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

grandfather chose often to forget. I remembered how his daughter did not boast but went secretly and took his head down from its pike. She must have been a brave woman. Would I do that for my father?
    I glanced across at him, tiny and stiff-backed on his horse. I knew my father greatly disliked Papists and often spoke enthusiastically against them in the Parliament, yet I believed this was because he was a pragmatist rather than a man of principle, acting more out of frustrated annoyance that they could not see what was good for them than from any cruelty or love of doctrine. Yet recently he wrote his own personal defence of the protestant faith,
A Demonstration of God in His Works
, so I had to believe his religion mattered much to him.
    It was a slow time to get the horses and the carrier through the jostling crowd. I tried not to stare like a country wench as we passed right under a house with four gilded turrets in the centre of the bridge, adorned with a dome and elaborately carved galleries which hung out many feet over the river. It was wonderful, a proper palace, but in miniature. Yet the idea of sitting in one of those galleries with such a sinister view of skulls would never hold an appeal to me. Perhaps Londoners got used to such sights, but I hoped I never did. To acceptbrutal death as normal in the midst of all this teeming life seemed to me a loss of humanity.
    ‘Nonsuch House,’ the carrier informed us, pointing out the miniature castle we were riding beneath, clearly delighting in having found an innocent such as I to ply with copious information. ‘Modelled on King Henry’s old palace, they do say.’
    After the little palace we passed between tall houses, six storeys high, on either side of the bridge with haberdashers’ or mercers’ shops on the ground floor. I watched enthralled as the goodwives of London pushed past crowds and sheep and cows and ducks that had to walk so far to market that they wore leather shoes on their feet, to reach the shops in search of their ribbons and gewgaws.
    ‘Rich merchants,’ confided our friend the carrier. ‘They live above the shop. And there was a tale to tell in that one.’ He leaned towards me as if I hung on his every word and pointed to a long narrow house whose balcony stretched dizzyingly out over the water beneath. ‘Used to be lived in by Sir William Hewet, who became Lord Mayor of London, great estate of six thousand pounds a year, he had, and a little daughter called Anne, just like you. One day the nurse was playing with her out of the window and dropped the little lass bang smack into the water. Everyone thought she’d gone to her Maker. Except this young lad who worked for Sir William, name of Edward Osborne. He jumped right in and rescued her. And do you know what?’
    ‘No,’ I replied, ‘but I believe you are going to tell me.’
    ‘Her father gave him Anne in marriage and an enormous dowry.’
    ‘If it were me,’ I pointed out prosaically, ‘I would have punished the nurse first. I hope little Anne dried off and was old enough to consent.’
    The carrier was disappointed by my lack of wonder.
    ‘And Edward Osborne,’ he added limply, ‘became Lord Mayor after him.’
    ‘This fellow’s stories are better than a play actor’s,’ commented my father, directing his horse out of the channel of filth that ran down the middle of the bridge.
    The carrier looked injured. ‘God’s honest truth, your worship. I travel this way so often I make a habit of taking in my surroundings.’
    We had come to one of three gaps in the line of houses on thebridge and suddenly, sparkling through the river mist, there was the white stone of the Tower of London, with dozens and dozens of wherries plying their trade in front of it, like a pond full of water boatmen.
    Even in broad daylight the Tower evoked a sense of dread. I had heard enough whispered tales of the rack and other terrible fates that awaited men inside those white walls. It would have been