PART ONE

I
Across the Narrow Sea

‘So now get up.’
Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the
cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned
towards the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out.
One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.
Blood from the gash on his head – which was his father’s first
effort – is trickling across his face. Add to this, his left eye is
blinded; but if he squints sideways, with his right eye he can see
that the stitching of his father’s boot is unravelling. The twine has
sprung clear of the leather, and a hard knot in it has caught his
eyebrow and opened another cut.
‘So now get up!’ Walter is roaring down at him, working out
where to kick him next. He lifts his head an inch or two, and
moves forward, on his belly, trying to do it without exposing his
hands, on which Walter enjoys stamping. ‘What are you, an eel?’
his parent asks. He trots backwards, gathers pace, and aims
another kick.
It knocks the last breath out of him; he thinks it may be his last.
His forehead returns to the ground; he lies waiting, for Walter to
jump on him. The dog, Bella, is barking, shut away in an
outhouse. I’ll miss my dog, he thinks. The yard smells of beer and
blood. Someone is shouting, down on the riverbank. Nothing hurts, or perhaps it’s that everything hurts, because there is no
separate pain that he can pick out. But the cold strikes him, just in
one place: just through his cheekbone as it rests on the cobbles.
‘Look now, look now,’ Walter bellows. He hops on one foot,
as if he’s dancing. ‘Look what I’ve done. Burst my boot, kicking
your head.’
Inch by inch. Inch by inch forward. Never mind if he calls you
an eel or a worm or a snake. Head down, don’t provoke him. His
nose is clotted with blood and he has to open his mouth to
breathe. His father’s momentary distraction at the loss of his
good boot allows him the leisure to vomit. ‘That’s right,’ Walter
yells. ‘Spew everywhere.’ Spew everywhere, on my good
cobbles. ‘Come on, boy, get up. Let’s see you get up. By the
blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet.’
Creeping Christ? he thinks. What does he mean? His head
turns sideways, his hair rests in his own vomit, the dog barks,
Walter roars, and bells peal out across the water. He feels a sensation of movement, as if the filthy ground has become the
Thames. It gives and sways beneath him; he lets out his breath,
one great final gasp. You’ve done it this time, a voice tells Walter.
But he closes his ears, or God closes them for him. He is pulled
downstream, on a deep black tide.
The next thing he knows, it is almost noon, and he is propped in
the doorway of Pegasus the Flying Horse. His sister Kat is
coming from the kitchen with a rack of hot pies in her hands.
When she sees him she almost drops them. Her mouth opens in
astonishment. ‘Look at you!’
‘Kat, don’t shout, it hurts me.’
She bawls for her husband: ‘Morgan Williams!’ She rotates on
the spot, eyes wild, face flushed from the oven’s heat. ‘Take this
tray, body of God, where are you all?’
He is shivering from head to foot, exactly like Bella did when
she fell off the boat that time. A girl runs in. ‘The master’s gone to town.’
‘I know that, fool.’ The sight of her brother had panicked the
knowledge out of her. She thrusts the tray at the girl. ‘If you leave
them where the cats can get at them, I’ll box your ears till you see
stars.’ Her hands empty, she clasps them for a moment in violent
prayer. ‘Fighting again, or was it your father?’
Yes, he says, vigorously nodding, making his nose drop
gouts of blood: yes, he indicates himself, as if to say, Walter was
here. Kat calls for a basin, for water, for water in a basin, for a
cloth, for the devil to rise up, right now, and take away Walter
his servant. ‘Sit down before you fall down.’ He tries to explain
that he has just got up. Out of the yard. It could be an hour ago,
it could even be a day, and for all he knows, today might be
tomorrow; except that if he had lain there for a day, surely
either Walter would have come and killed him, for being in the
way, or his wounds would have clotted a bit, and by now he
would be hurting all over and almost too stiff to move; from
deep experience of Walter’s fists and boots, he knows that the
second day can be worse than the first. ‘Sit. Don’t talk,’ Kat
says.
When the basin comes, she stands over him and works away,
dabbing at his closed eye, working in small circles round and
round at his hairline. Her breathing is ragged and her free hand
rests on his shoulder. She swears under her breath, and sometimes she cries, and rubs the back of his neck, whispering, ‘There,
hush, there,’ as if it were he who were crying, though he isn’t. He
feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he
would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron,
and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn’t want to
mess her up, get blood all down the front of her.
When Morgan Williams comes in, he is wearing his good town
coat. He looks Welsh and pugnacious; it’s clear he’s heard the
news. He stands by Kat, staring down, temporarily out of words;
till he says, ‘See!’ He makes a fist, and jerks it three times in the air. ‘That!’ he says. ‘That’s what he’d get. Walter. That’s what
he’d get. From me.’
‘Just stand back,’ Kat advises. ‘You don’t want bits of Thomas
on your London jacket.’
No more does he. He backs off. ‘I wouldn’t care, but look at
you, boy. You could cripple the brute in a fair fight.’
‘It never is a fair fight,’ Kat says. ‘He comes up behind you,
right, Thomas? With something in his hand.’
‘Looks like a glass bottle, in this case,’ Morgan Williams says.
‘Was it a bottle?’
He shakes his head. His nose bleeds again.
‘Don’t do that, brother,’ Kat says. It’s all over her hand; she
wipes the blood clots down herself. What a mess, on her apron;
he might as well have put his head there after all.
‘I don’t suppose you saw?’ Morgan says. ‘What he was wielding, exactly?’
‘That’s the value,’ says Kat, ‘of an approach from behind – you
sorry loss to the magistrates’ bench. Listen, Morgan, shall I tell
you about my father? He’ll pick up whatever’s to hand. Which is
sometimes a bottle, true. I’ve seen him do it to my mother. Even
our little Bet, I’ve seen him hit her over the head. Also I’ve not
seen him do it, which was worse, and that was because it was me
about to be felled.’
‘I wonder what I’ve married into,’ Morgan Williams says.
But really, this is just something Morgan says; some men have
a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has
this wonder. The boy doesn’t listen to him; he thinks, if my
father did that to my mother, so long dead, then maybe he killed
her? No, surely he’d have been taken up for it; Putney’s lawless,
but you don’t get away with murder. Kat’s what he’s got for a
mother: crying for him, rubbing the back of his neck.
He shuts his eyes, to make the left eye equal with the right; he
tries to open both. ‘Kat,’ he says, ‘I have got an eye under there,
have I? Because it can’t see anything.’ Yes, yes, yes, she says, while Morgan Williams continues his interrogation of the facts; settles
on a hard, moderately heavy, sharp object, but possibly not a
broken bottle, otherwise Thomas would have seen its jagged edge,
prior to Walter splitting his eyebrow open and aiming to blind
him. He hears Morgan forming up this theory and would like to
speak about the boot, the knot, the knot in the twine, but the
effort of moving his mouth seems disproportionate to the reward.
By and large he agrees with Morgan’s conclusion; he tries to
shrug, but it hurts so much, and he feels so crushed and
disjointed, that he wonders if his neck is broken.
‘Anyway,’ Kat says, ‘what were you doing, Tom, to set him off?
He usually won’t start up till after dark, if it’s for no cause at all.’
‘Yes,’ Morgan Williams says, ‘was there a cause?’
‘Yesterday. I was fighting.’
‘You were fighting yesterday? Who in the holy name were
you fighting?’
‘I don’t know.’ The name, along with the reason, has dropped
out of his head; but it feels as if, in exiting, it has removed a
jagged splinter of bone from his skull. He touches his scalp, carefully. Bottle? Possible.
‘Oh,’ Kat says, ‘they’re always fighting. Boys. Down by the
river.’
‘So let me be sure I have this right,’ Morgan says. ‘He comes
home yesterday with his clothes torn and his knuckles skinned,
and the old man says, what’s this, been fighting? He waits a day,
then hits him with a bottle. Then he knocks him down in the
yard, kicks him all over, beats up and down his length with a
plank of wood that comes to hand …’
‘Did he do that?’
‘It’s all over the parish! They were lining up on the wharf to
tell me, they were shouting at me before the boat tied up.
Morgan Williams, listen now, your wife’s father has beaten
Thomas and he’s crawled dying to his sister’s house, they’ve
called the priest … Did you call the priest?