Fair Fight (5 page)

She looked hard at me then, as though I’d gasp in shock or gratitude. I was still a convent girl, mind. As much as she and Mr Dryer might be perched together acting the part of Ma and father, they’d never give me up in so easy and usual a fashion. I didn’t feel surprised or thankful. I felt only a sickness start up in the pit of my belly. Tom looked as though he wished himself gone.

‘Tom’s agreed to the terms. He’ll work for me, here in the house. When he’s earned back what I’ve laid out for your keep and the earnings I give up by losing you, then you’ll be married. Mr Dryer will keep you on; should you begin losing your fights, Tom will have to make up that loss as well. Marriage cannot break your bond to Mr Dryer. That will end only when he says so, unless you or Tom can clear your debt of years. Tom understands this.’

Tom only looked miserable. How well did he know then what he’d done? He’d gone to ask for my freedom and instead he’d sold himself.

‘Don’t look so, Ruth,’ Ma said now. ‘You’re thinking that it will take years for Tom to pay back what I’d lose.’

I wasn’t, I was only thinking how sorry he looked and how dearly he must wish he’d never met me. My eyes found the child in mourning dress, looking out of her little picture. Her eyes were nothing to Tom’s.

‘I’ve considered that,’ Ma said, ‘and he may have you now. Jane will move into the garret and you can make yourselves a room together in the cellar. Your married home,’ here she laughed. ‘Tom will begin work tonight and later he’ll have what he’s come asking for. Now, you’ve a bout tonight, Mr Dryer tells me, so go and do whatever it is you do to ready yourself. Your husband will stay here and learn the ways of the house.’

And so it was that at thirteen or fourteen I was given to Tom in Ma’s parlour, and bound together more tightly than we’d ever have been in a church. Mr Dryer said not a word throughout.

As dawn came that morning we had our first kiss, in the dark of the cellar, on bed linen already clammy from the damp of the air. I whispered to him how sorry I was. I called him a fool.

‘I’m your fool now,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ll not be sorry any longer.’

‘You’re a dear fool,’ I said, and he kissed me again. His lips were salty and softer than I’d thought.

We lay still a long time. I, with my head on his chest, he with his arm about my shoulders, both of us still fully clothed and on top of the blankets. I’d never been held so by anyone before. The closest I’d come was when Dora would push against my back for warmth in winter. When I was sure Tom was asleep, and just as sure that I’d lie wakeful all the night long, I felt his breath stir against my hair.

‘I meant to take you out of here,’ he whispered. He said it so soft I knew he thought me sleeping. He said it like a private thing.

I thought,
Now it’s I who’ll have to take us both out of here
. I’d never considered before that such a thing might be done but in that moment I swore it; Tom mustn’t stay in the convent to have the goodness bled from him drop by drop. I’d take him out. I felt the wish to save him and keep him good burn so fiercely in my mind that I’d have found it unbearable then, if I’d known; five years on would find nothing much changed and the damp of the cellar grown deep in our lungs.

3

I
say that nothing much changed, but time never will stand still. Dora was delivered of a boy, the first boy we ever kept – girls Ma had tried sometimes to keep as being useful later, though Dora and I were the only ones to live long. This boy Dora thought Mr Dryer’s own son, and so he was kept and named Jack. Mr Dryer certainly thought Jacky his own. He dandled the thing upon his knee and bought it all manner of frills and blankets. Dora only looked at it when Mr Dryer visited; the rest of the time it passed from hand to hand, cooed over by whichever of the misses was bored. Most often it was left to scream itself quiet in the garret. I’d never minded infants one way or the other but Jacky wasn’t what you’d call sweet. He was thin and squirming and yellowish pale. He did nothing but shriek or stare. I left him to the other girls and when Dora tried to pass him to me I said, ‘I thought you’d a mind that this one should live,’ and she’d let me be.

Even when he grew, he stayed thin and yellow. He was a sidling, spying creature and moved about the place in much the way the rats did; he roamed everywhere, but still you barely saw him, and when you did it was a nasty little shock. When Mr Dryer called and had a mind to see the brat, he’d have to be found and made nice. As the years passed, Mr Dryer’s interest seemed only to grow as everyone else’s waned. By the time Jacky was four Mr Dryer had him fibbing at the dummy in the yard, though you could tell, even then, that he’d no talent for it. He’d hit it away alright, but when the dummy swung toward him Jacky would shriek and jump backwards as if it meant to fib him back. Mr Dryer would cuff him around the ear then, and Jacky would shriek anew. When Mr Dryer wasn’t cursing Jacky for his cowardice against a dummy, he was using him as a little footman. He liked Jacky to bring a tray, with rum in two glasses for himself and Dora and a bowl of perfumed water, to wash his goaty face and hands once he’d done with my sister. Anyone else would’ve jibbed at being treated so, but Jacky panted like a dog and ran to fetch the tray the moment Mr Dryer’s boot touched the step.

Tom and I expected to have a babber of our own, but we never did. I couldn’t say I was sorry, though Tom, I thought, would’ve liked to play the daddy. We never talked of it, for what would be the use? I supposed that part of me was broke, along with my teeth and knuckles.

Ma, in this time, had grown so weak that she sat abed all day, shouting for one or another of us from her pillow and only heaving herself up occasionally to stump about the house, leaning upon her stick, peering at the misses through swollen eyes. She did this even when it made her wince and moan, even when it took her an age to climb the stairs. She drooled in great quantities – caused by the mercury treatments for her sickness, but none the less ugsome. Her face grew steadily more lumpen, her gait skewed. She brought to mind an old hound with a leg missing. Her suspicions were grown as wild as her mind was grown addled, so that she might accuse Dora of holding coins back and never see that she was quite brazenly wearing Ma’s own comb in her hair.

Dora was mistress of the house in all ways that signified. If Ma gave an order my sister didn’t like, what then could Ma do to make her biddable? Even the bullies never would go near to Ma’s bedside unless sent there by Dora. Slowly, we all felt the changes trickle through the house. At table Ma could no longer stand long enough, nor hold her hand steady enough, to wield the ladle. She only sat, muttering even while she ate. Dora didn’t use food the way that Ma had, as punishment or reward. As soon as my sister had served herself she wasn’t fashed who else might have not enough or too much. She swung her ladle with a sloppy, distracted hand. It wasn’t just, but it set us all a little freer.

Tom worked the door every night, staying up till dawn to keep the misses safe and the cullies calm. Dora liked to use me as more than just a threat, which was all our Ma had ever done. Ma was always happy to take a stick to a girl’s head herself, but Dora didn’t tend that way. The first time she ordered me to beat a miss, a shivering creature who’d run off still wearing the silks the convent lent her and been dragged back, that first time I looked at her and said, ‘What shall I have for it?’

‘Oh, I don’t care,’ Dora said. ‘Take the cut she would’ve kept for herself tonight. It’ll teach her to mind.’

‘Then you’d better take the silks from her back or they really will be spoiled,’ I said.

In truth I didn’t beat her hard, though you’d not think it to hear her. That shivering girl put six shillings and eight into my hand that night and it was the most I’d been allowed to keep for myself for years. After that I played Dora’s beating hand whenever she needed. I began to keep back some of the money from my mills. Whereas Ma had been sharp and wary, my sister was too lazy to quarrel with me over it. She’d rule the girls with a fist of iron because she’d Tom and me to do it for her, but she couldn’t ask us to watch ourselves.

We needed that money; though Ma hadn’t liked to give away a penny, she’d bought the things we needed, our bread and blankets. Dora wouldn’t stir herself to see to any of that. I bought what we must have and I saved where I could, and slowly I built a hidden purse, which was only what I should always have had. In my mind I kept it either to buy my freedom from Mr Dryer, or more likely, to run away with Tom.

Then the day came that Dora took it into her head to have Ma’s room for her own. Tom carried Ma upstairs kicking and shrieking and all the house saw it. Ma lived in the garret then, and all her hold over us was lost. The staircase to the garret was so steep and rickety that Ma could barely manage it; soon enough she never came down at all and her only care was that she be kept well dosed with her medicines. Jacky took to hiding up there with her, and would run for whatever she bid him fetch.

The year of 1799, when I turned nineteen, was a hard one even for us in the convent, who never did feel hard times like most. Some folks blamed the war with France and others said the crops had failed. All we really knew was that each day the bread was dearer and yet less like something you’d want to eat. The gents still came to call, but were closer with their purses; the price of living had risen for everyone. You’d only to step outside to see the hunger carved into the people’s faces. We had more than most folk about us but still there were nights when I woke with my belly clenched like a fist. This, despite dipping into my little purse of savings, that’s how dear flour was then. It was bitter to be watching it drip away on bread and still to go about hungry. I dipped and it dripped and at last it was gone and we’d nothing but what we could earn by the day, or what Dora gave us. I won’t list here half the lengths we went to, to scrape a meal from turnips and barley and sometimes peas. I’ll only tell that the urchins on our lane came home with handfuls of nettles for their pot and seeing this, I went right out after them and gathered my own, coated though they were with muck from the river.

On the last day of August, Tom and I were fencing with wooden bills in the yard. We did this to keep me quick on my pins and had been doing it so long that now we parried and thrust like a country dance laid out, barely ever landing a hit. My husband – I called him so and always had, though we’d never been married before God – was nimble for his size. There was something comic about such a bull-beef cull bobbing on his toes; something comic and beautiful both, to my eyes.

Tom’s mug was red but his breath came evenly and his eyes were fixed on the bill in my hand in a way that would’ve made me fearful, had we been milling in earnest. He had to lean down to meet my stick with his own and his huge frame bobbing and bending so, he always put me in mind of a bear.

I thrust toward him and he put out his bill to hit my own away but as he did, Dora screeched my name from the doorway behind him. Sometimes my sister had a voice on her like a pig at slaughter. Tom half turned in surprise and in so doing thumped me, not upon the bill, but the fingers, just above the second joint. I cursed aloud.

Tom span back to me.

‘Bloody damn,’ he said.

‘Never a truer word,’ I said, and held up my hand. Blood was running down my arm and dripping from my elbow in its soft way.

‘Oh, hell, Ruthie.’

‘No matter,’ I said, though it stung like the devil.

‘Let me see,’ Tom took my hand. ‘Oh, it’s a nasty one.’

‘It don’t signify.’

I held my hand out in front of me so that it shouldn’t drip upon our clothes. The drops that fell were straight away eaten by dust and turned into splashes of black mud.

Dora had grown impatient and come toward us. Now she sighed as though my bleeding were a broken plate.

‘Mr Dryer bids me tell you,’ she was looking at me as though I were a sorry child made dirty, ‘that he’ll be taking you to mill at the fair tomorrow. He’s all hot about it, I couldn’t say why. He’ll be vexed indeed if you’ve broken your hand, Ruth. You’d best not have broken it.’

‘The fair!’ Tom said.

‘It ain’t broken,’ I told her, ‘and if I had I couldn’t help it.’

‘As long as you’ve not,’ Dora said. ‘So, will I tell him you’ll do what he asks? He tells me you’d better get ready to put on a good show.’

‘I don’t know what I can do in one night,’ I said, ‘but you may tell him I’ll stand up for him anywhere he chooses.’

‘The fair, Ruth,’ Tom said again.

I smiled at him. I’d not let Dora see my pleasure but oh, I felt it.

‘I told him as much,’ Dora said. ‘I said I needn’t speak to you at all.’

‘Indeed you needn’t, if it’s such labour for you.’ I looked to the air above her head as if it were of more interest than she might hope to be.

‘It ain’t so much labour,’ Dora said, looking again at my arm, which in spite of my holding it out had dripped blood upon my bare and dusty feet, ‘as it is ugly,’ and here she smiled at me as though I were a gent, a wide and maddening smile, and swept away, holding her skirts up more than she need.

Now Tom and I looked at each other and laughed aloud. Dora heard us and, thinking we mocked her, called back that we might go and rot.

‘The fair,’ we both said at once, and he took me into his arms, even knowing as he did that his shirt would have to be scrubbed with salt, to lift out the blood.

St James’ Fair, held every year for the first two weeks of September, was to us what it was to all good Bristolians; the finest time of the year. Oh, there were always those piss-lickers who called for the fair to be outlawed, but come September there it was, fine as fivepence. All the autumns of my life I’d walked beneath the bunting there; it was the best time for the misses to find trade, as good as ten ships of hungry sailors come ashore. When we were younger Dora and I would follow the girls, to find likely lads and help them make the acquaintance of the misses, if they were shy. Always, though, I’d found time to visit the sights of the fair – for what brat wouldn’t? – and the greatest of these by far was the boxing booth. Any time that I could beg the penny entrance, I went in there and gawped like a hayseed. The crowds that gathered would have you shaking your head in wonder, if you could find the room to shake it, so close were they packed. The big-name pugs down from the Fives Court in London would come onto that stage in the evening and show such high displays of science as would have you gasping aloud. Sometimes these London pugs would take on a valiant Charlie from the crowd, and he’d only to stay three rounds to win a shilling. He’d not even to win. I’d been aching for years to throw my hat in the ring at the fair and see if I could stay the three rounds. Mr Dryer had forbidden it, though it was Ma who’d told me that sour piece of news. I was only to watch and learn and take that learning to The Hatchet ring, where Mr Dryer could take a lot more from my mill than a shilling. Now he wasn’t only allowing it but ordering me there. I could scarce believe it and didn’t care the reason.

As low as we lived, and as sinful, we were never in real want; bawdy houses and taverns always will float through the harshest times. This is because those folks as can afford diversion will always want it; the lady boxer may stay afloat too for the same reason, while all about her sink and pull at her skirts.

‘At least something is left, look.’

There was the heel of a loaf in the kitchen. Tom took it up and tore it in two.

I took it from him quick enough. It was as coarse as if it’d been baked with sawdust and nearly as dry. I tipped the last of the milk into a saucer and we took all to the table, to sit and wipe our bread through the milk till it was soft enough that it wouldn’t cut our gums to eat it.

The kitchen was dark but still warm enough; the misses would only have been in bed an hour or so and a grumble of red still showed in the grate. Tom’s face was in shadow. I could see only his shape and the movement of his jaw, working the bread like a cow.

I’d not slept. Tom had found a cull we trusted to take a turn at the door and we’d brought the rushlight to bed at an uncommon hour, midnight or so. I’d meant to rest and rise fresh but habit is a strong master. I lay in the dark with my eyes open and my mind ran on by itself, along dark roads that led to strange places. Above me the sounds of the convent played out, sounds I knew so well that I could near see it all. I might as well have been up there with them all, for all the rest I got. I thought Tom hadn’t been much different, though he did sleep, at last. I lay and listened to his deep, satisfied breathing and by then I was so weary and queer that it seemed he did it just to tease me and I hated him a little.

Now we sat in the dark kitchen with only the sounds our own mouths made upon the bread.

‘I’ve a thrupence kept for gin,’ Tom said. ‘Shall we fetch a dram on our way?’

This was my husband asking if I were fearful.

‘Lord, yes,’ I said.

I was fearful and excited both. This was to be the most significant day of my life; as other girls dream of their wedding day, I’d dreamt of this. Of course I needed gin, to harden my hopes and my fists.

The fair always did have something of the dream about it, laid out always the same, a village of wooden booths and bunting, a full month in the making. This year, the year I was to be part of it, it seemed to me that every fair before it had stirred itself up to form this new one, waiting for the crowds to arrive.