The Town House (8 page)

Kate had said, miserably, that there would be but eleven months difference in the age of our children, in fact there was less than that, for Robin came into the world a little before time, a small, ailing baby, unlike Stephen. When I carried my second son to the Alms Gate I was the subject of coarse jests about being such a quick worker. ‘Do you get any faster,’ one man said, ‘you can knock off work and live on your Trimble.’

This time Kate sold her woollen gown and the hood. Since her place in the woolshed had not been filled, she dragged herself back to work at the end of a week, frail as she was.

‘That way we shall get something in hand,’ she said fiercely. ‘We can save my wage so long as the Trimble lasts. With two to feed – and God knows how many more on the way.…’

‘There’ll be no more, Kate.’ That was a promise which would cost me nothing to keep. I was not like my neighbour Dummy who could go through the performance which ended with a baby feeling nothing for the woman he bedded with. Yet, though our joy in one another had been lost, somewhere between Stephen’s birth and Robin’s, we were still a unit, we two against the world, as helpful to one another as we could be, a good wife, a good husband, good parents so far as our means allowed. Kate still washed and mended and cooked. I mended the roof and hunted for firewood, and every morning and evening I went to the woolshed so that I could carry the heavier child.

On one cold March evening, miserable with falling sleet, I found Kate awaiting me at the gate, with something of liveliness back in her face again. When I went to lift Stephen she stopped me, laying a hand on my arm.

‘The ponies from Bywater have just come in,’ she said, ‘and without Old John. He dropped dead on the road. If you went to Master Webster now you might get the job.’

It was a sensible suggestion; and Kate knew that ever since September
I had longed for a chance to leave Armstrong; for I held in my mind the certainty that if he had stood up for me strongly enough, saying that he
needed
me as a journeyman, his word would have carried weight, even against the rules. Yet pride is a curious thing and will pop up in the unlikeliest places.

‘But I’m a skilled smith,’ I said, without thinking. Those few words said it all. I’d strained and sweated, and waited and almost starved in order to be a smith, not a pack-whacker to a pony train.

‘On half pay,’ Kate said.

I knew the need to defend myself. ‘Should I earn much more, if anything? Pack-whacking is an unskilled job; anybody can do it and that sort of job comes cheap.’

‘They get about. They pick up things. They do errands for people along the road and get gifts that way. I’ve seen Old John come in with food for a week.’ She tightened her arms about Robin and braced herself to move.

‘If it’s beneath you to care whether we eat or not…’ she began sourly.

‘I’ll do it. Where shall I find him?’

‘In his office. Through the yard, there, to the right, where the light is.’

‘You take the baby home,’ I said, ‘I’ll bring Stephen.’ He could by this time walk a little, and holding his hand I went into the wool yard and knocked on the door.

The room inside served as office and living room, was well-lighted and warm. Tally sticks stood in every corner. Master Webster stood by an open cupboard on whose shelves lay samples of wool.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘I’m told that one of your pack-whackers is dead. I wondered if you would give me his job.’

He pinched his upper lip between his finger and thumb, pulled it out and let it go again.

‘You’re a foreigner. I’d sooner hev a man that knew the roads.’

‘I could learn my way about, master,’ I said, humbly.

‘Wasting
my
time meanwhile. You’re the smith they wouldn’t let into the Guild, ain’t you?’

I nodded, gritting my teeth together, for I saw in this the beginning of a hard bargain. The man nobody wanted.

‘Pack ponies are hard on their shoes,’ he said. ‘Now
suppose
I rigged up a forge, right here in the yard. Could you shoe the ponies as well as drive ‘em?’

‘Of course I could.’

‘It’d hev to be done on the quiet. Now and agin I’d hev to send a beast to Armstrong or Smithson, and if they queried why my trade dropped off, thass easy explained, ain’t it? Pony’s likely to cast a shoe anywhere.’

‘That is so,’ I said.

‘Mark you,’ he said,‘I’m doing you a favour. Making a job for you, you might say.’

I’m truly grateful.’

‘So you should be. Now, as to wages.…’

I saw his fingers working as he reckoned. They tapped out a sum which was fourpence more than I was earning at Armstrong’s. With a gallon loaf costing a penny it was an increase worth considering; and I bore in mind Kate’s words about a pack-whacker’s chances to earn a little extra here and there. So I sold myself into another bondage for an extra fourpence a week.

Within a week I was well aware of the advantages in my new job. For a trained craftsman, who had mastered his trade and passed his apprenticeship to become a mere driver of pack ponies
was
a come down, but it had its compensations. As Kate had said, we got into the country and it was in the country that food was plentiful and cheap.

When I joined Master Webster’s teamsters it was winter and we were not collecting the dirty fleeces from farms and sheep runs, we were carrying the picked-over wool down to Bywater.

Bywater was a small port, much smaller, we understood, than Dunwich or Yarmouth, but it had obtained, during the reign of the great King Edward the Third, one priceless privilege. It was allowed to export a certain amount of wool, in defiance of all the rules governing the Staple. This was because at some critical moment during the King’s wars with France, this small town’s fishing fleet had chanced to be in harbour, and had been able to offer the King eighteen vessels for the transport of troops to France, shortly before the great battle of Crécy. The privilege of being able to export wool freely, was its reward.

The Bywater people often laughed and joked about the privilege, saying that when King Edward granted them the favour, the limit he had set on their export had been far in excess of all the wool shorn
in East Anglia, for Norfolk and Suffolk were not then reckoned to be sheep-rearing districts. The favour was, they said, ‘like giving a one-legged man permission to dance a jig’. But things had changed since then; sheep runs had been established on many a ploughland and in my time Bywater exported every bale of wool the licence allowed.

Ships that set sail laden with wool, returned with other commodities and there were goods to be found in Bywater that could be obtained nowhere nearer than London. On the very first journey I made to Bywater we were stopped by an innkeeper at Nettleton. His little daughter was ill and he wanted an orange for her. She had once eaten an orange and all through her fever had craved another. I was lucky and found four and when I delivered them into his hands on the return he almost wept with gratitude. He took me and my fellow-driver, a lively little hunchback called Crooky, into his house and gave us each a mug of his best October ale. Then he asked which would we rather have, sixpence apiece or our pick out of his store-room. Crooky, who had no family and was a drinking man, chose the sixpence. I went to the store-room and stared about at more stacked-up food than I had ever seen in my life.

‘You mean I can have anything?’

‘Anything you can carry. Could you have seen the little wench’s face when I put the thing into her hands! Take what you like and call me still your debtor.’

I chose a great ham, which, sliced into pieces by any of the keen knives in Cooks Lane and sold piecemeal, would have been worth four shillings.

‘And I’d sooner give you that,’ said the innkeeper, when I had made my choice, ‘than the sixpence yon fellow took. The pig it came off fed on the scrapings of the plates, and drunk the wash-up water, and the smoking was done by the fire that we cook on. So it cost me nowt.’

That was my first experience as a doer of errands. Others followed. Not all the people we obliged were so deeply grateful and wildly generous, but I always remembered a farmer’s wife who had broken her needle. She lived a long way from the road we travelled and had twice walked the five miles and stood a whole morning in the biting wind to catch us on our way down to Bywater. She gave us the errand, and the money for two needles and asked us when we should be returning. We told her, and when we came clattering along, the unladen ponies trotting and thinking of their own stable, there she was, with two grey geese on long leads of plaited rushes.

She said, in a shamefaced way,‘Would you take these in payment? The needles had to be paid for in coin, and I have no more, nor shall till the calves are sold. But they’re good geese, right fat.’

‘A goose, for carrying a needle!’ I said, in astonishment. ‘Payment enough and over.’

‘But I can’t walk to Bywater – the calves would starve; nor I can’t sew with a goose, and my poor man’s hose all agape. I’m much obliged to you both. Besides,’ she said, grinning, gap-toothed, ‘the geese cost nowt. Gander do his work for pleasure, goose lay the eggs. All summer they keep the grass down so I can walk dry-foot to tend the calves. Whass to a goose?’

I could have told her. To a goose there were some feathers to add to the collection in order, one day, to have a feather pillow. Then there was a fine hot savoury meal, and fat to spread on our bread on many a cold morning; and bones to boil, with an onion or two, into a heartening broth.

Oh, and there was more to it than that. There was me saying to Kate,

‘You were right. Snatching at Old John’s job was the best thing I’ve done so far.’

And there was Kate, with some of the worry eased out of her face smiling at me with some of the old sweetness.

To the poor so little means so much.

When the sheep shearing time began and we started making journeys to outlying farms and sheep runs to bring in the fleeces there were more errands and more rewards. Now, with both of us in employment and a good deal of our food costing nothing we began to lay aside a penny here and there, in the renewed hope of being able to hire a house somewhere far from Squatters Row.

There seemed no real reason why the secret of the work I was doing for Master Webster in addition to my pack-whacking, should ever have been discovered. He was a very cunning man. He knew that the other drivers would soon notice if, bringing in a horse with a loose shoe, or an unshod hoof over-night, they found it wearing a bright new shoe in the morning. So he made a new rule, the teams were to be driven in rotation. In this way, in the course of a few days, I went out with each team, and on our return to the stable, would take careful note of the state of the hoofs of the ponies with which I had made that journey. Crooky was well known to be unobservant and unheeding; he would leave a pony with a strained fetlock, or a sore back and walk straight away to his drinking. I always walked away, just as light-heartedly, but,
when there was a job to be done, I went back, late at night, was admitted by Master Webster and went to work in the forge which he had set up in a little shed to which only I had the key. Every now and then, just to avert suspicion, a pony would be sent for shoeing to Armstrong or Smithson.

So, for six months Master Webster saved himself money and all was well.

One night, late in September, I had been working and was on my way home when I turned a corner and ran into a man who was lolling there by the wall. He reeled and had so much difficulty in recovering himself that I judged him to be drunk and clutched at him, steadying him with my hands. His hands clutched at mine, and at the same time he fell against me, his face buried in the shoulder of my jerkin.

I said, ‘Hold up, man,’ or some such words and he pulled himself straight, let go of my hands and lurched off.

I thought no more about him until, four or five days later when I came in with a load of fleeces from Clevely and reached home, I found Master Armstrong sitting on one of our stools.

‘I wanted to see you, Martin,’ he said. ‘Your wife said you might be back today, so I thought I’d wait a bit.’

Kate turned from the hearth where she was cooking supper and over his shoulder made a face at me.

‘Master Armstrong came yesterday and waited a long time,’ she said.

I had a wild hope that perhaps, in the last six months he had missed me, had persuaded the Guild to admit me, or, next best thing, was now willing to re-engage me at full journeyman’s wage and be hanged to the Guild.

‘What is it, master?’ I asked.

‘Thass this,’ he said. ‘You’re doing Webster’s smith work; and thass agin all the rules.’

‘Why should you say that?’ I put on an astonished face.

‘Now don’t play no fool’s game with me. We know. Smithson’s first man, Nobby, ran into you the other night. Your hands was black, he’d washed his, but he gripped yours and blacked his, see? And you reeked of the forge.’

‘I did indeed, after he’d reeled against me, and so would any man. As for my hands – I’d just helped to unload twelve ponies, three hundred pounds of filthy fleeces apiece, marked with tar some of them.’

Armstrong grinned. ‘You’re a sharp one. Then how do you explain
this?
Ever since March, when you took up with Webster, that look like his ponies don’t wear out their shoes. I noticed, Smithson noticed, but
it worn’t till we put our heads together we knew we’d
both
been done. I reckoned he was doing the jobs, he reckoned I was.’

‘Ponies don’t mind where they cast a shoe,’ I said. ‘And you can’t run a pack pony on three legs. We have to get work done at the nearest forge.’

‘That seem a rare rum thing that only this summer them ponies cast shoes so far afield so often. Me and Smithson, we still got our memories, mark you. ‘Twasn’t this way last summer, nor the one afore. Where’s the difference? The difference is that Webster hev now got, working for him, the rascal I took and trained out of goodness of heart and is now plying the trade I taught him to do honest men out of work.’

That, in a way, I could deny. I wasn’t doing it to spite honest men. I was doing it to keep myself alive. So I said,