An apple core hit her cheek. The woman’s eyes swivelled to seek out who had thrown it. She opened her mouth and let out a string of blasphemy so strong that my mouth dropped open in shock.
Griffin was behind me. He bent low to make sure I didn’t miss his words.
“Danger is everywhere, Eve. I want you to know that.”
A man close to the prisoner hurled the dregs from his tankard. The slops hit the cobbles just in front of her, and a little splashed up on to her hem. Her dress was torn and stained. One of her feet was wrapped in wool, the other jammed into a tight leather pump that sagged at the seams.
“She’s a thief,” Griffin said. “And a beggar. The councillors here are quite lenient and the crowd is tame. Perhaps they know her. They are harsher to strangers. I’ve heard that they gather the dung and the slops left over from the fish market, then search their pantries for rotting cheese and meat. They bring the stinking mess to the square, ready for the spectacle.”
I shivered. The same was true in London. Stones were forbidden, but they were hidden in rotting food and rags.
I turned to look him in the eye. “Mama and I are not beggars. We haven’t done anything wrong. There’s no reason for us to be in the pillories.”
“Is that so? What do the townspeople know of you, Eve? What do you think they will believe about you? You’re foreigners.”
“I know we’re foreigners,” I said. “But we’re lodging with Widow Primmer. We’re not begging or sleeping on the streets. She can vouch for us.”
“You know well that there are many reasons why women end up in the pillories. If you’ve committed a crime, even Widow Primmer can’t save you.”
He nodded his head towards the pillories. I didn’t want to look at them again.
“Sometimes it’s a mother who has a child without a husband,” he said.
Mama had a husband. She told me about him. He was called Joseph Cartwright and she met him soon after arriving in London. He died when I was a baby and was buried in a pauper’s grave with no possessions to bequeath to her.
“Do you and your mother attend church, Eve?”
“Church?”
Some Sundays we attended, some we did not. Mama slept through the sermon and didn’t know the words to the hymns.
“There’s a prison below the Bargate,” Griffin said. “It’s where they keep the people who don’t attend and those who stick to the old faith. Perhaps the townsfolk will suspect that your mother still takes mass as a Catholic. Can you prove that she doesn’t?”
The woman had stopped shouting. Her eyes drooped like she was trying to stop herself falling asleep. Her head jerked a little. If she slumped forward, she would lose her ear.
“I have to return home,” I said.
I freed my arm from Gina’s and tried to push past Griffin. He held my shoulder.
“There’s one last thing you should know.”
“Don’t!” Gina shouted.
“I would be doing Eve a disservice if I didn’t warn her, Gina.” His pale-grey eyes reminded me of ashes. “There’s a special whipping post for flogging witches.”
“My mother is not a witch!”
“I’m not saying that she is, but the townspeople will be watching. Claire has been the same way for many years. If she improves … if she worsens … that would be witchcraft.”
“My mother is not a witch!”
“There were two cats at your mother’s door today—”
“That does not make her a witch!” My voice was louder.
“Who knows what the townspeople will think…”
A scream sounded from the pillories. The woman was being released. A man was fussing round her head. I hoped that he was trying to extract the nail rather than taking the quick way. I turned and walked away. I wanted to run, back to East Street and back to my mother. I wanted to feel her apron against my cheek and her fingers in my hair. But I wouldn’t run, I would walk. Griffin needed to understand – we were strong.
THE PEARL EARRING
February was passing. Sunrise came earlier and sunset later. I had more time to search the town. I grew to know every crossroads and corner as well as I had done in Southwark. My favourite place was the Watergate. I’d sit on the steps watching the sailors preparing for high tide. Sometimes I’d imagine my mother breaking the surface of the water with a gold chain around her neck. She’d hand me a rope tied to a sack of gold that I’d help her lift out of the water. One day as I sat dreaming, I saw a face as brown as mine. My heart beat so hard, it nearly made the waves move. I started to rise, then I saw clearly that it was a sailor, a younger man with long hair and the start of a beard. Our eyes met, we smiled at each other and then he went about his business. Sometimes I’d walk round by the East Gate, though I was always more careful there. The houses were patched together, leaning against the wall. A strong storm would easily blow them away. Cows and pigs wandered between the homes, and it seemed to me that those creatures weren’t the only ones leaving their waste along the pathways.
I was just coming from Biddles Gate when I spotted him. I had been watching the crane load chests on to a ship. The men working the treadmill had been singing a song I recognized from Bankside. The man I spotted was walking along the quay, hugging close to the wall. I would have missed him if he hadn’t glanced up. Gun ports ran across the top of the ramparts and Widow Primmer had told me that once an explosion there had killed a man and left several injured. Everybody looked up at the guns when they walked by. As his face tipped up, I was looking down and I knew straight away that it was him – the man from the inn. He was wearing the same high-crowned cap, and I wasn’t sure, but I thought I spotted a small, cream pearl earring. He saw me, his eyes widened and then he looked away. He spun round and strode off.
No! He couldn’t disappear again! I jumped up and stumbled down the slippery stairs on to the quay. He had disappeared. A group of fishermen were scraping pitch over their boats by the shore.
I stopped in front of them. “Excuse me, sirs!”
They looked up.
“The man—” I pointed to the empty space where he had been. “Do you know him?”
“I see no man,” one of them laughed. He was young, not too many years older than me and trying to grow a beard. “Are you looking for a ghost?”
“He walked past here a moment ago,” I said. “He has dark skin, like mine.”
“I’ve seen him about.” This was from an older fisherman. He scratched his ear. “I think he’s waiting for cargo.”
“Do you know where he lives?” I asked him.
The fisherman frowned. “Why does that interest a child?” Then he laughed. “Of course, I see it! The family resemblance!” He nudged the younger one. “Don’t you see it?”
Family resemblance? Oh, they thought he was my father! We looked nothing alike, but…
“I need to find him.” I bowed my head and tried to look meek. “My mother sent me from Southwark to fetch him back.”
“He used to lodge with Nicholas Balcombe,” the older fisherman said. “At the apothecary shop on French Street. I’ve heard old man Balcombe isn’t coming back from London, but you could try there.”
They turned back to their work, joking about my “abandoned” mother. French Street was back near the Watergate. I had to be quick if I was to catch him.
He was standing in the street by the closed door of the apothecary shop, scraping mud from his boot. I waited behind him, hoping he would turn around. I’m surprised my thumping heart didn’t alert him. He carried on scraping his boots though they seemed clean to me.
“Sir,” I said.
Scrape, scrape.
“Please hear me, sir.”
He turned around. I thought there would be anger on his face, but it was just weariness. “Are you following me?”
“No, sir.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Is it just coincidence that I saw you in the inn and then on the rampart? And now you appear outside my lodgings?”
What could I say? Did I tell him that I thought he could lead us to treasure? Did I lie? Mama had said trust no one, because everybody lied. Perhaps he was tired of lies too.
I said, “My mother can dive deep. She learned it in the country where she was born, before she was brought here.”
Scrape, scrape. “Why should this interest me?”
“I thought perhaps you were Master Jacques Francis, the diver.”
He surveyed me without blinking. It made me look away and stop talking.
“My name is Anthony,” he said. He inserted his key into the door, pushed it open and banged it shut in my face.
I stood there for a moment, my nose touching the wood. Suddenly, my anger was so bright I could almost see it. It was like the fireworks that sometimes glitter in the sky on the other side of the Thames. We would see an explosion of light then a big bang. My fury was like that, bursting behind my eyes then thundering through my head. Mama and I, we did not have easy lives. People like us died in the streets from the cold or from hunger or from burning fever or swelling. But we weren’t dead yet. We’d been given a chance to improve our situation and this rude man, who could so easily help us, had slammed a door in my face.
I hammered on the door and waited. Nothing. I thumped it so hard, I felt the wood tremble.
“If you don’t let me in,” I shouted, “I’ll sit here until nightfall.”
I must have made a strange sight, sitting on the doorstep of a closed apothecary shop. I think every dog in Southampton came up to sniff me, and a stray pig too. As evening fell, a sharp breeze knifed off the sea. I could hear merriment from a tavern across the street and could smell – was that frying fish? Yes, frying fish. My stomach gurgled. Mama would be worried about me, but I couldn’t leave, not after all this time. I wondered if Master Anthony was enjoying a hearty meal in front of a roaring fire.
I stood up and kicked the door. “I’m still here!”
Nothing. Did he have a back way out? Was he long gone? No, there was a flicker of a candle behind the glass. I stretched up to tap the window, then pulled my hand back. If he hadn’t answered when I’d kicked the door, a mere tap wouldn’t bother him. I had to make sure he really heard me. There was pebble in my pocket. I’d found it down by the quay and picked it up because it was the shape of an arrowhead. I knocked it hard against the glass. Once. Just once. The glass cracked, fell apart and fell inwards. It was only a small pane, but there was a reason why only rich people had glass windows. Glass was very expensive. I stepped back, the pebble still in my hand. I could run. I should run. Right now!
The door flew open. The man was standing there. He looked over my head, up and down the street, as if he’d expected that someone grown had done the damage. Then he looked down and saw me. He pointed to the hole where the glass had been.
“Was that you?”
I nodded. Just like the fireworks, my fury had burned bright then disappeared. The anger must have been keeping me warm too, because now I felt the coldness of the evening. The wind felt like it wanted to slice my skin away. I shivered.
“Come inside,” he said. “Warm yourself up while you explain how you’re going to fix the window.”
The front room was the shop. Three candles burned on the counter and their flames reflected off the shelves of glass bottles. I could just make out the shards of glass from the window on the floor. I crouched over them, trying to brush them together with my hands. I wasn’t sure what I intended to do with them.
He bent over me. The flame flickered in his eyes. “Leave it, before you cut yourself.”
He straightened up and I followed him into a back room. There was little in there apart from a table, a wooden chair tucked under it and another chair drawn close to a small fire. A basket of kindling and small logs sat in a basket at the side of the hearth.
He pointed to the chair. “Sit there.”
The chair was warm from the fire. I reached down, grasping the arms to try and warm my palms. He prodded the fire with a poker, but the flames seemed to become even smaller. I thought it needed more kindling, but my teeth were chattering too much to tell him. I stretched my feet out towards what little heat there was and my toes started to uncurl.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Sorry does not pay for glass,” he replied.
“I’ll … I’ll pay.”
“Do you have the money to pay?”
“I … I would like to earn money.”
“I have no means to employ you.”
He threw a handful of kindling into the fire. It flared up and he quickly laid a log on top of it. For a moment I wondered if he’d collected his wood from the common land. Had he been there and I’d missed him? I’d asked some of the women washing their linen on Houndwell if they knew of him. They hadn’t.
I said, “You have the means to help Mama and me make our fortune.”
“You’re mistaken.”
“Mama and I are poor,” I said. “We’ve lived in more places than I can name. Sometimes we have nowhere to sleep at all.”
“Do you have a roof over your heads now?”
“Yes. But it won’t be for ever. Mama didn’t ask to come to England, but she still has to suffer hardships.”
He drew the other chair from beneath the table and placed it across from me. “None of us ask to be here,” he said. “But once that choice has been made for us, we have to make the best of it.”
“That’s what Mama wants to do.”
“Perhaps so, but I can’t help you or your Mama.”
He was staring into the fire. He reached forward and lifted the burning log with the poker. Flames roared under it, then up around it as if the fire was swallowing it whole. A blast of heat hit my face. The earlier cold made it feel even hotter. He let the log drop again.
“Mama was born on an island far away,” I said. “She told me they called it Mozambique.”
She had told me how she’d lived in a small house with a roof made from palm leaves. She’d had to draw palm leaves for me as we didn’t have palm trees in Southwark. Some of the leaves were so big, she’d said, she could wrap me up in them. The Portuguese had been there for as long as she could remember, and she could speak Portuguese as well as her own language of Swahili. Now she only spoke Portuguese when she was sinking and her own language never, except for calling me mpendwa. When she’d first seen the Tower of London, it had made her think of the big stone fort that she’d seen the Portuguese starting to build on one side of her island.
“Mama said she was a child when she was taken,” I said.
He still didn’t speak.
“Her island was surrounded by rocks and she would swim out to them with her older brothers. One morning, she swam back to shore by herself. That’s when she was stolen. She says that she hopes her brother told their mother that she had drowned. She didn’t want to imagine her mother standing by the shore hoping she would return. She won’t talk about her journey, though she once told me she was put on a boat with a chain around her neck, then taken to a market square in Lisbon in Portugal and sold. After that she was taken to a city built on water.”
“I know it,” he said.
I waited. I’d learned that it was best to let Mama tell her stories in her own time, especially as she often struggled to find words that I would understand.
“The city is called Venice. I spent many years there. It was not where I wanted to be, but I didn’t suffer like some. I…” He gave me a sideways look. “I had skills they found useful.”
“My mama was a maid,” I said. “She has a scar across her back from where her mistress poured hot wax across her.”
The fire flared and crackled. I would have to return soon. Mama would be starting to worry.
“Are you … are you Jacques Francis?” I asked.
“I’ve had many names. That was one of them. But it does you no good to know that. I still cannot help you.”
“They say—”
“I am old. I
know what they say. Would I be an apothecary’s errand boy if it was true? I would be living the life of a rich man surrounded by gold.”
I couldn’t see his face to read his expression.
“Is there no treasure at all?” I asked.
“I did not say that there was no treasure. There are plenty of secrets below those waters and some of those secrets may be gold, but I would not risk my life to find them.”
“But you risked your life for others.”
“And I made a decision that I would never do it again.”
“You wouldn’t have to. All you’d have to do is tell Mama where to dive. That’s all.”
“And even if she came back with bags of gold, do you think they would let her keep it? Do you think your mother’s life would be easier? If she is happy now, let her stay happy.”
She was only happy because she knew nothing about Griffin’s bag of beads. Soon there would be so many the drawstring would not pull tight. Then what? I thought of the woman in the pillories, her hem damp with slops and her ear nailed to the post. I had looked out for her in the town since then, but perhaps she had gone elsewhere.
Jacques Francis stood up. He went back into the shop and I heard the sound of a chest opening and closing. He came back with a cloak draped over his arm.
“Put this on as best as you can.”
I slid off the chair and tied the cloak around my neck. It brushed the floor. He opened the door and the cold pushed past him into the back room. I wrapped the cloak tight around me. He was already striding away. I ran after him.
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer. We were the evening’s entertainment for many in Southampton that night, especially me trotting along, trying not to trip over the cloak or let it drag in the dirt. We turned into St Michael’s Square. The church was dark and empty, the traders long gone. Lanterns flickered in the windows of the merchants’ houses surrounding us.
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