‘Oh, you Williamses!’ Kat says. ‘You think you’re such big
people around here. People are lining up to tell you things. But
why is that? It’s because you believe anything.’
‘But it’s right!’ Morgan yells. ‘As good as right! Eh? If you
leave out the priest. And that he’s not dead yet.’
‘You’ll make that magistrates’ bench for sure,’ Kat says, ‘with
your close study of the difference between a corpse and my
brother.’
‘When I’m a magistrate, I’ll have your father in the stocks.
Fine him? You can’t fine him enough. What’s the point of fining
a person who will only go and rob or swindle monies to the same
value out of some innocent who crosses his path?’
He moans: tries to do it without intruding.
‘There, there, there,’ Kat whispers.
‘I’d say the magistrates have had their bellyful,’ Morgan says.
‘If he’s not watering his ale, he’s running illegal beasts on the
common, if he’s not despoiling the common he’s assaulting an
officer of the peace, if he’s not drunk he’s dead drunk, and if he’s
not dead before his time there’s no justice in this world.’
‘Finished?’ Kat says. She turns back to him. ‘Tom, you’d
better stay with us now. Morgan Williams, what do you say?
He’ll be good to do the heavy work, when he’s healed up. He can
do the figures for you, he can add and … what’s the other thing?
All right, don’t laugh at me, how much time do you think I had
for learning figures, with a father like that? If I can write my
name, it’s because Tom here taught me.’
‘He won’t,’ he says. ‘Like it.’ He can only manage like this:
short, simple, declarative sentences.
‘Like? He should be ashamed,’ Morgan says.
Kat says, ‘Shame was left out when God made my dad.’
He says, ‘Because. Just a mile away. He can easily.’
‘Come after you? Just let him.’ Morgan demonstrates his fist
again: his little nervy Welsh punch. After Kat had finished swabbing him and Morgan Williams had
ceased boasting and reconstructing the assault, he lay up for an
hour or two, to recover from it. During this time, Walter came to
the door, with some of his acquaintance, and there was a certain
amount of shouting and kicking of doors, though it came to him in
a muffled way and he thought he might have dreamed it. The question in his mind now is, what am I going to do, I can’t stay in
Putney. Partly this is because his memory is coming back, for the
day before yesterday and the earlier fight, and he thinks there might
have been a knife in it somewhere; and whoever it was stuck in, it
wasn’t him, so was it by him? All this is unclear in his mind. What
is clear is his thought about Walter: I’ve had enough of this. If he
gets after me again I’m going to kill him, and if I kill him they’ll
hang me, and if they’re going to hang me I want a better reason.
Below, the rise and fall of their voices. He can’t pick out every
word. Morgan says he’s burnt his boats. Kat is repenting of her
first offer, a post as pot-boy, general factotum and chucker-out;
because, Morgan’s saying, ‘Walter will always be coming round
here, won’t he? And “Where’s Tom, send him home, who paid
the bloody priest to teach him to read and write, I did, and you’re
reaping the bloody benefit now, you leek-eating cunt.”’
He comes downstairs. Morgan says cheerily, ‘You’re looking
well, considering.’
The truth is about Morgan Williams – and he doesn’t like him
any the less for it – the truth is, this idea he has that one day he’ll
beat up his father-in-law, it’s solely in his mind. In fact, he’s
frightened of Walter, like a good many people in Putney – and,
for that matter, Mortlake and Wimbledon.
He says, ‘I’m on my way, then.’
Kat says, ‘You have to stay tonight. You know the second day
is the worst.’
‘Who’s he going to hit when I’m gone?’
‘Not our affair,’ Kat says. ‘Bet is married and got out of it,
thank God. Morgan Williams says, ‘If Walter was my father, I tell you, I’d
take to the road.’ He waits. ‘As it happens, we’ve gathered some
ready money.’
A pause.
‘I’ll pay you back.’
Morgan says, laughing, relieved, ‘And how will you do that,
Tom?’
He doesn’t know. Breathing is difficult, but that doesn’t mean
anything, it’s only because of the clotting inside his nose. It
doesn’t seem to be broken; he touches it, speculatively, and Kat
says, careful, this is a clean apron. She’s smiling a pained smile,
she doesn’t want him to go, and yet she’s not going to contradict
Morgan Williams, is she? The Williamses are big people, in
Putney, in Wimbledon. Morgan dotes on her; he reminds her
she’s got girls to do the baking and mind the brewing, why
doesn’t she sit upstairs sewing like a lady, and praying for his
success when he goes off to London to do a few deals in his town
coat? Twice a day she could sweep through the Pegasus in a good
dress and set in order anything that’s wrong: that’s his idea. And
though as far as he can see she works as hard as ever she did when
she was a child, he can see how she might like it, that Morgan
would exhort her to sit down and be a lady.
‘I’ll pay you back,’ he says. ‘I might go and be a soldier. I could
send you a fraction of my pay and I might get loot.’
Morgan says, ‘But there isn’t a war.’
‘There’ll be one somewhere,’ Kat says.
‘Or I could be a ship’s boy. But, you know, Bella – do you
think I should go back for her? She was screaming. He had her
shut up.’
‘So she wouldn’t nip his toes?’ Morgan says. He’s satirical
about Bella.
‘I’d like her to come away with me.’
‘I’ve heard of a ship’s cat. Not of a ship’s dog.’
‘She’s very small. ‘She’ll not pass for a cat,’ Morgan laughs. ‘Anyway, you’re too
big all round for a ship’s boy. They have to run up the rigging like
little monkeys – have you ever seen a monkey, Tom? Soldier is
more like it. Be honest, like father like son – you weren’t last in
line when God gave out fists.’
‘Right,’ Kat said. ‘Shall we see if we understand this? One day
my brother Tom goes out fighting. As punishment, his father
creeps up behind and hits him with a whatever, but heavy, and
probably sharp, and then, when he falls down, almost takes out
his eye, exerts himself to kick in his ribs, beats him with a plank
of wood that stands ready to hand, knocks in his face so that if I
were not his own sister I’d barely recognise him: and my
husband says, the answer to this, Thomas, is go for a soldier, go
and find somebody you don’t know, take out his eye and kick in
his ribs, actually kill him, I suppose, and get paid for it.’
‘May as well,’ Morgan says, ‘as go fighting by the river,
without profit to anybody. Look at him – if it were up to me, I’d
have a war just to employ him.’
Morgan takes out his purse. He puts down coins: chink, chink,
chink, with enticing slowness.
He touches his cheekbone. It is bruised, intact: but so cold.
‘Listen,’ Kat says, ‘we grew up here, there’s probably people
that would help Tom out –’
Morgan gives her a look: which says, eloquently, do you mean
there are a lot of people would like to be on the wrong side of
Walter Cromwell? Have him breaking their doors down? And
she says, as if hearing his thought out loud, ‘No. Maybe. Maybe,
Tom, it would be for the best, do you think?’
He stands up. She says, ‘Morgan, look at him, he shouldn’t go
tonight.’
‘I should. An hour from now he’ll have had a skinful and he’ll
be back. He’d set the place on fire if he thought I were in it.’
Morgan says, ‘Have you got what you need for the road?’
He wants to turn to Kat and say, no. But she’s turned her face away and she’s crying. She’s not
crying for him, because nobody, he thinks, will ever cry for him,
God didn’t cut him out that way. She’s crying for her idea of
what life should be like: Sunday after church, all the sisters,
sisters-in-law, wives kissing and patting, swatting at each other’s
children and at the same time loving them and rubbing their little
round heads, women comparing and swapping babies, and all the
men gathering and talking business, wool, yarn, lengths, shipping, bloody Flemings, fishing rights, brewing, annual turnover,
nice timely information, favour-for-favour, little sweeteners,
little retainers, my attorney says … That’s what it should be like,
married to Morgan Williams, with the Williamses being a big
family in Putney … But somehow it’s not been like that. Walter
has spoiled it all.
Carefully, stiffly, he straightens up. Every part of him hurts
now. Not as badly as it will hurt tomorrow; on the third day the
bruises come out and you have to start answering people’s questions about why you’ve got them. By then he will be far from
here, and presumably no one will hold him to account, because
no one will know him or care. They’ll think it’s usual for him to
have his face beaten in.
He picks up the money. He says, ‘Hwyl, Morgan Williams.
Diolch am yr arian.’ Thank you for the money. ‘Gofalwch am
Katheryn. Gofalwch am eich busness. Wela I chi eto rhywbryd.
Pobl lwc.’
Look after my sister. Look after your business. See you again
sometime.
Morgan Williams stares.
He almost grins; would do, if it wouldn’t split his face open.
All those days he’d spent hanging around the Williamses’ households: did they think he’d just come for his dinner?
‘Pobl lwc,’ Morgan says slowly. Good luck.
He says, ‘If I follow the river, is that as good as anything?’
‘Where are you trying to get? ‘To the sea.’
For a moment, Morgan Williams looks sorry it has come to this.
He says, ‘You’ll be all right, Tom? I tell you, if Bella comes looking
for you, I won’t send her home hungry. Kat will give her a pie.’
He has to make the money last. He could work his way downriver; but he is afraid that if he is seen, Walter will catch him,
through his contacts and his friends, those kind of men who will
do anything for a drink. What he thinks of, first, is slipping on to
one of the smugglers’ ships that go out of Barking, Tilbury. But
then he thinks, France is where they have wars. A few people he
talks to – he talks to strangers very easily – are of the same belief.
Dover then. He gets on the road.
If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It
gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men
trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a
wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great
many problems. And then horses, he’s always been around
horses, frightened horses too, because when in the morning
Walter wasn’t sleeping off the effects of the strong brew he kept
for himself and his friends, he would turn to his second trade,
farrier and blacksmith; and whether it was his sour breath, or his
loud voice, or his general way of going on, even horses that were
good to shoe would start to shake their heads and back away
from the heat. Their hooves gripped in Walter’s hands, they’d
tremble; it was his job to hold their heads and talk to them,
rubbing the velvet space between their ears, telling them how
their mothers love them and talk about them still, and how
Walter will soon be over.
He doesn’t eat for a day or so; it hurts too much. But by the time
he reaches Dover the big gash on his scalp has closed, and the
tender parts inside, he trusts, have mended themselves: kidneys,
lungs and heart.