Thomas, A Secret Life

by A. J. B. Johnston

  “This is the way, pup.”

  Thomas looks in the direction the driver is pointing. It’s toward the white-painted door that leads to what seems to be the inn’s storage area. Throughout the evening Thomas noticed the innkeeper and the serving girl go there from time to time, returning with small casks of wine, bowls and plates, fresh tablecloths and the like. Why would the driver want to take him there? Has he found a place for Thomas to sleep where he’ll be safe all by himself? Thomas nods sagely. The dolt of a driver is maybe not such a dolt after all.

  “No satchel?” the driver asks. “Thought youse kept it pretty close. The looms and all.”

  “Oh my god.” Thomas rushes back to the table where before he was seated, along with Strombeau. Sure enough, the sack is still there. It’s underneath where his tired feet in his battered leather shoes had been standing guard. He drags the heavy cloth bag out with a foot then picks it up and clasps it to his chest. “That was close,” he says to the driver. “Thank you so much. I don’t know how I could have left this behind.”

  “Sure, pup. Understands.” The driver steps quickly over to the white-painted door. A flick of the latch and it opens.

  The room they enter is dim and dark. The dominant smell is of canvas and wood. Thomas can make out wooden racks to the left and right, with different size barrels and casks in one area and stacks of dishes and clean linen in other spots. There are some wine- and food-stained tablecloths in a large wicker basket. The only light in the room is a candle flickering against the far wall. Behind the rack of barrels the candle is out of sight on entering.

  The driver closes the door behind them and puts a finger to his lips. Thomas nods automatically, though he doesn’t know why he has to be quiet. Isn’t it a storage room? Then he hears something. It sounds like someone stirring up ahead.

  “Here she is. The little one. Like promised.” The driver steps past the barrel rack and makes a grand gesture with his arm.

  Thomas steps forward to see. He is completely taken aback. There on a rolled-out pailleasse on a corner of the floor, kneeling with her hands on her hips and a smile upon her face, is the inn’s serving girl. She’s wearing the skimpiest of chemises. Through the thinness of the cloth Thomas can see nearly all there is, including most of her breasts up top and the triangle of a shadow down below.

  “Well?” the driver says.

  “Well … well,” is all Thomas can mumble. There is confusion on his face.

  The girl covers her chest with crossed arms. She is glaring at Thomas and the stunned look on his face. “No one’s forcing you,” she says, curling her lips.

  “Shush,” says the driver to the girl. “Youse looked after.” His tone is sharp. Turning back to Thomas, in a softer voice, the driver says, “Give it a try. Go on. Here. Puts that satchel here.”

  Thomas does as he is told. He takes his eyes off the girl and hands the man his satchel. He keeps his gaze focussed on the heavy bag, as the driver places it in an open space between two barrels on the wooden rack. It’s safe there, Thomas decides, right in his sight line. And with a nod he sends the driver his appreciation. He notices an odd little smile on the man’s face, which Thomas understands to be a reference to the waiting girl. He will recall that smile later on and think differently about it then. The driver makes a fist to say that his work is done. He quickly turns and is gone, round the barrel rack and into the darkness that lies behind. That’s kind, thinks Thomas. He appreciates the privacy for what he thinks he and the girl are about to do.

  “Well,” says the serving girl, moving on her knees closer to Thomas. He is still standing where he was. “What do you say now? Interested after all?” She reaches up and touches him lightly on his chest.

  Thomas does not answer, but his body responds. His heart is off and running. The thing between his legs is pressing against his pants. The serving girl notices the bulge and smiles.

  “The little soldier wants to stand and fight.”

  “Soldier? You call it a soldier too?”

  “Among other things. Let’s see if he is ready to salute.”

  She reaches out and unbuttons Thomas’s breeches. As soon as the pants tumble down, leaving him naked except for the cover of his chemise, Thomas falls to his knees beside the girl. He reaches underneath her chemise. He can’t believe what he finds. How could anything be so slippery to the touch?

  “Whoa,” she says, “go easy. That’s not dough you’re working there. That’s better. Now, let’s see what you can do.” She grabs hold of his chemise and pulls it up and over his head. She leaves her own shirt on. She scans him up and down. There comes a tiny smile. “Best to take off those socks, don’t you think?”

  Thomas rolls to put his legs in the air, and pulls off the offending socks.

  “That’s better,” the girl says.

  It turns out it’s over pretty quick. Her hand no sooner guides Thomas’s soldier to the spot than he is off, a-trembling with the relief. The girl gives a little laugh.

  “Your first, am I?”

  “I’ll be better next time, I will.”

  “Next time? Pretty cocky. What makes you think …”

  “Can we? Once more at least?”

  “Think you can?”

  “In a minute. It’ll come back. What’s your name anyway?”

  “Hélène.”

  “Thomas.”

  “All right then, Thomas.”

  Hélène sits up on the mattress and pulls off her chemise. Thomas tries not to stare at and repeatedly scan this entire landscape of skin that Hélène presents, but he can’t control his eyes. He barely hears her tell him about how her parents died long ago in an accident and how ever since she’s been looked after by her mother’s brother, Uncle François, the keeper of the inn, and his mean-mouthed second wife, Isabelle. The couple have always kept her fed and clothed in return for Hélène working in the inn. They even let her go to a parish school for a few years, long enough to learn the morality the church taught and how to sign her name. She can even read a bit. But once Hélène reached thirteen and began sprouting tits, aunt and uncle started hinting there were other ways for a pretty girl to bring in some money, besides helping out with the cleaning and serving in the inn. Hélène resisted for a while, but her complete dependency took its toll. She agreed to take a paying customer once in a while. One price for a fondle; three times that for a fifteen-minute ride. For every amount put in her uncle’s hand, Hélène was to receive a fifth. Thomas barely hears a word she says. His wide eyes override his ears. His gaze keeps going to her belly and down to her loins.

  “You’re not listening, are you?” Hélène picks up Thomas’s hands and places them lightly beneath her breasts. “How ’bout you be nice to these girls first?” He does as he is told, but then takes the hands away. He places them on her face, one on each cheek. He leans forward and gently kisses her on the lips. Then he descends to ravish her neck and throat.

  “That’s good,” she says.

  Thomas stops kissing her throat and places his cheek to hers. They rub their cheeks, soft on soft for what feels like a long while.

  “All right,” Hélène breathes in Thomas’s ear, “let me see what I can do with your little corporal. Maybe I can make him a sergeant now.” She starts to caress his thing with her two hands.

  It takes a few minutes, not that anyone is keeping track or cares. The two young people focus only on helping each other enjoy the gentle friction of their lips and their hands. Neither sees or hears a thing, other than the things that are his and hers. For Thomas it’s an entry into a world he’s long yearned to explore. As soon as his soldier is back to standing at attention they begin the second time. And sure enough, this time it’s better for them both. Thomas gets to feel like a man and not a boy.

  “How come he did this for you, anyway?” Hélène asks Thomas after
they are done. They are still intertwined.

  “What?” Thomas laughs. He walks his fingers across the top half of her naked body to tweak a nipple small and brown. She removes his thumb and finger and sends him a pretend frown. He reaches to the bottom of the mattress and finds his chemise. “What was that?” he asks, the eyebrows arching up. “Who did what?”

  “I don’t know,” says Hélène covering her breasts with her hands. “It’s just a little odd. Unless you’re his younger brother or nephew, I suppose. I’m no whore, but from what I’ve seen, them that pay are them to get the ride. But you don’t look like that fellow at all.”

  Thomas sits up. “Who are you talking about? Who’s he?” His face is serious now.

  “Antoine,” says Hélène.

  Thomas gives a confused face, the eyes blinking. “Antoine? Who’s that?”

  “You know. The driver of the diligence. Antoine. Guess he’s not your brother or uncle if you don’t know his name.”

  Hélène pulls on her chemise. The fun is over, she can see.

  Thomas reaches out and grabs her hard by the wrist. “What are you saying? The driver? He paid you for … for this?”

  “He gave my uncle the money and my uncle told me to keep you busy for a while. Doing this.”

  Thomas gets up off the straw mattress in a hurry. He clambers over to the barrel rack.

  “You did get two for one. There’s that.”

  Her words might be the hum of bees. Thomas doesn’t hear a thing. He’s grasping the wooden barrel rack like it’s a ship’s ladder to pull himself out of the sea. Where he had seen his satchel on the rack is now an empty space. The satchel with his money, his future, it’s not there.

  Thomas pulls his breeches on in a rush and searches the storage room in a panic.

  “It’s not here,” he says.

  “What?” Hélène asks twice, then gives up.

  Out the door and into the big room Thomas goes. He’s not yelling at first but his muttering and the shifting of objects creates a stir. The sleeping guests have no choice but to be disturbed. Uncle François and Aunt Isabelle descend from their little room upstairs and light some lamps. Looking round, and round again, and finding not what he seeks, Thomas begins to yell and punch the air. He shouts that he has been deceived. The driver of the diligence – Antoine is his name – he’s gone. Thomas lays out the blame. He doesn’t at first say what the blackguard has taken, but he uses the word, he calls the man a thief.

  “What’s he taken?” asks a sleep-disturbed Strombeau, a hand placed on Thomas’s outstretched arm.

  “The satchel, my satchel.”

  “Oh,” mutters the Capuchin.

  “That,” says a scornful Madame Soule.

  The other travellers turn away, wanting to go back to sleep. No one, it is made clear to Thomas, sees that he has lost a thing. It was just a baggy sack. Only Strombeau, with a muffled “Oh” shares the lad’s concern. The merchant had already deduced that the young man had all he owned, and something valuable at that, in his traveller’s bag.

  “That’s too bad, young Jean.”

  “It’s worse than that,” says Thomas, relieved that one person at least is a little aware of his loss. Thank God he is not completely lost, thanks to his foresight in stuffing as many coins as he could into the bottoms of his shoes.

  Thomas has a thought and runs to the front door of the inn. “Good,” he mutters to the darkness and immediately returns back inside. He notices Hélène has disappeared from the big room. He goes to Strombeau.

  “The diligence is still there. All the horses too. So maybe the driver is still around. Do you think he’ll realize the crime he’s committed and come back?”

  “No, lad, I think not,” says Strombeau. “Stealing a coach and its horses would be far more serious than lifting that satchel with your clothes.”

  “But it wasn’t just—” Thomas almost speaks about all the coins.

  “Wasn’t just?”

  “Nothing.” Thomas is not going to speak about how he got the stash of coins in the first place. Though they were his birthright, they were. “Nothing. I’d better get some sleep.”

  Of course, there is no sleep for Thomas as the inn goes back to dark and all the travellers to their straw mattresses and the innkeepers to their beds. The young man’s mind spins like a child’s pinwheel in the wind. He keeps going over the past few day, and what the driver said and did. He must have planned the theft two days in advance, beginning when he glimpsed a few coins back in Vire and heard Thomas insist that it had to stay with him. And pay extra to do so. He would have seen how heavy the satchel was to carry and figured out the rest. Then there was the final touch, the set-up with little Hélène. Now, the bastard has vanished in the night, taking what he really wanted while Thomas was distracted by his loins. He sits up on his portion of the mattress and puts his head in his hands. The driver must have stayed in the ill-lit storage room and while the serving girl kept Thomas distracted, took the satchel and off he went. “A hard cock is a terrible stupid thing,” Thomas mutters under his breath.

  When morning comes at last, the various fellow passengers again offer their condolences to the exhausted-looking young man. Thomas varies his thanks for their thoughts, but to each he feels compelled to say that the driver tricked him with an unkind ruse. No one asks what ruse that was because the truth is no one much cares. The worry among the passengers is rather about the trip to Paris for which they have paid. With no driver to control the horses, will they have to stay in the lowly farmhouse inn another day and night?

  “A thief! Honestly. I think there’s nothing worse,” offers Madame Soule, before she sidles off with relief to oversee her charge, the vulnerable Marielle.

  “Indeed,” says Père Athanase, breaking off a chunk of baguette to go along with his morning chocolate, “I did wonder if he was of that type. You can never be too sure about people. He didn’t look like a worthy type.”

  The Capuchin flinches when he realizes he’s saying this to Thomas, whom the monk also thinks is hiding something from the world. Thomas takes a deep breath and moves over to the table where the pretty Marielle is seated. Madame Soule has just gone to the little necessary room to do what must be done.

  “He took all your clothes?” she asks. “Oh my.”

  “Yes. I lost it all.” Thomas samples his morning chocolate with a sour expression on his face. It’s not the chocolate; it’s the continuing anger about being duped. He’s down to only the coins stuffed in his shoes and socks. “Not a penny left,” Thomas says with a moon face directed Marielle’s way, “not a one.”

  “But what then …” Marielle looks like she’s about to cry.

  “He’ll be all right,” interrupts Strombeau.

  Thomas plunks himself down. It appears there’s nothing he can do. He’s stuck with his sorry fate, and with only the coins he has stuffed in his pockets and hidden in his shoes. He burned the bridge with his parents. He can’t simply go back to Vire and make this move to Paris some other time.

  “That bag of yours, it was a ratty old thing in any case.” Strombeau sits down at the table alongside the downcast young man. Thomas glances up. The merchant from Bordeaux is not wearing his wig at all this morning. With all his red hair fully showing his face looks particularly ruddy. “You’re better off without it. That’s what I predict. It means you have to make a complete fresh start. What do you say to that?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know what to say. I had things in the satchel I could have used. Simple as that.”

  Thomas reaches for one of the portions of the two baguettes on the table, just dropped there by the innkeeper. The bread is not only cold, it’s hard as wood. It must be a day, maybe two days old. Thomas tosses the bread back onto the tabletop.

  “Just the same,” says Strombeau, “it’s a chance to sh
ow what you’re made of.”

  The merchant grabs one of the bread portions and breaks off a tiny dry bit. He pops the fragment into his mouth. When his mouth is empty again he says to Thomas, “Time to grow up.”

  Thomas’s eyes go wide then narrow to near slits. The expressions on the faces of Marielle and Madame Soule say they cannot believe what they just heard.

  “All right,” says Thomas straightening in his chair.

  Strombeau checks the hour on his pocket watch. He scowls and clicks the cover shut then puts it away. “That innkeeper’s not going to do a thing until he’s fleeced our pockets the best that he can. Everyone’s out for himself, mark my word. Except for certain ones.” Strombeau waves vaguely in the direction of Père Athanase. “And I’m not so sure about them.” The merchant exhales loudly and breaks off another morsel of dry bread. “What do you say do that, young Tyrell? Do I have things about right?”

  Thomas leans in closer toward the man. He’s liking him more and more. He’s not just a pudgy merchant with a watch. He sounds like he’s been out in the world. Strombeau puts a hand near his mouth to shield what he is about to say in a loud whisper from Madame Soule and Marielle.

  “No one gives you anything, Jean. If you don’t take it, rest assured someone else will. Understand?”

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  “Hey,” calls out the inn’s serving girl, Hélène, from across the room. “Hey, you.”

  The entire table where Thomas is seated looks up. One by one they realize that the servant with the low-cut chemise, half of her bosom showing, is beckoning none other than the young man in their midst, the one victimized by last night’s theft, the downcast Jean Tyrell.

  “Hey!” The servant girl is wiggling a finger for him to come hither. She adds a toss of her head, a length of hair showing out the back of her bonnet. “I need some help. To lift something in the storage room. You coming, Thomas?”