The Free Man by Conrad Richter

Author:Conrad Richter [Richter, Conrad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8041-5098-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

NOT a word came from Henner’s lips when they whipped him, not even to the post his hands were tied around. He would save all such, he told himself, for the guilty person, her with the sharp, stuck-up nose and cheeks deceiving as red cushions. So it was true what he had heard in the old country, that girls with fat cheeks had hearts of stone! Well, now for once in her life, a mistress would hear all a bound person had to say.

Not that he would go back tonight. The Bayley kitchen would have too many busy-bodies wanting to look at his back. You could smell scorched soap a long ways off. He would spend the night with Chris. Dried blood had pasted his shirt to his back but the great blacksmith hands, strong as steel and horny as iron, were gentle as a woman’s as they worked the shirt loose. Then they washed the cuts with cold pump water.

It was late in the morning till he went through the Bayley gate. When he got in the pantry Hester, one of the upstairs girls, was doing his work.

At the sight of him, she quickly dried her hands on the towel.

“What did they do to you, John?” she asked.

Grimly he worked off his coat.

“Tell the young mistress I have fetched back her answer. If she comes down now I will show it to her.”

“Why, didn’t you know!” Hester told him. “Miss Amity took the stage back to Reading town this morning.”

“So?” was all Henner said but inside of him bitter disappointment rose. She had outwitted him again. So that’s why she had the boldness to whip him. She had planned all the time to pick up her traps and run like Hain’s mill. You could hold a bull by its horns and a man by his word, but you couldn’t hold a woman. Well, he would still keep his word, but she would find that you couldn’t hold a man either. She would hear yet what his tongue had to say.

That day with his back gnawing even when he breathed the boy made up his mind. What was in it, he told no one. But before he went to bed, he came down from his loft room with a folded piece of cloth in his hands.

“Here is a present, Phranie,” he said. “I want you to give cheese and meat to any old one that comes begging from the ship.” He unfolded the cloth and it was his mother’s best ship’s apron, lye-colored and white and worked with zig-zag cross stitch.

Then he went back to the steps.

“Down with the bloody whips!” he called and, with the cook looking after him puzzled, went up to lie on his stomach in bed.

Except for his shoes, he did not undress. When all was quiet and Anders snoring from the chimney side, he put his things together. From the bottom of the chest he took even the little piece of iron some ancestor of his mother’s had to keep in her mouth when she was burned.

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