The King's Daughter (29 page)

‘No one must know.’ I gave her a purse to encourage blindness in my chamberer and maid. After discussion, we decided that another attack of royal megrim would not over-stretch her mendacity.

‘How exciting!’ she said wistfully. ‘I would like to come along.’ She half-smiled. ‘I always used to go with you when you set off on some mad venture or other.’

‘You will play the most vital part here.’ I leaned closer and whispered. ‘Furthermore, you’ll be free to flirt with you-know-who, without my hawk-eye watching you.’

I wasn’t certain which of several ‘you-know-whos’ I meant, but my words had a gratifying effect.

‘Oh,’ she gasped. ‘How did you know? Please don’t say anything to anyone. My aunt would be furious.’

‘Your secret is safe with me,’ I said truthfully. ‘Just as mine is with you.’

* * *

Tallie looked more and more grim as the wherry took us across the Thames.

‘Oars!’ shouted distant voices on the banks. ‘Oars, here!’

Our wherry slid through the dark water with little surges, propelled by a single scull at the stern.

Giddy with sudden freedom, I watched the pulse of the bow waves and sniffed the smell of water, coal smoke, fish, damp wood and rotting water weed, with the occasional whiff of sewage. The sparks of boat lanterns on the river crossed and re-crossed, weaving a thick net of lights, doubled by their reflections in the water. As we moved away from the Whitehall Stairs, the stink of sewage receded and was replaced by a new, open smell that made me think of the sky.

I felt very odd and unexpectedly happy to be wearing Peter Blank’s clothes again. I had even borrowed his name. Peter. No longer Elizabeth. Elizabeth was left behind in Whitehall with a terrible megrim. In spite of my apprehension about the exact nature of Tallie’s oracle, I felt utterly content, suspended for a moment outside my life. On my way to entering the mysteries, at last. My Whitehall apprehension had become a slightly dreamy acceptance of whatever might come next.

I watched Tallie from under my hat. I did not want to ask what troubled her lest she change her mind about our venture. I looked past her at the growing lights of Southwark. Our wherry bumped gently against some water stairs.

She looked up at the crowds on the embankment above. I heard her exhale.

‘Bankside,’ she said flatly. ‘Welcome to the company of other suburb sinners. I fear you’ll most likely learn more here than you wish.’

She looked back across the river. Before she could decide to go back after all, I leapt from the boat onto the damp mossy steps.

She caught my arm as I slipped on some wet weed.

Behind us across the river, on the far side of the locked Bridge, the City, like Whitehall, was asleep. Its streets were silent except for the Watch and wakeful dogs, lit only by the lanterns hung by law outside each house. Anyone breaking the curfew moved swiftly and spoke in murmurs, as Tallie and I had done.

At the top of the stairs, I watched her look around the wide, cobbled waterside street. Here on Bankside, it was a fair at midnight. In its lawless Ward Without, London exploded with a shout and threw its hat into the air.

I stared about me, too, feeling a little dizzy. At court, the crowds and drunken revels always swirled around a single defined centre, the authority of the crown, even when the king was reeling drunk. Here, noise and motion were all hugger-mugger, racing in every direction at once, around us on all sides.

I wanted just to stand and look, feeling invisible and safe in Peter’s trousers, hat and a cloak. Peter Blank could gobble up and remember all these new sights and sensations that the Princess Elizabeth would never be allowed to taste.

‘I’m not certain…’ Tallie began, looking back down at our wherry, now taking on passengers for the return crossing.

‘I am,’ I said.

Reluctantly, she turned away from the boat.

‘Look at them all,’ she said, as if to herself. She pressed her fingertips to her mouth and stared about her, just as I had done. But before she came to me, this had been her world, I thought.

I could not imagine how it might be to live here.

Beggars swarmed like gnats around us and other newcomers, mostly men, who climbed the stairs from other boats. Some already staggered with drink and breathed out fumes of wine and sack. But I also saw women in costly clothes stepping from wherries onto the river steps, wearing masks, offering their hands to the young men in frayed coatswho skipped after them. Older men pushed past with avid mouths above fine linen collars and heavy loose gowns.

Tallie snarled at a grimy child beggar, waved away a vendor of white clay
tabacco
pipes and set off at a fierce pace upstream, away from the Bridge, with her hat pulled low over her face.

I had to run after her. I wanted to say something, to connect us again, but the gap between us felt too wide. What must she have thought of me when we first met, with my ladies and gowns, my careless indifference to everyone around me and my impertinent, invading questions? Small wonder that she had raised her hedgehog spines!

Men in silks and men in filthy leather sat drinking outside crowded taverns and inns. Women leaned on their shoulders. Other women, not so fine as the arrivals at the stairs, strolled beside the water with seeking glances. Men with watchful eyes leaned on walls. A gang of Flemings pushed past us, shouting and waving wine bottles, calling for a boat back to London. I heard Dutch, French, German and Italian, and tongues I didn’t recognise. I saw white faces, pink faces, black faces and every shade in between.

I smelt the sweetness of burning
tabacco.
A forest of pale tendrils twisted up from the white clay pipes of waterside smokers perched on barrels. Inside the inns, smoke from still more pipes and from burning fires hung like a fog. Clearly, my father’s
Counterblaste
against the terrible demon of
tabacco,
had had little effect here. I wondered what he thought of this disregard for his orders, when he came to Southwark for the bear-baiting.

I breathed in other smells of roasting meat, charred fat, piss and ale, coal smoke, wood smoke, and a dense reek of human ordure and sweat.

My ears throbbed at the din. Shouted greetings. Calls from the water, ‘Oars! Oars here!’ Bellows of rage and curses flung after a dog that slipped past our legs with a chop snatched from a plate. Fiddles warred discordantly from inside thedifferent inns, largely drowned in any case by the shouting of filthy rounds and glees by those who sat drinking in the street.

The sound of curses mixed with thuds came from a piece of open ground to my left. There I saw a man standing balanced on one leg, his body twisted into an unlikely position, his eyes following his ball in a game of bowls. Then mocking shouts and the exchange of money began. Something familiar at last.

‘Is there no curfew here?’ I asked Tallie when I caught up with her.

‘Yes.’ She dodged around a seller of broken meats and rushed on. ‘But no one cares to try to enforce it.’

I looked up at a small unexpected sound, fragile but insistent in the street-level din. Above my head, a finch fretted ‘chip, chip’ in a cage hanging outside an upper window.

Through it all wove the constant, bellowed orders of vendors to buy, buy, buy! Trays and baskets were shoved in my way. ‘What d’ye lack?’ ‘What d’ye lack?’ Drums? Little dogs? Birds for ladies?

I could have bought rat traps, love potions, meat pies, fresh water, or the services of a scribe. By the sign he wore, I learned that I could hire a former soldier, now without employment since my father’s peace with Spain, to be my bailiff or watchman. Or I could buy a watch of the purest gold. Or fish hooks.

Or an assassin, I thought, dropping my eyes before one chilly gaze. I saw now why my father always took a pack of armed men when he left in his royal barge for the Southwark bear-baiting.

I eyed a man vomiting into the river. He wore ragged wool breeches. I thought of my father on his back at Theobald’s, spewing puddles into his slashed silk velvet sleeves. Appetites did not change with wealth and power.

My eager curiosity began to darken. Passing alleys, I lookedaway from eyes that touched mine. I felt suddenly too costly in dress and too well-fed. I began to see that those who looked like me were the prey. They brought their appetites here to Bankside where hunger fed on hunger, thinking that they would feed. And became easy victims for every Southwark predator who offered to feed them.

Here on Bankside was all the dissolution I had ever seen at court, without any of the riches. Every corner and narrow alley was filled with bodies, some asleep, others arranging nests in piles of rags, nursing babies, picking at sores, staring into space.

Everywhere I looked, I began to see how sex ruled appetites, that thing I feared, the thing I had come to study. I saw it in the eyes of the leaning women and the strolling ones, and in the heaving shadows of the side streets.

I was still trying to imagine Tallie in this place before she came to Whitehall. I tried to see her among these women, and to fit the girl who must have lived here with the strange magical creature who had first entered my door.

Then I saw a pocket being picked. And remembered Tallie’s skills with portraits and copied letters.

She must have felt something of my thoughts, because she paused in her march and gave me an odd smile over her shoulder. ‘I escaped. Imagine that!’

Before she had gone four more strides, two women stepped in front of her, blocking her way. ‘A black devil!’ said one. She leaned closer to peer into Tallie’s face. ‘And, I do believe, a cross-threaded bitch as well!’

I walked up beside Tallie.

‘A pair of ‘em!’ cried the first woman. ‘We won’t have doxy cheats here.’ She pushed her face into mine. ‘Gentry punks!’ Her breath smelled like a dung hill.

‘Trying to steal our livelihood,’ said the second woman. ‘This is our patch. Do you get what I say?’

Tallie raised her hands. No quarrel.

‘Get out, or we’ll tell our man to cut you.’

Tallie nodded curtly. She stepped forward, forcing the women to let us pass.

‘Black witch!’ muttered one of them. Glancing back, I saw her fork her fingers against the evil eye.

I found that my legs were shaking slightly but Tallie marched on without looking back. ‘This may prove to be dangerous learning that we’re after,’ she muttered.

A little farther on, a deep rich bass voice, as fine as any I had heard at Whitehall, cut through the clamour. I stopped at the edge of a small crowd. A short, fat man stood on a barrel, singing the history of
‘Clymme of the Clough'.
His voice steadied me and lifted my spirits again.

While I fumbled in my purse for a few pence to buy a copy of his ballad, a mangy cur sniffed at my boots. Looking down at its ragged pelt and its ribs, I could not help thinking of Belle and Cherami, plump and clean, and most likely asleep on the foot of my bed.

‘What the devil are you doing?’ Tallied hauled me roughly away by the arm. ‘That’s danger over there!’

I followed her eyes.

‘Don’t gawp, for God’s sake!’ She linked arms with me – two friends out for an evening stroll. ‘Don’t even look his way!’

At a table outside an inn, sat a tall, broad-shouldered man, ponderous with arrogant command. Once handsome, his face was now badly scarred. Before him stood a much smaller man, head down, hat in hand. Other petitioners waited their turn. I risked a snatched glimpse as we passed. He reminded me of my father receiving favour-seekers at court, or a judge delivering a sentence.

A pair of women, waiting their turn to speak to him, stared as we passed, then put their heads close and muttered.

Tallie kept her head down and tightened her grip on my arm. ‘Dear God…’ she murmured to herself. ‘I’ve taken leave of my senses!’

‘Who was…?’

She dragged me past two more taverns before she answered under her breath.

‘That was “their man”… the one those whores threatened would cut us. The upright man of the ward. Takes whatever he wants… demands his share of all the thieves’ takings.’ She swallowed. ‘He breaks all new whores. Those women back there, waiting to speak to him, knew us for female… I had forgot how sharp the eyes are here.’

She glanced back over her shoulder. ‘What if he had spied us and decided that he wanted you? I should never have brought you here. I forgot too much.’

‘He wouldn’t dare harm us when he learned who I am,’ I said, a little out of breath from keeping up with her.

‘Oh, my poor chook,’ she said. ‘He’d enjoy you all the more – if he believed you, which he wouldn’t.’ She shook her head. ‘I feared all the wrong things… Then he’d most likely cut your throat and throw you in the river. Who would you call to protect you?’

‘I’d tell him what would happen to him.’

‘And he’d howl with mirth. And call you mad. Here on Bankside, my boy, you’re just a nameless footman from the wrong side of the river.’

She stopped and turned me to face her. I looked at her more closely. I had never seen fear in her eyes before and began to understand the enormity of what she had undertaken.

‘My la… Peter… This is not Whitehall. And not a jape. I thought to lift your spirits. I’ve already let it go too far.’ She took my arm to turn us back.

‘Aren’t we near?’ I asked.

Reluctantly, she pointed ahead to a large, white house set inside its own high walls. I now saw the risk she was taking in bringing me here. If any mischance struck the first daughter of England and Scotland, Tallie would be responsible. And the upright man might have relished having her too. I had forgot that she could not easily refuse a request from me.

I didn’t know what to say. ‘You know better than I do,’ I said at last. ‘I’ll do as you decide.’

She stood staring silently at the white house. ‘You’d go back now, if I said?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’ Hard as it was to say, I meant it.

She wavered, not looking at me now. ‘I must make myself very clear. You do understand, don’t you, the nature of the promised oracle? I’m taking you to a brothel.’

‘I think that I guessed.’