The Bleeding Land Read Free Page B

many people!
    Rag-and-bone men soliciting folks’ saleable waste, pedlars crying their wares, woodcutters offering their skills, food vendors transporting fresh victuals. Animals, too, choked the thoroughfares; draught horses drawing carts and coaches, riding horses carrying travellers and messengers, dogs, pigs and poultry running loose in the streets. Then there were the cattle and sheep that were daily driven into the city on their way to rich men’s tables. Along with the stench of people and manure, the hearth smoke slung in dirty brown clouds above the buildings added its muscle to this assault on Tom’s senses. It was a seething, reeking clutter, a scene of chaos that half intrigued and half terrified him, so that for now he was glad that the sluggish brown river lay as a barrier between him and it.
    He took the wide-brimmed hat from his head and shook the water from it, watching a ship trawling for eels, pushing its way against the tide past the Old Swan inn and the Fishmongers’ Hall. The Thames was choked with all manner of craft, from the tall ships moored in the Pool of London before the yeomen warders of the Tower, to the rowboats, or wherries as he had heard men call them, and barges that ferried passengers hither and thither.
    Yet Tom knew he must soon immerse himself in the flow of folk joining the southern end of London Bridge and make his way along that most important of arteries into the city’s beating heart, where he would meet his father and brother. He would leave Southwark behind, passing through Bridge Gate upon whose crown the heads of traitors were skewered as ghastly reminders of what awaited such men. To Tom such barbarity reinforced his image of London as a living thing, an anarchic beast to which sacrifices must be made if some semblance of civilization were to be maintained. Many of the heads were little more than skulls now in which not even the crows would be interested, scraps of leathery skin and wisps of hair stirring in the chill breeze. That morning, when Sir Francis and Mun had left their lodgings early to be about their business in the city, Tom had walked with them as far as the bridge, there telling them he would join them later after he had explored Southwark. But the heads on London Bridge had bound him for a while with their macabre allure. He had simply stared at them, even though he knew such fascination marked him clearly as a countryman. He had stared and wondered what kind of men they had been in life and what offence had led them to that bad end. He’d wondered too how it must feel to cut off another man’s head.
    Now, peering up through the grey at the pale sun, rain falling softly on his face, Tom reckoned it was approaching midday. Time to cross the bridge then and walk the two miles upstream to Westminster, the other major suburb outside London proper and where, last morning, he had marvelled at the great buildings of Westminster Hall and the royal palace of Whitehall. His father and Mun would be expecting him, for as MP for Ormskirk Sir Francis had privileged access to Westminster Hall and had promised to show Tom its famous roof today, made, Mun had announced proudly, from six hundred and fifty tons of English oak. It irked Tom that his brother knew all these things before him, but that was ever likely, seeing as their father had taken Mun to London several times even before his elder son had become a resident of the Inns of Court.
    An appreciation of the complexities of English law was an essential quality in any gentleman, even one owning but a modest acreage, their father had explained when it had been decided that Mun, just turned eighteen, would lodge in London for two years. But this was Tom’s first experience of the city and it had not proved disappointing. He drank it in like a parched man. Yet, for all its vibrancy and chaos it was a bitter draught, because Tom knew his fate lay in the Church, where order and hierarchy suppressed instinct and