The Innocent Read Free

of a noisy crowd eager to enter the city and transact their business. It was slow going as the two women tried to hold a place for themselves on the broken stone pavement of the bridge, hugging the walls beneath the overhanging houses and shops that jetted out above them; it was the only way to avoid being splashed by riders and carts from the roadway’s sloppy combination of mud, animal urine, and dung.
    Anne’s senses were assaulted by the smell and the noise. She had never seen so many beggars before, with their pathetic rag-bound feet, their open sores and mutilated bodies—or been close enough to a strange man’s mouth to smell rotting teeth as he called out to friends among the crowd. Anne was not frightened by dis-ability for very few people escaped childhood without scars and injuries of some sort, but here every third person seemed malformed in some way. Deborah told her that many were veterans from the late wars at home and in France.
    That puzzled Anne. “Does no one look after them? What about the king?” she asked.
    Deborah’s reply was swept away as yet another party of armed and mounted men cursed their way through the crush, forcing the people in the roadway to jump from the hooves or be trampled. Anne was astonished by their rudeness, the callous way the riders laid about the people with whips to clear space for their horses. Were ordinary people to be treated like animals, just because they looked poor?
    Before today she never thought of herself as poor, yet when she looked at the Londoners, she saw that their own clothes, the city clothes that Deborah had made with so much careful love, were simple and drab compared to the rich jeweled velvets, the sumptuous furs and silks on the backs of so many men and women riding proudly into the city.
    Where they lived in the forest coin money was rare. That didn’t much matter because there was little to buy. You grew your own food, made your own cloth, sewed your own clothes, so there was nothing to be envious about in other people’s lives. All had much the same. But London was a new world and Anne found herself covetous, for the first time in her life, of the pretty things others had.
    Even worse than the way people behaved toward one another, however, was the reek of this place; the city smelled like a dung heap. The stench of animal excreta was compounded by the unseen fog of acrid human sweat trapped in winter’s unwashed wool on the bodies all around them.
    She, who was used to the clean smell of the forest, and the purity of untrampled snow, had to force herself to breathe—there was no escape. Breathe in and get used to it. And try not to notice that men she did not know looked at her boldly, their eyes roaming her body to see its shape under her mantle.
    One man even snatched back her hood to see her face. He laughed at her confusion—and her spirit—when she slapped his hand away.
    After that Anne became terrified she would lose sight of Deborah, so like a child she held fast to a piece of her foster mother’s cloak as the older woman patiently led her toward the farther end of the bridge up ahead.
    On the bridge itself, the buildings were huddled so close together that the girl could not see the river below, but she heard it roaring around the great piers beneath her feet; heard the groaning of the ice as it was broken by the raging water. In that moment she was overwhelmed with fear.
    What if the bridge, mighty as it was, should break under the weight of all the people and all the buildings and they were cast down into the roiling water below? As if in answer to her unspoken question, Deborah turned and looked at her, smiling confidently.
    “It will take more than melt water to tear this old bridge down. Don’t fear, small one. Another hour will see us there. Just walk as close to me as you can.”
    But the noise of the city was overwhelming too. It flowed around Anne with such intensity, she could feel it on her body like a physical