The Town House by Norah Lofts Read Free Book Online Page A

four sons, so he wouldn’t take over the ‘prentices.’
    ‘You want I should take him, eh?’ asked Armstrong, looking me over with a calculating eye.
    ‘You’d be doing yourself a good turn.’
    ‘In his sixth year. I don’t like other men’s ‘prentices, they ain’t trained to my ways. Besides, though I got work, I’m short of room. These three lay all in one bed as it is.’
    ‘He’d find his own bed. He’s married.’
    ‘What! In his sixth year! Scandalous.’
    ‘Thass different in Norfolk where he come from. They ain’t so hard-hearted; they make allowances for human nature.’
    ‘Let’s see your work,’ Armstrong said, speaking to me for the first time. ‘Clap a shoe on this nag.’
    My hands were less steady, my movements less sure than usual, because so much depended upon how I showed, but I did the best job I could.
    ‘Passable,’ Armstrong said, without enthusiasm, when I had done.
    ‘Well, do you take him, or don’t you?’ Old Betsy asked shrilly. ‘We can’t stand about all day, waiting on you.’
    ‘Tell you what I’ll do,’ the smith said, narrowing his eyes. ‘I’ll take him, but not as a six year man. He go back to five; that’ll give me a chance to undo the bad ways he’ve learned in Norfolk where everything is so different. He find his own bed, I give him his dinner and his dole at Christmas and Whitsun. Are you agreed?’
    ‘Thass for him to say,’ Betsy said. She looked at me and managed to convey, without a word, that in her opinion I should be wise to accept the offer since one in my position was not likely to get a better.
    ‘I agree,’ I said, ‘and I thank you.’
    ‘Well you may,’ Armstrong said. ‘And all here will witness the agreement.’
    All the men within hearing nodded and said, ‘Aye, aye.’
    ‘Start right in, then. How’re you called?’
    Mindful that I might even yet, even at this distance, be hunted, I renamed myself there and then.
    ‘Martin, sir,’ I said.
    I know now that amongst sailors there is a superstition that it is unlucky to change the name of a ship. Perhaps it does a man no good either.
VI
    So I was established and had a footing, however humble, in the town, and could not be driven out as a vagrant, and Kate found work the next day in a bake-house in Cooks Lane. The work was hard and heavy, the wages very small, but – and this meant much to us – she was allowed to bring away, at the end of her day’s toil, a good quantity of unsaleable stale bread.
    We started off our life in Baildon, in a lodging about which one of my fellow-apprentices told me, saying it was a cheap place. It was in a loft over a stable and contained six straw-stuffed pallets laid close together on the floor and a cooking stone under a hole in the roof. There was a trough in the yard below. The beds, at that time of the year, when people were on the move, were always occupied by travellers of the poorer sort, tinkers, drovers, tumblers and bear leaders, and by the humble pilgrims to St. Egbert’s shrine in the Abbey. The loft had a stench of its own, a mingling of the stable smell from below, of years of careless cooking on the greasy hearth, of sweat and foul breath and human excrement; Kate and I found this irksome, for though neither of us had been bred to be fastidious, we were used to fresh country air, and to stinks so accustomed as to be unnoticed. In this lodging place the stink changed from night to night and always, it seemed, for the worse. Still, it was a shelter, the cheapest one available and had I been earning only a little, we should have stayed there. As it was, what Kate earned just sufficed to feed us, and week by week I had to pay the rent out of my small store of money. I was ignorant of town life and had imagined that I might earn a coin or two by doing odd smith jobs for people, as Father and I had done in and around Rede: two things defeated that hope. For one thing Armstrong was a hard master and we apprentices often worked far