The Frozen Thames

by Helen Humphreys

  At the beginning of the freeze, the beginning of winter, the ice is clear and dark, like tar. As it melts it softens, the whole sheet of it sagging the way a floor does from having weight on it in the same place year after year.

  Snow shows the veins of brown leaves on the surface. The leaves have collapsed on the gravelly rind, their tracery fine as lace.

  When the sun’s warmth dissolves the snow into the ice, it becomes milky as the body of a fish. The leaves and sticks that have frozen into it filter light and heat through their skins, make themselves into islands, rings of water form around them, and they eventually burn themselves through to the water below.

  The ice seems to melt from above and below at the same time. Holes appear at random, and water pools on the surface. Each section of ice seems to be different from the one next to it.

  When the explorer finally does fall through the ice, it is swift and sudden, not the gentle lowering he had expected. He scrapes his shins on the jagged edges of the hole on the way down and then, because he has plunged through quite close to shore and the water is shallow, he climbs out awkwardly and walks home, the cold river water stiffening the hinges of his body shut.

  At home, drying by the fire, drinking hot milk, the explorer wonders at the wisdom of what he has been doing. He has been trying to learn the properties of ice, but all he has learned is that ice is diverse, that no piece of ice matches another. He has wanted to learn the ice in preparation for walking on the empty Arctic plains, but what he has perhaps done instead is learn the frozen Thames.

  1536

  —

  I have waited by the side of the river for ages now, hoping to get a glimpse of the King. We were told yesterday that he would be travelling down from Greenwich today, but no one is certain when this might be. There is a small group of us gathered at the bend of the Limehouse Reach, waiting for the royal carriage to pass us on its way to London. It’s not that I can afford such an idle morning as this, but I also cannot pass up the spectacle of a coach and four being driven down the middle of the frozen Thames. I might never see such a sight again in my life.

  It is said that the King performed such a feat mere days ago, but I missed seeing that passage. The river has been frozen a while now, and I am used to the skaters and the carts and the people walking about on the ice. But to see the King in his royal carriage use the river as a highway – that is a different matter altogether.

  It is also mere days ago that the King’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, died, and I wonder if somehow the events are related – if the journey down the frozen river has not a little to do with the death of a woman King Henry once loved. She died in Kimbolton Castle, in Huntingdonshire, where she had been confined, and perhaps she died of the winter, as so many have this year. Perhaps the castle was draughty and cold and she perished because of that.

  It is cold where I stand. I have to keep stamping my feet like a horse to keep the blood flowing to them. My breath hangs in a foggy sack and hardens into ice crystals on my muffler. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to wait here without freezing to death myself.

  The rumours about the King, of which there are always many, whisper that he might be tiring of the woman he divorced Catherine of Aragon for – Anne Boleyn – and that he is gathering evidence against her so that she may be charged with adultery. If this proves to be true, and the charges go forward, she would most certainly be put to death by hanging. Adultery is a treasonous offence.

  I was more partial to the old Queen than I am to the new one, but still I feel sympathy for Anne Boleyn, and for Princess Elizabeth, her daughter, who is not yet three years old. A motherless child is something to be pitied.

  There’s a cheer gone up farther along the bank, and I hear the coach and four before I see it – hear the rumbling of the horses’ hooves on the ice, deeper than the clatter on cobblestones. Each hoof-beat sounding like a muffled bell in the cold morning air.

  The horses are white and the coachman is dressed in scarlet and inside the carriage, out of our sight, is the grieving or plotting King of England.

  We stand on the bank and wave and cheer, regardless of whether our King is full of sorrow or full of rage. It matters not this morning. What matters is that the horses are as white as the snow, that they look both magnificent and ghostly as they pass, and that the sound of the hooves and the carriage is deep as a bell, deep as our own heartbeats sunken in our chests. What matters is that we have waited for this. We have waited for this, and it has come to us.

  1565

  —

  The Queen shoots at prickes set upon the ice. She has done this every morning since the river froze. I have been her companion in this pursuit, guiding her onto the Thames, placing the targets out for her, assisting with the longbow and arrows.

  At first the Queen took many men out on the river with her. There was a man to carry the bow, another to secure the prickes to the ice, a few to guard her royal presence, one who carried a chair in case she might want to rest from her exertions. At first, perhaps, the Queen did not know what to expect from the ice. She acted as though it were the same as a journey out to the palace fields. She took the same number of men as she would have taken with her on those occasions.

  But the ice is not the same as the earth. To step out from the banks, to view the palace and the grounds from the solid surface of the river, that is something that happens but once in a lifetime, and one need not behave the same on the ice as one does on land.

  After the third morning the Queen understood this. She bade the others stay behind and took only me, her chambermaid, with her. On the fourth morning she bade me dress as a boy, a page, so that it might be easier for me to accomplish my tasks without the burden of the long dresses I usually wear.

  The ice is quiet and demands the same. That is why the Queen likes to journey out onto it in the mornings with only me as company, because it is the closest she ever gets to being alone. The ice is like a whisper, constantly shushing us into its silence.

  Since it has come to be only the Queen and myself on the frozen river, the men must go out earlier than we to place the prickes upon the ice. Each pricke is the mark of a compass painted onto wood and fitted into a stand. The men do not put the targets in the same place each time. Perhaps they forget where they were the previous morning, and all the ice looks similar enough to them that they cannot distinguish between one place and another. I like it that we have to hunt the targets down each day, as though they are real prey and we are actually in the hunting fields.

  I walk behind the Queen, carrying the longbow and the quiver of arrows. I like the feeling of freedom I have wearing leggings, how much lighter I seem, how much movement is possible. We have been together long enough, the Queen and I, that we need say very little to one another, and I like that too. There’s no need to explain or question. I know what is required of me and I have learned Her Highness well enough by now to predict what she will do in any given situation.

  But the ice is new to us. The old ways of behaving don’t seem to apply here, and in the absence of new ways we hang in a quiet and cautious place. It is as though, in the very fact that the river froze, anything else might suddenly become possible as well.

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  There is certainly change about these days. Captain Hawkins returned from the New World with potatoes and tobacco, and much talk has taken place at the palace lately as to the merits of each. The potato is regarded suspiciously as being a sort of poison weed, but tobacco is being embraced as a substance of wonder and amazement. It is thought to be one of the best things yet brought home from the New World, and Captain Hawkins has been much praised for his discovery.

  The prickes are not set too far out this morning, and we find them quite easily. I lay the bow and arrows on the ice and reach up behind the Queen to remove her robe. She extends her left arm without a word, and I lace on the leather close-sleeve to protect her forearm from the snap of the bow string. She lowers he
r left arm and extends her right, and I button on her shooting glove.

  A longbow should be the height of the person who uses it. It should be as their shadow. The Queen’s bow is made from the supplest ash and her arrows are fitted with only the prized feathers of the grey goose. She is a good shooter and enjoys it, can handle a longbow or crossbow as well as any man, and yet I know that this shooting on the ice is not so much about the shooting as it is about the ice. The shooting is the reason to be out here, but it is the river itself that calls us back every day.

  The Queen takes up the bow and fits it with an arrow. I stand a little to the side and behind her, holding her robe over my arm. The sun is out and quivering in the sky above us. The ice of the river sparkles and the red hair of my Queen sparkles and the arrow flies fast and true to its mark. My body is warm and the world is cold and I feel, not like a maid, or a page, but like myself, and I do not know what to call this if not happiness.

  1608

  —

  By all accounts, Bess of Hardwick is a lucky woman. She is one of the wealthiest women in Britain, second only to the Queen. Each of her four marriages has increased her wealth considerably. She has six living children. She has built and owned some of the finest homes in England – Chatsworth, Oldcoates, Hardwick Hall. In 1601, she even undertook an inventory of all her possessions, had pages and pages written up with a list of items such as a stoole of cloth of golde tyssued and black tuftaffetie and an Iron for seacole, a payre of tonges. Even though her fourth marriage has ended badly, and her husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, has called her, strangely enough, a “sharp, bitter shrew,” Bess is largely satisfied with her rather generous portion of life’s banquet.

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  But Bess has a secret. She has told it to no one. She believes it to be true.

  It is those things we believe in that prove to be our undoing. Believe in love and you will be forsaken. Believe in your own good health and you will be sorely afflicted.

  Bess believes that if she stops building she will be struck dead. She has been told as much by her trusted fortune teller. She believes in the words of her fortune teller, goes to visit her in London to hear of all the good things that will soon befall her. She wasn’t expecting these words of dire prediction.

  It is not difficult for Bess to keep building. She loves to build. Her latest triumph, Hardwick Hall, has earned her the title Bess of Hardwick. It is a magnificent structure, four storeys tall, each storey higher than the one below it. There are so many windows in the building that it has inspired the rhyme Hardwick Hall – more glass than wall. She is so proud of this building that she has had her initials – E.S. – carved in stone letters at the head of the towers. Begun in 1590, there is still work to be done on the hall, so it is not a matter of there not being anything to build. The problem isn’t the lack of work. The problem is the weather.

  Last year, all was water. This year, everything is ice.

  Last winter a huge wave struck the coast of Bristol. Cardiff was also badly affected and the water swept fourteen miles inland. The dead were washed out of the graveyards, and the water climbed so high that it left lines on the walls of the surviving churches taller than any man. The hills of water were so fast and strong that no greyhound could have raced swifter to its prey. Two thousand people died, and it was written in a pamphlet Bess saw in London on one of her visits to the fortune teller that the wave was as though the greatest mountains in the world had ouer-whelmed the lowe valeyes.

  This winter the Thames has frozen. Crowds gather upon it, booths have been set up to sell ale and food. There is bowling and dancing. A shoemaker has established shop, and a barber cuts hair. It is said that if you have your hair cut on the frozen river it is something you will remember in the afterlife.

  The river is frozen and so everything also freezes. Puddles are small icy windows laid upon the earth. You can travel a hundred miles and not see a thrush or blackbird. Mortar freezes before it can be spread.

  Bess has had her workmen mix the mortar with hot ale in an effort to make it stick, but this has been to no avail. If the mortar won’t stick to the bricks, then she cannot continue to build and all that the fortune teller warned her about will come to pass.

  Perhaps it has already come to pass, for Bess has been ill with a fever for a few weeks now. She lives in her chamber with her maid in constant attendance, and even though she is an old woman of eighty, she is not ready to die and she fears it.

  Outside the wind howls and the weather continues cold and icy. The Thames stays frozen. Each day Bess sends word for the workmen to try mixing the mortar with hot ale again, and each day she is sent word back that this hasn’t been successful.

  Bess is dying and she knows it. She believes in the words of her fortune teller, but really, anyone could have told her that if you have to stop doing the thing you love, it will kill you.

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  1621

  —

  “Mullet,” says Henry.

  He is peering down at the space between his boots where, just visible below the surface, there is a sizable fish, frozen into the ice.

  “It’s not grey,” says William. He is down on his hands and knees, face right up against the river. “Carp. It might be carp.”

  “Not big enough.”

  “Gudgeon.”

  “Flounder.”

  “Flounder!” William raises his head, incredulous at his friend’s idiocy. “When was the last time you were after catching a flounder in the Thames?”

  “Could be,” says Henry. “Could be a flounder.”

  “Because you want it to be so, then it must be?”

  “No,” says Henry, lying.

  “Bullhead,” says William.

  “It’s not a bullhead.”

  “Not the fish. You.”

  The men are silent for a moment. All around them is the swirling noise of the Frost Fair, booths set upon the ice with all manner of goods for sale. Out towards the centre of the river, men are skating. They have fastened the leg bones of sheep onto the soles of their boots, and push themselves along with wooden staffs that have been shod with iron. Sometimes their velocity overtakes their competence and the skaters run into one another, often with poles upraised, risking death by impalement.

  “Remember when there was too much fish?” says William.

  Once, British noblemen fed so much salmon to their servants that the servants had a revolt and there was a law passed to limit salmon rations to a mere three times a week.

  Now, with the Thames in this frozen state, there is not enough fish. The fishmongers have gone out of business and the butchers are thriving, taking their custom.

  Henry regards the fish between his boots. It is held fast in the act of swimming, shadowy with the murk of the river surrounding it. He supposes they might be able to chip it out of the ice, but it seems a long way down and the effort involved would be too great. He wonders what it was like for the fish to freeze like that, whether it felt it, body slowing, stiffening up. How strange for water to suddenly become rock, for what was made of movement to be stopped.

  “I suppose we all must die,” he says, for it has just occurred to him that the fish is not only frozen, but dead.

  William looks up. “What are you going on about?”

  “Nothing.”

  There’s the smack of two skaters colliding on the ice just beyond them. One of the men is lying on the river now, rolling about and moaning and holding on to his leg.

  “Tench,” says William, his attention already turning away from the injured man and back to the frozen fish.

  Henry is seized with a fear of dying. He doesn’t want to slow and stiffen, turn to rock. He doesn’t want to exist in a frozen state until the end of time. It doesn’t seem right that it could happen to him. It all seems alarmingly unfair.

  “Well?” says William.

  “Loach,” says Henry. “Stone Loach.”

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  1635

  —

  The fourteen men assemble on the ice and, without speaking, divide themselves into two teams. Even in the midst of winter the sun is strong and they soon shed their coats and gloves, run down the frozen river in their shirtsleeves, shunting the football before them.

  It is Sunday morning. They should be in church, but they have come instead to the river to play football. They feel no guilt for their decision. It is glorious to be young and in motion, to be hurtling down the icy pitch towards the opposite goal with no thoughts in their heads other than those of winning the game. Church would have been a waste of such a day. Church would have meant sitting still, denying the urgency of their living bodies to move, to revel in the pleasures of the flesh.

  The game is not long begun when the two teams of boys come together in a scrum, a little way out from the bank of the river. Perhaps it is the strength of the sun, or the fact that the ice has been set a long time and is weakening. Perhaps it is because all fourteen boys in one spot is too much for the ice to bear. Or perhaps it is something else – the Lord making judgment on their sin for using His day to serve themselves.

  What happens next is that the ice gives way and the boys plunge into the cold river water. They fall in together, arms and legs tangled into a knot of flesh. There are some who cannot swim, and some who cannot climb out from under the bodies of their friends. In all, eight of the lads perish, consigned for eternity to a cold, watery grave.

  The vicar lays down his pen. He is not sure how to end his Divine Tragedie. He does not want to belabour the point that the drownings occurred because the boys were partaking of sport on the Sabbath, but he is afraid that if he just leaves it to his readers they might blame the ice instead of respecting the wrath of the Lord. Probably he has given them too many choices. Perhaps it is best not to mention the strength of the sun or the age of the ice.