Fair Fight by Anna Freeman Read Free Book Online Page B

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