Free Citizen Tom Paine by Howard Fast Page A

really became enraged, she would tell him details concerning the footman, her master, others, pouring it on to see him squirm and twist.
    Nothing went right with his business. Staymaking was a long-term trade, and unless you had quality on your list you could just as well give up. There was not enough business in Sandwich to support two staymakers, and when Paine could no longer pay his rent, when he was down to his last crown piece, he went back to Greeg.
    â€œYou be na a steady un,” Greeg said stolidly, and that was the end of it.
    They were given their eviction notice, and Paine said, “We’ll try another town.”
    â€œAnd I was to be higher than a duchess,” she mimicked him.
    â€œThings go up and down,” Paine said quietly. “I’m not beaten.” But for the first time in his life he felt old, he at twenty-two, longing for a childhood he had never known, caught in the cage and racing round and round, like a squirrel on a treadmill. This time he expected her to go back into service, but she stuck with him, berating herself for it, giving him worse, yet caught by the glimpse of a dream she once had known, hating him for his ugliness, for his gangling insufficiency, for his hopelessness as a man of any practical affairs, but at the same time in awe of him.
    The other town was no better, and then it was a third, the two of them trudging along the dusty highroad, Paine with his tools on his back, Mary with everything else they owned tied together in a kerchief. For Paine there was only a deep and abiding sense of guilt, and if Mary screamed at him, “It’s your fault, your fault, I was that comfortable and that well,” he could only nod his head. “Not even able to keep a roof over my head!” Yes, that was true. “Fine ideas, fine ideas, fine ideas! Looking down your big nose at me in service! Going to change the world, you are, coo, Master Tom Paine—ye dirty, lazy lout!”
    They would lie behind a hedge at night, with the cool mist of evening settling on them, with all the sweet, late smells of the English countryside riding the dark winds, and if it was quite cool she would move close to him, and for a brief time there would be peace. He could hold her and say to himself, I am in my castle, my home, and she would be sleepy enough to give in and hold her tongue. His love was so fierce and desperate, challenging God—you gave me this, she’s mine and beautiful and lovely, and I can make her into what I desire, that every movement of hers, every whimper, every twitch of fright struck a deep chord of pain in him. He didn’t blame her, but only himself; something deep and terrible inside of him gave him the power to look at the world and know, to see justice and injustice, and feel in his own soul the whip laid on the backs of millions. He was twenty-two and he was old, and what wasn’t broken inside of him was being forged into a hard core of steel; but she was just a child, and at night when she was asleep, he would croon softly over her, “My baby, my little one, my darling.”
    He stole that they might eat, and that gave her a stronger club to hold over his head, so that in her fury she would scream, “I’ll give you to the sheriff, ye dirty poacher!” The penalty was death. He crept into a barn and took a sack of turnips. The penalty was to be drawn apart by two teams of horses. He killed a rabbit, and for that the penalty was to have his ears and nose removed. But he would have murdered, killed in cold blood, his bitterness was such a growing, grinding thing; only toward her did he display any sweetness and mercy.
    In Margate, where they finally arrived, footsore and weary, he talked his way into the lease of a shop. Mary was pregnant, and Paine’s desperation became almost a form of madness. All day he toiled over his bench, and at night hired himself out for whatever work there was. She was ailing so that the