C.J. Sansom: Heartstone

The boy looked worried, shifted from foot to foot. 'He says it's important for us to learn, sir.'

'Well, I say you are too young. Now, fetch the mounting block, there's a good lad.' I said to myself, that man will go.

I RODE DOWN Holborn Hill and through the gate in the city wall at Newgate, the grim, smoke-blackened stone of the jail hard by. Outside the entrance to the old Christ's Hospital two halberdiers stood to attention. I had heard it was being used, like other former monastic properties, to store the King's weapons and banners. I thought again of my friend Roger's plans for the Inns of Court to found a new hospital for the poor. I had tried to carry on his work after his death, but the weight of taxation for the wars was such that everyone was pinching and sparing.

As I passed the Shambles a blizzard of small goose feathers swept out from under a yard door, causing Genesis to stir anxiously. Blood, too, was seeping into the street. The war meant a huge demand for arrows for the King's armouries, and I guessed they were killing geese for the primary feathers the fletchers would use. I thought of the View of Arms I had witnessed the previous day. Fifteen hundred men had already been recruited from London and sent south, a large contingent from the sixty thousand souls in the city. And the same thing was going on all over the country; I hoped that hard-faced officer would forget about Barak.

I rode on into the broad thoroughfare of Cheapside, lined with shops and public buildings and prosperous merchants' houses. A preacher, his grey beard worn long in the fashion now favoured by Protestants, stood on the steps of Cheapside Cross, declaiming in a loud voice. 'God must favour our arms, for the French and Scots are naught but the Pope's shavelings, instruments of the devil in his war against true Bible faith!' He was probably an unlicensed radical preacher, of the sort who two years ago would have been arrested and thrown in prison, but encouraged now for their hot favouring of the war. City constables in red uniforms, staffs over their shoulders, patrolled up and down. Only the older constables were left now, the younger ones gone to war. They looked constantly over the crowd, as though their rheumy eyes could spot a French or Scottish spy about to—what, poison the food on the stalls? There was little enough of that, for as Barak said much had been requisitioned for the army, and last year's harvest had been poor. One stall, however, was filled with what to my astonished eyes looked like a heap of sheep droppings until, riding closer, I saw they were prunes. Since the King had legalized piracy against the French and Scots all sorts of strange goods from impounded ships had turned up on the stalls. I remembered the celebrations in the spring when the pirate Robert Renegar had brought a Spanish treasure ship up the Thames, full of gold from the Indies. Despite Spanish fury he had been feted at court as a hero.

There was an angry tone, different from the usual haggling, in the many arguments going on up and down the market. At a vegetable stall a fat, red-faced woman stood waving one of the testoons in the stallholder's face, the white wings of her coif shaking with anger.

'It's a shilling!' she yelled. 'It's got the King's majesty's head on it!'

The weary-looking stallholder slapped his hands down and leaned forward. 'It's nearly half copper! It's worth eightpence in the old money, if that! It's not my fault! I didn't make this evil coinage!'

'My husband got paid in these! And you want a penny a bag for these scabby things!' She picked up a small cabbage and waved it at him.

'The crops have been damaged by the storms! Don't you know that? It's no good coming to me making moan!' The stallholder was shouting now, to the delight of some ragged urchins who had gathered round with a skinny dog, which stood barking at them all. The woman threw the cabbage down. 'I'll find better somewhere else!'

'Not for one of those dandyprats, you won't!'

'It's always those at the bottom that suffer,' she said. 'Poor people's work is all that's cheap!' She turned away and I saw tears in her eyes. The dog followed her, jumping and barking round her ragged skirts. Straight in front of me she turned and aimed a kick at it. Genesis stepped back, alarmed.

'Have a care, goodwife!' I called out.

'Pen-pushing lawyer,' she yelled back. 'Robed hunchback leech! I warrant you don't have a family half starving! You should be brought down, the King and all of you!' She realized what she had said and looked round, afraid, but there were no constables nearby. She walked away, an empty bag slapping at her skirt.

'Quiet, good horse,' I said to Genesis. I sighed. Insults about my condition still felt like a stab in the guts after all these years, but I felt humbled too. For all that I, like other gentlemen, might rail against the taxes, we still had money to put food on the table. Why, I thought, do we all put up with the King squeezing us dry? The answer, of course, was that invasion was a worse fear.

I passed down the Poultry. At the corner of Three Needle Street half a dozen apprentices in their light blue robes stood with hands on their belts, looking round threateningly. A passing constable ignored them. Once the plague of the authorities, the apprentices were now seen as useful extra eyes against spies. It was such a gang of youths that had sacked Guy's shop. As I passed beyond the city wall again at Bishopsgate I wondered bitterly whether I was going to a madhouse, or coming from one.

I HAD FIRST MET Ellen Fettiplace two years before. I had been visiting a client, a boy incarcerated in the Bedlam for religious mania. At first Ellen had seemed saner than anyone else there. She had been given duties caring for some of her easier fellow patients, towards whom she showed gentleness and concern, and her care had played a part in my client's eventual recovery. I had been astonished when I learned the nature of her malady—she was utterly terrified of going outside the walls of the building. I had myself witnessed the wild, screaming panic that came over her if she were made even to step over the threshold. I pitied Ellen, all the more when I learned she had been incarcerated in the Bedlam after she was attacked and raped near her home in Sussex. She had been sixteen then; she was thirty-five now.

When my client was discharged Ellen asked if I would visit her and bring news of the outside world, for she had almost none. I knew no one else visited her, and agreed on condition she would let me try to help her venture outside. Since then I had tried any number of strategies, asking her to take just one step beyond the open doorway, suggesting I and Barak hold her on either side, asking if she could do it with closed eyes—but Ellen had procrastinated and delayed with a guile and persistence more than equal to mine.

And gradually she had worked that guile, her only weapon in a hostile world, in other ways. At first I had promised only to visit her 'from time to time', but as skilfully as any lawyer she had manipulated the phrase to her benefit. She asked me to come once a month, then every three weeks as she was so famished for news, then every two. If I missed a visit I would receive a message that she was taken ill, and would hasten round to find her sitting happily by the fire soothing some troubled patient, having made a sudden recovery. And these last few months it had dawned on me that there was another element in the problem, one I should have seen earlier. Ellen was in love with me.

PEOPLE THOUGHT of the Bedlam as a grim fortress where lunatics groaned and clanked their chains behind bars. There were indeed some who were chained and many who groaned, but the grey-stone exterior of the long, low building was quite pleasant looking. One approached across a wide yard, which today was vacant except for a tall, thin man dressed in a stained grey doublet. He was walking round and round, staring at the ground, his lips moving quickly. He must be a new patient, probably a man of means who had lost his wits and whose family could afford the fees to keep him here, out of the way.