Two boys fighting near an impromptu pen of pigs.
A pie stall.
A bread stand.
Radishes.
Lace.
A girl, no more than ten, carrying a basket full of cherries.
Roast goose stalls on both sides of the road.
A lettuce lying in a puddle.
An amused man passing me and pointing to a drunkard struggling to get back on his feet. ‘Two of the bell and mark him, boy, whip-cat tippled already.’
Rabbits.
Two live geese, hissing and widening their wings at each other.
More pigs. More cows. More drunks. Many more drunks.
A well-dressed blind woman being led around by a scruffy-looking orphan girl.
Lame beggars.
A woman, coming in close to a random stranger, grabbing between his legs and whispering a drunken offer.
The rowdy bustle around the ale stalls.
A giant ‘from the Nether Lands’ – cried a man, hawking the novelty – and a dwarf ‘from the West Country’, side by side, to maximise the money-making effect.
A man swallowing a sword.
A fiddler. A piper. A flautist, eyeing me with suspicion, with dexterous fingers playing ‘Three Ravens’.
And the smells: roasting meat, ale, cheese, lavender, fresh shit.
The dizziness was back, but I kept on staggering forward.
My hunger, presented with the scent of so much food, was now actually a kind of pain. I walked over towards one of the goose stalls. I stood there, inhaling the roast meat.
‘How much is the goose?’
‘Three shillings, lad.’
I didn’t have three shillings. The truth was: I didn’t have any money at all.
I staggered backwards. Stood on a man’s foot.
‘Mind yourself, boy!’
Boy, boy, boy.
‘Yes, I am a boy,’ I mumbled, even though eighteen was positively middle-aged at that time.
And that is when things began to spin.
I was generally quite strong. One of the many quirks of my biology was that I was never really ill. I’d never had a cold, or the flu. I’d never vomited in my entire life. I’d never even had a bout of diarrhoea, which, in 1599, was an incredibly, suspiciously rare thing to be able to say. Yet right then I was feeling dreadful. There had been rain earlier, but now the sun was out and the sky was a hard blue. The same oblivious blue it had been above the River Lark. The heat added to the intensity of everything, which was intense enough to begin with.
‘Maman,’ I muttered, delirious. ‘Maman.’
I felt like I could die. And, in that moment, I was perfectly fine with that.
But then I saw her.
She was standing holding a basket of fruit, frowning at me. She was about my age, but looked it. She had long dark hair and eyes that shone like pebbles in a stream.
I walked towards her, staring in wonder at the plums and damsons in the basket.
I felt a strange sensation, like I wasn’t in my own body.
‘Can I have a plum?’ I asked her.
She held open her palm. I thought of Manning’s hand and the outstretched fingers that kept my mother under the water.
‘I don’t . . . I . . . I . . . the . . . I . . .’
I saw the stray cow I had seen earlier, walking through the crowd. I closed my eyes and my mother fell through the sky with the weight of timber. I opened them and the fruit seller was frowning at me, cross or confused or a little of both.
I wobbled a little, as the street sped in circles.
‘Steady thyself,’ said the fruit seller.
Those were her first words to me.
Steady thyself.
But I couldn’t steady myself.
I could see why my mother needed walls to lean onto after Father died. Grief tilts you.
Things went very light and then very dark.
The next thing I knew – a moment, or five minutes later – was that I was lying flat on my front, half my face in a muddy puddle, surrounded by plums and damsons. Most of them were in the mud too. Some were getting crushed underfoot by passers-by. One was being eaten by a dog.
I slowly got to my feet.
A crowd of boys were laughing and mocking me.
The girl was scrabbling around on her knees trying to salvage any plums she could.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
I picked up a muddy plum and walked away.
‘Ho! Hey! Ho! You!’ She grabbed my shoulder. Her nostrils were flaring with rage. ‘Look what you have done!’
I thought I was going to faint again, and decided to keep moving, so I didn’t do any more damage.
‘Stop walking! You can’t just walk away!’
I bit into the muddied plum. She grabbed it out of my hand, fast as a bird, and threw it on the ground.
‘That basket was a week’s money. A good week. Now I have to pay Mr Sharpe for fruit I never sold.’
‘Mr Sharpe?’
‘So, you can pay me now.’
‘I have no money.’
She was red-faced with humiliation and anger. She looked confused about the money situation. Maybe it was because, despite the dirt on my clothes and compared to most of the crowd around us, I was quite well dressed. My mother had always made sure that, even though our circumstances had drastically changed since moving to England, we looked as noble as we could afford. Which was, with hindsight, one of the many reasons we had struggled to fit in among the raggedy villagers of Edwardstone. Not the main reason, obviously.
‘That,’ she said, pointing to the lute on my back.
‘What?’
‘Give me that. That can be your payment.’
‘No.’
She picked up a rock. ‘Well, I shall break it then, the way you broke my basket.’
I raised my hands. ‘No! No.’
She must have seen something in my face that made her think twice. ‘You have no food but you are worried about a lute.’
‘It was my mother’s.’
Her face softened, went from anger back to confusion. ‘Where is your mother?’
‘She died three days ago.’
She folded her arms. Yes. She looked around eighteen or nineteen years of age. I can tell you that she wore an ordinary white dress, a ‘kirtle’ as folk used to call it, and a simple red neckerchief, worn at an angle, with the knot tied at the left side of her neck. I can tell you that she had very clean skin – a rarity among this crowd – and had two moles on her right cheek, one smaller than the other, like a moon in a planet’s orbit, and a small constellation of freckles over her nose. Her dark hair was half inside a little white cloth cap, half free and wild.
She had the kind of face that had spent most of its time frowning, but there was also a glint of mischief to her that played around with the corners of her mouth, as if a smile was always in the process of wanting to emerge but being tightly regulated by some disapproving authority inside her mind. I can tell you she was tall too. A quarter head taller than me at that time, if shorter than me when I became, physically, a ‘grown up’.
‘Died?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded. Death was nothing remarkable. ‘So who do you have?’
‘I have myself.’
‘And where do you live?’
‘Nowhere now.’
‘You have no home?’
I shook my head and felt the shame of it.
‘Do you play?’ She pointed to the lute on my back.
‘I do.’
‘Then,’ she said resolutely, ‘you will come and live with us.’
‘I couldn’t do that.’
A young girl came and stood next to her, with an identical but unbroken basket. It was the cherry seller I had seen further along the street. She looked about ten or eleven. Sisters, clearly. The same dark hair and fierce stare. A drunk tried to grab a cherry, but she had quick reflexes and turned her basket away from him, and made daggers with her eyes.
/> ‘This is not charity,’ said the older girl. ‘You will come and live with us until you have paid what you owe. For the fruit and the basket. And you can pay for your lodging too.’
The younger girl stared at me with eyes as direct as arrows.
‘This is Grace,’ the older girl explained. ‘And I am Rose Claybrook.’
‘Hello there, Grace.’
‘He sounds peculiar, and smells like a horse’s arse,’ Grace said, unimpressed. Then, to me, ‘Where did you spring from?’
‘Suffolk,’ I croaked. And very nearly added: and France. But I sensed I wouldn’t have to. Suffolk would be foreign enough.
I felt dizzy again.
Rose came to hold me up.
‘Suffolk? You walked from Suffolk? We will take you home. Grace, help me hold him. And give him some cherries. It’s a long walk in this state.’
‘Thank you,’ I whispered, as soft as the air, concentrating hard on placing one foot in front of the other, as though learning to walk again. ‘Thank you.’
And that is how my second life began.
London, now
Maybe I had been leaning against the wall too long in the gentle rain. Maybe you couldn’t be still any more in a relentlessly frantic city, without the city seeking some kind of soft unconscious revenge.
I hadn’t seen them approach. I had been lost, thinking about Rose, feeling the intense story of the road. But I hear Abraham growl and I look up and they are there.
Five of them. Boys, or men, or something in between. They have stopped to look at me, as if curious, as if I am a sculpture in a museum. One of them, tall and gym-shouldered, comes close, in my face. Another boy, behind him, says, ‘Ah, don’t be a psycho, man, ’s’ late. Let’s go.’
But the large one isn’t going anywhere. He pulls a knife. The blade shines yellow under the streetlight. He expects to see fear in my eyes, but he doesn’t. You get to the point, after everything has happened to you, that nothing can surprise you.
Abraham growls and bares teeth.
‘Set your dog on me and he gets it too . . . Phone and wallet. Then we go.’
‘You don’t want to do this.’
The boy – he is a boy, I now realise, despite his height – shakes his head. ‘Quiet. Phone, wallet. Phone, wallet. Now. We got things to do.’ He looks around. The wet whisper of a car sloshes by in the rain. Keeps moving. It is then I recognise one of the boys. The youngest one. His face is half hidden, inside his hood. He has scared wide eyes. He is hopping from foot to foot, eyes darting, uttering words of panic under his breath, taking out his phone, pocketing it, taking it out again. It is the boy I had seen in class today. Anton.
‘Leave him,’ he says, his voice muffled, backing away, and my heart breaks for him. ‘C’mon, let’s go.’
Time, I realise, is a weapon these days. Nothing weakens people like having to wait. In the street. With a knife in their hand.
‘It’s small,’ I say, referencing the knife.
‘What?’
‘Everything gets smaller over time. Computers, phones, apples, knives, souls.’
‘Stop talking, man, now or for ever.’
‘Apples used to be giant. You should’ve seen them. They were like green pumpkins.’
‘Fucking shut up, you dead cunt.’
‘Have you ever killed someone?’
‘Fuck, man. Phone and wallet. Or I slice your throat.’
‘I have,’ I told him truthfully. ‘It’s horrible. You don’t want that feeling. It’s as though you become dead yourself. Like their death inhabits you. It sends you insane. And you carry it, you carry them, inside you, for ever . . .’
‘Stop talking.’
My eyes lock with his. I press the invisible force of centuries into him.
Abraham growls again. A growl that becomes a bark.
‘He’s basically a wolf. Very protective. If you stab me you just better make sure I don’t let go of the lead.’
The knife trembles a little, with the boy’s fear. Maybe it is this. This shame of his own fragility that makes him lower his arm.
‘Fuck this, man,’ he says. He walks away, backwards, then fast, with the other boys following. Anton steals a glance back at me and I smile and confuse him more. I understand. The way you can get caught up in things, find yourself floating, heading towards trouble you can hardly avoid.
Hackney, near London, 1599
They didn’t live in Bow. They lived further out, in a small narrow house on Well Lane, in the village of Hackney. There were a lot of strawberry fields and fruit orchards in Hackney at that time. Compared to much of the areas in and around London, Hackney smelled quite inoffensive, and the air healthy to inhale, though it was very different to the countryside I had known in Suffolk. For one thing, there had been a theatre there. It had been dismantled a few months before I arrived, but Rose told me it had been wonderful and that Richard Burbage himself had performed there and Lord Brown the bear.
I don’t know if it was the result of having a theatre but Hackney seemed to be a more open-minded kind of village than Edwardstone. There was no palpable fear of the outsider. Well, except for a lady called Old Mrs Adams who spat at people she walked past and often shouted ‘Shit-arse’ or ‘You walking Hell turd’ at them, but people laughed it off. And that didn’t really feel like fear of the outsider so much as general hatred for everyone, which was at least a non-discriminatory attitude.
‘She spat on my apples once and Grace went for her like a wild cat,’ Rose said, the first time I was Hell-turded, which was on my first walk to their cottage.
Their cottage was a timber and plaster affair, near a small stone wall that had its own overly ambitious name – the Great Stone Wall – and was a pebble’s throw from a modest stretch of water known as the Great Horsepond. The horses in question could mainly be found in a barn called – I kid you not – the Great Barn.
There was another barn behind that – called, alas, Oat Barn – and beyond there were the fruit orchards, with trees crammed close together for acres and acres. Further along was the stone circle of the well itself, tucked amid beech trees. To a twenty-first-century gaze it would all look quite rustic but to mine, then, the various walled partitions of the land and the close proximity of the trees in the orchard made it seem a very modern kind of place.
Rose and Grace had a deal with one of the local fruit farmers, whereby they would pick and sell the fruit of the season – plums and damsons and cherries, but also apples and greengages and gooseberries – and split the money they made unevenly in the favour of the farmer, Mr Sharpe, ‘a tight-fisted miser’, who had cultivated the fruit.
The cottage had more windows than I had seen in a house for a long time. It was nothing at all to what I had known in France, but it was a more advanced kind of lodging to the one I’d known in Edwardstone.
‘So,’ Rose asked me. She had a forthright look about her. A grown-up, take-no-nonsense look. ‘What is your name?’
‘Tom,’ I said. Which was the truth. But then I worried about the truth of me, and how it was dangerous. So I lied about my surname, for the first of many times: ‘Tom Smith.’
‘And so, how old are you, Tom Smith?’
I had to be careful here. The truth – eighteen – probably wouldn’t have been believed. And if it had been believed then it would have been dangerous for her to know. And yet I simply could not tell her the age she most likely assumed, thirteen or fourteen.
‘How old are you?’
She laughed at me. ‘I asked you first.’
‘I have sixteen years.’
She didn’t bat an eye at that. I suppose I was lucky in that when the condition took hold I was already tall, thick-necked and broad-shouldered. ‘Your eyes look older,’ is all she said. Which I found a marvellous comfort, as everyone in Edwardstone had been convinced I was set in stone in my early teens.
‘And I have eighteen,’ she said. ‘And Grace has ten.’
This was fine. This talk. I
t was fine. But I didn’t want to reveal any more. I couldn’t. I was a dangerous secret. It was better for them not to know about me.
They gave me a meal of bread and parsnip pottage and cherries.
Rose’s smile was like warm air. ‘You should have been here yesterday. We had pigeon pie. Grace is a master pigeon-catcher.’
Grace mimed catching a pigeon and twisting its neck.
A moment passed. Then, inevitably, another question.
‘Why did you come here?’ Rose asked.
‘You invited me.’
‘Not here. Why were you heading to London? On your own? What are you fleeing from?’
‘Suffolk. If you had ever been there you wouldn’t even question it. It is full of pig-headed superstitious hateful people. We were from France, you see. We never fitted in there.’
‘We?’
‘I mean, when my mother was still alive.’
‘What happened to her?’
I stared at Rose. ‘There are some things I would rather not talk of.’
Grace noticed my hand, the one holding the soup spoon. ‘He is shaking.’
‘He is also across the table,’ Rose said. ‘You can speak as if he is here.’ Then her eyes were upon me again. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘If the price of this food and a night of comfort is to talk of painful things then I would rather sleep outside in a ditch.’
Rose’s eyes flashed with anger. ‘You will find Hackney has some excellent ditches.’
I put down my spoon and stood up.
‘Do they never jest in Suffolk?’
‘I told you I am from France. And I am in no mood for jesting.’
‘You are a sour thing, aren’t you? Curdled like milk.’
Grace made a show of sniffing the air like a dog. ‘He even smells sour.’
Rose was stern with me. ‘Sit down, Tom. You have nowhere to go. And besides, you must stay here until you have paid us what you owe.’
I was a mess. I was confused. There was too much intensity inside me, after three weary days of walking and grieving. I wasn’t angry with these sisters, I was grateful to them, but that gratitude was swallowed up inside the pain of closing my eyes and seeing Manning’s hands.
‘You are not the only one with sorrows in this world. Don’t hoard them like they are precious. There is always plenty of them to go around.’