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be robbed, and I’ll watch you chase off the footpads.’
    ‘No one’ll rob you when you’re with me,’ I said.
    ‘Then you’ll let me walk with you,’ Tom said, and it wasn’t a question.
    Tom was from Coalpit Heath. He told me it was a tiny place where all in the village worked in the colliery and black dust covered everything. He might’ve had the voice of a farmer but his family were all miners. He said he was grown too big to be any use down a mine, though he’d tried to keep at it. I thought he walked as though he were down there still, hunched over and sorry, keeping his arms close.
    He’d been sent to Bristol to look for work on the docks and was lodging with a lady in St Thomas, who’d thought him a negro when first he’d arrived, he said.
    ‘At home we’re all black as Turks, with the coal-dust. I never realised how filthy dark I was, till I came here and saw how many colours of skin there are to see.’ He threw out his arm as though we were still in The Hatchet yard. In The Hatchet black men, mulattos, Jews and gypsies were all as welcome as a white man, if they’d coins in their pockets. It was that variety of tavern. Tom’s arm wasn’t black any longer.
    ‘I scrubbed myself raw,’ he said, ‘and the lady I rent from wasn’t any too pleased when she saw the state of the bathwater. She made me tip it out and fetch another tubful from the pump, it was so black. It wasn’t fit for a pig to get in after me, she said. The pump’s three streets distant. It took me half the day, back and forth with buckets.’
    I laughed. I still recall how sharp and strange it was when he looked at me. I couldn’t help but feel he was mocking me – he must’ve been – and yet, and yet, there he was, walking beside me and telling me about his home.
    As we drew near to the convent, which wasn’t far, not far enough, I made him stop. I leaned against a wall. From where I stood I could see the dark bulk of Sam leaning up against the door and the lamplight coming pink through the silk shades at Ma’s window. It didn’t look like a good Christian home.
    ‘Why d’you stop?’ Tom asked.
    I didn’t know how to answer. He looked awkward and unhappy suddenly and I thought, Perhaps he thinks I’ve stopped so that he’ll kiss me and he’s looking at my gap-toothed chops and casting his mind about for escape . I couldn’t let him think that.
    ‘I wish you’d go now,’ I said.
    Now he looked even more miserable.
    ‘Have I offended you, Miss Matchet?’
    ‘No,’ I said, and because he looked so downcast still, ‘my name’s Ruth Downs.’
    ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I knew Ruth, but I thought you were Miss Ruth Matchet.’
    I laughed then and Tom smiled too, a little ashamedly.
    ‘I suppose I should’ve guessed it. Miss Matchet from The Hatchet. It’s too neat to be true.’
    I stopped laughing and then I didn’t know what to do.
    At last he said, ‘If you don’t want that fellow to mark me, mayn’t I just stand here and watch you go in?’ He nodded toward the convent door.
    My head swam strangely as I walked toward the house. I could feel Tom’s eyes upon my back and I was suddenly conscious of my walk, too wide, too swaggering for a lady. As I reached the door Sam tipped me a wink, having spied Tom, and was about to speak when behind him the door opened. Ma was standing in the doorway, an unlit lamp in her hand and a look of fury well enough known to me upon her face. She stepped forward and with her free hand grasped me roughly by the shoulder.
    ‘What’s this?’ She was loud enough for the whole street to wake. ‘You, out with young men without my leave? You, who has to save her strength for the ring?’ She began to drag me up the step. The fat from the lamp splashed out upon my neck; it was still warm.
    If Tom hadn’t been across the street I’d have gone mildly enough, as I always did. This one day, mind, I wrested my shoulder from her. We both stumbled. I was burning with the shame.
    I