Fair Fight by Anna Freeman Page A

was that each day the bread was dearer and yet less like something you’d want to eat. The gents still came to call, but were closer with their purses; the price of living had risen for everyone. You’d only to step outside to see the hunger carved into the people’s faces. We had more than most folk about us but still there were nights when I woke with my belly clenched like a fist. This, despite dipping into my little purse of savings, that’s how dear flour was then. It was bitter to be watching it drip away on bread and still to go about hungry. I dipped and it dripped and at last it was gone and we’d nothing but what we could earn by the day, or what Dora gave us. I won’t list here half the lengths we went to, to scrape a meal from turnips and barley and sometimes peas. I’ll only tell that the urchins on our lane came home with handfuls of nettles for their pot and seeing this, I went right out after them and gathered my own, coated though they were with muck from the river.
    On the last day of August, Tom and I were fencing with wooden bills in the yard. We did this to keep me quick on my pins and had been doing it so long that now we parried and thrust like a country dance laid out, barely ever landing a hit. My husband – I called him so and always had, though we’d never been married before God – was nimble for his size. There was something comic about such a bull-beef cull bobbing on his toes; something comic and beautiful both, to my eyes.
    Tom’s mug was red but his breath came evenly and his eyes were fixed on the bill in my hand in a way that would’ve made me fearful, had we been milling in earnest. He had to lean down to meet my stick with his own and his huge frame bobbing and bending so, he always put me in mind of a bear.
    I thrust toward him and he put out his bill to hit my own away but as he did, Dora screeched my name from the doorway behind him. Sometimes my sister had a voice on her like a pig at slaughter. Tom half turned in surprise and in so doing thumped me, not upon the bill, but the fingers, just above the second joint. I cursed aloud.
    Tom span back to me.
    ‘Bloody damn,’ he said.
    ‘Never a truer word,’ I said, and held up my hand. Blood was running down my arm and dripping from my elbow in its soft way.
    ‘Oh, hell, Ruthie.’
    ‘No matter,’ I said, though it stung like the devil.
    ‘Let me see,’ Tom took my hand. ‘Oh, it’s a nasty one.’
    ‘It don’t signify.’
    I held my hand out in front of me so that it shouldn’t drip upon our clothes. The drops that fell were straight away eaten by dust and turned into splashes of black mud.
    Dora had grown impatient and come toward us. Now she sighed as though my bleeding were a broken plate.
    ‘Mr Dryer bids me tell you,’ she was looking at me as though I were a sorry child made dirty, ‘that he’ll be taking you to mill at the fair tomorrow. He’s all hot about it, I couldn’t say why. He’ll be vexed indeed if you’ve broken your hand, Ruth. You’d best not have broken it.’
    ‘The fair!’ Tom said.
    ‘It ain’t broken,’ I told her, ‘and if I had I couldn’t help it.’
    ‘As long as you’ve not,’ Dora said. ‘So, will I tell him you’ll do what he asks? He tells me you’d better get ready to put on a good show.’
    ‘I don’t know what I can do in one night,’ I said, ‘but you may tell him I’ll stand up for him anywhere he chooses.’
    ‘The fair, Ruth,’ Tom said again.
    I smiled at him. I’d not let Dora see my pleasure but oh, I felt it.
    ‘I told him as much,’ Dora said. ‘I said I needn’t speak to you at all.’
    ‘Indeed you needn’t, if it’s such labour for you.’ I looked to the air above her head as if it were of more interest than she might hope to be.
    ‘It ain’t so much labour,’ Dora said, looking again at my arm, which in spite of my holding it out had dripped blood upon my bare and dusty feet, ‘as it is ugly,’ and here she smiled at me as