He knows by the way people look at him that his face is still
bruised. Morgan Williams had done an inventory of him before
he left: teeth (miraculously) still in his head, and two eyes, miraculously seeing. Two arms, two legs: what more do you want?
He walks around the docks saying to people, do you know
where there’s a war just now?
Each man he asks stares at his face, steps back and says, ‘You
tell me!’
They are so pleased with this, they laugh at their own wit so
much, that he continues asking, just to give people pleasure.
Surprisingly, he finds he will leave Dover richer than he
arrived. He’d watched a man doing the three-card trick, and
when he learned it he set up for himself. Because he’s a boy,
people stop to have a go. It’s their loss.
He adds up what he’s got and what he’s spent. Deduct a small
sum for a brief grapple with a lady of the night. Not the sort of
thing you could do in Putney, Wimbledon or Mortlake. Not
without the Williams family getting to know, and talking about
you in Welsh.
He sees three elderly Lowlanders struggling with their bundles
and moves to help them. The packages are soft and bulky, samples
of woollen cloth. A port officer gives them trouble about their
documents, shouting into their faces. He lounges behind the
clerk, pretending to be a Lowland oaf, and tells the merchants by
holding up his fingers what he thinks a fair bribe. ‘Please,’ says
one of them, in effortful English to the clerk, ‘will you take care
of these English coins for me? I find them surplus.’ Suddenly the
clerk is all smiles. The Lowlanders are all smiles; they would have
paid much more. When they board they say, ‘The boy is with us.’
As they wait to cast off, they ask him his age. He says eighteen,
but they laugh and say, child, you are never. He offers them
fifteen, and they confer and decide that fifteen will do; they think
he’s younger, but they don’t want to shame him. They ask what’s
happened to his face. There are several things he could say but he selects the truth. He doesn’t want them to think he’s some failed
robber. They discuss it among themselves, and the one who can
translate turns to him: ‘We are saying, the English are cruel to
their children. And cold-hearted. The child must stand if his
father comes in the room. Always the child should say very
correctly, “my father, sir”, and “madam my mother”.’
He is surprised. Are there people in the world who are not
cruel to their children? For the first time, the weight in his chest
shifts a little; he thinks, there could be other places, better. He
talks; he tells them about Bella, and they look sorry, and they
don’t say anything stupid like, you can get another dog. He tells
them about the Pegasus, and about his father’s brewhouse and
how Walter gets fined for bad beer at least twice a year. He tells
them about how he gets fines for stealing wood, cutting down
other people’s trees, and about the too-many sheep he runs on the
common. They are interested in that; they show the woollen
samples and discuss among themselves the weight and the weave,
turning to him from time to time to include and instruct him.
They don’t think much of English finished cloth generally,
though these samples can make them change their mind … He
loses the thread of the conversation when they try to tell him their
reasons for going to Calais, and different people they know there.
He tells them about his father’s blacksmith business, and the
English-speaker says, interested, can you make a horseshoe? He
mimes to them what it’s like, hot metal and a bad-tempered
father in a small space. They laugh; they like to see him telling a
story. Good talker, one of them says. Before they dock, the most
silent of them will stand up and make an oddly formal speech, at
which one will nod, and which the other will translate. ‘We are
three brothers. This is our street. If ever you visit our town, there
is a bed and hearth and food for you.’
Goodbye, he will say to them. Goodbye and good luck with
your lives. Hwyl, cloth men. Golfalwch eich busness. He is not
stopping till he gets to a war. The weather is cold but the sea is flat. Kat has given him a holy
medal to wear. He has slung it around his neck with a cord. It
makes a chill against the skin of his throat. He unloops it. He
touches it with his lips, for luck. He drops it; it whispers into the
water. He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a grey
wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.