Antonia Senior Treason's Daughter (retail) (ep

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.Then there’s another big old scream from your mother.Then there’s a rushing about.And then your old daddy hears wailing from his wife’s mother, and he knows then, my darling, that you killed your mother, you did.Dead, she was, with blood all over the mattress and some spattered up onto this old canopy.’Nurse pats the roof of the four-poster.Don’t look, don’t look.It is too late.Hen looks up at the fat fingers lingering on the green silk.Nurse has won; they both know it.Yet she can’t resist a last shot, a final malicious dart.‘Milly, little Milly as she was then, scrubbed and scrubbed, but the stains, they wouldn’t never come out.Never.’She blows out the candle by Hen’s bed and picks up the last light.She carries the flame to the door, where it throws its golden glow on her face, softening it and rubbing out the lines.‘Goodnight then, my darling child,’ she says as she closes the door, leaving Henrietta in the darkness.She has looked for the blood in the daylight and never found it.She has inched all over this bed, half hoping, half fearing to see the stains.But at night-time, in the darkness, she knows the blood is there.She can feel it pressing damply through her nightclothes.Great ribbons of glistening blood cling to the roof of the bed, dripping down from the frame and onto the covers in soft, regular exhalations.Henrietta, fifteen years old and brave enough by daylight, lies in the darkness, trapped.A scrabbling at the door; a whisper.She recognizes the voice and feels the misery lifting.The door opens, and Sam’s thin body flits into the room.‘Don’t cry,’ he whispers.‘Pox on her, the witch.Attack, Hen.Attack!’‘How?’‘That thing we’ve talked of.Sebastian and Viola.Sebastian and Cesario.I’ve brought clothes.’‘We can’t.’‘He’s out.She’s down in the kitchen talking about the Greatness of our Ned’s Blessed Soul.’She grins, and he squeezes her hand.Hen jumps from the ledge first, landing in a suck of mud.Sam lingers behind, wedging the window open with a knotted cloth.While she is waiting, she looks down the dark alley towards Fetter Lane and the bobbing lights beckoning them on.I spend hours waiting, she thinks.Waiting for Sam to come home, for Father to talk to me, for Grandmother to be like she used to.Waiting for the end of the day, and waiting for the morning to come, and all the while measuring out time, filling days, chopping the hours into bite-size chunks, like the gobbets of stale bread Cook leaves out for the birds.Not tonight.Not now.A sense of limitless freedom fizzes inside her.Sam lands beside her with a squelch, breaking into her reverie.He grabs her hand, pulling her towards the lights.They round into Fetter Lane and on into the hubbub of Fleet Street.A carriage creaks past, the horses’ hooves scraping on the stones.Beyond it, a huddle of apprentices, arms linked, pull back from the mud-spattering wheels, laughing.The linkboys jostle for business, their torches jumping and shaking.A pie-seller calls, ‘Hot and fresh’, and the smell of the stewed meat rises above the hum from the nearby piss-alley.A tub-preacher shouts his disapproval to indifferent drinkers, who spill in a jovial froth from the open doors of the packed-out Crown.There is more laughter and singing, and somewhere a voice raised in anger.After the quiet of Hen’s house, it is shockingly busy.Bewildering.She stands for a pace, reaching out a hand to the brick wall to steady herself, letting the noise and the life wash over her.She is a pebble on the foreshore wanting to be sucked up by the mighty tide.It trembles in her again, this freedom, this fear-edged joy, and she turns to let Sam read it all in her wide grin.He grins back at her, a mirror.They begin to run, feeling the call of a London night, its promise of adventure and danger, and the fug of coal and booze and chatter.After an initial stunned muteness, she hollers and whoops as she runs through the city’s glorious, rancid streets.Her call is lost in the mix, swallowed up in a London burr that rises to the coal-smeared sky.They run and run, Sam ahead of her, showing her the way in the dusk.They follow the curve of the Thames as it wraps around the raucous city.Along Fleet Street, up Ludgate Hill, Henrietta inhales swirls of coal smoke as she fights for breath.Down Watling Street, past the spilling-out drunks at the inn at the bottom, past the shifty punters emerging blinking from the stews, past the scavenging urchins of the Blackfriars slums.They run until her chest heaves, and she has to fight to keep Sam’s back in sight as he threads in and out of people, of horses, of carts, of puddles.Through the shadowy gaps in the torchlight, skipping through the pigs rooting in the filth that froths over the banks of the Wallbrook.The pigs squeal as they scatter, flicking mud and worse onto Hen’s stockinged legs.Still she runs, wanting to laugh, but too short of breath; wanting to stop, but desperate to run on and on.Until, at last, they come to the great bridge, and Sam stops, halfway across, and flings out his arms to catch her.They lean over a low, soot-black wall on London Bridge, looking up the river towards home.At their backs, the masts of trading ships moored in the Pool jostle and sway, black against the darkening sky.The wind blows up the shivering river, bringing with it the smell of pitch from the shipyards and the fierce creaking and clanking of the working rigging.Hen and Sam perch between rows of crooked houses in the space left by a fire – a sooted gash handmade for boys to hang out over the river and jeer at the boatmen’s attempts to shoot the bridge.No boats now.This late, they won’t attempt the bridge’s currents, but gather at the steps either side to fight and tout for customers.Hen leans over, a little too far, peering into the darkness of the river.She can just make out the flow and eddy of the water, and the bubbling white ferment where the Thames fights the legs of the bridge [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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