The Light Ages (18 page)

‘I thought you said this was London?’

‘Me?’ He chuckled. ‘I didn’t say.’

‘But is it?’

‘Why don’t you come and take a look?’

Saul hauled me to my feet. My head was spinning as he dragged me across the floor of a long space shaved by rafters, filled to its dim recesses by dusty wreckage, towards a huge crumbling opening in the brickwork, far bigger than any doorway.

I stood at the edge of it, swaying.

‘So?’ Saul asked. ‘Is this what you wanted?’

All below, the sights, the sounds. And lights, lights everywhere.

U
P IN THAT HIGH ROOM
that first summer, I could never get over the view. It changed moment by moment, hour by hour. The gaslight rails of Stepney Siding, the smoking mass of the Easterlies and the domes and spires of Northcentral beyond, the green haze of Westminster Great Park, the tall, impossibly frail lattice of Hallam Tower, the wyreglow of its aethered brazier sweeping dark or blazing white across the London skies.

At dawn, a chorus of ships’ horns, sirens and whistles started bellowing to each other across Tidesmeet. Soon, the ships out in the deeper channels where their pilots awaited the rise of the tide joined in; sound piling on sound until the air shook with it. Then the pigeons clattered up from their roosts, and the cocks started crowing, and the pigs squealing in their pens, and the seagulls began to circle as the milk trains clattered in from Kent.

I would open my eyes—and know instantly where I was, and kick back my nest of sacking, and see if Saul was awake. Then to balance on the balls of our feet close to the edge of that swarming drop and see who could piss out the furthest. Whole families would be waking as we slipped down ladders to the main stairwell, scattering cats and rats and drunken sleepers, swinging and ducking under doorways and sliding all the way down to smoke-fogged Caris Yard where that pump would already be clanging. And dogs barking, the morning rasp of vendors hawking bread, oysters and hot codlings, the cries of the newspaper boys and the rumbling carts of the costermongers. Nothing in this sunshine, in this bustle, though, could really look ugly, not even in London’s notorious Easterlies. And now that summer was here, surprising numbers of trees, weeds, vines and flowers forced their way to the sun’s attentions. The whole Easterlies, in those times, in that Age, and in my memory, were warm and green and verdant.

Down the hill lay Doxy Street. Along there the trams and carriages, and the cars and the carts and the drays, bore guildsmen of every kind to their daily labours in Tidesmeet Docks. Here, also, were the bars and bad hotels and the unguilded boarding houses, the pawn shops and the dealers in goods of various provenance, the dollymops who lounged in the sun each morning on steps and in doorways, their night-clothes in fascinating disarray. It was a season of prosperity, and a huge new railway bridge was going up on the muddy bank on Ropewalk Reach as London strove to extend its bounds to the marshy land south of the river. You could watch the big dredgers clawing across the shining brown waters, and hear the cry of spells as the pilings went up from their thin foundations. As the morning warmed and the work of a thousand different guilds began, the whole of the Easterlies became a clamour of voices as guildsmen struck up one chant over another. The whole of London filled with song.

This lad who called himself Saul and me citizen took me down to Smithfield on my first morning; down at the edge of the Easterlies, which seemed so different in daylight. Instead of one butcher’s stall, there was row upon row of them. You could get lost in this vast square amid the white and red hanging quarters of beef and mutton. About me here were gathered an incredible mixture of London society. Mistress cooks from the big houses in Northcentral, bosoms quivering within striped blue aprons, their maids struggling with wicker baskets in their wake. Guildsmen out from their Clerkenwell factories, each dressed in their own fashion, browsing and smoking and eating and drinking as they took their break. Quiet mistresses of the lesser guilds who’d come over on the tram from Chiswick in the Westerlies and from the gardens of the Kite Hills—women not so very unlike my mother—darkly dressed and bonneted, and moving more slowly from stall to stall, touching the squishy waterapples and the loops of dried sausage and rummaging in their purses as they debated what they could afford.

‘So tell me again, just so that I can be sure I’ve got this right, Robbie,’ Saul was saying in his strange and husky voice. ‘You’re from a place in Brownheath, which is in Yorkshire, called Broombridge? And you came here because you wanted to
escape?
Even though no one was actually after you?’

‘I came for London.’

‘London … ?’
The word was muttered in amazement. It was as if, living in the Easterlies, a denizen of the sooty heap of buildings he called Caris Rookery, Saul really didn’t believe that he was in London at all. ‘And your father’s a guildsman?’

‘Yes … I mean …’ I knew I had to be careful here. My head was still swollen and aching from the beating he’d given me. ‘Isn’t yours?’

Saul looked at me, then shook his head, although seemingly more in amazement than denial. It was already plain to me that Saul hadn’t been initiated into any guild. In fact, he didn’t seem to have any kind of employment, which was odd considering he was at least two years older than me and clearly managed to fend for himself.

‘Perhaps you could report to your guild here, Robbie,’ he said. ‘Bang on the brass knocker, present yourself … There’s
bound
to be a guildhouse. Here, believe me, there’s a bloody guildhouse for everything. They’d probably even have you in. Isn’t that how it works with you guildsmen—climbing over each other’s backs to stop the rest of the world getting a look in?’

‘It isn’t
my
guild, and I don’t want them,’ I said, quite enjoying Saul’s astonishment as we wandered on through the crowds.

‘So you came for this—this city? So why are you smiling, Robbie? Why do you seem so happy? You should try it here in winter. There’s no work and nothing but kingrats and lice. You should have your fun, then go back home, citizen, before the season changes. Back to your father and your mother.’

‘My mother’s dead.’

He shrugged. ‘A few more shifterms, you’ll realise everyone has a hard luck story …’

We walked on. Saul, I noticed, had a way of walking, a way of looking. A swagger of sorts, although at the same time he seemed almost to be cowering. Those red-rimmed eyes, as we ducked herbs, slipped through the steam of bubbling pots of poultice, never settled anywhere, yet seemed to take in everything. I stared and stumbled amid the smell of things roasted and things baked, spices and marinades, leaking mountains of butters and cheeses … And faces of different hue and aspect, too, which I’d barely glimpsed in my storybook imaginings up in Bracebridge, but here wandered real in their strange clothes, and spoke in their strange voices. Tattooed sailors who’d surely travelled the far Horns of Africa and Thule; Frenchmen—who, I was surprised to notice, didn’t really have tails—even Negroes, and many other broad and swarthy men who spoke what might just have been English in impossibly strange accents. And there were bizarre fruits; things long and large and rude-looking, and things rainbow-coloured, and things strangely scented which could have been twisted by the dreams of some guildsman or borne from the far Antipodes, and perhaps both. And then there were the beasts. A dazzling red and green talking bird. Snakes swimming in tanks. Foul-looking creatures, seemingly half-lizard and half-chicken, which hissed at you from their cages, and around which there was much betting and speculation. A sad and smelly dancing bear. The whole scene, the size of everything, and the crowds and the bustle, amazed me. Bruised and light-headed from fatigue and this endless succession of new sights, I caught in one instant the mingled whiff of smoked ham and fresh bread and was ravenously hungry. Saul seemed unconcerned, his hands in his pockets and his lips pursed and faintly whistling. Only his eyes were alert, darting.

Then something sharp nudged my ribs. It was his elbow. ‘Take this,’ he hissed.

I took it.

‘And this. Not
there-
shove it underneath your shirt, you dolt. Hide it, like I’m doing ..

Dumbly, I followed suit. Apples and bread rolls and the things he’d called oranges. A curl of sausage. Not understanding—for surely they had to be priced and weighed?

‘Now
run.
’

Instantly, Saul was away, and all I could do was follow him. Head down, I butted elbows and chests, slammed against trestles. Baskets tumbled, shouts rang, displays of fruit rainbowed across the paving.

Ahead of me, always just in sight, always in danger of vanishing, flapped the grubby tail of Saul’s embroidered shirt. I skidded across cabbage leaves, scrambled over pallets. There was a brief commotion. There were shouts and screams. But Saul spun, and he was running again, ducking cloaks and hands. He was quick and I was desperate to keep up with him as he sprinted down an alley, weaving around the waterbutts, extravagantly swerving and darting now for the sheer joy of the escape, and I could hear, echoing with the clatter of our feet, that we were both laughing.

He reached a ladder hung on the side of a building, and we hauled ourselves up to the roof and sprawled in hilarious agony on a slope of mossy tar. The London sky, cloudy and shot through with sunlight, hung warm and damp and smoky over the city, seemed to embrace me. Saul unloaded the stuff he’d tucked beneath his shirt against his belly, and I did the same, my mouth brimming with saliva.

E
NGLAND’S GREAT SOCIAL PYRAMID
climbs far higher in London, and those who struggle within its foundations are as tightly squashed as the lower strata of the earth. Turn one way, and a dank alley widens into a square, and in that square plays a snowy marble fountain. Turn another, and the pavement sinks below you to drown your boots in sewage. The likes of Saul and me, living in Caris Rookery, dwelt among thieves and pickpockets, and dollymops and seasonal workers and sailors who had lost their boats, the elderly and the mad and the infirm, and wild-eyed waifs of incredible thinness and viciousness. Here, much more than in Bracebridge, there were also the unguided who had once been guilded—families and sometimes whole guilds which had been tossed down through the Easterlies by recession or misfortune. They seemed to me the most lost of all, those guildmistresses in their once—good clothes dragging children in torn sailor suits around the edges of the market at the end of Tenshiftdays.

But Saul and I were lucky that summer. We ranged far and wide, from Smithfield to the Halfshiftday market at Stepney to the shop displays along Cheapside and the spillages from wagons leaving the quays at Riverside, and back down the Strand, taking risks which only the young and the fleet-footed could have undertaken. Then down Doxy Street to the places in the far Easterlies where we could sell things which had fallen into our innocent hands for, as I was starting to learn from Saul, the whole idea of
something
belonging to
somebody
was fundamentally wrong. But whether we owned or didn’t own the food we ate and the clothes we wore and the blankets we slept in, it was a summer of plenty. The wealth of the whole of London seemed to be floating down towards the Easterlies in a glittering, prismatic rain of borrowed scarves, pocketed fruit, dropped fob watches, flighty fans and fine ebony canes. Worst come to the worst, there was always paid work to be had down at Tidesmeet. Saul and I spent many lazy shiftdays working in a bondhouse by the old quays, clambering over teachests with buckets of ink, endlessly stencilling a guild symbol which was something like a fat-bellied three. The teachests were piled higher than houses, and were patterned with the beautiful ideographs of Cathay. These distant yellow-skinned people plainly also had their own guilds, but I soon learned from Saul that no one would care if I dribbled ink or drew faces on the sides of those teachests—least of all the bondsman dozing in his aromatic office. We could just as easily squat on the roof and watch the funnels of the steamers and the sails of the clippers shimmer by. All that mattered was that one morning, the master of the particular guild which oversaw the collection of excise would attend the bondhouse and issue the appropriate release papers. Thanks to our stencils, the bondhouse’s contents could then be sold as if their duty had been paid. And the excise officer would encounter a fat envelope in an unexpected place, or the cancellation of some embarrassment or debt.

Tidesmeet Docks were a city in themselves, which was forever changing in its smells and substances. Every day, there would be new arrivals of coals from Newcastle, rank hoppers of saltpetre from the Indies, fragrant sheaves of tobacco from the Fortunate Isles, barrels of Muscadet, endless sacks of every kind of fruit and produce, some of which, rotting and mouldering, brought plagues of insects even more irritating and ugly than those which commonly alighted on the flesh of every Londoner in those long hot shifterms. Whole markets lined the watery fingers of the old quays which had grown too small to accommodate the big steam freighters which now brought in most of the trade. There was an air of antiquity here, and the buildings along the water’s edge were decorative beneath their thick layers of paint and grime. Up on the hot tiles of that bondhouse roof, eating nameless jerky encased in hard grey bread and looking down on the world as if we owned the entire place, I loved it all, although I still didn’t really understand any of it. Like a magician’s box unfolding in endless layers, first silvered and smoky, then delicious and filthy, then glorious and horrid, London seemed to encompass everything within its sooty bricks.

‘Look at
them,’
Saul said, waving his sandwich towards some cranemen ambling beneath us. They were bare-chested underneath their leather jerkins to show off their vine marks of the haft, and so impressively muscled that they almost looked as if they could lift the loads themselves. ‘Their whole lives are wasted following their bosses’ instructions—and all those ridiculous signs and shouts and whispers ..