Fair Fight (34 page)

I felt it all the more when I came downstairs. The breakfast table was as it always was, with my plum cake, my chocolate, the boiled meats I rarely touched but which were always brought. The clock ticked upon the mantel, the unknown portraits frowned down from their frames. Lucy stood as silently as always, waiting to step forward and serve me. I sat, for what else was I to do? I picked up the cup of chocolate. My swollen hand moaned in protest as my fingers curled about it. It was this, I think, that moved me to speak.

‘Today I would like these portraits removed, Lucy. Have Mr Horton put them somewhere safe. I will leave it to his judgement as to where.’

‘Yes, madam,’ she said.

And that was all. When I thought of it, what else was she to say?

Once I had begun, I found I must carry on. If I had to quarrel over it with Granville, let it be a larger matter than a small. I had Horton and Henry work together to take down the portraits from all about the house. I had them take the heavy candlesticks to Granville’s study. I had the stuffed fish removed from the hallway.

I was alive with excitement, pointing at everything about me, saying,

‘And this, and this! Remove this! And the sword, take that away. Keep it safe, but take it away. What else, what else?’

The menservants did exactly as I told them. Horton seemed a little dazed by the sudden activity; I suppose he did nothing much in our house but polish the banister and see to the silver. Henry could scarcely conceal his smile.

Mrs Bell came into the hall at full speed, as though she expected to find burglars there. We heard her coming up the back stairs, heavy as a country hobnail. When she burst through the servants’ door and saw us she stopped short. I was directing the removal of a painting depicting a bewigged gentleman with forbidding eyes. It was high enough that Horton had been obliged to fetch the step-ladder, which Henry had climbed. Now he was trying to unhook the painting safely from the wall, while Horton craned up to support the heavy frame. The whole procedure was ungraceful, with cries of, ‘Steady there!’ and, ‘Hold her, Mr Horton!’ while I waited impatiently for it to come down, so that I might direct them to the next. I could not help holding my gloved hands before me as though I myself held an invisible painting. This was the scene Mrs Bell came upon. Her mouth opened and then quickly closed itself and squeezed tight.

I saw her face and felt glee rise up in me.

I could not help but say, ‘Yes, Mrs Bell?’

She drew herself up and said, ‘I came to see what the noise was about. I’m sure I was not expecting this.’

‘You need not have expected it, we have it perfectly under control.’

Just then the painting came away from the last hook and fell. Horton stopped its collision with the stone floor by falling to his knees and giving a terrific grunt as he caught it. Mrs Bell looked at him coldly.

‘I would have liked to be given notice of anything irregular, madam,’ she said to me. ‘I am in charge of the household, after all. I cannot run the staff if I don’t know what they are doing.’

‘I am mistress of the house, Mrs Bell.’ My heart was thumping in my chest. I could feel my scalp prickle against the tender, half pulled-out roots beneath my cap.

‘Yes, madam. Mr Dryer –’

‘Is not here. And is in any case not your concern. Now, I do not wish to keep you from your duties. As you say, you have a staff to run.’

The menservants had grown still. I could see by the set of Henry’s shoulders, the careful bow of Horton’s head, how carefully they were listening.

‘Yes, madam.’ She said nothing more, only turned and went out through the door to the back stairs.

After that I lost my enthusiasm. I started to see how the bare patches, where the paintings had hung for so long, stood out brighter and cleaner than the rest of the wall. It showed how dark the house was. I had nothing to hang in the place of the paintings. I had no money of my own to buy anything like a painting. I ordered the men to wrap everything they had removed and went up to my dressing room. My fists itched inside my gloves, where scabs were forming across the knuckle.

The letter arrived at breakfast the next day and it was all I could do to finish my chocolate before I threw on my cloak and hurried down the drive. I was out of breath when I reached the gatehouse, the cold burning in my breast. Henry was beating at the leather man with both fists, so close that his brow almost touched the leather. Mrs Webber stood behind it and held it still, her legs braced.

‘Is that all you have?’ she was saying. ‘Why, a bantling has more hit than you.’

Henry let out a shout and redoubled his effort. His bare back ran with perspiration and I knew that his fists would be raw when he stopped. Mrs Webber saw me and winked over Henry’s shoulder.

‘Here’s Mrs Dryer, come to look at you. What think you, Mrs Dryer? Got a fib on him like a feather’s touch, don’t he?’

‘I have a letter,’ I said, ‘from my husband.’

Mrs Webber laid a hand on Henry’s arm to still him. He stopped his milling and straightened up, blinking the perspiration from his eyes. Mrs Webber passed him a rag.

‘Do you now,’ she said.

‘He writes that he has found Tom a mentor, a Mr Mendoza. I see by your face that you have heard his name before.’

‘I should think I’ve heard his name. He was Champion of England in his time. I’d guess near anyone would know it. Henry will, I warrant you.’

‘Mr Mendoza, the Jew,’ Henry nodded. ‘He came up with the Jew’s stop. Named after him, it is.’

‘He’ll teach Tom some good science,’ Mrs Webber said, half to herself.

‘There is more,’ I said. ‘We are to go to London. We are to go before the week is out. My husband has taken a house for us. He is sending Stephens back, with the carriage. Your husband is to try for it. Oh, goodness, Ruth,’ I had never called her so before, ‘he is to try for Champion of England, just as your Mr Mendoza was.’

I realised, suddenly, that I had read Mr Mendoza’s name myself, in one of Granville’s sporting papers. I had not thought of it before. It seemed almost fantastical, that Granville should hire a man famous enough to be written about in a paper. I grew quiet.

Mrs Webber only nodded. Henry stood and looked between the two of us. His chest was chill now, and pimpled.

‘What’s this?’ he said. ‘Ain’t this good news?’

‘
’
Course it is,’ Mrs Webber said.

‘Of course,’ I agreed.

We went inside and Henry dressed, and we sat by the fire and drank to it, just what beer Mrs Webber had in the house, and tried to talk merrily of all we would need for London. Mrs Webber was cheerful enough while we spoke of dresses and hats, but I thought, whenever the conversation paused, that I could see my own thoughts in her eyes.

What now? After all that has gone before, what is to come to us now?

PART SEVEN

Ruth

20

W
e were two days on the road to London. We went in Mr Dryer’s coach, sent back specially for us, with a cull I’d never clapped eyes on before at the reins. Henry wept like a babe when Mrs Dryer said he’d to stay behind, and I saw it near broke her heart to leave him, though she acted careless. She couldn’t help it, though, for what reason had she to bring him? Mr Dryer had sent this cull, Stephens, on purpose to fetch us.

The coach was so grand I could scarce make myself step inside. It had seats of shining wood with velvet cushions, and brass brackets for the lamps, shined up gold. The windows had curtains at them, tied back with braid. Even the floor and ceiling were shiny as a conker. I sat as careful as I could, afraid of spoiling the seat, though I didn’t know how I might spoil it. I couldn’t stop stroking the velvet, one way smooth, the other rough. Mrs Dryer sat beside me.

I was wearing my new dress, made of the muslin Tom had chosen me, a cream ground with thin blue stripes. I knew I’d dirty it in no time, but my days, wasn’t it pretty. Mrs Dryer had it made up for me by a proper needlewoman, in the new style. I thought it a marvel. Besides it being the finest thing I’d ever put on – so fine I felt an ox in it – on top of that, it was the most comfortable thing I’d ever worn. The waist was so high I need only have the shortest stays, which Mrs Dryer also had made for me, as a gift. I was of half a mind not to take them, but I could hardly wear long stays with a gown that fell from just under my dugs, so I gave her the last lessons without charge, to make us even. Those short stays left my waist free, and if you never wore short stays I couldn’t explain how it felt to be so much unlaced. I could run, or fight, or anything.

Now we jolted along, talking in fits and starts, our moods as uneven as the road. Mrs Dryer clenched and unclenched her hands in her lap for a time, but the journey unwound and neither of us could keep nervous for two whole days. Dullness always will creep in after so long as that, whatever waits at the road’s end. I spent hours thinking over Tom’s fight to come, and wishing I’d been there to see him ready. He was to stand up against a lad by the name of Jem Belcher, a Bristol boy himself. I’d heard the cull’s name more often than I could count, called ‘Bristol’s great hope’, and the like. I wished I’d seen the boy fight, but I never had. Near as soon as he’d shown his talents some London swell had whipped Belcher off to teach him. Since then he’d been working his way through the London rings and showing himself quite the pug, by all accounts. I comforted myself that whatever help Belcher had been given, he’d not have had so fine a trainer as Mr Mendoza.

We stayed the night at an inn. I’d never done such a thing before. Mrs Dryer called me her maid, and the innkeeper called me miss, and goggle-eyed my gown. Mrs Dryer asked that he find me a bed near her own room but what he gave us was a bed for me directly next to hers, a little cot-bed with a straw mattress, placed behind a screen, for the sake of her modesty.

Stephens slept out with the horses and took his supper there too. I envied him the ease of it; bread, cheese, ale and a pile of straw. He could do exactly as he pleased and no one would look twice.

Mrs Dryer and I ate a supper of venison pasties in a parlour that smelled of damp leaves, though we’d a good fire. Mrs Dryer said she thought the pasties were beef, and only called venison. I couldn’t have told you, but it could’ve been the innkeeper’s puppy sliced up and roasted and I’d not have cared. We drank a good deal of wine, not speaking much, and then we went up to that odd little room and looked at each other as awkward as newlyweds. I went behind the screen and began to undress.

‘Mrs Webber,’ her voice came, all blurry. ‘I find myself stuck.’

‘Stuck!’ I said, and went around the screen, in my shift.

She’d tried to pull her dress off without the buttons all the way undone and got herself tangled in it. We laughed then, and I felt less queer. I pulled her gown back down and spent an age getting the little buttons unfastened. My fingers are clumsy with small things.

‘My days,’ I said, ‘who’d want to be a lady?’

‘Indeed, no one should,’ she said. ‘It is a hateful thing to be. We are bound in every direction.’

‘What’d you rather be, a gent?’ I looked away as the gown came off at last, but not quick enough that I didn’t get a little shock. I’d known she was scarred, but somehow I’d never thought of it as being all over her. She was scattered with lumps, seeds sown under the skin.

‘Gentlemen are worse,’ she said. ‘No. I would be something wild and free. A deer, perhaps. Will you unlace me?’

She didn’t make it easy, hunched over as if she expected a fib in the belly, though I stood at her back.

I had, then, to fumble my fingers over the knots. Her skin was so pitiful it tugged at my heart. I thought of how her ma must’ve wept over it. Between the seeds there were pits, as if birds had pecked some of the seeds out. I’d seen a vast deal of poxed misses come to the convent but Mrs Dryer’s case was the worst I’d laid eyes on.
She must’ve near enough died
,
I thought.

‘If you were a deer, a gent would come and shoot you and have you on his table,’ I said.

‘Then I would be a boxer,’ she said. ‘Like you.’

‘I’ve never been free a day. You can’t imagine how tight I’ve been bound, and to what.’

We both got quiet then and went to our beds.

I lay behind the screen and listened to Mrs Dryer sigh and turn in her own bed. After I was sure she must be asleep, her voice floated out of the darkness.

‘I don’t know that I can bear to see him.’

It was so low that I wasn’t sure she meant the words for me. At last I replied, equally soft, ‘Who do you mean?’

A sigh. ‘My husband, of course. I could hardly mean yours.’

I couldn’t blame her; Mr Dryer had in him everything that was blackest about the quality, as I saw it.

‘Do you not love him?’ I asked, at last.

‘Love him? No. I don’t believe he has a single soft feeling for me. He has betrayed me worse than I could have dreamt.’

‘Took a lover, has he?’ I thought,
Now, does she mean Dora, or ain’t she the only mistress he keeps?

A silence. Then, ‘You must think me a fool.’

‘Never that, Mrs Dryer. Not unless you forget to block when I swing at you.’

She laughed a little then, a sad laugh, but better than none.

‘I saw him,’ she said. ‘I saw him take her into my own poor mama’s house. I think, I have begun to believe,’ her voice caught, ‘I have begun to believe that if he wins the house from my brother – as he means to do – I think perhaps he will set her up in it, to live. In the only house I’ve ever felt truly happy, with my mama’s things about her. Sometimes, Mrs Webber, when I think of that, I find myself imagining terrible things. I don’t expect you can know what I mean.’

‘Not know? Don’t forget, he left me without food.’

‘I never forget. It was the greatest sin.’

‘So we’re both sinned against by the same gent, ain’t we?’

‘We begin to sound like conspirators. But I will not lower myself, just because he does. I have thought it over so often that my head aches.’

‘You’re too good, that I know,’ I said.

‘But, oh, Mrs Webber, this woman, in my mama’s house. She is so cheap. She wears the most violent shades of pink and red. She is vile! I find I hate her.’ Her voice grew thick once more.

‘Hush, now,’ I said. ‘Try to sleep. This helps nothing.’

‘You are right, of course,’ she said, meek as a child, and I heard her turn over and sigh and grow still. Sometimes there came a sniff but she didn’t speak again.

I lay and thought of Dora, and the bright pinks she always favoured. Likely, I thought, Mrs Dryer would hate me if she knew that Dora was my sister, and who’d blame her? I’d been trying not to think of it for weeks, truth be told.

Mrs Dryer’s ma’s house
, I thought, and couldn’t tell how I felt to think it. How far for my sister to rise; poor, good Mrs Dryer. If I had the choice, would I let Dora take that house? Perhaps I would. I didn’t envy Mrs Dryer, married to that unfeeling cully, dry in name and nature. I swear home I did feel for her, but that house was something Dora would never have another chance at . . . Like the Championship of all England. I tried to picture my Tom’s face. I could see him as he was when first we met, awkward and bashful. I couldn’t conjure his face as he’d been when last I saw him, only his broad back, disappearing into Mr Dryer’s carriage. The carriage we’d travelled in, I realised then. My Tom had sat upon that velvet. I wondered if he’d stroked the seats.

London put me in mind of Bristol, so that my heart ached to see the wide streets filled with carts and folks going about their business, everything dusted with soot. It wasn’t much different that I could see, except that it took us so long to go through it, and, I suppose, so much longer to go from shabby to grand. In Bristol the swells lived pressed up against the common folk.

The house Mr Dryer had taken was in the grand part, and was smaller than the one he’d had with Mrs Dryer, but that ain’t to say it wasn’t a palace to my eye. The door was opened by a footman I’d never seen, and like the innkeeper, he saw my gown and called me miss. I near laughed, being then so devilish nervous.

‘I will see you later, Mrs Webber,’ Mrs Dryer said. Then to the footman, ‘Will you show Mrs Webber to her room?’

He said he would and she went off, led to her own room by a maid, another one I’d never clapped eyes on before.

I followed the cull down the stairs to a room beside the kitchens and he opened the door for me, just like a butler opening the door for a lady. He didn’t try to step inside.

‘Mr Webber’s quite the man,’ he said, and I nodded. ‘He’s with Mr Dryer and some other gentlemen, but as soon as he’s free I’ll tell him you’re here.’

I don’t know if I replied, because that moment I stepped inside the room and first thing I saw was Tom’s razor beside the ewer and his old, familiar hat upon a chair. I felt as if I’d had a poke in the eye. As soon as the cull shut the door I went to the chair to put my hand to the hat, but before I could reach it I spied Tom’s shirt, left on the bed in an uneven fold, and so picked up that. It smelled so familiar that I had to put it from me and sit on the bed’s edge. My husband was that moment making conversation with a bunch of swells – on the eve of his fight for all England. Here I sat, in this strange London room, in a dress too fine for me. I thought of how much had changed, since Mr Dryer sent me to fight at the fair. I was rageful then and my hands curled into fists, but I couldn’t have said who I clenched them for.

I waited like that all evening, it seemed like. I opened the door and listened out for voices but I got nothing at all. I paced about that room, picking up all Tom’s things in turn and then placing them back, as careful as a sneak-thief, though he’d never have minded. At last I washed my face, my arms, my legs, and dried myself on a rag, all of it quick, in fear that Tom’s first sight of me would be my bare arse crouching over the basin. I put my fine gown back on and spent an age fussing with it, to get the skirts to sit straight. Then I had nothing to do but stare out the narrow window at the view, which was only a slice of a bare courtyard, a brick wall and the corner of what might’ve been the privy. My thoughts went around like pugs circling each other; he’d never come, he must come, he’d come every minute, oh, he’d never come!

Then the step on the stair, and my heart squeezed itself almost shut; I’d never have mistaken it. I heard him cough halfway down and it was my own Tom’s cough. I couldn’t have said how it differed to any other cull’s, but it did. I heard him hesitate outside the door and I didn’t know what to do with myself. Should I stand, or sit? My face wouldn’t settle.

Then he was there, bigger and more real and exactly the same as I remembered him, all at once. He crossed the room in two steps and swept me into his arms before I could turn queer. He smelled of sweat and sawdust and beer. His jaw bumped against mine as though we’d forgotten how kisses were to be done.

He held me tight and then put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me out a little to look at me.

‘That dress looks well on you.’ He went as pink as he’d done as a lad.

‘Thank you for it,’ I said.

‘You’re welcome. I wanted to send you more. After tomorrow I’ll buy you anything you can think of. You’re thinner, Ruthie. I hope you’ve been eating well.’

I could feel my smile grow tight. Tom let my shoulders go, sat and pulled me onto his lap. I let him tell me all about his training and the bouts he’d fought, the swells who’d shaken his hand. I couldn’t be as easy as he wished me, nor as I wished I could. At last I stood and walked about while he talked. He talked on, only leaning forward in his chair and following me with his head. He scarce noticed I didn’t reply. The beef he’d eaten, the places he’d seen, the hits he’d taken and dealt out to others. And oh, Mr Mendoza, he had to tell me all about that. The fellow was so small, you’d never guess he’d been Champion in his time, and he’d had the grace to tell Tom all kinds of tricks. He’d been his trainer for all of a week and then he’d gone back to prison, or some such. I barely listened, only looked at how Tom’s face was lit with it.

At last he grew weary of my pacing and tried to pull me back to him. I let him take my wrist and stood before him but I didn’t sit on his knee again.

‘What ails you, Ruthie? I’ve been waiting to tell you all this! You hardly heed me.’

How could I say that I hated to hear Tom sing the praises of that useless clotpole, Mendoza, who’d let himself be carted off to prison when Tom needed him the most. Again, my husband was bending to kiss the boots of cullies who weren’t worth half what he was; cullies who’d kept me away from his side and filled his head so full of puff that he forgot to think of me. The very sound of Mendoza’s name made my stomach drop. Mr Dryer’s name was worse; my stomach felt the same and my fists itched with it.

‘I’m only weary,’ I said.

He took me to bed then and I tried to be soft when he put his hands to me. It was a strange, far-away kind of love, as though my heart was fallen down a well. He couldn’t reach me, or perhaps I’d not let him. He only kissed me and sighed and murmured as he always did. I wanted to weep that he’d not noticed, but the weeping piece of me was as far off as the loving piece.