Citizen Tom Paine Read Online Free PDF Page B

them would go to a tavern and drink bitters until their heads felt like mighty lumps of lead, and then hanging onto each other, they would go reeling home, singing at the top of their lungs. These drinking bouts meant beatings for two of the apprentices, but for Tom there was always the intercession of Mistress Morris, his master’s wife.
    It had started the time Master Morris, a wasted little man of sixty, went off to Nottingham on a matter of business. His wife, twenty years younger, plump, pretty, considering that smallpox had marked her whole face, called Tom in to fix a split corset.
    She said to Tom afterwards, “You’re a sly devil, the way of you Quakers. But don’t you go to talk on me or I’ll put a knife in your back.” Still she couldn’t harm a flea, and it made him feel like a man afterwards, boasting to Stivvens and Coot. She was good to him, and she brought him cakes and cookies and kept impressing Morris with what a fine boy Tom was. But Stivvens, inflamed by Paine’s stories, tried the same thing on his mistress; a rolling pin put an inch-high lump on his head.
    Stivvens wanted to be a highwayman; he talked of almost nothing else, and he said a hundred times if he said it once that as soon as he was sixteen he would go off and join Red Gallant’s band on the Dover Road. That was in the time when highwaymen still wielded great power, when bands of forty and fifty cutthroats roamed over the King’s Roads and fought pitched battles with the redcoat troops.
    â€œâ€™E’s a prince, that Red Gallant is,” Stivvens would say.
    â€œFair enough, but it’s a short life. Me to live to ninety,” Coot remarked cautiously.
    Tom said there was only one way of life, and that among the bloods. If you weren’t blood in England, you were dirt. He was minding the bloods and watching their ways.
    â€œBe one yerself, eh?”
    â€œMaybe,” Tom said.
    â€œAnd ’ow?”
    â€œThere are ways. I ain’t saying it comes easy, but there are ways.”
    Stiwens was impressed. “You got a way, Tom?” he inquired.
    â€œAh—”
    â€œLum!” Coot snorted. “Out a dirt ye come; dirt breeds dirt! Don’t I know? Down it’s easy, but no goin’ up.”
    â€œI ain’t saying,” Tom nodded.
    â€œLum!”
    But Stivvens afterwards told Tom that he had faith; a man didn’t have a head on his shoulders for nothing, and he himself was making for a take, a small take, nothing impressive, but as Stivvens put it, “Enough shillings for an evening full a noxies. Pretty ones too. Four shillings a poke, I intends to pay.”
    Tom saw the intent and warned the boy, “They can hang you for stealing.”
    â€œIf they catch me.”
    Tom dreamed that night, slept fitfully, had nightmares, woke and slept, and the next day begged Stivvens, “Don’t do it, Alec, don’t.”
    They caught Stivvens; he had broken into the till of a weaver next door, to his master’s shop and made off with two pounds eight. Like a fool, he put the money into his shoes, and while he overslept in the morning, his master took the shoes to cobble, thinking he would take the cost out of the boy’s pay. The weaver came in to tell his tale, and the sum of the money fitted in too nicely. They beat the boy, and it took only thirty of the best to make him confess.
    For the next few weeks, Coot talked of nothing else but Stivvens in Old Bailey. “Fancy,” he would say to Tom, “little Stivvens.”
    â€œIt don’t seem possible,” Tom agreed.
    â€œThey’ll try him with the great ones,” Stivvens decided.
    â€œHanging?”
    â€œDon’t see what else.”
    â€œThey can’t hang him, he’s a baby, a little fool. He never had sense. His wits were addled.”
    â€œLum, open and shut. ’E broke in, now it’s a rope around ’is neck. Open and