Barbara slid into bed.
Lily said, “Barbara?”
“Aye?”
“I truly do wish to learn to write better.”
The sigh was a small one, admitting defeat. Barbara turned so her back rested warm against Lily’s. “All right, then,” she said.
*
Lily paid attention to her lessons and she practiced in her copy book, and by the start of the third summer, she was more advanced than all the boys.
“I’m taller than ye, anyway,” said Henry, claiming that small victory, even if he could not match her skills.
Simon was tallest, having shot up to the full height of a man seemingly overnight, though he was but fourteen. Walter, smaller and swift, would provoke him the way someone might bait a bear, stepping lightly to one side when Simon’s fists swung.
Barbara told Walter, “Ye’ll do that one time too often and wish that ye hadn’t.” To Simon, she added, “And ye needn’t dance to his piping. Ye do have a brain.”
Walter smirked at his brother. “His brain’s not that big.”
Simon’s hand moved so fast that they none of them saw it till Walter lay flat on the floor.
“See now, what did I tell ye?” said Barbara, and sighed as she helped Walter stand. “Shake hands and be done with it, that’s right. And try to behave, will ye? I’ve got a friend coming.”
When Barbara’s friends came to visit she saw them alone in the parlor which lay at the back of the house, with its own private door to the yard so that visitors could come and go without having to walk through the front rooms.
The parlor was always kept ready for guests. Chairs sat waiting to welcome them under a framed picture of a perpetual sunrise at sea. Should they wish to stay longer and spend the night, there was a bedstead against the far wall by the fireplace, with curtains drawn around it, but the friends who came to visit Barbara usually stayed no more than an hour or so and then departed. Sometimes they took ale or wine, but Barbara always saw to that herself, just as she always cleaned the parlor without needing Lily’s help. “There are too many things in this room,” she’d said once, “that are breakable.”
So on this afternoon, when Barbara’s guest had but scarcely arrived and there suddenly came from the parlor a loud sound of breaking glass, Lily looked up from her work in surprise.
Being in the kitchen, Lily was already just outside the parlor. Near enough to be in Simon’s way as he pushed past her in a running blur, slammed the parlor door fair off its hinges, and dragged out a man by the knot of his cravat.
Lily had witnessed the boys’ fights, but those had been brief and had left few real bruises. She’d never seen anyone getting an actual beating.
The man, by the end of it, was on the floor and his cravat was no longer white but stained red from his bleeding as Simon’s fists landed relentlessly, blow after sickening blow.
Archie tried to pull Simon away and was elbowed back violently into the wall.
It was Barbara who finally took Simon’s face in her two hands and said, “Stop!” and he did, but the damage was done.
It brought trouble.
The man stayed two days in their parlor, stretched out on the bed. He was senseless at first. Archie sent for the doctor, who said they were fortunate. “He’ll keep that eye, once the swelling goes down, and he’s just now begun talking back to me, so I believe he’ll recover with rest, though I’d keep him well clear of your lad for a while, else you’ll lose that one, too.”
That evening at the table while they ate their supper there was silence.
Archie finished first, refilled his cup with ale, and looked at Barbara, who hadn’t been meeting his eyes. He said, “The man has a job to do, like any other man.”
“Not a good job,” she said. “Transporting people away from their homes and their families to be sold for ten years of slavery.”
“He only arranges the ships.”
“Doesn’t make his hands any the cleaner.” She looked at him then. “Ye ken what he did.”
“Aye. Ye still should have managed it differently. Because not only did I lose a bottle of wine in this business, but now he will want to be paid, and paid dearly, to keep Simon out of the Tolbooth, or worse. You may well hang your head, lad,” he added to Simon. “You’re going to cost me far more than I get from the church for your upkeep. And not just this once, but for years. I’d do better to just let ye swing.”
But his tone held no violence and Barbara looked over the table to tell Simon, “He doesn’t mean that. Not truly.”