London Falling (36 page)

And then Anne arrived, all alone. ‘Mora, what have you done?’

Mora hadn’t done it yet, but she did now. She planted her feet into the pool of blood, into the soil directly beneath it, her life locked into that spot, like a tree growing into the earth. She knew now that she could never be moved. ‘Take my hand now, mistress, and they won’t be able to budge you either.’

Anne hesitated. And then she put her hand, cool and calm and beautiful, the hand of a mother, into Mora’s feverish grip.

‘They insist we have babies,’ declared Mora. ‘They insist it – and they will realize their error!’

Anne looked uncertain, even fearful. ‘They are saying our teacher has confessed to . . . to what he did with us, and to more that he certainly did not. But this is more than he ever showed us. Where did you learn it?’

‘Out of the air. Or I call it air, at least. We can’t breathe it as it is, so we have to change it first.’

‘Mora, this is going to be bad – for you and for me.’ And at that moment the soldiers, followed by the mob, burst into the courtyard, and the three Privy Council men strode towards the pigsty, looking astonished. The mob started to call out that this was a fit place to find such a Queen. But one of the councillors yelled for them to be silent, that Anne was to be accused, not convicted. Mora felt the heat of the mob, felt their hunger for blood. It felt as if they hated her mistress, yet loved her at the same time. They loved her for being something they could hate. They might love her entirely if she became a victim, but for now she was still someone who had made them suffer. They had their own tide of opinion which rolled like a sea around them. They started to question why the Queen was clasping the hands of a maid in such a demeaning place. The councillors, standing at the fore, could see, more clearly and were desperately asking for the Queen to let go of Mora’s hands. Two of them, Mora decided, had her mistress’ genuine interest at heart, but in the face of the third what she saw was only violence. He opened his mouth, pointing at the pigs, and started to bellow about witchcraft.

The shout went up all around them then:
Witch! Witch! Witch!

‘She isn’t a witch!’ yelled Mora. She was looking straight into Anne’s eyes, pleading with her to stay, knowing that as long as she held on to Mora, they couldn’t take her. She realized that they thought the pigs were a sign of Anne’s witchcraft, not Mora’s, so she repeated. ‘She isn’t a witch!’

Anne gave her a look which tried to say sorry and thank you and to bless her to God. That glance was full of worry and fear, like a mother’s. She was going to show them her innocence, like pearls cast before swine! Mora screamed at her not to. The Queen muttered a prayer under her breath, then she let go of Mora’s hands and turned, and the mob almost fell on her, but the soldiers held them back, and the councillors led her away.

Mora grabbed hold of a post. The mob tried to haul her away too, but their hands simply slipped off every time their fingers tried to clutch at her. Mora could feel the fabric of London itself getting in the way. The Queen vanished into the crowd, the official body escorting her. Mora didn’t see her look back. She herself stood there firmly as the mob started to throw things at her, hard objects which all missed her, mud that splattered back at them. She was like a mirror they had fashioned, as she stood there looking back right into their eyes and their yelling mouths.

They even brought instruments to try and prise her away. They dragged her sobbing fellow maids along to plead with her. She watched as some of them suffered instead of her. They brought fire, too, until the remnants of the soldiers warned them that this was the King’s property, and burning it would be a hanging offence. Mora stood there steadfast. She was standing for her Queen. She was planting something in this soil, to take root there and boil them – and all the mobs they would later breed. They deserved nothing better, not the mob itself not even the maids with their pleading words that they would just as soon turn against her.

They waited there for days, and even took turns in standing watch. Having heard of it, the King sent several courtiers to observe. They questioned her with words that Mora largely didn’t understand, and even asked her if she had given her soul to Satan. Mora then replied, saying she had not, that she didn’t know what a soul was, that she thought Satan might possess many faces, and how did they know they themselves didn’t serve him? They grew wonderfully, impotently angry at that. They replaced the local guards with soldiers, and gave orders that nobody should feed her. But Mora experienced no need to eat or sleep or shit. Something enormous was happening to her, and she concentrated on it alone, and made an inner joy out of it. She was binding herself to the soil.

Two weeks passed thus. They taunted her with what was happening to the Queen, how she was imprisoned in the Tower and sentenced to die. The musician was dead already. Mora saved her breath to scare them with sudden noises. Her only power over them now was fear. She was stuck here, she knew, but she was stuck here as a demonstration. She and the guards were alone in the great house, apart from the crowds that came to see her, that spoke of her far and wide. Then one day a guard, himself not looking too pleased, told her that Queen Anne was dead, though her sentence had been commuted from burning to beheading. The crowds that came now looked sad for her, for she was something that remained of Anne, who had suddenly become the ‘good Queen’.

Finally, a priest came, and tried to bless her; all the while she yelled at him. She was afraid they were going to burn this place after all, but then they all went, and they locked the gates behind them. They locked every exit that Mora might use, in fact, and bricked up every window, as Mora discovered two days after they had left, when she started to feel confident that this wasn’t a trap to get her to move from her vigil, and went to look inside the house. Walking away from that spot where the bodies of the pigs had started to fester, and the blood had become an old stain, was surprisingly difficult. Mora found herself strangely restrained, as if wrapped immobile in sheets. She barely made it to the upper rooms before having to run back, feeling an exhaustion like death about to descend on her.

She sat down, panting, in the pigsty. She wasn’t hungry, and felt full. But she realized with horror that her stomach was cramping with the pain of emptiness. Her body wasn’t used to this new life that had been forced on her. And now she couldn’t see how there would ever be an end to it.

It took her five years to break free, walking slightly further from the pigsty every day. In that sleepless time she came to inhabit the empty rooms of the great house. She sat amid the ruins of nobility. She found nothing of use. She had no windows to look out of, but she was able to feel the world beyond. She felt it in more detail all the time. She could feel what the mob thought of this house now: that it was haunted. But they didn’t quite remember Mora. The bigger idea of Queen Anne overshadowed her. Eventually they probably only knew that a woman haunted the place, but didn’t know why, and they didn’t even consider that she might still be alive inside the haunting she had been sentenced to.

One night, when she was sure of her power, when she had considered and refined it, Mora walked to the great doors . . . and through them.

She stopped once she saw and felt the presence of London outside. It had changed. It had got much bigger, much closer, in just that passage of time. It had changed like she had, twisted up by all her cramps and tensions, becoming old before her time. Walking away from the house proved difficult, so she made a short first expedition, in secret, and then searched her heart for how she could do it more easily. She took soil from the pigsty and put it in her pockets, and now she could walk at least a little way further abroad.

She heard locals still talking about Anne, about how she’d lived here, and Mora would say under her breath, as she passed them, ‘She wasn’t a witch.’ Some wench was now on the throne. On a couple of occasions, the people she passed happened to be talking of witches, and they looked at her and saw her in some strange way, and started to chase her, terrified but eager.

At some point, without ever really deciding on it, Mora accepted that she now probably was a witch. She had become this thing that her mistress had never been. She had been led to it by her mistress’ honest wish for motherhood. Mora had had no choice in the matter. It was like a wheel running downhill.

She took to hurting the people in secret, to going about absolutely unseen, learned by constant experiments with the gestures of her hands, copied from the musician, and flashing a knife from a pocket, hurting them with small cuts, killing their dogs and cats, and pledging them like she had the swine; sending them on somewhere and feeling the tide washing hard into her at the moment of their deaths.

The locals started to talk about her again. And it seemed that someone at court had remembered, because one day when Mora had returned to her sty and was standing there in pain during the night, she heard the gates open again, and soldiers entered.

That night, Mora learned that her power was not as great as she had thought it was. Now that she had stretched the weave to let herself move out and about, so others could move her too. They were here to kill her, ultimately, but first they raped her many times, having to straighten out her curled-up older self to find the soft young girl concealed inside.

They were so pleased with themselves at having conquered the witch that they decided to keep her captive, and made one of the stables into a cage where they could visit her. They put her in chains of cold iron forged in London, and those felt as if they would hold her, at least for a while. The house was opened up again, and the mob came back to see her, too. She seemed to be a gibbering old lady, she realized from inside herself sometimes, whenever her mind came to the surface. The mob handed her food, which she put down beside her. She felt that taking it would lead her back to normality, where she might be destroyed even more, split apart on the rocks of expectation. The mob seemed to like her as a thing they could come and view.

One day a child, a little girl, came along to see the witch. Mora smiled at her, and took the bread she offered. She complained that the chains were so rough on her, and she was so weak and would be dead soon, and asked if she could be set free of them, just for a few moments. That wicked, cunning child went and found the key, perhaps off her father, and she took off Mora’s chains.

Mora killed her with her bare hands, and dedicated the child’s death with the correct gestures, enjoying the feeling of what had been the child’s mind being swept off to face punishment. And so much more strength flooded into her then, more than she had ever felt before. She could suddenly see it all, see the tides and the angles, see how buildings and people altered them.

She killed all the soldiers, one by one, dispatching as many of them as she could as sacrifices. She became something even greater with every moment. And now she was able to glimpse who she was sacrificing to, and to hear a distant laughter. Mora didn’t care. They deserved it. She raped those who had raped her, and then sentenced them to die forever.

When they were all dead, she closed the gates of this charnel house behind her, and walked out through the wall, invisible and mighty, into the white sepulchre that was London.

With the Sight, she could see that the soil she carried would let her go no further than the bounds of the city. But, by carrying it, she could travel anywhere within it. She was like a great predatory fish being let loose into a large lake. She was master of this expanse and no further.

She turned to look back at the locked gates of the house. ‘She wasn’t a witch,’ she announced for the last time.

Centuries passed, and Mora experienced too much life. London grew around her too, astonishingly, her small pool becoming full of more and more of ‘the mob’. In a tavern one evening she counted the years of kings and queens, and realized she was seventy. And though she now looked it, and looked back to her youth as a woman of seventy would, she had not a single new ache that had crept up on her, only those that were old friends. The same was true at age one hundred, and then passing through the decades to two hundred, and then she let thoughts of that go too, and forgot she had an age.

She would take three children, and make a good sacrifice, and feel life flooding back into her, and she wanted to laugh at the mob at the same time, knowing that she again had vengeance on them for what they had done to their Queen, and to Mora herself. They claimed they so loved their children. They loved them enough that they would kill innocents like her mistress to have more. So she loved giving them fewer. She would sacrifice adults too now, in a way she had learned when the city burned . . . and she had stayed among the flames, dancing and learning the skill of giving someone whole to the flame, so that the moment of striking and of sacrifice became one, spending and receiving in the same instant. That was like being in love with the destruction, having congress with it.

In order that people would know what she was about when they glimpsed her, she learned what the people most feared from such as her, and made herself into that. She therefore fabricated herself a cat out of so many sacrifices that she lost count, all of them boiled together at once in a cauldron that she stole from the back of a cart, and then infused it into a dead mog she’d found lying in the street. She made it as something that would reflect what she herself was back at her, something that would not argue, not offer her any distraction that might lessen her purpose or stay her hand. It was to provide all the good things about having company, and none of the bad. It was nothing like a child, for it was nothing of her, and yet only her.

In the aftermath of the Great Fire of London, she gradually became aware that, in this small pond, there were starting to be others who did as she did. They came with all the buildings that were now shutting out the sky. Some of them hid in the shadows, as she did, but some walked around in silks and hats. With civilized gestures of the right hand, they described to their servants where they would place such a building, while crafty, secret gestures of the left hand were making sure the angles of that building were right for the unseen tides which only they and Mora knew of. Mora herself did not feel inclined to meet those of either kind, but she feared the latter more, seeing immediately that they worked for kings and had the stuff of kings about them. She hated kings half the week, and the mob for the other half. She recognized the irony that, as people flooded into the small pond she was trapped in, they all seemed to feel the same, thus hating themselves as being part of the thing they hated, or at least all of them did a little. As more of them came, more buildings appeared, and so more of the crafty architects who knew the same secrets as she did arrived, until Mora found herself feeling limited. It was as if they were fencing off more and more of the tiny space she survived in.