by Norah Lofts
‘I wondered if you could oblige me with a drop of hot water. I gotta pinch o’ ginger in my pack. With hot water and honey that make a rare warming drink. Ever tried it?’
‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘I can let you have some water if you’ve got a crock.’
He was trained to take in as much as possible at a glance. One sweep of his eyes informed him that although, having a roof over her head, Kate might be said to be better off than he was himself, she was yet pitifully poor. The two children were eating bowls of water gruel, the very cheapest form of food and they were eating it hungrily. But he noticed too that a mattress, made of sacking through which the straw was bursting, lay against the back wall, taking up, indeed, more than a half of the floor space. Better than lying on the bare ground in the open.
‘I’ve got a bowl.’ In a moment he was back with it; he brought also his pinch of ginger and his pot of honey.
‘I thought maybe the lil’ dears ‘d fancy a spoonful of the honey in their gruel,’ he said.
She was ashamed that even a stranger, begging at her door, should have seen how poor the children’s supper was.
‘You are kind; but they’ve finished now.’
‘Honey,’ Stephen said.
‘Be quiet. Now, if you’ll give me your bowl. …’ She took it, poured into it the small amount of hot water left over from the making of the gruel and handed it back to him. Outlined against the hearth her figure looked slim and shapely – too thin, but he wasn’t fussy.
‘I brung the ginger,’ Pert Tom said, coaxingly. ‘If you never tasted it, you should. Go down right warm, like a fire in your belly.’
‘I believe you. I’ve no time to try. I have a lot to do and my husband will be home any minute.’
She spoke the last words in a very clear, significant way.
‘Well,’ he said in a deflated tone. ‘Thanks for the water.’
He returned to his corner, drank his warming brew, choking a little, put his pack under his head and cuddling close to Owd Muscovy for warmth, began to drift towards sleep as easily as an animal. Once, just before sleep took him, he was not-unhappily aware of his woman-hunger, a mistake to drink the ginger, he thought, it was well known to heat the blood; if he’d known the woman was waiting for her husband and would refuse her share of the precious stuff he’d have saved it for a more promising occasion. Then he was asleep.
The bear, stirring restlessly and grunting, roused him. He doubled his fist, thumped the heaving bulk beside him and growled,
‘Lay down!’ The bear, ordinarily – and with good cause – extremely obedient, continued to stir and grumble and presently Pert Tom was wide awake and aware that something was, if not wrong exactly, out of the ordinary. There was a distant noise which roused a confused memory of his soldiering days; and overhead the sky, without star or moon, was curiously light with a pinkish-yellow pulsing glow.
‘You’re right. Something’s afoot,’ Tom said to the bear, and got to his feet, shivering in the brittle cold of the night. The confused noise sorted itself out into the sound of men shouting, some heavy thumping and – was it possible? – the twang of bow-strings. Nearer, and quite distinct, came the sound of movement from the hut in the other corner. The pulsing light leaped again in the sky and he could see the woman in the doorway.
There was something intimate about the two of them being wakeful at this hour of the night and he forgave her for her earlier unfriendliness. He ambled over and said,
‘Wha’s going on?’
‘They’re fighting.’ He could hear that she had been crying. ‘And Martin must have gone and got mixed in it. He isn’t home.’ She gave a sharp sob. ‘I never thought they’d do it,’ she said, a wild note creeping into her voice. ‘And I never thought he’d have so little sense. … If he’s hurt. … Oh, if only I knew!’
The sky lightened and darkened and the distant noise increased.
‘’Sno use me going to look. I don’t know your Martin.’
‘I know that. I want to go myself.’
‘Then why don’t you?’
‘The children. If I take them and he’s hurt then I’ve got both hands full and couldn’t help. And if I leave them and they woke … with all this noise and nobody. … The others have all gone to watch. They ran past minutes ago.’ She leaned forward and put a hand on his arm. ‘Would you watch them for me, just five minutes while I go and look or ask. … Somebody must have seen him.’
‘I don’t mind,’ he said, without enthusiasm.
‘Oh, thank you! If the little one wakes, put his thumb in his mouth, but the big one, say Mother won’t be a minute.’
She was gone, running like a deer.
‘So, after all, I’m in,’ Pert Tom said to himself, ducking his head and entering the low dark hut. He remembered, from his single searching glance the position of the hearthstone and the fact that at one side of it lay a heap of dried twigs and on the other some more solid pieces of wood. He took out his flint and tinder and soon had the fire alight. He squatted on his heels, warming his hands and the inner sides of his thighs. As the light strengthened he looked about him again. The two children lay against the wall, foot to foot, wrapped in a piece of woollen cloth. The unoccupied portion of the mattress, with another cloth crumpled across it, looked comfortable and inviting. He threw two pieces of wood on to the fire and went and lay down. He teased himself pleasantly with the idea of the woman lying here beside him, and dozed a little, losing all consciousness of time.
He roused when Kate came back.
She was no longer crying. The scene outside the Abbey Gate had shocked her into calmness; she had been obliged to stare into the face of dead man after dead man in her search for Martin, fourteen in all, some horribly mutilated by arrows. She had not found him, nor anyone who had seen him lately, but a woman had told her that some of the men of the town had been inside the Abbey when the archers took them by surprise. She felt certain that Martin was there, dead; and mingled with her grief was a deep resentment that he should not only have joined the rabble in their stupid quarrel, but been in the fore-front of the attack. When she thought of him lying dead she was ashamed of that feeling, but it was there just the same. Torn by two such conflicting emotions and denied the relief of tears she had fallen into a stunned, somnambulistic state in which she was conscious of a single purpose – she must get home to the children. The sight of Pert Tom sprawled on the bed did not surprise her, although she had forgotten him, and when she had thought of the children had visualized them as being alone. She was past feeling anything so trivial as surprise; in a world where Martin was dead anything might happen.
Tom propped himself on one elbow and waited for her to speak. After a minute he said,
‘You didn’t find him?’
Such a stupid question merited no answer. She sat down on one of the two stools and stared at the fire and presently said,
‘Why did he have to join them? They’d treated him as badly as they could. He was a good smith. …’ As she spoke those words the tears almost came, for she saw Martin as he had been on that evening at Rede, striding back, full of youth and power, from his work at Ancaster and coming to her rescue. A hard bitterness dried the tears. ‘A good smith,’ she repeated, ‘but they wouldn’t let him into their Guild. And then they broke his leg and lost him his job. He didn’t have to side with them.’
‘How d’you know that he did?’
‘If he didn’t where is he? Never once since he lost his job has he been away for the night. And I know what he was doing today. Helping with a pig-killing, just over the Ditch. And I know what happened. …’ She lifted her head so that the firelight shone in her eyes and on her lips, ‘He thought he’d get back in with them, show them what he was made of. The fool!’ Grief and fury came together in the last word.
So far as Pert Tom was concerned she might have been speaking in a foreign tongue. Lust was lively now and he saw every hope of gratification. He got to his feet and laid a heavy hand on Ka
te’s clenched in her lap.
‘Like ice,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna get my ginger and we’ll put the pot on and hev a nice hot drink. Pull you together better’n anything.’
She said nothing; when he returned she was sitting as he left her, staring into the fire. He was putting water into the pot and the pot in the heart of the flames when she said, as though continuing a conversation,
‘We never even said good-bye.’ Then there was another long pause before she spoke again.
‘It was all on account of me that he came here and was so wretched. He’d have been better off at Rede. He said so. No, I said that. I used to say a lot of things I didn’t mean.’
The water boiled and Tom made his brew, using the last of the ginger and stirring in the honey with a liberal hand.
‘Here. You get that down. You’ll feel better in no time.’
‘As though I could,’ she said, speaking directly to him for the first time. ‘Nothing could make me feel better except the sight of Martin coming in that door.’
‘Drink it and try.’
She thought that in his dull un-understanding way he was trying to be kind, so she lifted the bowl and sipped and coughed.
‘Go down so nice and warm, don’t it?’ He swilled his own with gusto.
Spices were so expensive that only the rich could afford to buy them for their flavour; to develop a market among the poorer people the merchants had craftily spread the rumour of their aphrodisiac virtues. Pert Tom, because he was ready for Kate and warmed by his ginger, all too easily believed that the sip or two she had taken would render her complacent.
‘Don’t let it get cold,’ he urged her. She lifted the bowl and drank its Contents in that same sleep-walking fashion. He waited another minute then he said,
‘Don’t fret. There’s as good fish in the sea as ever came out.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘This,’ he said; and took hold of her, his purpose quite plain.
She woke then and remembered that her first feeling towards him had been one of distrust. He was big and hot and heavy; he reeked of bear; it was like being mauled by a bear. He had his face at her breast – in dreadful parody of a nursing child – and she could feel the heat of his breath through her clothes. She pushed, but he only pulled her closer. She wanted to scream but knew it would be useless, there was no one to hear except the children. She went limp in his hold and let him pull her down on to the bed. Then she said,
‘Wait,’ and made the first motion of unfastening her dress. Just as he’d expected, Pert Tom told himself. Then her hand moved, quick as a slithering snake, and she had snatched a piece of burning wood from the fire and was on her feet, standing over him, threatening him with it.
‘Get out!’ she said.
He jumped up and stood hesitant, face to face with her in the tiny room. He had only to get hold of her arm and twist it. … But she jabbed at him with the flaming branch; the heat scorched his face and singed his beard. He backed to the door which opened outwards and was unlatched. With the opening of the door under the pressure of his body a draught of cold air came swooping in; the flaming tip of the branch flared more fiercely and a piece of it dropped off and on to the edge of the straw stuffed mattress which broke eagerly into flame.
Kate did scream then and tried to stamp on the new flame, but in a second her skirt was blazing. She threw the branch towards the hearth and stooped, smacking ineffectually at her skirt. Then she grabbed at the children, calling them by name, shaking Stephen awake and trying to lift Robin. They woke and shrank, screaming, nearer to the wall, away from the blazing edge of the mattress, the blazing of Kate’s skirt.
‘Help!’ she screamed to Tom. ‘Help!’
It had all happened so quickly that he was still pressing his hands to his smouldering beard. But he had his wits about him. Save her, help her out and what would be the result? Trouble. People were always ready to believe the worst of any stranger. She’d tell how the fire started and the least that would happen would be that he’d go to the lock-up; and nobody would care for Owd Muscovy. You could lose a good bear that way. Better let the bitch burn.
He put out his hand and pushed the door shut. It took another movement of air with it so that the flames leaped up with a hollow roar. Before he could have counted ten, before he dared withdraw his hand from the door the inner side of the low thatch was alight.
He stepped back then to a safe distance. There was a moment when the woman and both the children were screaming together, then the thatch fell in on them, throwing out showers of sparks and little clots of burning straw. The screams stopped. There was a smell of burning flesh and then, after a minute, mingling with it, the stink of smouldering fur.
‘Owd Muscovy!’ cried Tom and ran to the corner where the hobbled bear was plunging about, alight in a dozen places.
‘Lay still. Lay! Down! Down! Down!’ said Tom, beating at the thick greasy fur, tearing off bits of burning straw. He was not even conscious of the pain in his hands, he was so intent. The first lesson a bear-leader learned was that it did not pay to have too shabby or openly-intimidated a bear; people liked to think that the bear was much stronger than any man and that but for the muzzle and the chain would tear its leader to pieces.
‘Holy St. Ursula,’ Tom moaned. ‘You’ll look like the moths hev been at you.’
Even when his pelt was out of danger the bear, in whose early training fire had played a part, was nervous and shivering. Tom would have calmed him with an untimely offering of bread and honey, then remembered that he had taken the honey into the hut. All wasted and the ginger too!
‘And all over what?’ he asked himself. ‘Slice off a cut cake that’d never’ve been missed. Silly bitch! What got into her?’
He looked back at the hut then. The poor flimsy timbers of its front and side wall had fallen inwards over the whole and had almost burned themselves out.
‘Need never hev happened,’ he said. ‘Could hev been as nice as nice.’
In a mood of self-pity, and with no twinge of conscience, he again settled down beside the bear and slept so soundly that he did not hear the other residents of Squatters Row return from their sight-seeing.
With morning light shining on the ruin, the dumb man’s wife and Old Agnes found the destruction of one small hut of far more interest and moment than the burning of the great Abbey Gate which they had seen during the night. They asked the inevitable question, ‘How did it happen?’ and Tom had his tale ready. He had waked to find the hut blazing and had done his best to save whoever was inside. He had his blistered hands, his scorched face and raggedly singed beard to show. Nobody for a second doubted the truth of his story. Dummy’s wife managed, without exactly saying it in so many words, to imply that such an accident could have been expected, if you couldn’t have a proper house the only thing to do was to make your fire in the open, as she had done all these years. The accident, in fact, was the result of trying to set yourself up above your neighbours. Old Agnes, remembering that Kate and Martin had dealt more fairly with her over the Trimble that her clients ordinarily did, said that perhaps it was a mercy in disguise – if Martin were really dead; it was a hard world for widows and orphans.
Pert Tom was praised for his attempted rescue and sympathized with for having wandered into Baildon just at this time. Nobody would be in the mood to be amused by a bear’s tricks today. The town was in mourning, some said nineteen men dead and many more injured. And all for nothing.
Tom believed that trade would be bad and soon after breakfast was on his way towards the North Gate of the town when he saw a new detachment of soldiers marching in. They moved with the dogged, flat motion of men who have marched through the night, so it was likely that they had come from a distance. The fighting seemed to be over and they wouldn’t be marched back without a rest. Soldiers were good customers, easily amused and very open-handed. He turned himself about and followed them back into the centre of the town.
The Market Squa
re was scattered with the litter – some of it curiously irrelevant – that was left by street fighting. There were the spent arrows, the burned out torches, the thrown-down clubs, and sticks which might be expected, but there were also bits of clothing, part of a wheel, a cooking pot, some grey wool on a spindle. Patches of blood showed where men had fallen dead or injured, but all the bodies save one had been removed. An old woman and a boy of about ten were struggling with the corpse of a heavy man, the old woman crying and hysterically admonishing the boy.
‘Hold his legs higher. Higher. You’re letting his bum drag on the ground.’
Pert Tom remembered how, after the Battle of Radscot Bridge he had come across a dead man with a ring on his finger. It was that ring which had enabled him to buy Owd Muscovy, a two-year-old, fully trained. He went carefully over this battleground and saw nothing worth salvaging except the spindle which he put in his pack.
Inside the great stone archway the burned edges of the gate hung jaggedly. Two monks, their faces expressionless, as though every morning they measured up burned gateways, were using a yardstick. Soldiers stood on guard all along the front of the Abbey, and inside Tom caught a glimpse of archers, pikemen, a man or two in armour. The soldiers he had followed had disappeared through the gateway, but soon others came out in groups of three or four and made off up Cooks Row towards the ale-houses. He followed and was soon giving thanks to St. Ursula that he had decided to stay in the town. The bear’s tricks were well received, especially his imitation of a pike man’s drill with a little cane for a pike, and by two o’clock in the afternoon Pert Tom had collected as much as was needed to live luxuriously by his standards for the next four days, which was as far as he ever looked ahead. He found an inn not yet discovered by the soldiers and therefore spared the sudden inflation of prices, and took a leisurely dinner of boiled beef and dumplings, apple pie and ale. Before he left he had his wooden bottle filled with ale and on his way back down Cooks Row he did some pleasant shopping; a meat pie and five pickled onions for himself, a pot of honey, apples, bread for Owd Muscovy, half a pig’s head for the wife of the deaf and dumb man whose fire he hoped to share again.