Fair Fight (2 page)

My sister gripped the edge of the table as though she could barely keep her seat. I thought I knew what a stirred about mixture she felt; she was always a coward about blood, but she was head-over-tail for silk.

I wasn’t called upstairs to help dress her and nor was I called to admire her. I knew she was made fine from the cooing of the girls but I’d not go to look. I didn’t lay eyes on her till I passed her sitting with the other misses in the hall, where the cullies might come to look at them. To my eyes then she looked a stranger, her mug painted high and her figure pushed into a ruffled gown of palest pink. Her hair was put up and curled about the face, as the other misses wore theirs. The five of them sat like mismatched sisters, in a row of all different shapes and shades, pressed together against the cold. My own dress was plain enough and grown ragged at the hem, but I had sleeves and a flannel shift. She looked very small between Gypsy Jane and Maggie. As I watched, she laughed aloud at something Maggie said, though I didn’t think she’d seen me. She wasn’t taunting me. If I knew my sister, she was keeping her courage up.

She mightn’t have been teasing me then, but it was almost all she did in the days to follow. She still came to sleep in our bed in the garret when at last she’d done, smelling of sour salt and pinching me that I might move, even if I was pressed up against the wall when she did. I didn’t know if she came because she liked to, or because Jane was a wasp over her room – there was always that kind of quarrel going on in our house. At first I’d wake to her nails cruel upon my skin and a whisper, ‘You’ve taken all the bed,’ or ‘You’re snoring, you sow,’ but at last she gave up the play. She pinched because I was abed and she wasn’t, and both of us knew it. Sometimes, when first she began, I’d pinch or slap at her hands and we’d start to scuffle on the bed till Ma called up the stairs that she’d take the skin from our arses if we kept at it. Then we’d freeze, Dora’s hair in my fist and her arm about my neck and warily we’d release each other, each of us ready to fly at the other if she made a move to go again. At last I learned that the surest way to madden my sister was to accept her pinch and only burrow deeper into the bed.

Dora always had painted up every chance she got, even when she was too young to do more than make a mess of herself. Ma wasn’t one to waste paint on a child who couldn’t earn, so Dora had begged from the girls for any pot with a little left inside, or painted her lips with beetroot and her eyebrows with charcoal, as anyone could who had those things about the house. She’d always been in a fever to get me painted up too; I’d had to fight her off sometimes, so desperate was she to put black smudges along my eyebrows. Now she’d her own paints and powders she never thought of wasting them on my plain mug. Instead she spent as long as she dared in front of the broken piece of looking-glass we had up there, dabbing at her face with a piece of sponge.

When she saw me watching her, she’d remark, ‘How plain I am. My teeth ain’t quite straight.’

Her teeth weren’t crooked, mine were. She meant,
Look, Ruth, how handsome I am beside you
.

Sometimes she’d say, ‘Oh, I wish I were prettier. The captain swears home I’m the bonniest creature he’s seen in all his travels but I’m sure he don’t mean it.’

And she’d sigh as though the cully were a prince, rather than a weather-beaten, gypsy-faced goat.

‘You’re bonny as a turd stuck with primroses,’ I’d say, or some other weak retort. She’d only toss her head and smirk.

After a few months of this, Ma finally bid Dora sleep downstairs. I couldn’t say what turned her mood; Ma was changeable as a cat.

Dora acted like she’d been granted a high favour, though she might’ve complained to Ma long ago if she’d really wanted to share Jane’s bed.

‘You might be fitted to live up here like a scullery maid,’ she said, tying her clothes into a blanket, ‘but I’ll move down.’

‘It’s down in truth,’ I said, ‘to those sheets crusted stiff. I’d not sleep down there if you paid me.’

‘But no one will pay you, Ruth,’ she said, and swept to the door, ‘to sleep or otherwise.’

It was sudden as a slap; in that moment I grew wild to be earning myself. I couldn’t bear to be the servant of the house, to be cold and hungry and alone, on top of it all. I knew that ten was too young to be a regular miss, but Ma had said only days before, when I said my shoes had grown holes, that she’d find a cully for me if my feet were so devilish cold. She’d meant it to be a threat, but now it seemed more like a promise.

If I’d had any kind of sense I’d have asked Ma to find one of those cullies for me, but she was in one of her rages and had been so for days. I couldn’t approach her; she was likely as not to take her stick to me before I spoke. If she did hear me out, she was as likely again to find a cully who’d pay to hurt a girl, just for spite at my daring to ask anything of her. If I’d had any kind of patience I’d have waited for her to grow calm, but at ten years old patience wasn’t a virtue I was blessed with. Instead I waited only till all the girls were painted up and the house opened, when all in the place were occupied with the night’s business, and I supposed to be ready to run at anyone’s call.

I crept back up to the garret, keeping the door open and one ear cocked to the stairs. I didn’t have silks, but in the corner of the clothes press was a dressing gown that had once been Maggie’s. It was of silk twill embroidered white-on-white, the opening edged with knitted lace. It was spoiled by a bloodstain to its skirt that wouldn’t lift out. I’d tried to lift the stain with salt, but the cloth was so thin it couldn’t stand much scrubbing, and in the end I’d left it stained rather than tear it. Ma had given it to Dora, who’d left it behind now that she’d her own, unspoiled things.

I took off my dress and pulled the dressing gown on, over my shift and stays. The broken bit of looking-glass was too small to see much of myself; I stood and bent in front of it to glimpse here a shoulder, there the knitted lace at my neck. My shift showed grey where the dressing gown hung on me, but I couldn’t go without it; I’d have showed my chest bare to the nipple the moment I moved. I knelt on the stool so that I might see the skirt with its bloom of dark rust.

I tried to put up my hair as the misses did. I had only two pins but at last I got it into a kind of knot. I wished I’d any kind of paint at all, but Dora had taken everything. I pinched at my cheeks to pink them and bit at my lip till I tasted blood. Then I went and hesitated at the top of the stairs.

From below came the sounds of boots on the stairs and a breathy laugh. The doors on the second landing opened and closed. Other voices drifted up from the hall. A cully said something I couldn’t hear in a complaining tone.

I heard Dora reply, ‘Come this way then, if you ain’t fond of waiting.’

More boots sounded on the flags of the hall. There came the sound of another door opening and closing – the parlour, I thought it. Then all fell quiet.

I crept down the staircase. On the second landing I stopped, to listen for signs that all were occupied. I couldn’t hear much; only an uneven creaking that could’ve meant anything. I’d have to trust. Down I went.

I stopped on the middle stair and looked about the hall below. The front door was half open and through it I could hear the sound of the bullies talking upon the step. I could smell their pipes, the cheap clay kind they always smoked, sold with the tobacco already inside and thrown away after. There was nobody in the hall. The kitchen door was shut tight; the door to the cellar steps stood open a little way. This was where Dora had taken her cull, most likely; Ma would throttle her if she took a man into the kitchen, which was the one place in the house where the cullies never could go. The parlour door was ajar and from here there came gentlemen’s voices, smooth with good breeding. Here sat the cullies who’d been willing to wait.

My plan was simple; I’d open the parlour door and offer to fetch the gents some rum. If any of them seemed to give me the eye, I’d offer a little more than rum. I didn’t feel nervous of finding the words; I’d heard the girls do it more often than I could count. I only thought of how it might be to put coins into Ma’s hand and see her queer smile.

By the time I reached the parlour I was nervous as a flea. The breeze from the open front door raised the hairs on my arms and I suddenly felt how thin and low was the dressing gown. I stood there in the hall like a noddy, unable to decide whether to go forward or back.

As I hovered there the cellar door opened behind me, and someone screamed. I jumped and span about; Dora stood in the doorway, on the top step. Behind her a young cull’s mug peered over her shoulder from the darkness of the cellar steps.

Now I heard the parlour door open and turned to see the gents come out, crying, ‘What’s this? What ho?’

At the same moment, the bullies burst in from the front step and then stood as foolish as I’d been, not being sure who to manhandle out of the house.

Dora stopped her shrieking and began laughing.

‘I took you for a ghost,’ she kept saying, and each time was too fitted to say more.

The young cull behind her pushed out into the hall and looked me over. He was barely grown, eighteen or so, but dressed sober as a monk. I’d noticed him about the place before, and marked him as being like a lad in an old man’s costume. His hair was curled and powdered like a cull twice his age. He didn’t smile to see Dora so merry.

‘What the devil?’ he said. ‘What is this child about? Is that blood upon her?’

I didn’t like to be called a child.

Dora came forward, still laughing.

‘She’s playing at having her courses.’ She tried to touch the skirt and I pulled it away from her fingers.

Dora’s young cully looked stern at this and the other gents only looked fuddled. One of our bullies stepped up, opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again.

Dora was still the only one who saw the joke. It was enough for me, mind. I’d only two roads open to me and I’d sooner have been hanged than run back upstairs, so I took the other and threw myself at her. I got a good hold of her dress with one hand and with the other I began to beat her anywhere I could reach. She put up her hands to defend herself, still laughing, till I landed a couple of blows in good earnest.

Then she called out, ‘She’s run mad! Take her off me!’

I only had time to strike her perhaps twice more before strong hands gripped my neck hard enough that my shoulders came up about my chin like a frightened chicken. I let her go. It was Ma’s hand that caught me. I’d rather have had the bullies a hundred times.

Ma struck at my arse and I twisted as far from her stick as I could, which her grip on me being what it was, wasn’t far enough. She couldn’t reach my buttocks and instead the blow struck me in the small of my back, which had me shrieking like a hog. It ain’t the worst pain, to be struck upon the spine, but it’s painful enough.

‘Hold still,’ she said, and drew me back toward her.

By then I thought only of escape, twisting and bucking, heedless of my skirt and my bare legs. I raised myself up and heard Ma’s grunt of effort, and then quite as suddenly threw myself toward the flagstone floor. I felt her lose her grip and had one moment of freedom, my hands out to take the force of the stone, when she again found the cloth at my waist and I stopped with a jerk, like a dog coming to the end of a short rope. Now I was dangling helpless and Ma still with a stick in her free hand. I put my arms up to cover my head.

‘Madam, stay your hand,’ one of the gents said. I thought it was Dora’s dowdy cull.

No blow came. I could hear Ma huffing and snorting, and the gent talking to her very low, though I couldn’t make out what he said.

I heard Ma say, ‘Four shillings,’ and the cull replied, ‘Done.’

Suddenly she let go of my skirt and it being so unexpected, I’d no time to brace myself. I fell onto the flags, hitting my elbows hellishly. Both arms were set to humming.

‘Get up,’ Ma said to me.

I got to my feet as fast as I could, lest she strike me again for being slow.

Dora was watching me with a blank face; my sister was none the wiser than I.

‘Go on,’ Ma said, ‘into the yard. These gents want to watch you fight.’

I started forward before I even heard the words properly. I was still only relieved at being spared a beating. My arms were devilish sore.

Dora must’ve complained, for behind me I heard Ma say,

‘She’ll not spoil your face. She’ll regret it if she does.’

It was dark outside, and cold. One of the bullies from the door came out holding up a lamp. A little ring formed around me, of the girls and what callers were about the place. Into this circle Ma pushed Dora, who stumbled and righted herself and looked as though she’d protest, if only she dared. More cullies came out, pulled from the beds of the misses by the promise of amusement, and were now calling,

‘Oh, good sport!’

‘What, are we to have a show? I’ll put a shilling on the stocky one!’

That meant me.

I wasn’t vexed any longer and Dora looked only fearful, holding her arms against the cold.

‘Come on,’ one gent called out, ‘set to!’

I looked at Ma. She nodded at me and raised her stick a little. I squared up to Dora and held my fists up. She looked only miserable.

‘Put your fives up,’ I said to her, ‘for I’ll have at you whether you do or no.’

‘I’m changing my bet,’ one voice called out. ‘I’ll put six shillings on this one. I shall want to see blood for it!’

This perked me up and I quipped, ‘Blood is a pound.’

All about me laughed and I felt it as only a ten-year-old can, who is suddenly the centre of admiring attention. I could hear the betting increase.

‘Wait,’ Ma said now, ‘put some pennies in a purse for the girls. Whoever wins shall take it.’

‘You have taken four shillings for them already, madam,’ said Dora’s young gent, the one who’d sent us out there.

‘For their services,’ Ma said. ‘Put something in a purse for the girls. They’ll fight the harder for it.’

I heard coin hit coin as one of the culls passed a hat about. Ma stepped close to Dora and said something in her ear that made her straighten up and let go of her arms, though she still looked miserable as sin.