Читать книгу Plague Child - Peter Ransley - Страница 13

Chapter 6

They – whoever they were – would find me if I stayed in Poplar. So I did what I judged they would not expect. Like Dick Whittington, I turned again, walking back towards the City.

I would find out who they were, the men who, I was convinced, had killed my mother. Try and find the answer to the questions that whirled endlessly in my head like so many angry bees. Why had Mr Black taken me on as an apprentice? What was his connection to the man with the scar?

The man who could answer these questions, or most of them, was Mr Black.

The wind was driving dark, scudding clouds over the marsh when I set off next morning, after spending a second night at Mother Banks’s. I reached the outskirts of the City at midday. There I stopped. I would not get far in my apprentice’s uniform, and the seaman’s jaunty scrap of a cap barely concealed my red hair.

Just inside the City I found the kind of market I needed. From Irish Mary at a second-hand clothing stall I bought thin britches – because they had bows that tied at the knee, which I fondly imagined to be the height of fashion – and traded my give-away apprentice’s boots for a pair of shoes with fancy buckles like those ‘worn at court’, she said. A leather jacket tempted me, and I drew out the coin Matthew had left for me. She bit it, saying it was not only a good one, but one of the first to be minted.

‘How can you tell that?’

‘See? On the rim there – the lys?’

Her long fingernail pointed to a tiny fleur-de-lys, above the King’s head. She said the mint mark showed that it was coined in 1625, the year of the King’s Coronation.

‘About as old as you are,’ she cackled.

An unaccountable shiver ran through me; the sort of shiver that used to make Susannah ask: ‘Has someone walked over thy grave, Tom?’

Matthew had told the shipwright it was mine and I took it back, turning it round and round between my fingers, feeling that perhaps it was a magic coin and, if I spent it, I would be spending part of my past. I reluctantly took off the expensive jacket, and put the coin back in my pocket. Instead I bought what she called a Joseph, perhaps after the coat of many colours, although these colours were those of various leather patches that held it together, larded with grease and other stains I did not care to question. At another stall I exchanged my apprentice’s knife for a saw-tooth dagger. The upper part of the blade was lined with teeth that would catch the tempered blade of any sword and snap it.

The City looked different. Cornhill was swept clean. In spite of drizzling rain, groups of scavengers were out in Poultry, throwing household filth, dead birds and a dead dog into their carts. They did not argue, as they usually did, that a pile of refuse was ‘over the line’ in the other’s ward, or, when the other cart was out of sight, dump it over the boundary. Planks were being laid so that coaches would not get stuck in the muddy streets. A group of men were arguing fiercely outside St Stephen, Walbrook, where the bells were ringing. I asked one man what o’clock it was and what was the service? He told me it was four of the clock and there was no service. They were practising the bells for the King.

‘The King?

I stared at him stupidly. ‘Do you not know? The King has set up a government with the Scots. He arrives tomorrow from Edinburgh to talk to Parliament.’

To talk to Parliament! I stood there, stunned. The King was going to listen to Parliamentary demands! I walked away in a dream. I felt that what Mr Ink had said was coming true, and we were on the brink of a new world.

It was beginning to grow dark, but it was too early to find Will, my drinking companion, in the Pot. I hoped to beg a bed from him. Once, when it had been too late to return to Half Moon Court after a heated debate, I had slept in his father’s tobacco warehouse. I made my way towards the red kites, which always dipped and soared above Smithfield in the evening, searching, like the poor, for what the butchers had thrown away. In Long Lane I stopped. When I ran from Half Moon Court, Mr Black had shouted that I was in great danger. Just words to entice me back? Or a genuine warning? I seemed to recall a note of real desperation in his voice. I still carried my apprentice’s uniform, rolled in a bundle. I turned it over and over in my hands, unable to admit to myself that the bond between us was quite broken.

From Half Moon Court came the sound of horses. A voice I did not recognise was shouting brusque commands.

A woman with a boy and girl running round her skirts came out of the market clutching a bloody bundle in a scarf, full of high spirits at finding their evening meal. The girl had a battered wooden toy and the boy tried to grab it. The girl ran from him into the street just as a Hackney hell-cart came out of Cloth Fair into Long Lane.

The boy stopped short, but the girl stood frozen in front of the approaching cart. The driver, who was riding one of the two horses, pulled frantically at the reins. The horse he was on responded but the other reared, dragging the coach forward at an angle towards the child. The child stared upwards at the rearing horse, wonder rather than fear on her face. The woman was screaming.

A man in the coach shouted, his voice cut off as he was thrown against the side. The flailing hooves were descending towards the child. Only then did she turn to run.

I flung my uniformed bundle at the horse’s head. The horse shied away, whinnying frantically, falling against the other horse, hooves coming down inches from the girl as I snatched her up.

I stood there holding her while the driver struggled to calm the panic-stricken horses. I was shaking, but she seemed unmoved.

‘Horse,’ she said, stretching her hand out to the animal the driver was preparing to remount.

‘Horse,’ I agreed, stroking her hair. ‘Horse.’

Her mother, sobbing with relief, was moving towards us when the curtain in the coach slid back. All I could see was the scar. A livid scar running from cheek to neck. The man had twisted round in his seat, and the scar seemed to be doing the cursing, swearing at me.

Petrified, I gripped the little girl to me. My hat had come off, and it was still light enough for him to see me. But he was righting himself, cursing and rubbing his head where he struck it.

He turned towards me. I glimpsed fine linen and eyes as cold as money. Before he could see my face I lifted the little girl high in the air, dandling her up and down in front of me to conceal my red hair. She squealed in delight.

‘Are you trying to get your children killed? One less mouth to feed?’

I felt all the fear and hatred that I had heard in my father’s voice when he had spoken of the man. And anger that there was not a trace of concern for the child or her mother. An almost uncontrollable urge filled me to pull him from the coach. Then the woman spoke:

‘I am sorry, sir. I am truly sorry. It is my fault.’

Hearing the beseeching, pleading note in her voice, taking all the blame when the coach was travelling so recklessly, I could stand it no longer. I handed her the child and walked up to the coach.

But he had turned away with a grudging satisfaction at her apology and was now shouting at the driver, who, with some difficulty, had quietened the horses. ‘Come on, come on, man! I must get to Westminster before dark.’

He shut the curtain. The driver scuttled for his whip, cracked it and the carriage lurched off. I stood there, staring after it. Although there was a chill in the evening air, my body crawled with sweat at how near I had come to giving myself away. There was a timid touch at my elbow. The woman was holding out the scarf, which wrapped the bloody remains she had scavenged. I felt a double pang: that she should offer me her supper, and that I could look as if I needed it. She whispered something to the little girl.

‘Thank you,’ the girl said.

I smiled, moved to gallantly sweep off my hat and bow, discovered the hat was not there, affected great surprise, which drew a giggle from the girl and a smile from the woman, and could not seem to find it although it lay in front of my eyes, which drew peals of laughter from the girl.

‘It’s there!’

‘Where?’

‘There!’

This welcome little game was interrupted by a familiar voice.

‘What’s going on?’

George had come out of Half Moon Court. He still had a plaster on his head where I had struck him, but his darting eyes seemed as sharp as ever. I turned away, retrieving my hat. The woman told him what had happened. All that seemed to concern him was that the coach and its occupant had gone. I moved to pick up my uniform, torn and muddied by the wheels of the coach. I felt his eyes on me, but then I heard Anne’s voice.

‘George, are you going?’

My heart lifted. If only I could speak to her before her father!

‘I must get my coat,’ George said. ‘It’s a chill evening.’

‘Please hurry!’

‘All right, all right,’ he muttered.

He gave me another curious look. I bent and picked up a rotting apple from the sewer, which seemed to satisfy him I was a beggar, for he went back into the court. Under the overhanging jetties it was darker and easy to follow him, keeping to the shadows of the opposite building. Although my new shoes leaked, they made less noise than the clumsy boots. Candles were lit in the house. The last of the light always came into my window in the evening, and I could see the edge of my mother’s Bible on the sill.

At least, I determined, I would take that away.

Anne came to the doorway. She wore a pale-blue, high-waisted dress which I knew to be her best, presumably for the benefit of the visitor. Over that she had put on an apron. She carried George’s coat. He seemed to take an interminable time putting it on, during which he shook his head gravely before finally coming to a decision to speak.

‘What has happened to Mr Black is God’s visitation on you, Miss Anne,’ he said.

She looked at him in terror. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I think you know,’ he said steadily.

‘Indeed I do not! Please go for the doctor.’

I stared up at the window of Mr Black’s bedroom. In the wavering candlelight I could just see Mrs Black passing restlessly by the bed, peering out of the window.

George stopped buttoning his coat, glanced up at the window, not speaking until Mrs Black had passed out of sight. ‘You let the devil out of the cellar,’ he said softly.

‘I did no such thing!’ Her voice was equally low, but sharp and contemptuous, as if it was the last thing in the world she would dream of doing.

‘I saw you.’

‘I came down when I heard the disturbance.’

‘I saw you going up.’

There was a trace of uncertainty in his voice which she leapt on. ‘You cannot have done. You make too much of yourself. Get the doctor!’

Perhaps he was lying and merely suspected. Or had seen something, but, groggy after my blow, could not be sure. At any rate, he began to move away reluctantly, and my heart went out to her for standing up to him.

All would have been well, but then she added bitterly: ‘You should have let him have a candle.’

She knew what she had said as soon as the words were out of her mouth. He stopped and turned very slowly. As he did so I caught the smile of satisfaction on his face. It vanished as he looked at her with grave concern.

‘How did you know about the candle?’

She gave a little moan. ‘Please go.’

‘Mr Black needs more than a doctor to cure him. We must root out the cause of the illness: your sin.’

He spoke so solemnly, so gravely, I had to struggle against the feeling that he was right, had been right all the time, and that the devil was within me. When George and Mr Black had first brought me here from Poplar, before the boat bumped against Blackfriars Stairs, had I not sworn a pact with him to be as evil as possible?

‘You must confess,’ George demanded.

She staggered. I thought she was going to faint.

‘I cannot tell my father – it would kill him!’

‘Then you must confess to God.’

‘Yes, yes. You will not tell my father?’

‘If you are good, child, and accept my guidance.’

She nodded perfunctorily, turning away. I could see she was on the edge of tears. ‘Please go now.’

He was insistent. ‘You will? Accept my guidance?’

‘Yes!’

He smiled. ‘God be praised! The sinner repenteth!’

He took her hands and began murmuring a prayer. At first she submitted, head bowed, but when she tried to take her hands away he only held them more tightly, murmuring away. Half a dozen times I nearly broke out of that doorway. Half a dozen times I forced myself back until suddenly I no longer cared whether he was pure good and I was pure evil. I jumped out.

‘Leave her! Leave her alone!’

Nothing George had said could have made his point better. For a moment I must have looked like some foul spirit coming out of the ground. Anne screamed and backed away to the door. George ran. ‘Anne!’ Mrs Black shouted from upstairs. ‘What is it? Has George gone for the doctor?’

There was no sign of him. ‘I’ll go,’ I said.

Guilt drove me: I felt that Mr Black’s illness was my fault. And breaking a bond is not just a matter of throwing away a uniform and selling boots. I went because I could not get out of my head it was no longer my job. Several times a year Mr Black had these strange attacks. He would stop what he was doing and stare at me like a blind man. Once, he dropped back on his chair, missed it, and fell to the floor. The first time I was very frightened, but Mrs Black drummed into me that when he had one of these attacks I must run and fetch Dr Chapman, for my master’s life depended on it.

The doctor practised near St Bartholomew’s in Little Britain but, luckily, was returning from a patient only two streets away. He was a bustling little man, of great good humour.

When I first met him I had told him I hated my hair; he offered to cup me for nothing, in the light of the discoveries of Mr Harvey, who declared that blood circulated and nourished everything. If enough was taken, he said, it might drain the colour from my hair. I thought he was serious and backed away hastily, at which he burst out into roars of laughter.

Now he said slyly, as we hurried back to Half Moon Court: ‘I like your court dress, Tom. Are you to be presented to the King tomorrow?’

He went upstairs laughing, but that soon died. I always knew from the sound of his voice how serious the attack was. Now his greeting and his banter dwindled almost immediately into silence. There was no sign of George or Anne. It was very quiet, apart from the murmurings of the doctor, and the occasional creaks when he moved across the floor above me. There was no chance of my confronting Mr Black, but I might get my Bible.

I opened the door to the kitchen, where a kettle was heating by the side of the fire. I crept to the bottom of the stairs; from there I could see that the door to Mr Black’s bedroom was closed. There was the faint clink of metal against a basin. I had watched Dr Chapman cup him once. After tightening a bandage round Mr Black’s arm he would warm a lancet in the candle flame and draw it across a bulging vein. After a spurt of blood there would be a steady flow. It would take about ten minutes.

I took a step or two up the stairs. A shadow fell across the small landing above. I glimpsed the edge of Mrs Black’s dress and pulled back against the wall. Never able to stand the blood-letting, she had gone into her own room. Anne was probably with her.

I stood indecisively. I could see straight through to the print shop, and beyond that to Mr Black’s small office. The door, normally locked, was open. Papers littered the writing desk and the floor around it. A chair had been knocked over. I took a candle from the kitchen and went past the printing press into the office. Mr Black must have been working here when he had the attack.

As I picked up the chair I saw it: a bound black accounts book, of the type Mr Black used to keep a note of deliveries of ink and paper, and sales of pamphlets. But on the cover of this one was inked a single letter T.

Whatever I hoped to see when I opened it, it was not dull accounts. But there they were in Mr Black’s neat hand, items of purchase and columns of figures.

I flicked through the pages rapidly. There was my life in Half Moon Court, from the cost of the watermen that had brought me here and the tutorials with Dr Gill, down to the very bread and cheese I had eaten, faithfully recorded right to the last halfpenny. I stopped as a word which seemed out of place with the others half-registered in the turning pages: portrait. Portrait?

I turned back, to see an entry whose amount dwarfed all the others.

8 August 1635. Paid to P. Lely. Portrait in oils & frame. £20-0-0.

I had had no portrait done. The very idea was laughable. Only people at court had their pictures painted. No. That was not quite true. Each Lord Mayor had his portrait painted and hung in the Guildhall. I went very still.

The summer of 1635 I had taken a message to the clerk in the Guildhall and been told to wait for a reply. While I was in the waiting room a young man wandered in. His smock and hands were daubed with paint. He spoke with a thick Dutch accent and said the Mayor had gone out to a meeting, and he too was waiting for him.

He pushed my face to one side so he could see the profile and grunted something in Dutch. He said he was tired of painting old men who wanted to look young and dashing, and as an exercise he would really like someone young and dashing to sketch.

I was flattered and amazed by the incredible speed with which he sketched. By the time the clerk came with the reply, and to say that the Mayor was ready again, the painter had caught me like a bird in flight. A grin. A sulk when I grew bored with him. In profile. Staring with wide eyes straight out of the paper.

As the charcoal flew across the paper he grunted, ‘The eyes you have. The nose. Everything but the hair.’

‘What do you mean?’

He seemed too absorbed in the next sketch to answer. ‘Turn. No no – the other way!’

I begged him for a sketch but he said he needed them all. ‘Perhaps the painting you may one day see, mmm?’

He smiled, patting me on the cheek, leaving traces of charcoal and paint which I left there until they disappeared.

Peter – that was his name. I stared at the account book: P. Lely. Peter Lely. Perhaps Mr Black had commissioned him to do a portrait of himself. No. No printer could afford it, and if he could he would surely hang it prominently. Somebody had paid for a picture of me. But who? Why? And where was it?

I heard sounds upstairs; the doctor’s deep voice and Mrs Black’s low murmuring answer. Quickly I riffled through the remaining pages. A folded piece of paper, which I supposed was used as a marker, flew out of the book. I picked it up and placed it on the table. There was nothing of interest in the rest of the accounts, but there was a whole new section at the end. Mr Black had turned the book upside down to start the section on the last page. It was a cross between a diary and a tutor’s report on my progress, or lack of it.

I was ‘obstinate as a mule’. ‘Bright but uncontrollable.’ One day there was ‘a glimmer of hope’, the next total despair – ‘I would have him on the boat back to Poplar if I could.’

It was soon clear that these were notes for more carefully worded reports, for there was the draft of one of them, pulling together various amended notes. Written two months ago, it declared: ‘Mr Tom hath the Latin of a scholar, I have taught him a good Italian hand, he can use a fork at table, but his morality must still be called seriously into question.’

Mr Black got reports from Dr Gill. Why did he need to write these? They must be for the same person who commissioned the portrait. The accounts book answered at least some of the questions that had been plaguing me. Someone had paid Mr Black to have me educated and apprenticed; either the man with the scar, or, more likely, the kindly old gentleman Matthew had told me he represented.

Remembering the piece of paper I had picked up, I unfolded it. It was part of a letter, written on a different paper, a thick quality paper, and the hand was very different. Mr Black was proud of his hand, the simple sloping penmanship of a businessman, without flourishes, essential for something that might have to be read quickly in a dim light or a swaying carriage.

This was written in an erratic, angular hand, liberally sprinkled with capitals and with thick upstrokes and downstrokes that cut into the surrounding lines and made the words so difficult to read I had to move the paper closer to the candle. The paper was that of a gentleman, possibly one who had a scrivener to write his letters for him. I could see why he had not dictated this one.

It was a page from a longer letter:

. . . means that he now looks at the boy in a different way. He sees him as a great Folie who must be got rid of. Perhaps a Taverne brawl or some similar kind of ACCIDENT.

He has men for the purpose, who have been given a likeness and of course the boy’s hair stands out like a beacon.

This matter will bring me to London sooner than I intended, but meanwhile re the accounts you sent me . . .

The page ended with some minute dissections of the cost of paper and ink. I searched frantically among the papers for the preceding page, but could find nothing. In spite of what had happened to me, I could not believe I had read the words right, and, hands trembling so much I almost singed the paper with the candle, began to decipher every word of that page again.

‘What are you doing?’

It was Anne, holding the kettle. I was so still, so intent on those scrawled words, she must have taken the kettle from the fire and been on her way back to the stairs before she saw me.

‘Somebody is trying to kill me.’

The words came out of my mouth lame and halting, marked with disbelief in spite of the evidence in front of me. But I must have looked so rigid with shock that she came up to me, concern on her face.

‘What are you talking about?’ she whispered.

‘Look –’

I showed her the letter. I had forgotten she could not read. In a panic I gabbled that somebody had paid to make something of me, and now that I had failed had decided to get rid of me. It must have sounded a great nonsense, for she pulled away with alarm.

‘You’re mad!’

‘Look –’

Even though she could not read them, I tried to show her the patterns the words made, in the vain hope that she would see the madness, the evil, in the blotches, the sword-like downstrokes.

‘Anne!’ Mrs Black called. ‘The water must have boiled by now.’

There was the creak of a door opening upstairs. ‘Get out,’ Anne hissed.

‘I’m not mad,’ I whispered. ‘You must believe me!’

We heard her on the stairs. ‘What’s going on? Is that George?’

‘No, Mother,’ Anne shouted back. ‘The water’s just boiled. I’m coming.’ To me she whispered: ‘George has gone for the constable. Stay – if you want to be arrested.’

It was only when she went that I thought of my Bible. I hurried to call her back, but she was already halfway up the stairs. I folded the letter and put it into my pocket. I went to the door and listened. It was silent in the yard, but towards the river there was the sound of rioting, in the direction of Westminster. I hoped that would make it difficult for George to find his constable.

After a minute or so Anne returned to refill the kettle. The pail in the kitchen was empty. Ignoring me, she went to the pail in the yard we normally washed in. I followed her, taking the pail from her, doing what I had done so many times, drawing my fingers over the water, breaking the thin film of ice already forming on it. I ached for normality, and the everyday action calmed us both. I dipped a jug in the water and poured it into the kettle.

‘How is Mr Black?’

‘He cannot speak.’

I was stunned. Water flowed over the top of the kettle as she pulled it away. I stared up at the window, where I could see the elongated shadow of the doctor move across the wall.

‘I am sorry.’

‘You struck him,’ she said, accusingly.

‘He struck me!’

‘It is his right.’

‘When it is just. George taking the candle was not just.’

We had instinctively drawn away from the house, into the shadows of the tree where, for that brief period, we used to play as children. ‘I should never have let you out! George knows.’

‘Don’t trust him.’

‘I must.’

She began to move back to the house.

‘If he meant well by you, he would tell your father.’

She stopped. She was now in the light, and I could see that her hands, which she twisted together constantly, were white with cold. I longed to touch them, to take them in my hands, but dare not. There was a trace of the old mockery in her voice.

‘And I can trust you?’

‘Yes!’

I spoke with a ferocity that made her jump with fear, but then she gave me back a look of such intensity I wanted to lower my eyes but could not, or dare not. It seemed to go into my very soul in a way no preacher, nor my mother and father had ever done.

‘Did you write that poem?’

‘Yes – and meant every word of it.’

Everything at that moment was as sharp and clear as the moonlight on the splinters of ice I had broken in the pail. She stared back at me, trembling, but before she could speak there was the sound of someone turning into the court from Cloth Fair. At the same time I saw her mother coming to the window. I jumped into the shadows.

It was the pewterer who lived opposite. His clothes were usually dusty with the chalk shed by the plates and mugs when he took them from the mould, but now they were clean. For him, like the shipwright, business had dried up.

His gait was unsteady. He scarcely gave Anne a glance. ‘Goodnight, Mr Reynolds.’

‘Goodnight, Anne.’

Mrs Black had withdrawn from the window. The intensity of the moment had gone. Neither of us spoke. She picked at her apron. Suddenly she put a hand to her mouth to smother laughter.

‘What do you look like!’

‘Well, I think,’ I said stiffly, with a stab of indignation, yet with a feeling of relief that we were back on the familiar ground of mocking banter.

I displayed my shoe. In the dim light the gap where the upper was parting from what was left of the sole could scarcely be seen, and I thought it had a particularly fine buckle.

‘This shoe has been presented at court.’

‘Which court?’ She struggled to stop giggling. ‘James or Elizabeth?’

She could not contain her laughter and I was frightened they would hear her. ‘I had to change my clothes!’

‘As people do in your pamphlets?’ she mocked. ‘Because someone is trying to kill you?’

A movement in the window drew our eyes upwards. The candles in the room threw a wavering silhouette on the wall of Dr Chapman fastening his bag. Time and again, I find, ideas come out of desperation.

‘You know your numbers?’ I whispered urgently.

‘Of course,’ she said indignantly.

Without another word I grabbed her hand and ran her into the house. Water splashed from the kettle and she almost dropped it. I took it from her and put it down. Now she looked convinced I was mad, was ready to scream. I went into the office, picked up the accounts book and pointed out the letter T, which I think she understood.

And, as I whispered the names of the purchases, she with increasing bewilderment in her face scanned the numbers. She knew some of her letters by stitching them and her numbers by shopping. We heard the bedroom door opening upstairs. I almost dropped the book, then could not find what I was looking for. She was begging me silently to go, her hands locked beseechingly.

I found the entry.

8 August 1635. Paid to P. Lely. Portrait in oils & frame. £20-0-0.

She did not understand the words, but stared in such wonderment at the number, she did not react to Dr Chapman’s voice.

‘I will call in tomorrow morning.’

There was no reply from Mr Black, but his wife said: ‘Look – he is writing something!’ I could hear the doctor go back into the room.

‘Twenty pounds!’ Anne exclaimed.

It was as much as a skilled clerk earned in a year. I told her what it was for.

‘A picture! Of you? It must be something to do with the man with the scar.’

‘So I imagine.’

‘I hate him!’ she said vehemently. ‘Shouting at my father when he’s ill; ordering him about. Who is he?’

I shook my head. She kept looking at the entry in the book and then at me. I do not know what she was seeing, but it was no longer a clown, a tumbler, or even an apprentice. She bit her lower lip as she often did when she was vexed or puzzled.

‘Twenty pounds,’ she kept saying with awe. ‘For a picture. Of you.’

‘A monkey.’

‘Don’t joke. Where is it?’

‘How do I know?’

‘I knew it.’ The words came out in a tiny explosion. ‘One day my father –’ She stopped herself.

‘Your father what?’

She shook her head and refused to say more. We heard Dr Chapman saying goodbye and hurried through the darkened print shop to the door. I desperately tried to think of a way of seeing her again.

‘Can you bring me my Bible?’

‘Where?’

‘I’ll write to you. Through Sarah.’ I groaned inwardly again at the frustration of her being unable to read.

‘I will learn,’ she said, matter-of-factly, as though it was something she could do in a day or two. ‘If my father cannot speak, I shall have to read. My mother is no good at business.’

‘Bring the Bible to church. Sunday.’

She stood there, slight, determined, letting me out through the back door, while her mother let the doctor out of the front. There was something about her I had never even guessed at before, behind all the mockery, the trivial games, something that I can only call, even at that age, calculation.

Whatever it was, I leaned forward, before she could close the door, and kissed her.