Fair Fight (35 page)

Afterward I turned away, but Tom only moved close behind me and wrapped me in his arms.

‘I’ve missed that,’ he said, ‘and I’ve missed this. I’ve been picturing you, all alone in that big bed and wondering if you slept sweetly, and how you did.’

‘You’ve no notion how I’ve done, for you ain’t asked,’ I said.

Tom’s hold on me tightened.

‘Tell me all you’ve done,’ he said, warm in my ear.

‘You won’t believe me,’ I said. I felt queer, hateful and weepy together. I didn’t know if I should keep silent, I didn’t know if I could bear him to touch me, and yet I wanted to turn into his arms and cling to him like ivy.

‘I’ve been teaching Henry to fight,’ I said, at last.

‘Blushing Henry? Have you, then? Is he good?’

‘He’s fair.’

‘I’m glad you’ve had diversion, Ruthie.’

‘I’ve been teaching Mrs Dryer, the same.’ My heart began beating hard; I was surprised he didn’t feel it thumping against his bare arm.

‘Mrs Dryer? I don’t follow. D’you mean she shows you, how to be a lady?’

‘I teach her, to be less of a lady.’

‘I don’t follow you,’ he said again.

‘I’ve taught her to box.’

‘You have taught her . . .!’

‘She pays me two shillings a time.’

‘Have you run mad?’ Tom released me and rolled onto his back. ‘Mr Dryer won’t like this.’

‘Mr Dryer needn’t know. Mr Dryer left me to starve.’

‘He’ll be hopping when he hears of it. Why’ve you done this, Ruth? You’ll spoil everything. We’ve only to bow to him one more day and we’ll be rich and free. I can’t fathom you.’

‘I can’t fathom you! Did you not hear me? He left me there to starve.’

‘He brought us more than we could eat.’

‘He brought
you
food! You! That was gone as soon as you were. I’d nothing, Tom. You can’t imagine.’

‘Mr Dryer won’t have meant you to be hungry. I’d warrant his servants were to blame, through pure idleness.’

‘What, do you worship him so?’

Tom only made a sorry noise and got out of bed. I didn’t try to hold him. I lay and stared evils at the wall. I heard the creak of the chair as he settled into it.

Neither of us spoke for a long while.

At last I said to the wall, ‘You should be glad I’ve saved a purse for us. Unless you like being beholden to Mr Dryer so much.’

‘I won’t be beholden after the morrow,’ he said, ‘and all you’ve shown me is that you’re faithless. You’ve saved against my losing! You shouldn’t have even come here. I wish you hadn’t, I swear home.’

What could I say, after that? I only lay and felt my eyes burn. At long last, Tom rose from the chair and I felt the bed buck and settle as he got into it beside me. I felt myself stiffen and he must’ve felt it too.

‘Don’t fret – I ain’t about to touch you. I’m only in bed because tomorrow signifies too high that I’d lose sleep for you.’

He seemed to sleep straight away. I lay wakeful for what seemed the whole night long. It can’t have been, mind, for then it was morning and I was waking.

I count that morning as one of the worst I’ve spent my life long. I woke to find Tom lying beside me, staring up at the ceiling, where a spider of cracks danced across the plaster. He’d not smile and, for my own part, I found I couldn’t make my hand reach for him.

He swung out of bed without a kiss for me – he’d never risen without one, in all our marriage. If I were sleeping I’d still feel his lips upon my cheek before he heaved himself up and if I were the one to rise first, I’d do the same, and lay a kiss on his sleeping face. A small thing, the lack of a kiss, but it felt like a fib to my stomach. I raised my head as he began to move and when he didn’t turn to place his lips on mine, but swung his legs from beneath the blankets, showing me his broad back, I caught my breath with the surprise of it.

I lay and watched him stretch out, grimacing as his muscles crackled with stiffness; a feeling I knew so well that I near felt it in my own limbs. The ceiling was too low for him to stretch fully upright but he did the best he could in the space, pushing his palms against the cracked plaster and arching his back. He didn’t once look at me.

I held the covers tight under my chin and when he did turn, I couldn’t speak. The worst of it was that I could see how I’d hurt him but I couldn’t show him my own raw heart. I could only give him a tight little smile and curse myself. Tom looked at me sadly.

‘You can’t help your own feelings, Ruth,’ he said, as though I’d spoken. ‘I can only try now to prove you wrong.’

If I’d been a different woman, I’d have clutched at him and wept. Instead I could only say, ‘Can it ever be wrong to take care of what may come?’ with an ache in my guts.

So the morning went on, in a kind of dull agony. Tom and I’d never had such ill feeling between us. I didn’t know how to begin to mend it.

When I slipped off my dressing gown, my first gift from Tom’s success, I felt as though it was our luck that I took from my body and left crumpled on the blankets.

We breakfasted in our room and in silence. A maid with red hair and freckles so close they’d formed blotches, brought us a tray of victuals and didn’t know whether to curtsey. She’d likely never served a breakfast in servants’ quarters before. In the end she bobbed a little on her pins and looked so fuddled that I did the same, which made her shake her head, as though she’d water in her ears. I was devilish glad when the door shut behind her.

I took the tray and put it on the chair, there being no table, and then I took a bowl of porridge from it and a cup of small ale and handed them to my husband. I didn’t know if I offered them in penance or not; I only felt heavy. Tom took them and thanked me in a quiet voice but then spooned his porridge so slow that I couldn’t bear it. He kept his eyes on his bowl. I thought he’d a nervous stomach, and that here was a place we could understand one another, but no matter how I looked at him, his eyes wouldn’t rise to mine.

At last the maid came back and said, ‘You’re to go upstairs, the master says.’

You could see she’d thought it over and wished she’d not bent her knees to us.

‘Right, then. Best we get on,’ Tom said, standing as slow as he’d spooned his breakfast.

The coach was waiting in the yard. Tom and I looked at each other, then, because we didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We were so evenly matched for nerves – I could see it in his eyes – that I felt a wash of calm. Then he turned away and only stood, shifting from foot to foot, and the calm drained away. I felt a great despair come over my head like a hangman’s hood. We stood there, Tom shifting, and I blind with misery, for Lord knows how long, till at last Mr and Mrs Dryer stepped out into the yard.

If I’d thought myself twisted up before, now my heart turned into a churning thing I had no hold on, like a river in flood. Mrs Dryer met my eyes and the gladness in her own at seeing me was so clear, I suddenly felt all the tears I’d held come rushing to my throat in a straining fist. Then I saw how Mr Dryer’s eyes flickered past me without even a nod and how he looked Tom over, like a horse-dealer checking a nag, and I felt hatred strong enough to fold my knees. This got all tangled with the weeping, and for one moment I thought I’d fall down in a faint. Then the hate came to the fore and I clung to it like a branch, and was glad of it. I stared at the side of Mr Dryer’s face and wished him dead. He was lucky indeed I’d not the power to grant it.

We were all to ride in the same carriage. Mr Dryer held the door open for his wife and they stepped inside. Then he leaned out and called, ‘Come, Webber,’ like a cully calling a dog.

Tom didn’t even look shamed to follow. He held the door open for me, and I might then have looked him in the eye, but I was riding the fury and couldn’t think of anything else.

We sat opposite the Dryers, them facing forward and Tom and I travelling backward. I didn’t stroke the seat this time. I barely looked at them at all. I’d no room left in me for thinking of trifling things. I could feel fear start up and try to take down my rage, but I’d not give it up. I dug my nails into my palms and stared at Mr Dryer’s legs and hated him as hard as ever I could. When at last the sight of his legs made me feel queasy, I looked instead at Mrs Dryer’s feet, almost touching my own. At last I raised my eyes quickly to her face, just to make sure of her. I was glad that I couldn’t speak to her. I’d never have known what to say. It was a comfort, though, to have her there and know she’d kept an even greater secret from her husband than ever I’d done.

She held her head very high and looked about herself, out of the window and upon us all, devilish bold. She’d covered the last of her bruises with her paint, but they were there if you knew where to look, swimming faint beneath the surface like fish in a duckpond. She wore gloves, but I thought from the careful way she held her hands that they were tender, and I wondered if she’d been fibbing at a bolster again. She’d covered her poor hair with a bonnet.

Tom’s shoulder shrank away from mine and he kept his eyes shut fast. Every so often Mr Dryer made some half-witted comment, on the rain being likely to hold off, or my husband’s bloom of health, each time bringing fresh hatred, like bile, to my mouth. Tom stayed silent. Each time Mr Dryer spoke my husband winced and his eyes squeezed even tighter, forming wrinkles across his cheeks that I’d been more used to seeing in mirth. His mouth was so tight that he’d lost his lips.

I might’ve expected Mr Dryer to be vexed at being so unheeded but instead, he grew ever more cheerful; he’d not be quiet a moment. I’d never seen him like it. It was dreadful to be shut up with this babbling fool, my husband sitting rigid, and I quivering with words unspoken. I had to wind my fingers tight together to prevent them flying out to touch Tom’s arm, the veins that coiled like ropes. He was as far from me as if he’d taken his corner already; I could do nothing but watch. The fear was gaining ground over the hatred, made all the worse through Mr Dryer’s flapping chops. He was cheering from the ringside, as useless as I, and Tom was left to do what he could by his fists. None of us would be able to stand beside him when it signified. Though I’d barely eaten, my stomach rolled like a sailor’s walk.

Too soon, and after an age, we reached Wimbledon Common. It was said afterward that the crowd that day numbered twenty-five thousand. I didn’t stop to count, and so must believe it. I know that when I first saw the fancy gathered there, the great number of horses bearing gents in tall hats, I felt as though I’d any moment see what little breakfast I’d eaten drop onto the turf.

I’d not known anything, I’d had no notion of what a mill this was to be. There were reporters there from the London newspapers, ready to write down each fib and poke. There were any number of swells, as I’ve said. Worst of all, most of all, there was the Duke of Clarence in a seat at the ringside, with his men gathered round him. I didn’t know who he was then, thanks be. I’d have dropped, to know that royalty had turned out to watch my Tom fight.

Through the carriage window the press of people seemed a cauldron at the simmer; thousands of shifting, bobbing heads packed tight under the grey sky. I thought they’d the air of a crowd before a hanging. At a very little distance, stark against the sky, the gibbet stood clear to see; a last skeleton left forever hanging in his chains. He swung in the winter wind, rags a-fluttering, as though he, too, was fretting after the Championship.

‘Well,’ Mr Dryer said, ‘here we are, eh, Webber?’

No one said a word.

No sooner were we climbed down, than we found ourselves encircled by culls, sent there by Mr Dryer to meet us. They all hailed Tom and to my surprise he greeted them in his usual easy way. Only his tight shoulders showed his nerves. He didn’t introduce me.

Within this circle we were hurried through the crowd, the men calling, ‘Tom Webber, coming this way! Make way for the next Champion of England!’

The crowd craned to look. The boos and cheers turned into one great sound that beat at my ears like wings.

I was beginning to feel a strange calm, not unlike the hush that came over me in the ring when I knew myself about to take a basting. I looked at Tom’s back as he walked, his head a little bowed, and wished him strength. I wished he might know how much I loved him. The crowd were nothing, hooting beasts, they might all rot, they didn’t signify. Their noise ebbed from my ears till I felt I could hear my husband’s every step crunch upon the frosty grass, his breaths ragged in his throat.

We passed men and women, quality and common. We passed folks selling ale and hot potatoes, and braziers ringed with people warming their hands. There were voices, lifted in song. And through them all we walked, in our circle of guards, and me in my bubble of quiet and fright.

We walked to the ring and it wasn’t till we reached it that I remembered what we came for. I saw the ring, and something in me woke up and shook itself.
Why
, I thought,
Tom will win it, surely. Tom’s scarce lost a fight his whole life long
.

I could see Tom thought the same. He straightened up and began to look about him and flex his fists.

The ropes marked out a square of the frozen turf, not raised at all. Most of this vast crowd never would see a moment of the goings-on, except those who’d pushed to the front, and the gents on their raised benches and on horseback.

The beefy culls around Mrs Dryer and me ushered us toward a row of wooden stools, against one side of the ring. I looked once at the stools and when I looked back Tom had been parted from us, swept to his corner and over the ropes, like a lone sailor in a life raft.

‘Shall we sit?’ Mrs Dryer asked me.

I shrugged, but did as she said; there was nothing else to do but sit. Some of the culls who’d swept us there stood behind us, to keep the crowd from falling on our necks.

I was glad to be out of the press of the crowd, but now it seemed that everyone towered over us. The noise had begun to pound against my ears again and no one had even begun to cheer yet.

Tom had been joined in the ring by Mr Dryer and two other culls, his second and his bottle-holder, I knew they must be. I didn’t know either one of them and it seemed devilish queer that it should be they, who could’ve been anyone, rather than me there beside him. All four of them came toward us, sitting as we were by Tom’s corner. We were separated then only by the ropes; I could’ve stood from my seat and touched Tom’s arm, if I’d a mind to. I looked up at my husband’s face, which was grown boyish and wide-eyed, like a child told a moral tale meant to give fright. I wondered then what those culls were whispering, to make him look so.