Fair Fight (8 page)

Only Perry’s younger sister, Miss Charlotte, survived and she was left scarred. When the pox descended Mr and Mrs Sinclair had been from home, visiting near relations, and so were saved. As soon as the house was declared safe, Perry’s parents returned to bury their children and wished him home. A manservant was dispatched to fetch him.

What a strange, mixed burden for my friend to bear. He had lost two siblings in one swoop, and yet as the only remaining son, he could suddenly expect to be lord of a great estate. He would not speak much, only said that he was not sure that he wanted to go from school. We both wept, I know, though we took care to do it privately. Perry, I suppose, wept for his brother and his pretty sister, but I – well, I wept secretly and selfishly, and cursed the fates on my own account that I should be parted from him.

My new bedfellow was a fifteen-year-old merchant’s son by the name of Granville Dryer. When first he was shown into my room my heart sank to see him. He was very thin and pale, with the most serious expression imaginable – the very opposite of the sturdy and smiling boy he came to replace.
No fun shall be had here
, I thought.

Granville was not of good stock, being the son of a merchant made rich by trade. Bristol was built on trade, of course, but in the case of the Dryers the wealth was so newly acquired that the family still had the scent of bread-and-dripping dinners hanging about them. His mother dressed like a maid got into the clothes-press of her mistress; a muddle of lace and bright silks. Her son, by contrast, looked quite the little puritan, with his plain buckles upon his shoes and his unadorned coat. Here I mean plainly cut, not unadorned in the modern, natural style – the tailor’s scissors had been guided by the word ‘serviceable’ rather than ‘fashionable’. This grieved me for two reasons; I didn’t like to go about with him, dressed as he was, and it was only by his own perverse nature that he wore it. His mother bewailed it at every visit, brushing at his coat as though she could wipe the austerity from it.

‘Why will you not wear the frockcoat I sent you?’ she would scold.

Granville would only stand and wait for her temper to run its short course. When later I glimpsed the lamented frockcoat I better understood his disinclination. It looked like the kind of gold-braided thing one’s father would have worn and thought himself the dandy.

At night, listening to Granville’s quiet breathing, I ached for Perry, his warm bulk and familiar snores. I missed everything about him; I would have given anything to be scratched by Perry’s over-long toenails, or have to wrest back the blankets that he had stolen.

Prize-fighting was the only subject which could move Granville Dryer to animation. He had persuaded his father and Mr Allen to allow him a subscription to
Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal
, from which he carefully cut the sporting pages. These he would peruse in whatever leisure time was afforded us, which did not make for merry company. I could only inspire the cove to converse by asking him about the pugs he admired, at which point he would begin an enthusiastic sermon scarcely less dull than his silence. I thought him the most tedious creature imaginable. I was wrong, however – Granville Dryer was up to his eyes in vice, quite as deeply as Perry and me. He merely had an unattractive coat upon his back to hide it.

One morning, Granville and I sat idly in the garden, upon one of the few benches placed there, trying to eke what warmth there was to be had from the weak March sunshine. The benches were exclusively the province of us older boys and I still enjoyed the novelty, having so recently been one of those obliged to always sit upon the wall, which was not allowed and likely to land a boy a whipping. Granville, having arrived at the school at the advanced age of fifteen, could not appreciate what privilege we enjoyed. Now he was seated as straight-backed as if he were at church, his sporting pages open upon his knee and his gaze as intent as if he had not read their contents a thousand times before. I was lazily observing a game of shuttlecocks being played only a few feet away by two of the younger boys. They were hopeless players, each spending more time running after the cock than hitting it. When one of the hapless creatures managed to hit the thing straight into Granville’s lap he leapt as though stung. I laughed aloud, so rarely had I seen his discomposure rattled. Granville’s glare swung between myself, so evidently enjoying his moment of indignity, and the urchin who’d placed him there. It settled on the boy. The bantling looked ready to soil his breeches at having those sobering eyes light upon him.

‘What do you mean by throwing this thing at me?’ Granville asked.

‘Please, sir, it was his fault,’ the boy replied, pointing at his fellow.

The other boy gaped at the injustice done him.

‘You scaly gull! You hit it so skewed I could not help it!’

‘Well now,’ Granville said, ‘suppose we can find a means by which we decide which one of you whelps is to blame. George? Are you agreed?’

‘Certainly,’ I replied, without the faintest notion of what he meant. I was desperate for any kind of lark.

‘Then let us have you brats set to.’ Granville stood and moved purposefully toward the boys. ‘The loser shall bear the consequence.’

They shrank back and it was clear enough by their faces that they expected him to strike them. Instead he drew a line in the hard mud with the toe of his boot. Then he moved forward perhaps two feet, obliging the first boy to leap out of his path, and drew another.

‘What are you about, Dryer?’ I called.

‘Providing you some sport, Bowden,’ he replied. ‘This shall be scratch. To your lines, gentlemen.’

By this time the boys had understood what was coming.

The smaller of the two said, ‘Please, sir, I don’t want to fight.’

‘What, even though this jackanapes threw the blame upon you? And you,’ Granville turned to the other, ‘this boy called you a scaly gull. If that is not enough to spur on your fists, think you both upon this; either you stand up against each other or my dear friend George Bowden and I will whip you until you wish you had.’

Here Granville winked at me. I was delighted with this new side to him and thrust myself up from the bench, crying, ‘By Jove, yes!’

The two boys shuffled themselves up to their lines.

‘I’ll lay sixpence on the smaller one,’ I said, for I had thought he had showed spirit in shouting out the ‘scaly gull’ comment with such vim. We were allowed to have coins by then, being considered to be of a responsible age.

‘Done,’ Granville said.

By now we had summoned a smallish crowd and a few more bets were placed by other boys.

Granville called out, ‘Set to!’

In truth the bout was a damp one. Neither boy was particularly eager to strike his fellow, but in the end my coin proved well placed. My little squeaker got Granville’s boy in a fairly respectable neck vice from which the other could only pummel his back and legs with ineffectual fists.

Granville was shouting out all the while, ‘Strike the backs of his knees! Bring your arm around, you clunch!’

The fight lasted no more than a few moments; one of the servants spied our play from the window and before any real hits were made Mr Allen was striding across the yard and pulling the boys apart by their ears.

‘You young gentlemen,’ he turned to Granville and me, ‘should be putting a stop to this kind of mischief.’

‘Yes, sir,’ we chorused.

Mr Allen dragged the two young pugs off to have their posteriors thrashed. Granville’s lad, the larger, looked at us as though we might plead his cause. The other only looked at the ground.

‘You owe me a sixpence,’ I said to Granville, ‘short as that was.’

Granville reached into his pocket. He had only fourpence and a piece of biscuit wrapped in a scrap of paper. I accepted it as being good enough.

‘Next time, I shan’t accept a wager from you until I have seen the coin.’

‘Next time we’ll have them fight in one of the bedchambers, shall we?’ he replied. ‘With a sentry at the door?’

In that moment he became, if not such an agreeable companion as Perry had been, at least a satisfactory one.

It was Granville who instigated our surreptitious excursions – something that Perry and I had never thought to do. We escaped not, as one might have thought, at night – we were too thoroughly locked into the place for that – but in the one hour’s leisure time we were granted after dinner. The way out was simple; over the wall behind the washhouse and into a narrow alley stinking of fish and waste, from which we were free to roam the city of Bristol for the best part of a glorious, liberated hour.

It was during these free hours that I discovered Granville’s other prevailing vice – the boy, staid as he looked, was absolutely gripped by the pursuit of skirt. Granville, even at the tender age of fifteen, spent every spare penny he could find on the strolling mollies of the docks. As green as I sound by it, this was another activity that I had not thought to try. I had been used to Perry and had never thought to look elsewhere, but in the face of Granville’s experience I found there was the same hot shame and joy in the rough hands of a trollop as there had been in my friend’s soft pink palm.

‘They are all clapped to the eyes,’ Granville said, ‘but you need not fear their hands. It is the only worthwhile advice my father ever gave me.’

I spent that summer at Aubyn Hall. I was anxious all the journey. How would Perry receive me, after so long apart? Would things be altered between us? Perhaps I, myself, had been changed by having known the touch of a woman. I could not be sure.

In the event, as I should have guessed, it was Perry who was changed. His merry ways had quite left him. He did not speak of his pain at losing his brother and sister, but I saw it in his sudden silences, his gritted jaw.

The anxiety, which had felt like a bird trapped in my chest, was only stilled in the dark, when we clasped hands and swore fidelity once more. We slept in the same bed, as we had at school. No one thought to tell us we might not.

For her part, Miss Charlotte Sinclair was grown as quiet as Arthur had used to be. I was so deprived of feminine company that even in her melancholy I found her a pleasure to the eye, and when she could be persuaded to speak, to the ear. She was scarred about the face but was handsome despite it. Poor Miss Sinclair’s scars were a constant reminder of Perry’s good fortune in being at school when the pox descended. I thanked God for sparing him.

However much Perry and I might have wished our friendship to remain the same, it could not, because we were not. We were no longer equals in situation and standing; Perry was never a boy inclined to humility, and despite his grief he could not help now but make me feel it. We no longer talked of being pirates. Instead, Perry made fierce, expansive plans and I was only to assist him in them. I was still a schoolboy, bending over to receive stripes across my buttocks, while Perry was brought wine and bowed to.

Perry might be bowed to by servants but he was not caressed by painted ladies. Back at school that autumn, Granville and I were relentless in our pursuit of funds for this purpose. We challenged the younger boys to place wagers on anything we could conceive, in order to relieve them of their property, so that we might pawn it. We wrote letters home plaintively telling of lost purses, and we pawned what few items of value we had of our own; on my part, a pen from my father and a particularly good handkerchief my mother had given me, on Granville’s, that gold-braided frockcoat at last found some use at the pawnbroker’s.

One day our wanders took us past the yard of The Hatchet Inn, where a prize-fighting ring could be glimpsed over the fence of the yard.

Granville stopped to look upon it, empty as it was, and urgently insisted that we go inside. I followed him, quailing a little at walking through the company of dockers and sailors.

Once in the yard, Granville pushed himself up to the ropes and took up a handful of the sawdust and held it to his nose.

‘What does it smell of?’ I asked him.

‘Action,’ he said. He held it out to me and I dutifully bent my nose to it. The scent of action was remarkably similar to that of old sawdust.

That winter Perry’s family came to Queen Square, on the very day that school was to close for the Christmas holidays. I was delighted; I had long hoped my two friends might meet. The Sinclairs very generously offered both Granville and me a room for the night, and so it was arranged.

The meeting was not an immediate success. Granville’s costume looked even more austere in the Sinclairs’ elegant drawing room and his manners could not be said to compensate. He greeted Mr Sinclair with a bow so small that he might have had an iron rod down the back of his coat. Toward Mrs Sinclair he did a little better, taking her hand and bending from the waist, but he could not meet her eyes. I could see her looking him over with a gentle expression of surprise. Perhaps his strange manner was due to intimidation at their rank; perhaps he thought he was maintaining his own dignity in refusing to fawn upon them. He did himself no favour by it and only appeared utterly charmless. Mr and Mrs Sinclair were gracious enough, but I thought they were surprised at me for choosing such a companion and my ears burnt to know it.

Perry himself was less than delighted; at the first opportunity he pulled me aside and whispered, ‘By God, George, what do we want with this queer creature?’

‘He is not so strange at school,’ was all the reply I had. I felt as humiliated as if Granville had forced me into his ugly coat and it had been I, behaving so ungraciously to my hosts.

‘What do I care if he is the Prince of Wales at school? What do you mean by bringing him? Are you so attached to him that you cannot bear to be parted? Have you shared a bed so long?’

I would have laughed, but for the pain on my old friend’s face.

‘Good God, no!’ I cried instead, loud enough that Granville, who was looking out of a window at the pleasant square, looked over at us. He must have suspected we were speaking of him.