Free Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast

slapped his face with all her might. He stood there and stared at her and rubbed his cheek and thought of the footman.
    â€œHigh and mighty,” she snapped. “Just a corsetmaker, but them in service ain’t fit to be with you.”
    â€œYou hate me, don’t you?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    Then he made up his mind that he would never look at her again, and for two weeks he managed not to see her, muttering at his work, black and hopeless.
    â€œGet an arm around un,” Master Greeg advised him.
    â€œShut up and go to the devil.”
    â€œI’ll dock ye that shilling.”
    The black mood passed, and he had a fit of tremendous resolve. He would set up for himself. Carefully, he had laid by nineteen pounds, and now he left Greeg, took an old shop, and moved his tools and bench in. Morning until night he worked, putting by every penny he could save, denying himself food, denying himself every little bit of comfort a man could have, drink, things to read, dreaming only of the day when he could afford to marry the woman he loved. And then he sought her out and asked her.
    â€œI knew ye’d come back,” she said smugly.
    â€œYes, I had to.”
    â€œThen mind you behave.”
    â€œI want to marry you,” he said desperately.
    â€œCoo!”
    â€œI love you, I’ll do anything for you, I’ll make you happy—”
    â€œGo on.” But she was weakening; this was better than the footman, who had never proposed marriage, better than the butcher’s way, better than her master who would catch her in the pantry; for a moment the twisted, burning eyes of the staymaker captured and held her, and in her small, fluttering mind she formed one glimpse of half-born dreams. She smiled and dropped a curtsey, and Tom Paine’s soul reeled with gorgeous triumph.
    â€œKiss me, go on,” she said.
    He held her in his arms and the world was his.
    â€œAnd mind, no nonsense about being in service.”
    â€œNo, no, you’re the whole world for me! Do I care what you’ve been. You’ll be Tom Paine’s wife now and I’ll put you high as a duchess—higher!”
    â€œGo on.”
    â€œI’ll be rich. I won’t always be a staymaker!”
    â€œHigh and mighty for you— Eee, you’re a strange one.”
    â€œYou care a little,” he begged her.
    â€œMind you, marriage.”
    â€œYes, yes, my love, my darling.”
    â€œYou are a chap for words,” she said admiringly.
    â€œThey don’t mean much; they’re cheap. We’ll have more, we’ll have children.”
    â€œMouths to feed. Things come high,” she pointed out, making a face.
    â€œIf only you love me—”
    â€œMaybe,” she pouted.
    He thought afterward that if certain things had not been, if certain things had gone otherwise, it might have been different. What she was, she couldn’t help, and knowing that only made it worse for him. Long after, he would think of how he had tried to teach her to read and write, and how after ten or fifteen minutes of struggling with an idea, she would turn on him with childish fury. Sometimes he was sure she hated him, and sometimes, holding her in his arms, he would have a brief moment in which he knew she loved him. She was what she was, beaten into shape by her tiny world, a tribal creature laid over and over with a thousand taboos. Sometimes, probing as gently as he could, uncovering layer after layer, he would be at the point of finding her frightened little soul, and she would burst out at him, “Coo! High and mighty and fine you are, making fun of me again, you with your fine airs!”
    â€œI have no airs, Mary darling.”
    â€œActing like a duke, and you a corsetmaker.”
    He would shrug and nod and tell her that he was sorry.
    â€œScornful of service you are, and I was that comfortable there, with gentlefolk too, not your dirty pigpen quality!” Or if she