Read Online Fair Fight by Anna Freeman - Free Book Online

for gin,’ Tom said. ‘Shall we fetch a dram on our way?’
    This was my husband asking if I were fearful.
    ‘Lord, yes,’ I said.
    I was fearful and excited both. This was to be the most significant day of my life; as other girls dream of their wedding day, I’d dreamt of this. Of course I needed gin, to harden my hopes and my fists.
    The fair always did have something of the dream about it, laid out always the same, a village of wooden booths and bunting, a full month in the making. This year, the year I was to be part of it, it seemed to me that every fair before it had stirred itself up to form this new one, waiting for the crowds to arrive.
    The day was horrible warm, the sky low and heavy as damp skirts. My head swam from the strange air and the gin. Every year, since the day we met, we’d been here together, crushed in the crowd at the front of the boxing tent, cheering every blow.
    Perhaps for common folk it was a diversion, nothing more, but for a pug the fair was a starting line, the place where a cull could make his name, and the buzz was that this year all the fancy would be on the look-out for the next Champion of England. Gentleman Jackson had stepped down as holding the title too long, and finding no man willing to match him. All the fancy would come on the rush to Bristol now, the city which had birthed so many champions of the ring. Jack Slack, Ben Brain, The Tinman – all of them were Bristol boys. Even old Jack Broughton had fought his first bouts at St James’ Fair. Jem Belcher, the lad tipped to have a good chance at the Championship up in London that year, was called ‘the Bristol youth’, and he’d had his start on the very stage that I was to step onto now. Every hopeful young rough would be out with his fives raised, and every fancy name crowding the ring. Tom had great hopes of watching one of these high-stakes mills, or of picking out beforehand which of the likely lads the fancy might take a shine to and carry up to London. My thoughts were fixed on my own fight and couldn’t see beyond, but I thought I’d feel different when once it was done. I liked to see good science in a mill as much as the fancy; perhaps more, for I could learn from the tricks used and turn them to my own use.
    Tom held his head up as we walked and it gladdened my heart to see him unfurl from his stoop. He only bent a very little, so that he might hold my hand, the difference in our heights being so vast. We both called out and waved to the people we knew: Mrs Dick, who sold hot potatoes from a brazier, Black Lou the piper, and the magician’s boy, and many more men and women laying out their wares, tuning up fiddles, or hanging bunting. Two brats followed behind us till Tom turned and waved at them, at which they ran off, shrieking up a racket. I supposed they took him for a giant. The great wheel of the flying coaches stood over all.
    The boxing tent was something to see, with its painted front showing pictures of bare-chested millers knocking seven kinds of hell out of each other and plenty of gore done in buckets of scarlet. In years before I’d used to stand before it and set upon any girl I could, to encourage the gents passing in to feel obliged to stop and watch, and perhaps throw me the penny entrance. The fancy like to see a cat-fight before the main attraction, even between children. Now I’d fight on its stage, and not as a Charlie from the crowd. I was both swollen and quaking with the thought of it.
    The wooden booth had a window cut into it and here an old woman sat, to take the pennies from the fancy. She barely looked at us but only held out her hand for the money.
    ‘My wife is come to fight,’ Tom said.
    Now the woman goggle-eyed me.
    ‘You’d best come in, dearie,’ she said, and swung open a door cut so neatly into the wall of the booth that I’d never known it was there. Inside it was done up like a gypsy caravan, or almost like, with a stove and a kettle, a lamp and a pair of