I, Coriander Read Free

should make her so out of humour.
    ‘I am sorry, Coriander,’ she said, softening, ‘but these shoes are not for you. Let that be an end to it.’
    An end it was not. It was the beginning.
    I felt the loss of the shoes like a hunger that would not go away. I knew they were still in the house. I was sure I could sometimes hear them calling me, and when I followed the sound it always led me to the door of my father’s study.
    As it turned out, it was not the alligator that I should have been scared of, but the silver shoes. They came from a land no ship can sail to, a place that is not marked on any map of the world. Only those who belong there can ever find it.

3
    The Silver Shoes
    S omething changed in my mother after the silver shoes arrived. She seemed worried and would not let me out of her sight. Then another strange thing happened. I was playing in the garden. The Roundheads were trying to catch me so I had hidden out of sight under the garden bench: I had to, because I was a royal prince disguised as a girl. It was a good place to hide. No one knew I was there, not even the Roundheads, and this way I got to listen to all sorts of grown-up conversations, my mother having many friends and visitors who came to ask her for advice and remedies.
    Honestly, I had no idea that the heart could cause such trouble and strife. It could be broken and still mend. It could be wounded and still heal. It could be given away and still returned, lost and still found. It could do all that and still you lived, though according to some, only just.
    Mistress Patience Tofton was one of the visitors. I had not been listening that much until I heard the name Robert Bedwell. Then my ears pricked up, because I often played with his sons. They lived just down the river from us in Thames Street. He must, I supposed, have had a wife once and the boys a mother, but I had no memory of her.
    Patience Tofton was all words and tears.
    ‘He will be wanting a wife of letters,’ she wept bitterly, ‘a younger wife than me. I am too long a spinster.’
    That was the silliest thing to say. Why, Master Bedwell was no spring chicken himself. He would be pleased to know that Patience Tofton, who was pretty, with fair hair and all her own teeth, should like him at all.
    I peeped out from under the bench. My mother was talking to her kindly and softly, her words lost to me, and she kissed Patience on both cheeks.
    ‘It will be all right, then?’ asked Patience, getting up to leave.
    I leapt out from my hiding place and said, ‘Of course he will marry you! Do not take too long about it. Your two children are keen to be born.’
    After I said it I thought perhaps I should not have. It took Patience Tofton by surprise, I can tell you. She went a greenish white, then fainted, falling like a bush that has been chopped down.
    I went into the house, thinking it best to disappear until I heard the click of the garden gate. Then I looked out of my bedchamber window to see Master Bedwell helping Mistress Tofton home.
    Later that day my mother came and sat on my bed.
    ‘What made you say that to Patience?’ she asked.
    ‘I know not,’ I said, for in truth I did not. ‘I just know that she will marry Master Bedwell on Midsummer’s Day and they will have a son and a daughter.’
    ‘That is all?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, giving it some thought. ‘Well, that much I feel certain about.’
    ‘Coriander,’ said my mother, looking into my eyes, ‘you are like me. But remember, you must keep your thoughts away from your tongue.’
    ‘I will never say another word about any of the thoughts I have tumbling in my head,’ I said apologetically.
    ‘That would be a pity,’ laughed my mother. ‘Let us agree that you can tell them to me and your father and Danes, but no one else.’
    ‘So can I have the silver shoes?’
    ‘No, Coriander. Believe me, they are not the right shoes for you.’ She sounded so sad. ‘I had shoes like those once. I walked in them for