“I miss the sea,” she whispers without voice. She looks without eyes to London’s evergrey sky. A wooden arm extended as if pleading for rain. She knows that only the wind now brings her water. No breaking waves will again caress her body and transport her away. It is decades since she last voyaged to China, since sailor’s feet massaged… Read it
Bludworth had a few decades’ amount of blood in pails around the fine doors of Mansion House. Where did it come from? The blood leaked from the boils of the plague of 1665, gathering in pails and soaking the wooden beams of the houses that were now going up in smoke. The men brought the blood to him. It sat… Read it
I take out the brooch I had made for him. The snake seems ominous to me now. It slithers into my mind, bites and poisons it. For I have not seen him in months. He has not followed me, only my instructions that he should not. His wife came to me in the summer, when the sky was china blue… Read it
“Go on,” I laugh, “I, a milliner’s daughter, marry a Prince?” “But you are the most desired widow in Britain,” my Prince replies. He is on his knees crawling after me. His fine buttoned waistcoat snags. “Didn’t you refuse a Duke for me?” he implores. “You know I did – that stinking old man!” My hand catching the golden thread… Read it
Look! There’s the Abbess, starlight giving an edge to the white crispness of her vaulted wimple shaped like the Abbey’s Gothic archway. Do you see another Abbess behind her and another, beyond? Endless Abbesses and arches, stretching through time? This place was already four centuries old when the Conqueror came. 1066. William has invaded, burning and sacking Saxon England. London… Read it
