by Erica Brown
‘No,’ he said firmly and took her hand off his groin.
She pursed her lips and looked petulant. ‘Are you sure you won’t change your mind, sweetheart? I’ll do anything you want for a good price, and I’ll make all your bruises feel better.’
He smiled, gripped her shoulders firmly but gently and pushed her away. ‘Winning makes my bruises feel better.’
She pouted like a young girl though still tried to look happy. Tom wasn’t deceived. He saw the worry in her eyes and guessed she was concerned that she might not make enough to live on by morning and Stoke would give her another beating.
‘How’s Clarence?’ he asked, averting his eyes as he finished buttoning his shirt and pulling on his jerkin.
All pretence at being a young coquette disappeared and lines of worry showed up more prominently around her eyes and in the sudden downcast mould of her mouth. ‘He’s got a bit of a cough at present. Somebody told me that I should give him plenty of oranges. There’s lots of them coming in on the packets from Spain now, so he said.’
Tom guessed that the advice had come from one of her clients, possibly a doctor. He wondered if he was the same man who had hit her, but doubted it. Stoke was her pimp and the likeliest culprit. ‘Have you bought some oranges?’ he asked her.
‘I did, when I had the money. It don’t go far, and some of it goes astray, you might say.’ She shrugged and jerked her head over to where Stoke was watching her with keen and greedy eyes. Besides horses and fights, Stoke also looked after the dollies who plied their trade around the ancient lanes and by-ways between Steep Street, Christmas Steps and Trenchard Street. Trade could be brisk depending on the forest of masts that sprouted like spruce trees along St Augustine’s Quay in the heart of the city.
Cuthbert Stoke was almost a bona fide businessman, though not quite. He had fingers in many different pies. Not only did he act as procurer and take a cut of the doxies’ earnings, but he also rented them rooms in buildings he owned. Most dated from the seventeenth century, damp yards at their rear, plaster flaking from walls on the upper floors, and evil-smelling growths blackening them at ground and basement level.
Tom stared Stoke out until the man turned away and the crowd finally obscured the view.
He looked into Sally’s face and she smiled hopefully, perhaps thinking he had changed his mind. Not only was she past her first bloom, but he could hear a wheezing in her chest that hadn’t been there on the last occasion he’d seen her. He might be wrong, but there was a fair chance she had consumption.
Guilt and compassion got the better of him. ‘I’ll walk you home,’ he said, took her arm and led her to the door. I’m being a coward, he thought. In his mind he was in Jeb’s bedroom, the sick man propped up on a multitude of pillows. After the first greetings – how the trip went, if the weather was good, had they run before the trade winds – Jeb would relate all the happenings at Marstone Court. Tom would tell him about his voyage, the things he’d seen and the places he’d visited.
Looking like the cat that got the cream, Sally threw the end of her shawl over her shoulder and linked arms with Tom. ‘Get out the bleedin’ way and let a lady through,’ she shouted with a sly look and a voice like a foghorn.
Sally talked and played the tart all the way from the Counterslip, over St Augustine’s bridge and along the quay. She lived in a shabby room at the top of the Christmas Steps, a steep warren shaded by overhanging gables and dating from a time when men had worn doublet and hose and there’d been an abbey close by, stretching along the banks of the Frome. Nothing much had changed in hundreds of years, except that the buildings had got shabbier. But it was easy to imagine medieval apprentices shouting the wares of their masters from the dark doorways of the ground-floor shops, or a careless servant tipping night slops from the first floor into the alley below.
Unfortunately for Sally, she lived in a room on the ground floor. Once the door to the street had closed behind them, Tom’s nostrils were assailed with the sickly smell of rotting plaster and middens that emptied into cess pools, which in turn seeped into the Frome where it sank or floated backwards and forwards on the ever-changing tide. The river itself was only a tributary of the larger Avon and the Floating Harbour and wound into the city from the east. The Floating Harbour was a godsend to shipping. In previous times ships had lain on mud at low tide. Wooden stanchions, fixed across from the stone quays, had stopped them sticking fast between tides. Since the construction of the Floating Harbour they sat in deep water. The water was welcome; the sewage that came with the Frome was not.
A small glow came from the fireplace where burnt pieces of Radstock coal tried unsuccessfully to warm and lighten the room.
Sally flung her shawl on to an unmade wooden bed of rough timbers and straw-filled mattress. ‘I’ll light a candle.’
The glow from the fire lit her face as she bent, lit a taper then a candle, snuffing the former and laying it carefully aside for future use.
A cast-iron pot hung on a trivet above the fire. Not smelling anything appetizing, he assumed it was empty, unless its contents were congealed on account of the fire being so low.
‘There!’ said Sally spinning round and clasping her arms about him. ‘Now you can have your money’s worth.’
He reached round his back and unclasped her hands. ‘I told you. No.’
She looked hurt. ‘Ain’t I good enough for you any more?’
He avoided her eyes. ‘Where’s your son?’
She shrugged. ‘Out somewhere.’
Tom was appalled. What was he? Nine years old? It was close to midnight and his mother didn’t know where he was, though Tom guessed from experience that it suited her for Clarence to be out of the way. There was only one bed in the room. She could hardly service her clients with him lying beside her.
Tom looked at the dying embers in the grate. ‘Do you have any coal?’
‘Cold, are you? I can make you warm.’
As he picked up a poker and did his best to revive the dying glow, he heard the rustling of petticoats. Even before he turned around, he knew what sight would greet him.
‘Like it,’ she asked coquettishly. Her thighs were bare and her woollen stockings were held up with garters made of string.
‘Cover yourself.’
‘Don’t you want—?’
To Tom’s relief, footsteps sounded in the passage outside. Clarence Ward crept in from the street. The latch on the door rattled obstinately as he opened it. Still suffering the aftermath of drinking too much gin, Sally was slow to drop her dress.
A pale face appeared from around the door. Clarence was thin and had the streetwise look of a child used to desperation. Whatever he thought about his mother’s lewd display, it flashed only momentarily into his eyes, then disappeared as if he accepted what must be done to survive. But it angers him, thought Tom, and he probably wants to kill me, just like I wanted to kill the men my mother went with.
Sally dropped her skirts and was immediately on the defensive. ‘Where’ve you bin, you little toe rag?’
Coins rattled in ragged pockets as she shook him, jerking him closer to her side. She held out her hand and clicked her fingers.
‘Give it here!’
The boy’s gaze stayed fixed on Tom’s face. ‘Only if you promise to send him away.’
‘I ain’t doing no such thing! He’s a friend!’
The boy poked out his tongue. Sally shook him and something sprinkled from his pockets and on to the floor. Tom heard the gritty sound of sugar being ground beneath the boy’s bare feet.
‘Sugar!’ Sally exclaimed. ‘You bin down that Hole in the Wall again?’
Tom smiled to himself. An old pastime and still going strong; boys with nothing to lose would bust a barrel of sugar when no one was looking, scoop as much of it as possible into a sack, then sell it down at the Hole in the Wall, the centre of smuggling and thieving in the city. The hole referred to in the name of the place really existed and through it a lookout was poste
d to sound the warning should the excise men appear.
‘I got money,’ the boy exclaimed and brought what looked like silver coins from his pocket – four shillings, Tom guessed; the going rate for stolen sugar hadn’t risen in years.
Sally was livid. ‘This ain’t a good way to earn a living, Clarence!’
The boy turned cocky. ‘It’s better than opening yer legs for any raggledy man that comes calling.’
She clipped his ear. ‘Cheeky little bastard.’
The boy dodged away, rubbing his ear as he looked from her to Tom and back again. ‘Got to earn some money, ain’t I?’
So far Tom had been disinclined to interfere, but this last comment goaded him into action. He stepped closer, his presence seeming to dominate the room. ‘There are other ways to earn a living, lad.’
The boy eyed him warily. Sally’s shouting and shaking of the boy had caused her to cough. She turned away and grabbed a piece of unidentifiable cloth – probably some item of undergarment – and coughed up a mixture of blood and phlegm.
Both man and boy looked at her, their eyes filled with concern. Tom’s fears were realized. Sally had consumption. Her days on earth were numbered.
Tom’s fingers went to the money in his pocket. His voice was firm. ‘Your mother needs medicine, and you need to make an honest living.’
‘What like?’ said Clarence, his eyes still fixed on his coughing mother.
Tom knew he had hit the right spot. He recognized the aggression in the boy’s voice for what it was; a mix of anger and outright despair, though he’d known worse. At least for now the boy had a room to live in, though it wouldn’t last, Tom thought sourly. From boarding house, to room, to a dark doorway; he’d known them all. He pushed the memory of his own childhood to the back of his mind. He had to if he was to help Sally and her lad, and he felt obliged to do so. It wasn’t that the lad was his; he couldn’t be. It was just that he had an affinity with Clarence. Their mothers had come out of the same mould. Jeb had been there to help him, and he was here to help Clarence.
He adopted a cheery voice but found he couldn’t smile. ‘Do you fancy getting away from Bristol? How about going to sea and seeing the world? It’s a big place, you know.’
Something sparkled in the boy’s eyes then was swiftly gone. Tom sensed his defensiveness. It was so familiar; so much part of his own childhood when he’d hated every man who had handled his own mother and the gin palaces for degrading her mind, which in turn degraded her body.
The boy shrugged. ‘I might do. There again I might not.’
Tom knew better than to approach the boy, lay his hands on him and preach in a fatherly manner about mending his ways. A seed had be planted and allowed to grow in the boy’s mind, but he also had to be aware of the consequences of his actions should he carry on the way he was.
‘If you get caught you won’t be around to look after your mother.’
‘I’ll send her money from prison.’
‘Not if you’re in Australia. They deport hundreds of thieves there, so I hear.’
The boy looked thoughtful. Getting deported as a result of his crimes had obviously never occurred to him.
Sally stopped coughing and her face began to assume something of the radiance he remembered from her youth.
‘Could you really get him a place on a ship?’ she asked.
‘I can do better than that. How’s about you give up this place and go to live with your sister at Portishead?’
The sister ran a pub there and, following the death of her husband, had asked Sally to help out.
‘But Clarence—’
‘What if I get him a place at the Merchant Seaman’s Apprenticeship School? He’ll be fed and warm while he’s being taught a trade along with a lot of boys like him. What do you say?’
She looked at him as if he were a plaster saint just lately come to life and the boy looked at his mother as if he were suddenly little more than a toddler, as if whatever she said was the God’s truth.
‘Well! Just imagine! My boy at a proper school and learning ’ow to be a sea captain. Ain’t that lovely?’
Tom didn’t point out that most of the boys ended up as able seamen rather than captains, though some did a lot better than others. He could see the sudden hope in her eyes and also the love she bore for her son. She wanted something better for him than she’d had for herself and it touched his heart.
The cynical look dropped from the boy’s eyes as he looked intensely at his mother. ‘As long as you go and live with Auntie Annie, then I’ll do it.’
Sally nodded. ‘I couldn’t think of anything better. Can’t you just imagine me serving great flagons of porter? It’ll suit me all right it will.’
Tom felt pleased for them both and chanced rubbing the boy’s head. ‘Meet me at ten-thirty tomorrow morning outside St Nicholas’s church.’
‘Is that where the school is?’ the boy asked.
Tom shook his head. ‘No. Come with your bundle. I’ll take you there. You can ride pillion behind me.’
Although being surly was a hard habit to break, the boy’s eyes brightened. It wasn’t every day he got to ride pillion on a horse and attend a proper school.
Sally accompanied Tom out on to the steps when he left. The fine night had turned to rain. Water dripped from the overhanging buildings and made the cobbles treacherously slippery.
Tom reached for the prize money in his pocket. He had ten guineas in all. ‘Here’s three guineas,’ he said and pressed the coins into her hand. ‘Now get out of here and to your sister’s.’
She glowed with gratitude. ‘You’re a good man, Tom.’
He brushed her gratefulness aside. ‘You’re sick, Sal, and Clarence deserves a chance. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him.’
Tears glistened in her eyes as she clasped his hand between hers. ‘If you want to tumble with me, I’ll do it for free—’
He shook his head. ‘No offence, I hope?’
Her dark eyebrows knitted above her pert nose. ‘Then why are you being so kind to me?’
He smiled weakly. ‘I used to know a mother and son just like you and Clarence.’
He didn’t explain any more than that but thinking about the past made him want to immerse himself in it. Besides, it would help put off the dreaded moment at Marstone Court when he’d have to face Jeb. He chose to walk up the Christmas Steps and then along to Steep Street. By the time he got there his shoulders were soaked and his heart ached.
The past always had the same effect on him. He thought of how good Jeb and his wife had been to him, their daughters becoming like sisters. He thought of how Jeb talked about his son and what he might be doing in heaven.
He thought about having a few drinks, the heat of rum burning into his throat and sending his mind into oblivion. But away from the docks, he asked himself if he really was thirsty or merely a coward, putting off the moment of returning to Marstone Court and Jeb.
He found himself walking up Steep Street, a curse of a climb that twisted upwards and led to the ferry at Aust and the main road to Gloucester. Shabby signs advertising chimney sweeps swung and creaked from buildings on both sides of the road. During the day hooves and iron-rimmed wheels hammered over the cobbles and street urchins ran and dived for apples fallen from a passing cart or scrabbled for cast-off peelings thrown into heaps for the scavengers with their thin ponies and smelly carts, to sweep up and take away.
Many of the streets around the docks were narrow. Like Christmas Steps, the upper floors of old buildings almost touched over the steep winding alleyways that were laughingly referred to as roads. He had a quick drink in the Ship Inn, a low place where the smoke from a thousand pipes of Navy shag had blackened the ceiling and permeated the walls with its gut-churning smell.
One nip of Jamaica Rum was enough. Tom swigged it back quickly, hoping it would dispel the vision of Sally with her skirts up and Clarence with that desperate look in his eyes. Suddenly he felt sick and in need of seeing the one pe
rson who could make him feel better. Jeb Strong was the most important person in his life and he was probably wondering why he hadn’t come in to see him before going off to enjoy himself.
‘Are you off, Tom?’ said the landlord.
Silently Tom waved his hand over his shoulder and was gone. He collected his horse from Bennetts stables, mounted, then crossed the river and travelled southwards out of the city, glad to leave the smog behind him, though the smell of his own unwashed body and thoughts of Jasper Strong travelled with him.
Chapter Nine
Marstone Court rose in fairytale splendour among the meadows. Sandstone turrets, quoins and mullions sparkled in the misty sunshine of an autumn day. Swathes of red, gold and brown trees bounded the acres of parkland, and fields of corn and fat cattle tumbled like giant patchwork beyond the high walls to the River Avon.
The original house had been built in the latter years of the sixteenth century and purchased by Isaiah Strong in 1770. He had spent a fortune modernizing it, ripping out oak panelling, enlarging rooms and adding painted, gilt-edged ceilings that would not have disgraced Versailles. He could well afford it, thanks to the triangular trade; outward-bound ships taking cheap trade goods to Africa that were exchanged for slaves, packed tight into stinking holds, who in turn were taken to the West Indies to provide labour on the plantations. On the last leg of the trip, sugar, molasses and rum were loaded and brought to Bristol. Isaiah Strong had done very well and on his death his estate had gone to his son Samson, who in turn had passed it on in equal measures to his three sons, Emmanuel, Otis and Jeb.
Tom reined in his horse and looked at the mansion as if seeing it for the very first time. He’d never quite been able to call it home. Too large, too gaudy and too intimidating for his taste; always Jeb’s house.