Authors: Norah Lofts
He put out his hand and pushed the door shut. It took another movement of air with it so that the flames leaped up with a hollow roar. Before he could have counted ten, before he dared withdraw his hand from the door the inner side of the low thatch was alight.
He stepped back then to a safe distance. There was a moment when the woman and both the children were screaming together, then the thatch fell in on them, throwing out showers of sparks and little clots of burning straw. The screams stopped. There was a smell of burning flesh and then, after a minute, mingling with it, the stink of smouldering fur.
‘Owd Muscovy!’ cried Tom and ran to the corner where the hobbled bear was plunging about, alight in a dozen places.
‘Lay still. Lay! Down! Down! Down!’ said Tom, beating at the thick greasy fur, tearing off bits of burning straw. He was not even conscious of the pain in his hands, he was so intent. The first lesson a bear-leader learned was that it did not pay to have too shabby or openly-intimidated a bear; people liked to think that the bear was much stronger than any man and that but for the muzzle and the chain would tear its leader to pieces.
‘Holy St. Ursula,’ Tom moaned. ‘You’ll look like the moths hev been at you.’
Even when his pelt was out of danger the bear, in whose early training fire had played a part, was nervous and shivering. Tom would have calmed him with an untimely offering of bread and honey, then remembered that he had taken the honey into the hut. All wasted and the ginger too!
‘And all over what?’ he asked himself. ‘Slice off a cut cake that’d never’ve been missed. Silly bitch! What got into her?’
He looked back at the hut then. The poor flimsy timbers of its front and side wall had fallen inwards over the whole and had almost burned themselves out.
‘Need never hev happened,’ he said. ‘Could hev been as nice as nice.’
In a mood of self-pity, and with no twinge of conscience, he again settled down beside the bear and slept so soundly that he did not hear the other residents of Squatters Row return from their sight-seeing.
With morning light shining on the ruin, the dumb man’s wife and Old Agnes found the destruction of one small hut of far more interest and moment than the burning of the great Abbey Gate which they had seen during the night. They asked the inevitable question, ‘How did it happen?’ and Tom had his tale ready. He had waked to find the hut blazing and had done his best to save whoever was inside. He had his blistered hands, his scorched face and raggedly singed beard to show. Nobody for a second doubted the truth of his story. Dummy’s wife managed, without exactly saying it in so many words, to imply that such an accident could have been expected, if you couldn’t have a proper house the only thing to do was to make your fire in the open, as she had done all these years. The accident, in fact, was the result of trying to set yourself up above your neighbours. Old Agnes, remembering that Kate and Martin had dealt more fairly with her over the Trimble that her clients ordinarily did, said that perhaps it was a mercy in disguise – if Martin were really dead; it was a hard world for widows and orphans.
Pert Tom was praised for his attempted rescue and sympathized with for having wandered into Baildon just at this time. Nobody would be in the mood to be amused by a bear’s tricks today. The town was in mourning, some said nineteen men dead and many more injured. And all for nothing.
Tom believed that trade would be bad and soon after breakfast was on his way towards the North Gate of the town when he saw a new detachment of soldiers marching in. They moved with the dogged, flat motion of men who have marched through the night, so it was likely that they had come from a distance. The fighting seemed to be over and they wouldn’t be marched back without a rest. Soldiers were good customers, easily amused and very open-handed. He turned himself about and followed them back into the centre of the town.
The Market Square was scattered with the litter – some of it curiously irrelevant – that was left by street fighting. There were the spent arrows, the burned out torches, the thrown-down clubs, and sticks which might be expected, but there were also bits of clothing, part of a wheel, a cooking pot, some grey wool on a spindle. Patches of blood showed where men had fallen dead or injured, but all the bodies save one had been removed. An old woman and a boy of about ten were struggling with the corpse of a heavy man, the old woman crying and hysterically admonishing the boy.
‘Hold his legs higher. Higher. You’re letting his bum drag on the ground.’
Pert Tom remembered how, after the Battle of Radscot Bridge he had come across a dead man with a ring on his finger. It was that ring which had enabled him to buy Owd Muscovy, a two-year-old, fully trained. He went carefully over this battleground and saw nothing worth salvaging except the spindle which he put in his pack.
Inside the great stone archway the burned edges of the gate hung jaggedly. Two monks, their faces expressionless, as though every morning they measured up burned gateways, were using a yardstick. Soldiers stood on guard all along the front of the Abbey, and inside Tom caught a glimpse of archers, pikemen, a man or two in armour. The soldiers he had followed had disappeared through the gateway, but soon others came out in groups of three or four and made off up Cooks Row towards the ale-houses. He followed and was soon giving thanks to St. Ursula that he had decided to stay in the town. The bear’s tricks were well received, especially his imitation of a pike man’s drill with a little cane for a pike, and by two o’clock in the afternoon Pert Tom had collected as much as
was needed to live luxuriously by his standards for the next four days, which was as far as he ever looked ahead. He found an inn not yet discovered by the soldiers and therefore spared the sudden inflation of prices, and took a leisurely dinner of boiled beef and dumplings, apple pie and ale. Before he left he had his wooden bottle filled with ale and on his way back down Cooks Row he did some pleasant shopping; a meat pie and five pickled onions for himself, a pot of honey, apples, bread for Owd Muscovy, half a pig’s head for the wife of the deaf and dumb man whose fire he hoped to share again.
For the town this might be a day of mourning, but for Squatters Row, never in any real sense part of the town, it was a jubilant occasion. Old Agnes had laid out six that day and tad four more to do tomorrow.
‘Of course I could’ve done the lot today but it don’t do to hurry. If you make it look easy they grudge your pay.’ She had bought bacon and ale for her supper, and was sharing Dummy’s fire because she was too busy to make her own. Dummy had spent the day grave digging and brought home a pig’s trotter for each member of his family and ale for himself.
Just at dusk Peg-Leg arrived, begging to be told what had happened. He had been out of town for three days visiting a niece who lived in the country and had a tender conscience. Every now and then when he grew tired of the food doled out at the Alms Gate he would pay her a visit; she would feed him, mend his rags, call him ‘Uncle Jacob’ and restore his self-esteem. Sometimes her patience and his good behavior would last four, five days, a week; but sooner or later he would offend her and she would reprimand him, and he would return to Baildon, laden with the provisions which it eased her sense of responsibility to provide. On this evening, after an unusually brief visit, he was carrying a piece of pork, a dozen eggs, some flat oat-cakes sticky with honey, and a little sack of walnuts. He was easily drawn into the group and. the tit-for-tat bargaining, promising a share of his pork when it was cooked in return for a piece of pig’s head this evening, swapping some eggs for a mug of Old Agnes’s ale and sharing out the walnuts amongst the children.
The air of festivity mounted until one child was bold enough to ask Pert Tom to put the bear through his tricks. Tom was not going to break an infallible rule for dwellers in Squatters Row.
‘Owd Muscovy, he’ve earned his rest today. Tell you what I will do, though. I’ll play you a tune on my whistle.’
He played a merry tune and the children began to hop and skip in time to it. Peg-Leg said, with a trace of wistfulness,
‘Nice to be young, and sound of wind and limb. I was a rare one at a hornpipe once on a time.’
‘Young!’ cried Old Agnes scornfully. ‘I can shake a leg with the best. Aye, and after a full day’s work, too.’
Gathering up her skirts and exposing skinny legs like knotted twigs and huge flat feet, she began to caper, calling to Tom to play faster, to play louder. Dummy’s wife sprang up to join her and their antics made even the deaf-and-dumb man laugh; he rocked from side to side, making a hoarse wheezy sound, like a pair of bellows whose leather sides had cracked.
It was into this merry scene that Martin walked.
He saw first the black ruin of what had been his home. Breath and heart-beat stopped; then reason took control. A few yards away was the leaping fire, a crowd about it, laughing and dancing to music. They wouldn’t be doing that if Kate and the children had been. … No. The eighbours were celebrating a near escape, Kate and the children were there … beyond the fire.
He walked towards it and Old Agnes, spinning round, saw him, stopped dead, let her skirt fall, and stared. In a second they were all staring and silent; on the defensive, like cattle in a field when a strange dog enters. And he could now see beyond the fire. No Kate, no child of his.
‘Holy Mother of God!’ Old Agnes said, ‘we thought you was dead, too.’
‘Dead.’ He repeated the word. ‘Too? D’you mean. …’ The rest of the question could not be spoken; his jaw jerked convulsively.
Old Agnes moved towards him and took him by the arm. She was suddenly sober and aware of how callous their behavior must seem to him.
‘Flared up in the night, your place did. But we thought you was dead too. … She… Kate was running round, hunting for you and crying. And with all gone together there didn’t seem much to grieve about.’
He said, ‘Burned,’ but the shaking of his jaw mangled the word so that it emerged in a moan of anguish.
Agnes tightened her hold on his arm.
‘Come and sit down, lad. Come to the fire and take a sup of ale. It’ll ease you.’
He pushed her off and took a few staggering steps back to the buttress which had been one wall of his home, and was now blackened by the flames which had destroyed it. He leaned his head against the cold stone and so stood.
He might have known. It was all part of his life’s pattern; every small mitigation of misery had been immediately followed by some new misfortune. An hour ago he had been given the means to make his family safe and comfortable for ever, so by some Devil’s logic it was inevitable that now he should have no family.
He thought – She never had anything! And the tears came scalding into his throat and stayed there.
Back by the fire, where the silence continued, though the eating had been resumed, Old Agnes eyed Martin uneasily, and presently made her second imaginative leap in the day.
‘Go and tell him you
tried,’
she said to Pert Tom. Tell him you did your best to save them. Show him your hands. It’ll make him feel better to think somebody tried. Coming on us all playing the fool and making merry. … Go on!’
Pert Tom rose and ambled over and stood beside Martin and said,
‘I did me best. Tried to save ‘em. Burnt meself. Look.’
Martin neither looked nor answered, but he put out his hand and laid it on Tom’s shoulder. The bear-man could feel the ague-like shudder that ran through the other man’s body, and although he felt no guilt in the matter, something of Martin’s deep misery was communicated to him.
‘Once,’ he said, ‘a man that knew a lot about things, towd me burning to death worn’t as bad as it sound. Talking about holy martyrs, he was. He said the smoke sorta choked you and deadened your senses afore the fire took howd. Reckon thass true, too. They on’y screamed once.’
Through the knot of pain in his throat, Martin said,
‘Pray God that’s true.’ He used the expression from habit, out of earnestness. There
was
no God, or such things could never happen. How
had
it happened?
He forced out the question, adding, ‘She was always… so careful. I’d put in a good hearthstone, and clay round the smoke hole.’
‘I dunno. I woke up to find it all ablaze. Like I said, I tried, but that was too far gone, then. Burn meself. Look.’ Once again he held out his hands. Some of the blisters had broken through hauling the bear’s chain all day. All Martin could see was Kate, young and pretty, just as she was when she had come to join him under Tuck’s Oak. But he managed to say,
‘I’m deep in your debt for that much. Leave me alone now.’
Tom went back to the fire.
‘He hev took it to heart,’ he said to Old Agnes. ‘Pity. I know more’n one man’d think himself well rid of his wife.’
‘They was different from most,’ said the old woman, thinking again of the Trimble.
The fire burned low, presently every one save Agnes had left it. She took a good drink of her ale to give her heart and then filled the mug again and went to where Martin stood.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘you drink this. I’ve had my losses too, and I know what I’m saying. Ale’ll ease you.’
He made no move to take the mug, and she went on,
‘I been with death all my life, Martin, and folks in sorrow. Them that come out of it best take what comfort they can get and turn their minds to other things, even if thass only squabbling over the pickings. You can’t bring Kate back, nor go to her till your time come. So you must bear up and comfort yourself.’
‘She never had anything; nothing but worry and misery and toil. And all my fault.’
‘Don’t talk so daft,’ the old woman said sharply. ‘You couldn’t help being poor. I never saw a man more ready to turn his hand to anything. I never saw a better husband neither. I’ve said that a dozen times, seeing you so careful about fetching the water and the firewood and all. Come on now, lad, don’t add to your own load.’ She held the mug to him again. He took it, gulped down the contents and handed it back. ‘Now leave me,’ he said.