The Storytellers Read Free Page A

thinking, just for a moment, about the time when she would not be there.

C HAPTER

    S t JAMES’S PARK looked grey. A watery sun was failing to free its frosted trees and probably wouldn’t succeed any better on that day than it had on all the previous ones, stretching back to an autumn Londoners had forgotten. Strands of mist furrowed the lake’s water top, will-o’-the-wisps, entreating passers-by to join them. Unimpressed, ducks and geese stood huddled together like spinsters around a dance floor, content to watch, their playfulness long drained. The cold, invisible, penetrated everything. Winter was in control.
    Harvey had passed from Westminster along a path christened Birdcage Walk by locals after King James I, on his accession in 1603, ordered the marsh there drained to form a landscaped park with an aviary along its southern edge. But the park took its name from an ancient hospital for lepers, dedicated to St James the Less, which once stood nearby. The narrow lake that Harvey now hurried by, his coat pulled tight, gathered water from the little River Tyburn before it spilled into the Thames near Downing Street.
    The village of Tyburn had been a short distance north, close to where Marble Arch now is, once a place of execution. The first recorded was in 1196 when William Fitz-Osbert, a charismaticchampion of London’s poor, had his limbs pulled off by horses before being hung there for stirring up trouble, along with nine of his accomplices. In 1537, Henry VIII used Tyburn to dispatch a number of those opposed to his suppression of Catholicism. A clever innovation, allowing for multiple hangings, increased the popularity of the spectacle considerably. On a June summer’s day in 1649, a delighted crowd was treated to twenty-four simultaneous killings: twenty-three men and one woman. The last official lynching to take place at Tyburn was of John Austin, highwayman, in 1783. The maintenance of order was seen by the authorities as their special responsibility and sending rebels to dance the Tyburn jig an essential deterrent.
    Harvey was a glutton for London history and his mother a firm proponent of capital punishment. ‘Too many liberties are taken these days, Harve,’ she would often say. ‘Examples need to be made.’
    As he hurried towards the slender Blue Bridge, which crossed the lake, where he expected to meet Peter Betsworth, he imagined a clutch of union leaders hanging, like Abel Meeropol’s strange fruit, from a Tyburn tree.
    The park was largely deserted as he stepped onto the overpass. Just a few, like him, going from A to B, hurried to their business. The summer melee of prams, picnickers, joggers, strollers and duck feeders ignoring signs urging them not to, were absent. Parks were healthy things, he thought, in all respects. They brought high-born and low, young and old, eccentric and coy, lovers and lonely, the under-dressed and over-dressed together in a space that belonged to no one and everyone. Even the police, who passed through from time to time on horseback, looked on their best behaviour, far removed from the game of cops and robbers that frequently corrupted their weaker brethren. Parks reflected society as it wished to be: temperate moments before and after the struggle to survive.
    Harvey checked his watch. It was not yet ten. He had someminutes to spare, although it was not a day on which to be early or late. He clasped the handrail, as if to take in the view. It would be another twenty years before the London Eye would turn slowly in the distance and he could envy any who had made it into one of the pods: a mobile cave with an ever-changing view – mankind’s advance.
    â€œMr Mudd?”
    The man addressing him was nondescript, as he imagined his father had appeared to most people. Only to Sylvia was her husband a knight in shining armour, a description her son felt strengthened with each year of widowhood.
    â€œYes,” Harvey