The Lady and the Poet by Maeve Haran Read Free Book Online

some three hours past, half the county was laid out before us, sparkling like a jewelled wedding veil, and our ride was broken only by the song of birds and the occasional cursing of the carrier when one of the wheels of his cart lodged itself in the narrow track.
    How different from what we saw once we approached London.
    We rode for a half-hour through Southwark, a wild area just south of London Bridge, inhabited by many foreigners and strangers, with bear pits and theatres, noisy clanging from a hundred workshops; courts and alleys thick with the stench of wine, piss and cooking fat.Everywhere there were stray dogs and huge bands of wandering children, many of them dirty and in rags that barely covered their decency, with great begging eyes, all clamouring with their hands up, saying, ‘Give us a groat, kind mistress,’ and making gargoyle faces and pretending to throw stones at us when we did not. And I was shocked at the sight of the oldest and poorest lying in the street on straw pallets but feet away from the filth of the midden. And everywhere yet more children.
    ‘Are there so many children on the streets as this always?’ I asked the carrier. ‘Have they no homes to go to?’
    The carrier laughed. ‘Children are like vermin, mistress. They come out of the gutters and swarm everywhere. Sometimes I think we have more children in London than rats or fleas.’
    As we approached the city the carrier, a native of Cheapside, dour as a pall-bearer until now, grew more and more cheerful so that by the time we reached London Bridge he was as gossipy as a wench at a wassail.
    Near to the bridge, and from nowhere, a smell so overwhelming assailed us that I caught my breath. I, who thought nothing of whitewash mixed with pig’s blood or the odour of animal excrement spread over the fields by farmers, indeed who laughed at the town dwellers who covered their noses at it, found myself choking like a child with the whooping cough.
    It was like nothing I had ever encountered. Rotting and rank. Fume laden. It smelled like the overflow of a thousand privies, burning the nostrils and making the eyes water. I thought of my precious Loseley with a flower garden and green meadows and wondered how our heaven could smell so different from this hell.
    ‘Aaah,’ said our friend the carrier, breathing in deeply as if he were scenting a batch of new-baked bread, ‘the London stink! Home!’
    And then we were on the bridge. On every side of us the crowds swelled, not just with people but with herds of cows and flocks of sheep, all heading for the single entry to the great city, apart from by river, from the south.
    But the stink was not the worst thing.
    From the first gateway of the bridge, twenty skulls grinned down at us, all beheaded or executed for treason.
    I was torn, half fascinated, half repulsed that we, a country that had produced art and song and poetry, could be guilty of such barbarism.
    ‘Only twenty of ’em! Not like the old days under her father,’ grunted our carrier with regret. ‘There used to be hundreds then. Made an example of, for taking arms against the Crown, to encourage the other nobles to keep their swords in their scabbards.’ He shook his head at the eternal folly of his betters. ‘Yet I’ve heard young gentlemen pointing up at them skulls and showing off with “That were my uncle,” or “He be my father-in-law,” as if it were something to be proud of that their relations ended up with their bowels on a skewer!’ He laughed and spat. ‘They’d better be careful, mind, or they’ll end up there themselves. Since the Pope made the Queen a heretic even the walls inform round here.’
    I shuddered and looked away. We were so protected from such things at Loseley. Poor men that died for their beliefs, only to be the object of a cheap boast by their descendants. I remembered hearing the story about Thomas More, whose name we share and are distantly related to by marriage, a fact my father and