bad. My hands were so stiff they’d scarce close, and the skin on my face was grazed, where his knuckles had slid across my sweating cheek. I’d no notion how much pain was to be had from my giving a lad a thrashing, and his half-missed blows upon me. I learned to expect it all soon enough, and I learned that it passed. I never would grow used to the shock of the full-facer – all you feel is speed and weight and surprise, and all the other ills come later – but I learned how fast I could be, when I’d a need to. I found that Mr Dryer would stop a bout if he feared me too injured. That’s not to say I wasn’t left beat, but there was always talk about this or that pug who’d died, gasping up blood with his last words. Mr Dryer wouldn’t let that befall me; he’d guard me as he would his purse.

In a place like The Hatchet, near as important as winning was having bottom; this was the fancy’s word for courage so deep it runs close to lunacy. I stood up against anyone they brought me and never backed down even when I knew I’d take a beating. I fought a sailor with only one foot, who grabbed me by my hair and wouldn’t leave off, however the crowd screamed ‘Coward’. I fought a lad even littler than I, who looked over at a cull in the crowd – his daddy, I supposed – every time he made a hit on me. I used that to my benefit and fibbed him in the eye the next time he turned his head. I fought girls bigger than Dora, thick-armed washerwomen who knocked me off my pins as fast as I’d have done an infant. I fought brats my own size till we were both so weary all we could do was lean against each other at the scratch and hear the crowd cry, ‘Shame’. I stood up against grown men and the fancy who gathered to watch only laughed and cheered. A little girl up against a big swinging cull is as diverting as a dog against a bear, and if the puppy gets a bite in, so much the better.

I learned, the first time I was really beat, that it was better to mind what Ma told me and go back to the ring, than try to stay at home in the convent. Once you’ve stood in front of a woman like Ma, a one-footed sailor looks like a fairy. I begged to be allowed a holiday and she gave me a beating I swear home I can still feel if I close my eyes. The next time I came home so battered I’d have liked to have slept a good week away, I got up and took myself back to The Hatchet as soon as she bid me, with never a whimper aloud.

In any case, I was happier in the ring than at home, whatever the price in bruises and cracked teeth. I had bottom and all the fancy cheered me for it. I’d never in my life been cheered before – no one had ever had cause to celebrate me. The fancy called me ‘Miss Matchet’ and declared I was match for anyone. They called me a real pug, which I’d never heard a girl called before. When I walked down the street, folks called out to me and begged me to show my arm, or make a fist. It was the happiest time of my life. Soon enough the culls in The Hatchet knew me so well that not one of them would try to get his hand up my dress any more, for all the rest would’ve turned on him before Mr Dryer could get there.

Ma fed Dora and me near as well as she fed herself. She bought me a new dress from the bow-wow shop and had it sewn up short, so that I could mill in it without tripping. She had me pickling my knuckles in brine and brandy. She had me posing in my boxing dress to entertain the visitors. She threatened the misses that she’d set me on them if they didn’t mind her.

Mr Dryer, for his part, came and went in our house whenever he pleased. He arranged that Dora should have her own room, and wasn’t there a scene over that, with Jane shrieking and Ma slapping her and chasing her out of the house, only to have Sam bring her back again. Ma made Jane a room in the cellar and she wailed over it loud enough, but she stayed there. She was lucky to be in a house like ours and she knew it; her looks were near enough gone.

Mr Dryer had some culls come in and fit up Dora’s room with a desk and a glass-fronted cabinet for his books and bottles, till it was more like a gent’s study than a molly’s bedroom. For me he sent padded mufflers to protect my hands in training and a leather dummy stuffed with straw, which hung from a rope in the yard. The chickens used to peck the straw out of the seams at its bottom end, till at last I hoisted it too high for them to reach. I named that dummy after Ma and each morning I beat it till it was sorry.

When I was perhaps thirteen, the cullies began asking me to do more than pose for them. Ma took me aside and said that Mr Dryer paid enough each week for my keep that I needn’t – indeed, that I mustn’t, if I thought it would weaken me for my sport upon the stage. I’d not realised till that moment that Mr Dryer had bought me, as he had Dora. I told Ma that I thought it would be best to keep my strength for the ring, and she let me be. I didn’t say so for Mr Dryer’s sake, nor for boxing. I said so because by then I’d noticed Tom.

Tom Webber was a great swinging cull, as big as the bullies and only fifteen. He wasn’t what you’d call handsome; he’d a brow so heavy it looked to have been chiselled in stone, and a nose to match. For all that, he didn’t look mean. He held himself as though he wished he weren’t built so large.

When first he began to appear beside the ring at The Hatchet I thought nothing much of it, though I noticed him as being so big and his face so young. He would come and stand right beside the ropes, or if not that, then perched upon the rail, as clumsy as a goose on a fence, where he could see all the goings-on in the ring. I’d try not to look at him. When I came out of the ring afterward, whether defeated or victorious, the men all gathered round and pushed cups of cider or wine-and-water into my hands. Now Tom began to make himself part of this circle, edging ever closer. Sometimes he stood right beside me, yet never said a word. I didn’t quite like it; he was like a spy. I’d go to the privy, out past the yard, and when I came back his head would be sticking out above the crowd, seeming to scan the place. His eyes would meet mine and he’d seem to settle. Whenever I looked up I felt his eyes upon me. I didn’t know what he looked for; he couldn’t admire me. I’d been fighting for three years then, and was plain to begin. By the time Tom laid eyes on my mug I’d had my nose knocked sideways and my teeth, which were always crowded, well, they weren’t so cramped up as they’d used to be. I’d almost no teeth on the top left-hand side, till close to the back. The ones that were left still hid behind one another, as if scared – as well they might be. I wasn’t a picture to look at and I didn’t care; my hair was always in a cap, for my idea was only to keep it out of my eyes, not make myself handsome. I no longer wished for silks, but wore hardy cotton gowns, sewn up so that my ankles showed. When I went out past the neighbourhood, where folks didn’t know me as Miss Matchet, I drew stares and comments, ‘Ooh, what did you do for that beating?’ and the like. Mine wasn’t a mug any young lad would find to make sheep-eyes at. And yet – there he was. I didn’t know if he meant to mock me, or if Ma or Mr Dryer had paid him to watch me, or if he was touched in the head. He could’ve been any or all three. I hated him, and yet I looked for him too.

Then came the day I climbed down from the ring, stretching and sore, the inside of my lips tender and tasting of blood, my knuckles numb with the promise of pain to come. Suddenly it was Tom’s hands pushing ale into my own, though now he wouldn’t look at me at all. I only took it and held it in my stiff hand. I was scared to drink it – I had wild thoughts of poison. He was confusing me so, I was near as loosely tied in the head as Ma.

Ma by then was grown devilish queer. She’d never been a trusting woman but now she was suspicious in the wildest ways; accusing the girls of sneaking away to meet cullies when they went to the water-pump, saying they were out to cheat her of her cut. She accused them of pleasuring the bullies for no charge, the same charge she threw at that slow-smiling negress so long ago. If I walked too close behind her she whirled about to face me, as though she thought I’d a mind to push her down the stairs. She peered at the coins handed her, feeling them all over with her fingers, counting them over and again before she believed them fair and put them in her purse. She began always to touch the walls as she went about the house – I thought perhaps she was going blind, but then she sometimes wobbled so upon her pins she could just as easily have been holding the wall to keep steady. I didn’t know whether she was took sick; she wasn’t a woman you could ask such a thing of. She began to feed scraps of her dinner to her dog before she’d taste it. Sometimes when her wine was poured she made one or other of us swap cups with her; her eyes then would flame as though she’d foiled a plot to poison her.

Now I looked at the ale Tom gave me in the same way, and felt the bindings of my sense unravel. What did he want from me? I couldn’t bear it. I pushed the cup back at him so firmly that it hit his chest and splashed up against him, leaving a brown half-moon stain against his shirt. The folks about us laughed and cried out.

‘What’s this?’

‘Scorned, sonny!’

Hands clapped Tom upon the shoulder so that he jumped a little.

Tom’s mug reddened and he took his cup back. He looked lost as a choir boy in hell.

I let myself be carried off then, in the crowd of culls clapping me upon the back as though I were a man. I felt a little spark of glad spite that I’d thrust his cup back at him.
There now
, I thought,
let him goggle-eye someone else
.

I went for home not long after. The street was dark, lit only by the lamp hanging over The Hatchet’s door and what little light came through the windows of the houses. I stepped out onto the soft grime of the road and even before I was out of the circle of lamplight he was at my shoulder. I span around fast enough that he had to step back, and he must’ve known I was ready to plant him one by the look on my mug. He held up a hand, palm out.

‘Please,’ he said, ‘I only want to walk with you.’

I’d never heard his voice before. It was the voice of a farmer, soft and thick as fur. His eyes were like a dog’s, though that sounds badly. They were brown, deep and trusting.