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Overview
The Crimson Petal and the White meets Fight Club: A page-turning novel set in the world of female pugilists and their patrons in late eighteenth-century England.
Moving from a filthy brothel to a fine manor house, from the world of street fighters to the world of champions, The Fair Fight is a vivid, propulsive historical novel announcing the arrival of a dynamic new talent.
Born in a brothel, Ruth doesn’t expect much for herself beyond abuse. While her sister’s beauty affords a certain degree of comfort, Ruth’s harsh looks set her on a path of drudgery. That is until she meets pugilist patron George Dryer and discovers her true calling—fighting bare knuckles in the prize rings of Bristol.
Manor-born Charlotte has a different cross to bear. Scarred by smallpox, stifled by her social and romantic options, and trapped in twisted power games with her wastrel brother, she is desperate for an escape.
After a disastrous, life-changing fight sidelines Ruth, the two women meet, and it alters the perspectives of both of them. When Charlotte presents Ruth with an extraordinary proposition, Ruth pushes dainty Charlotte to enter the ring herself and learn the power of her own strength.
A gripping, page-turning story about people struggling to transcend the circumstances into which they were born and fighting for their own places in society, The Fair Fight is a raucous, intoxicating tale of courage, reinvention, and fighting one’s way to the top.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780698167971 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 04/14/2015 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Sales rank: | 582,157 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Some folks call the prize-ring a nursery for vice. Boxing is talked against by all the magistrates and held up as unlawful and wild, even sometimes called unchristian. As I see it, those pious old smatchets are right, but what of it? Prize-fighting is all those things, but more, it’s beautiful. The sight of two people—for it’s not only men, you know, who take the ring—who’ve built their skills and their bodies, struggling together with nothing between them, no ball or stick, but only desperate force and the will to live—why, there’s the root of all mankind, the stuff of our lives played out. Till you’ve seen one pug, bare chest steaming in the frosty air, half blinded by his own blood, drop the other to his knees on the frozen turf and turn to roar to the sky, well, if you ain’t seen it, you can’t know. It brings you to the base of yourself; just the sight brings a bellow to the throat. Prizefighting is named “the noble sport” by the fancy crowding the ringside, and so it seems to me. Nothing much else in my life has been noble.
I’d like to say that my beginnings were humble, but they weren’t beginnings, because I never really left them but for a short while. I was born in a narrow house we called the convent, and I came into the world as fighting and blood-soaked as I mean to leave it, upon a big oaken bed that had carried the weight of a regiment of cullies. Ma used to say I might’ve had twenty daddies. She meant, by the look of me: my jaw too large, my eyes too small, my nose thin and hooked as a gypsy’s. I’d teeth to spare, crowd-ing my chops and hiding one behind the other, too bashful to line up straight. I was a puzzle made of the plainest parts of those twenty daddies, the parts they left behind and went on to give handsome children to their lady wives.
Ma never would answer questions, but she couldn’t stop the misses’ talking. The story went that when she was young, a fine gent bought the house to set her up as his mistress. He grew tired of her, as cullies do, and had given the place over to her as a means of saying sorry. Dora always thought that the cully who flit was our daddy, but as we grew up and grew so different, it was plain that whichever man had a hand in making Dora, he wasn’t likely the same cull who made me. It didn’t much signify in a house like ours. In our house a girl’s worth could be counted out in pounds, shillings, and pence, and that was all the worth that mattered.
A babe, of course, never can be much counted that way, and as infants Dora and I had always to make ourselves useful or else stay out of sight. It’s the same choice children are given the world over: be of service or be gone. We were there to scrub the flags and empty the pots, we were there to fetch the callers to the misses or, if some sailor became more trouble than he’d paid to be, we were there to fetch the bullies to see the cully out. The misses all held the same view of keeping house, however they lived before they came there; they’d do what they must to keep their own fires lit and whatever Ma stirred herself to bid them in the way of housework, and never be fashed to lift a finger more. All the rest fell to Dora and me.
Every so often there’d come a new miss with a desperate look about her, lugging an infant that screamed and spat up into its blanket. Ma was fond of pink-cheeked wretched misses; she’d always take a ruined girl over a hard-faced strumper. Then Dora and I would have a babber to drag about like a doll, or carry up to the garret, if it wouldn’t hush. We never could keep any of those infants long enough to love them—we’d come down one day and it’d be gone and none of us would ask where it’d been whipped off to. Sometimes the miss it’d belonged to took it hard and wept. Ma never minded weeping in the kitchen, but if a molly couldn’t smile for the cullies she’d be turned out quick as blinking. She might sit at breakfast bawling as though she were the infant herself, if she could dry her eyes and flutter them when once she stepped foot outside the kitchen. I remember a miss who never could stop weeping, and was put out upon her arse for it. I recall standing in the hall, my hands twisting in my apron, as she was hustled from the door, the bully’s big hand between her shoulder blades. I was only five or six, I should think. Her thin back was aquiver with tears, in only the same poor dress she’d come in, for of course Ma kept back the silks. A miss could get along all right if she’d silks of her own, so it was spite as well as greed that drove Ma’s hand. I went to the parlour window and watched her struggle down the road with her box, dragging it by one handle and rucking up a wake in the dirt of the street like a skiff at low tide. I pressed my face right up to the glass, to see her as long as I could. I couldn’t say what it was about that particular miss that caught my fancy, but I’d think of her sometimes, after that; I liked to imagine that when she’d turned the corner she’d found her baby waiting there and would be mother to it again. Later, when I grew up a little and had a grasp of the trade, I wondered at Ma keeping Dora and me. She kept us and never did hire us out to the cullies whose tastes ran to kiddies, though she threatened to often enough. I suppose, in a woman like our ma, that passed for love.
The convent was so narrow that it looked to have been built in an alley, crushed up against the houses on either side like a drunken crone held up by two fat fellows. Ours was the oldest house on the lane, the houses that had once stood on either side having been burned down, or torn down to make room for the new ones. Because the house couldn’t spread out, it reached up; there were five floors, if you counted the cellar, and all the rooms were full, though the bodies in them changed about. My whole life, we never had a spare room for more than a day.
In our house we went to bed when the whole world was rising. I’d lie there and listen to the milkmaid shouting in the lane, and the women calling to those below to look out, as they emptied their pots. I’d fall asleep with the sun pinking the dark behind my eyes. I always thought it the best way to live; in daylight the world was merry and safe. At night it was always better to be up and ready. I’d no choice in it, so it was well that I thought it so fine—Ma would never have stomached me creeping about the house in the daylight, while all the house was abed.
Sleeping all day as we did, we took our breakfast when other folks had dinner, at three or four o’clock. The kitchen table had been built just where it was and took up near the whole room; you’d have had to chop it to firewood to get it out of the door. We sat around it, pressed together on the benches, the misses in their silks, all bare arms and bosoms, and Dora and I always pushed to the ends of the bench, with half our arses hanging off. The bullies would put heavy bars across the front door and come to sit with us, though sometimes they stood, the room being so full. There were chairs at the head and the foot, and the bullies never did sit in them, as the men might expect to in any usual house. Ma sat always at the head of the table. The other chair was for whichever girl she saw fit to reward, whether it be a miss who’d taken good earnings the night before or a newcomer who was proving difficult to turn and so needed softening.
When Dora and I weren’t making ourselves useful we’d be huddled in the garret in the bed we shared, or else out upon the street, teasing the pigs; there were always pigs upon our street, let out and brought back in at night. Sometimes we’d be sent to the tavern around the corner, on Frog Lane, which hired out rooms to misses, to fetch home one of the girls. Our mollies were put two to a room at the convent, so one or other of them was always using the rooms at The Hatchet Inn. I preferred that errand over any other. I liked the smells: ale, straw, and smoke. The folks there knew my name and called out, “How d’you fare, little Ruth?” and best of all was the yard, with its roped stage, upon which there had been so many bouts between pugs, or cocks, or dogs, that the boards were patched black with old blood. I always lingered as long as I dared when Ma sent me there.
If you were a caller at the convent on a usual day, you’d think it as fine as any swell’s place, with velvet hangings and sconces for candles upon the walls. The front stairs were always lit and the parlour, where the cullies sat, had a brocaded settee and a table with curved legs that looked ready to drop a curtsey. The parlour always had about it an air of waiting: all those breaths of restless old goats, waiting for a miss to have done with his crony and come to fetch him for his turn. None of the family ever would sit in that room, though it was done out so nice. If no sailor was waiting there, and if I thought no one would miss me, I sometimes went in to look at the pictures upon the walls. One was a small painting of a little girl, all done up in mourning dress, her face very serious and drear. The other was a fine picture of trees upon an autumn lane, made all from feathers. Ma had taken them from some likely lad by way of payment. I had a special fancy for the painting of the girl. I’d pose before the glass and with my hands clasped under my chin, as she did. I never could make my eyes like hers, no matter how I turned my head. Her eyes were sweet and mournful; mine were a pig’s, too small for my face. Sometimes, I used to imagine the little girl stepping from her frame and strolling off down the autumn lane, perhaps to some place where she needn’t look so sad.
The mollies’ rooms were hung with as much finery as Ma could arrange, all feathers and cushions and draperies. All of this was for the sake of the cullies—the minute you went up past the first landing or into the kitchen, why, the walls were bare lime-wash and the furnishings as plain as my mug. Ma charged a good rate, three or four shillings a time, so we were never short of misses willing to work. The cullies paid it, because Ma never would stand to see a cull robbed at the convent. There were houses like ours where a fellow had to keep an eye on his coat and boots, never mind his pocket-watch, but Ma wouldn’t stomach it and all the neighbourhood knew it.
When I was perhaps ten and Dora twelve or thirteen, one of the misses—a smooth-skinned negress who’d shared a room with Gypsy Jane—was turned out for smiling her slow smile at one of the bullies once too often. Ma never could tolerate anyone else’s pleasure if it didn’t pay.
Dora and I were in the scullery. I was scraping the porridge pot and Dora was at the sink, trying to stretch half a bucket of water to clean all the dishes so that she needn’t go back to the pump. All we heard was a squawk of raised voices, a scuffle, a cry, the slam of the door and then Ma, calling Dora’s name. We looked at each other and I felt hot relief that it was my sister’s name Ma called, not mine—I didn’t know, when Dora swallowed hard and put down the bowl she was wiping, that it would be the last one she’d clean for a good while. I was left there amongst the dirty dishes to finish on my own. From then on, she’d help about as much as any of the girls, which was to say, as little as she could. Dora was to earn and I was left to be young by myself and so must be all the more helpful or all the more invisible.
You’d never have guessed, to see Dora at table that first breakfast after, how she’d turned her back on me when at last she came to bed, so that she might snivel. She was quiet, but Dora and I were always quiet at table. Her nose was tipped as pink as a mouse’s but her eyes were dry. She held herself carefully, as though she’d just discovered she was made like a teacup: breakable and worth good money. When Ma put the first piece of the bacon—a better piece than Dora had ever eaten, I’d suppose—onto the plate in front of her, she looked up in surprise.
Ma nodded and smiled, which was queer to see, her smiles being so stiff from underuse. Ma’s smile was not a cheery sight, nor a comfort; it made my belly clench. Dora looked only confused and put to the blush. Her hands darted toward her plate and held the rim as though someone might wrest it from her.
I was so green over that bacon I was near sick. I’d been given plenty of reason to envy Dora; my whole life long, people had been forever stroking her cheek and telling her she was a beauty. I expected to feel ugly, but I wasn’t ready to see the best bacon on my sister’s plate. It was as thick as my finger and pink as a baby’s tongue, spreading out a puddle of juice for Dora to wipe her bread in. The fat looked crisp enough to melt at the edge and inside, thick enough to chew. My own piece was scarcely enough to flavor the bread. Dora and I were used to comparing our portions mutely, sliding our eyes at each other’s plates; now she looked at me only once, to be sure that I’d marked how far she was risen. I tried to keep my face still, but she’d seen what she looked for and was smug as a house cat. She didn’t look at me again for the rest of the meal. She needn’t now, for just as she wasn’t to be kept hungry, nor was she to be left to herself. The misses were all fluttering over her and Ma was watching it all like a poultryman over a flock of geese.
“The captain knows how to put a girl through her paces—reckon you’re raw this morning, ain’t you?” Polly, a thin girl who’d not been in the house more than a month, shot a sly glance at Dora.
Dora nodded, her mouth being as full as she could stuff it. In any case, she wasn’t used to being spoken to at table.
“If you thought it sore yesterday, you wait till tonight,” Gypsy Jane told her. She sounded glad about it.
Dora’s eyes grew wide, and she looked as though she struggled to swallow.
“Ah, don’t heed her.” Irish Anne patted her hand. “You’re born to it. You’ll not have trouble.”
“I didn’t say trouble, I said she’ll be tender.”
“That’ll wear off soon enough. You’ll have a cunny like a leather purse before you know it,” Maggie said.
Polly, who’d wept every day for a week when first she came, let out a laugh like a dog barking.
“You’ll use Jane’s room.” Ma’s voice could lay all the talk to silence.
Gypsy Jane only nodded. She’d not expected anything else.
“And we’ll find you a gown. I have something in pink silk just right for a virgin girl,” Ma said. “I think we can call you unspoiled awhile longer.”
All the misses made a face. Jane leaned over and said, “You’ll have to bleed.”
“Hush,” Ma said, “don’t make more of it than it is. It’ll scarce be a scratch.”
My sister gripped the edge of the table as though she could barely keep her seat. I thought I knew what a stirred-about mixture she felt; she was always a coward about blood, but she was head-over-tail for silk.
I wasn’t called upstairs to help dress her, and nor was I called to admire her. I knew she was made fine from the cooing of the girls, but I’d not go to look. I didn’t lay eyes on her till I passed her sitting with the other misses in the hall, where the cullies might come to look at them. To my eyes, then, she looked a stranger, her mug painted high and her figure pushed into a ruffled gown of palest pink. Her hair was put up and curled about the face, as the other misses wore theirs. The five of them sat like mismatched sisters, in a row of all different shapes and shades, pressed together against the cold. My own dress was plain enough and grown ragged at the hem, but I had sleeves and a flannel shift. She looked very small between Gypsy Jane and Maggie. As I watched, she laughed aloud at something Maggie said, though I didn’t think she’d seen me. She wasn’t taunting me. If I knew my sister, she was keeping her courage up.
She mightn’t have been teasing me then, but it was almost all she did in the days to follow. She still came to sleep in our bed in the garret when at last she’d done, smelling of sour salt and pinching me that I might move. I didn’t know if she came because she liked to, or because Jane was a wasp over her room—there was always that kind of quarrel going on in our house. Dora still came creeping in, and she’d pinch me even if I was pressed up against the wall when she did. At first I’d wake to her nails cruel upon my skin and a whisper, “You’ve taken all the bed,” or “You’re snoring, you sow,” but at last she gave up the play. She pinched because I was abed and she wasn’t, and both of us knew it. Sometimes, when first she began, I’d pinch or slap at her hands and we’d start to scuffle on the bed till Ma called up the stairs that she’d take the skin from our arses if we kept at it. Then we’d freeze, Dora’s hair in my fist and her arm about my neck and warily we’d release each other, each of us ready to fly at the other if she made a move to go again. At last I learned that the surest way to madden my sister was to accept her pinch and only burrow deeper into the bed.
Dora always had painted up every chance she got, even when she was too young to do more than make a mess of herself. Ma wasn’t one to waste paint on a child who couldn’t earn, so Dora had begged from the girls for any pot with a little left inside, or painted her lips with beetroot and her eyebrows with charcoal, as anyone could who had those things about the house. She’d always been in a fever to get me painted up too; I’d had to fight her off sometimes, so desperate was she to put black smudges along my eyebrows. Now she’d her own paints and powders, she never thought of wasting them on my plain mug. Instead she spent as long as she dared in front of the broken piece of looking-glass we had up there, dabbing at her face with a piece of sponge.
When she saw me watching her, she’d remark, “How plain I am. My teeth ain’t quite straight.”
Her teeth weren’t crooked, mine were. She meant, Look, Ruth, how handsome I am beside you. Sometimes she’d say, “Oh, I wish I were prettier. The captain swears home I’m the bonniest creature he’s seen in all his travels, but I’m sure he don’t mean it.”
And she’d sigh as though the cully were a prince, rather than a weatherbeaten, gypsy-faced goat.
“You’re bonny as a turd stuck with primroses,” I’d say, or some other weak retort. She’d only toss her head and smirk.
After a few months of this, Ma finally bid Dora sleep downstairs. I couldn’t say what turned her mood; Ma was changeable as a cat.
Dora acted like she’d been granted a high favour, though she might’ve complained to Ma long ago if she’d really wanted to share Jane’s bed.
“You might be fitted to live up here like a scullery maid,” she said, tying her clothes into a blanket, “but I’ll move down.”
“It’s down in truth,” I said, “to those sheets crusted stiff. I’d not sleep down there if you paid me.”
“But no one will pay you, Ruth,” she said, and swept to the door, “to sleep or otherwise.”
It was sudden as a slap; in that moment, I grew wild to be earning myself. I couldn’t bear to be the servant of the house, to be cold and hungry and alone, on top of it all. I knew that ten was too young to be a regular miss, but Ma had said only days before, when I said my shoes had grown holes, that she’d find a cully for me if my feet were so devilish cold. She’d meant it to be a threat, but now it seemed more like a promise.
If I’d had any kind of sense I’d have asked Ma to find one of those cullies for me, but she was in one of her rages and had been so for days. I couldn’t approach her; she was likely as not to take her stick to me before I spoke. If she did hear me out, she was as likely again to find a cully who’d pay to hurt a girl, just for spite at my daring to ask anything of her. If I’d had any kind of patience, I’d have waited for her to grow calm, but at ten years old, patience wasn’t a virtue I was blessed with. Instead I waited only till all the girls were painted up and the house opened, when all in the place were occupied with the night’s business, and I supposed to be ready to run at anyone’s call.
I crept back up to the garret, keeping the door open and one ear cocked to the stairs. I didn’t have silks, but in the corner of the clothes press was a dressing gown that had once been Maggie’s. It was of silk twill embroidered white-on-white, the opening edged with knitted lace. It was spoiled by a bloodstain to its skirt that wouldn’t lift out. I’d tried to lift the stain with salt, but the cloth was so thin it couldn’t stand much scrubbing, and in the end I’d left it stained rather than tear it. Ma had given it to Dora, who’d left it behind now that she’d her own, unspoiled things.
I took off my gown and drew the dressing gown on over my shift and stays. The broken bit of looking-glass was too small to see much of myself; I stood and bent in front of it to glimpse here a shoulder, there the knitted lace about my neck. My shift showed grey where the dressing gown hung on me, but I couldn’t go without it; the dressing gown being so big, I’d have showed my chest bare to the nipple the moment I moved. My stays were grown too small to be counted upon for modesty. I knelt on the stool so that I might see the skirt with its bloom of dark rust.
I tried to put up my hair as the misses did. I had only two pins, but at last I got it into a kind of knot. I wished I’d any kind of paint at all, but Dora had taken everything. I pinched at my cheeks to pink them and bit at my lip till I tasted blood. Then I went and hesitated at the top of the stairs.
From below came the sounds of boots on the stairs and a breathy laugh. The doors on the second landing opened and closed. Other voices drifted up from the hall. A cully said something I couldn’t hear in a complaining tone.
I heard Dora reply, “Come this way, then, if you ain’t fond of waiting.”
More boots sounded on the tile of the hall. There came the sound of another door opening and closing—the parlour, I thought it. Then all fell quiet.
I crept down the staircase. On the second landing I stopped, to listen for signs that all were occupied. I couldn’t hear much, only an uneven creaking that could’ve meant anything. I’d have to trust. Down I went.
I stopped on the middle stair and looked about the hall below. The front door was half open, and through it I could hear the sound of the bullies talking upon the step. I could smell their pipes, the cheap clay kind they always smoked, sold with the tobacco already inside and thrown away after. There was nobody in the hall. The kitchen door was shut tight; the door to the cellar steps stood open a little way. This was where Dora had taken her cull, most likely; Ma would throttle her if she took a man into the kitchen, which was the one place in the house where the cullies never could go. The parlour door was ajar, and from here there came gentlemen’s voices, smooth with good breeding. Here sat the cullies who’d been willing to wait.
My plan was simple; I’d open the parlour door and offer to fetch the gents some rum. If any of them seemed to give me the eye, I’d offer a little more than rum. I didn’t feel nervous of finding the words; I’d heard the girls do it more often than I could count. I only thought of how it might be to put coins into Ma’s hand and see her queer smile.
By the time I reached the parlour I was nervous as a flea. The breeze from the open front door raised the hairs on my arms, and I suddenly felt how thin and low the dressing gown was. I stood there in the hall like a noddy, unable to decide whether to go forward or back.
As I hovered there, the cellar door opened behind me, and someone screamed. I jumped and span about; Dora stood in the doorway, on the top step. Behind her a young cull’s mug peered over her shoulder from the darkness of the cellar steps.
Now I heard the parlour door open and turned to see the gents come out, crying, “What’s this? What ho?”
At the same moment, the bullies burst in from the front step and then stood as foolish as I’d been, not being sure who to manhandle out of the house.
Dora stopped her shrieking and begun laughing.
“I took you for a ghost,” she kept saying, and each time was too fitted to say more.
The young cull behind her pushed out into the hall and looked me over. He was barely grown, eighteen or so, but dressed sober as a monk. I’d noticed him about the place before, and marked him as being like a lad in an old man’s costume. His hair was curled and powdered like that of a cull twice his age. He didn’t smile to see Dora so merry.
“What the devil?” he said. “What is this child about? Is that blood upon her?”
I didn’t like to be called a child.
Dora came forward, still laughing.
“She’s playing at having her courses.”
She tried to touch the skirt, and I pulled it away from her fingers.
Dora’s young cully looked stern at this, and the other gents only looked fuddled. One of our bullies stepped up, opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again.
Dora was still the only one who saw the joke. It was enough for me, mind. I’d only two roads open to me, and I’d sooner have been hanged than run back upstairs, so I took the other and threw myself at her. I got a good hold of her dress with one hand, and with the other I began to beat her anywhere I could reach. She put up her hands to defend herself, still laughing, till I landed a couple of blows in good earnest.
Then she called out, “She’s run mad! Take her off me!”
I had time to strike her perhaps twice more before strong hands gripped my neck hard enough that my shoulders came up about my chin like those of a frightened chicken. I let her go. It was Ma’s hand that had caught me. I’d rather have had the bullies a hundred times.
Ma struck at my arse and I twisted as far from her stick as I could, which, her grip on me being what it was, wasn’t far enough. She couldn’t reach my buttocks and instead the blow struck me in the small of my back, which had me shrieking like a hog. It ain’t the worst pain, to be struck upon the spine, but it’s painful enough.
“Hold still,” she said, and drew me back toward her.
By then I thought only of escape, twisting and bucking, heedless of my skirt and my bare legs. I raised myself up and heard Ma’s grunt of effort, and then quite as suddenly threw myself toward the flagstone floor. I felt her lose her grip and had one moment of freedom, my hands out to take the force of the stone, when she again found the cloth at my waist, and I stopped with a jerk, like a dog coming to the end of a short rope. Now I was dangling helpless, and Ma still with a stick in her free hand. I put my arms up to cover my head.
“Madam, stay your hand,” one of the gents said. I thought it was Dora’s dowdy cull.
No blow came. I could hear Ma huffing and snorting, and the gent talking to her very low, though I couldn’t make out what he said.
I heard Ma say, “Four shillings,” and the cull replied, “Done.”
Suddenly she let go of my skirt, and, it being so unexpected, I’d no time to brace myself. I fell onto the flags, hitting my elbows hellishly. Both arms were set to humming.
“Get up,” Ma said to me.
I got to my feet as fast as I could, lest she strike me again for being slow.
Dora was watching me with a blank face; my sister was none the wiser than I.
“Go on,” Ma said, “into the yard. These gents want to watch you fight.” I started forward before I even heard the words properly. I was still only relieved at being spared a beating. My arms were devilish sore.
Dora must’ve complained, for behind me I heard Ma say, “She’ll not spoil your face. She’ll regret it if she does.”
It was dark outside, and cold. One of the bullies from the door came out holding up a lamp. A little ring formed around me, of the girls and what callers were about the place. Into this circle Ma pushed Dora, who stumbled and righted herself and looked as though she’d protest, if only she dared. More cullies came out, pulled from the beds of the misses by the promise of amusement, and were now calling, “Oh, good sport!”
“What, are we to have a show? I’ll put a shilling on the stocky one!”
That meant me.
I wasn’t vexed any longer, and Dora looked only fearful, holding her arms against the cold.
“Come on,” one gent called out, “set to!”
I looked at Ma. She nodded at me and raised her stick a little. I squared up to Dora and held my fists up. She looked only miserable.
“Put your fives up,” I said to her, “for I’ll have at you whether you do or no.”
“I’m changing my bet,” one voice called out. “I’ll put six shillings on this one. I shall want to see blood for it!”
This perked me up, and I quipped, “Blood is a pound.”
All about me laughed, and I felt it as only a ten-year-old, who is suddenly the centre of admiring attention, can. I could hear the betting increase.
“Wait,” Ma said now. “Put some pennies in a purse for the girls. Whoever wins shall take it.”
“You have taken four shillings for them already, madam,” said Dora’s young gent, the one who’d sent us out there.
“For their services,” Ma said. “Put something in a purse for the girls. They’ll fight the harder for it.”
I heard coin hit coin as one of the culls passed a hat about. Ma stepped close to Dora and said something in her ear that made her straighten up and let go of her arms, though she still looked miserable as sin.
“Go at it,” Ma said, when once the hat was passed.
What could I do then? I stepped to Dora and fibbed her on the cheek as hard as I could. As I did it, I thought, Now Ma will thrash me, for marking her face. This thought only made me fight the harder. For Dora, that first blow seemed to clear her head. She’d been playing the nervous princess, but we’d grown up fighting as often as we ate, which was one too much and the other not often enough. We fell to now as though we were alone in the garret, all feet and teeth and fistfuls of hair. I forgot the gents and Ma’s stick. I forgot the hat full of coins. I didn’t remember that we were in the yard till I had Dora down on her back, one knee upon her chest, and felt my other knee grow wet with mud. My sister’s throat was in my hands, her pulse beating hot beneath my palm. Her hands pushed at my face and raked my cheek, but I only pressed my knee into her chest and kept my grip till she choked out, “Enough.”
I never got hold of the purse of pennies; Ma kept that, as I could’ve told you she would. I hardly cared, for my slice of bread was near as thick as Ma’s that night, with butter all the way to the edges.
“Don’t you grow used to it,” she said. “I can’t imagine you’ll earn so much again.”
To Dora she said, “You’ll have a good slice too, but it will likely be the last for a while; you look like you’ve been through a mill.”
If anyone else had said so it would’ve been a jest, for “mill” was a common word for a fight. None of us sitting around that table knew whether to smile; if Ma was punning, it was the first we’d ever heard from her. In the end, none of us laughed, only twitched anxiously about the mouth. Ma’s face was stern, and she spoke as though Dora had begun the scrap herself, rather than begged to be spared it. Dora’s right eye was pinked, her lip was swelled and she had a scratch upon her cheek, which later would scab like a string of beads.
I made that slice last as long as I could, keeping each bite small and working my way about the edges to save the middle. Before I had done, Ma said that if I didn’t get on and eat my supper she’d have it back from me as being too large, and then I had to eat that soft buttery middle in two hasty bites.
Now, when I think back over it, I’m surprised that Ma treated me, seeing as I’d ruined Dora’s looks for a week. She liked to keep us unsteady, so that we never could predict how she’d turn, one minute to the next.
However good it was, that slice lasted only a few bites, and soon I was hungry again and cold upstairs alone. Dora seemed to prefer the company of the other misses, and I was left to do everything about the house, without company to speed the work. So, though I was fearful, I was glad with it when, a few weeks later, Ma called me out from where I was chopping turnips in the kitchen. I found her waiting with two gents in the hall. One of them was the sober young cully who’d set us to milling, the other a yellow-haired, stocky cull of the same age, eighteen or nineteen, with a shiny blue coat and a silver-topped cane.
“Go with these gents, Ruth, and do as they tell you,” she said.
The straw-headed gent was goggling at me quite openly.
“She’s damned small, Dryer,” he said.
“I tell you she will suit,” the sober one replied.
“She’s as biddable as you please,” Ma said, in the special voice she used for gentlemen.
I’d have chosen a thousand times to go off with strange cullies before I’d talk back to Ma, so I took off my apron with unsteady hands and went to them. Ma nodded.
“She’ll do as she’s bid,” she said. She turned away and began to climb the stairs.
“Come along, then,” said the sandy cull, “Ruth, is it? I am Mr Sinclair. This is Mr Dryer—but he tells me you have met before.”
I was struck dumb; I could only nod. Why did they take me out of the house? I should’ve been far easier in myself if Ma had told me to take them upstairs.
Once I was out in the street, the hand of fear closed about my bladder and I thought, I can’t be sure if I’ll ever come back again; perhaps she’s sold me outright. All about me was familiar, excepting the backs of the two gents, and it was them I must follow, trailing behind as they strode on with long legs and sure steps. If I’d had more sense about me I might’ve been calmed by that; they didn’t expect me to run from them.
When I saw The Hatchet ahead of us I chided myself to be calm. We were to take a room, then. It was something indeed, to have two cullies to begin. The misses would want to hear it all; they’d crowd about me. I’d have bacon. The sober gent turned at the door to be sure that I followed.
“Hurry up, girl,” he said.
I felt my bowels bubble and loose. I’d not expected to be so anxious. I suddenly realised how ragged was my dress and wished Ma had given me silk. I’ll have silk tomorrow, I told myself. I’ll have silk tomorrow, if I’m brave today.
I felt as though my head was floating above my body.
The sober gent was talking in the ear of the innkeeper. Mr Sinclair, the yellow-headed one, came toward me and took me by the arm. His fingers were stronger than I’d have thought them.
“We shan’t have use for a slow girl. Pick your feet up.”
All about me were culls and misses who’d come and gone through the convent rooms. In any usual case I’d have been bidding all the company a good evening, but now I could barely look at them. I was so awash with fear and pride that I didn’t know whether I hoped they’d marked me or not. The gent’s hand was hot upon my elbow.
He pulled me through the tavern, winding around the people. I stumbled after him, trying not to trip over feet and the legs of stools. It wasn’t till he stopped and turned to face the room that I realised that he wasn’t taking me to the little stairs that led upstairs to the chambers to hire, nor to any of the back parlours used for the same purpose. We were going toward the back door, where the beaten mud of the yard gave way to the low wooden stage roped round with cord.
Mr Sinclair turned and addressed the whole room. His voice was loud and as honking as a goose.
“Come out now, and watch this little girl go against the butcher’s boy!”
“All bets to me,” called Mr Dryer.
Then we were pushed outside as the whole tavern tried at once to get out of the doors.
I was more fearful than ever I’d been when I thought I’d have to play the whore. There was a boy waiting up there with his chest bare and his fists bandaged, and they pushed me up beside him. I knew his mug, though not to speak to. He didn’t say a word to me, but paced and puffed and put his maulers up, fibbing at the air.
Mr Dryer climbed up beside me.
“You will fight in your shift,” he said. “Take your dress off.”
It was the first word he’d said to me. I only looked at him, till he put out a hand and twitched at my sleeve impatiently. Then I slowly loosed my dress enough to pull it over my head. The men watching called and whistled.
“All bets to me,” he called again, and leaned over the ropes to take coins from countless hands.
I stood there, shivering and trying not to look at the crowd about me, till Mr Dryer came back to the middle of the ring.
“Who will second the girl?” he called out.
I couldn’t help but look now. A scattering of hands were up in the crowd. Mr Dryer pointed at one of them, a miss I thought I knew. She came climbing over the ropes and smiled at me. I felt a little better to have a second, even one not very familiar. She came beside me and patted my arm. She looked rough about the face, but kind—looked, in fact, like just the sort of miss I was most used to seeing. She took my dress from my hands and hung it carefully over the ropes at the corner, and then sank to one knee and put the other out before her.
“Come on, then,” she said, below the calls of the crowd.
I sat upon her knee, just as a real pug sits upon the knee of his second, just like all the big-name pugs at the fairs. It was that, more than anything, which gave me courage. It made me feel at once that it was more real than any moment I’d lived, and yet, more of a play. I felt a great calm settle over me. I looked at the butcher’s boy, now sitting on the knee of his own second, his breath still puffing in and out like a bellows. I thought, I’ll drive that breath out of you, sonny. I thought it so hard that he seemed to feel it and looked up at me. He stuck his tongue out. I only smiled, the same smile I used to tease Dora.
Mr Dryer called, “Come up to scratch!”
I walked there for the first time. The scratch in The Hatchet, the first I ever put my toe upon, was one of two lines painted white upon the wooden stage. All the lines I’d walk up to after that moment, some made in the earth with a stick, or chalk upon stone, or sometimes only agreed—the scratch shall be here, where the twig points—all of those lines have blurred one into the other in my mind, but my first scratch was a true one. I’ve always preferred a painted scratch. It can’t be argued with, nor scuffed.
I’ve a very clear memory of that moment, though I see myself in it, which can’t be real. It’s dusk, not yet dark but falling fast. Two torches burn in holders at The Hatchet’s door, lighting the crowd about them strangely. The crowd is a shifting mass of murmurs and hats. The straw-headed gent stands at the front of the crowd, so close to the ropes that he’ll take a kick in the eye if he’s not quick on his feet. I’m standing at the painted line, my fists bunched but hovering around my waist. My chest is flat, my stays too small, so that my nipples show clear under the flannel shift. My legs are bared a good few inches; my shift is too short. Already my legs are stocky and solid as a sow’s. My arms, too, are thick as logs, grown strong from the work of the house. My face is calm, my narrowed eyes fixed on the bobbing, puffing butcher’s boy. I’m willing him to die.
That’s what I remember. That, and I cut my fist on his teeth. I’d not learned then how to harden the skin and no one had thought to bandage them. His teeth pierced my hand, and from then on each fib I landed left a mark of my own blood upon his chops, like paint upon the door of a plague house.
That night I ate a plate of oysters so juicy they burst in my mouth like berries. The girls asked me to tell them the story of the mill over and again, and each time I told them how I’d thought I was to have two cullies for my first time, they screamed with mirth to think of it.