A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online Page B

they were permitted to speak our tongue.
Here comes your mother from marketing.
    His mother, plump but not country rosy, came near-running
down the street with her basket. She was of Dover and liked to
believe the sea salt stayed in her skin, a sea girl. She kissed and
embraced and admired. Quite the gentleman.
    - And the girls?
    - Joan has a great belly, Meg scolds her tailor for dithering
about the day, Anne is well and that leaves poor Dorothy.
    - Poor Dorothy.
    - She sits with her wooden doll. The French are not all
bad, a French carpenter made it for her. Of course, this is all
strange to you. You do not know the house.
    - Small, Kit said, as they both led him in, hands on
him, their only son.
    - We were better off near Bull Stake, his father said. Get
the girls off our hands and there will be room enough. Your
mother and I and poor Dorothy.
    The apprentices went back to their hammering and through
the smell of leather that was his boyhood and unchangeable,
unlike thought and faith, Kit was led to the main room, as he
took it to be, with its sad pledges of a dead prosperity - betrothal
chest, rocky table, chairs that were wooden emblems of family
degree, from infant to father, though not in themselves a family
of chairs. Young Dorothy sat on the brown-stained boards and
drooled over a little wooden lady in a wooden skirt. She was
twelve years old and an idiot. She sat in a pool of wet. Her mother
ran to her, lifted her, finding her smock wet and warm, so she had just done it. She cried for Meg and Anne, who should not
have left their sister alone so, and then their feet, unshod from
the sound, could be heard on stairs and the door opened and they
entered. Margaret was twenty and her betrothal to the tailor had
gone on too long. Anne was fourteen and marriageable too, had
not Joan two years back married when she was thirteen? And
now she was fifteen and carrying. All ready to breed, even poor
Dorothy who, if they let her loose in the fields, would be served
by some farm lout as readily as mare and stallion, save that season
for humanity was sempiternally there, like faith and thought. But
he, Kit, would deceive nature, ever and never in season, a
paragon of the cheating of the true end of what was called love.
Now he was kissed and kissed, women with bosoms eager to
give milk. Poor Dorothy, being wiped and changed while the
wet floor was mopped, looked at him without recognition, doll
clutched to her own growing bosom, a finger in her mouth.

    What was there to tell them? Triv and quad but nothing
yet about his defection from orders. Girls? He had met no
girls. Nay, wait, and he resexed, as in one of his own poems,
Mr Walsingham into a lady of luscious hair, fine carriage, great
prospects, but he must mind his books, get ready for the cloth,
find a parish, then and then only think of a holy family. His
mother and the girls, Dorothy drooling at the tail, clutching
her doll, went to the kitchen to get supper. The kitchen was
small, the flagged floor uneven, but the pots and pans shone
with their old refulgence. Kit stood at the door, watching,
talking, listening. The girls, save Dorothy, had much to say.
John Moore, their father’s once chief apprentice, had his own
shop by the East Gate, not far from the abbey, St Augustine’s,
that the Queen’s father had pillaged and then turned to a palace.
Joan, his wife, though but fifteen, was disdainful of her spinster
sisters. And she now carried a great belly before her in pregnant
pride. They were to have for supper beef boiled with carrots. The
bread, today’s, was fresh. Kit mumbled a torn crust. There was
a firkin of Kent ale. Kit could have wept.
    Wept? Why? At the comfortable cycle of life that smelt
of bread and beef seething, round and round for ever if the preachers and governors would allow it, and he himself a tangent
to the cycle. Wept at a future that, he knew, must be perilous.
Wept because they, his womenfolk