Free The Town House by Norah Lofts

come from, you’ll fare no better. There they’ll hold agin you that you didn’t do your full time there. See?’
    At that moment it seemed like a cruel blow aimed at me personally by malignant fate. Later on I understood better and knew that I was but one of many men of all crafts who were, in the towns, superfluous to requirements. All through my lifetime, ever since the great rising of 1381, on all but the most old-fashioned manors the serfs had been buying themselves free and had thus been at liberty to apprentice their sons how they would. So every year more apprentices qualified to become craftsmen than old craftsmen died or retired, and those safely inside a Guild were casting around for excuses to keep the young men out. Often the excuse was flimsy, invented. In my case there was no need. I was a ‘foreigner’; my exclusion needed no cunning twist and would cause no searching of, conscience on anyone’s part.
    ‘What’s to become of me then?’ I asked.
    ‘Ah,’ Armstrong said. ‘Thass the question. But I got the answer. I’m sorry for you, Martin, and I’m making you this offer outa goodness of heart. You mind that. I brung this up at the Guild meeting too, and they was all agreed. You can’t be a full journeyman, nor claim the rate laid down for such. But you can go on as a paid apprentice, see? They looked up the rules, laid down in past years when there was a shortage of apprentices. They was paid then, anything between quarter and half the standard rate; and you being a bandy sort of chap, I’d give you half.’
    I looked at him, and quickly away, lest he should see the loathing in my eyes. I’d had, from eating at his table and a hundred other little things, evidence of his meanness and cunning. Pretending to do me a favour he had prolonged my apprenticeship for a year. Now, pretending to do me another, he was getting a skilled, finished workman at half rate.
    But I had no choice. Half pay was better than no wage at all. I said humbly,
    ‘Thank you very much.’
    He jumped up quickly and said,
    ‘Let’s to work then.’
    All that day, added to my own bitter disappointment, was the dread of the moment when I must tell Kate. She did not, however, weep, orrail against Armstrong and the Guild; only the deepening of the lines in her face, the increased droop of her mouth, betrayed how shrewd the blow had been. I had dreaded her tears, and yet now, perversely enough, I wished she had cried. I might then have been moved to take her in my arms and comfort her. Once in a hard winter I saw a tree entirely encased in a coating of ice. Our poverty and our worries, and our defeated hopes were putting a similar casing around our souls. Soon we should have lost even the memory of love, and be dull, plodding work animals, no more.
    Kate had said, miserably, that there would be but eleven months difference in the age of our children, in fact there was less than that, for Robin came into the world a little before time, a small, ailing baby, unlike Stephen. When I carried my second son to the Alms Gate I was the subject of coarse jests about being such a quick worker. ‘Do you get any faster,’ one man said, ‘you can knock off work and live on your Trimble.’
    This time Kate sold her woollen gown and the hood. Since her place in the woolshed had not been filled, she dragged herself back to work at the end of a week, frail as she was.
    ‘That way we shall get something in hand,’ she said fiercely. ‘We can save my wage so long as the Trimble lasts. With two to feed – and God knows how many more on the way.…’
    ‘There’ll be no more, Kate.’ That was a promise which would cost me nothing to keep. I was not like my neighbour Dummy who could go through the performance which ended with a baby feeling nothing for the woman he bedded with. Yet, though our joy in one another had been lost, somewhere between Stephen’s birth and Robin’s, we were still a unit, we two against the world, as helpful to