A RAVEN EMBOSSED IN GOLD
Prologue
On a cold, wet night in the autumn 1818 I stopped for the night in Malton, at an inn on the banks of the Derwent River. There, sitting at his ease by the hearth I saw John Childermass. I had seen him once before, on that famous night at the Old Starre Inn when he had shown us the King's book. I recognised him immediately and joined him at the fire. For someone who stood so high in the restoration of English Magic he remained something of a mystery and I, both curious and brave, asked him to tell me his story. He smiled and shook his head. There was nothing to know, he told me, he had been Norrell's servant and nothing more.
But that night after I had retired to bed I dreamt, and in my dream I sat once again with him and this time he answered my question. This was the story that he told in the quiet, fire lit night.
1. The Land of Green Ginger
I was born in The Land of Green Ginger1, or so my mother told me. But I doubt it, she just liked the name. We all liked the name, the delicious warmth of it in our hungry mouths like the taste of heaven. It is far more likely that I was born in one of the cellars down by the staiths2 where the walls were always damp from the eternal presence of the river, and the drip of water from the ceilings beat a constant, erratic rhythm. I was a child of the streets, a bare foot urchin, one of many with nothing to distinguish me from all the other and, like the rats we resembled we were drawn to the river. Running in gangs, running in packs there was nowhere we couldn't go, nothing we didn't know. We knew the masters that owned the staiths, we knew the ships and the lighters3 that docked there, the cargos they carried and the sailors that worked them. This was our world; this was our home and our refuge. This was where we belonged.
The rest of the town was for work, the lighted streets were where the fine people walked, browsing the shops and the markets. We knew them too, we knew where they hid their purses, we knew where they kept their watches, we knew the pockets that could be dipped and those that had to be cut. We knew how to run as a ragged urchin mob, clamouring with noise, some to distract, one to dip; we knew to pass the prize between ourselves, one to the other until no one who saw or shouted or followed could know which one of us held the goods. And then we would vanish, like rats down holes, back to the lanes and the alleys, back to the river, back to my mother.
Black Joan they called her, black eyes, black hair, black heart. She was the mother to us all but only I was her child. I wish now that I had asked her why she chose to have me, she didn't have too. I remember enough times when she dosed herself with Tansy and Pennyroyal4 to rid her body of the unwanted burden that some lover, some man, had planted there. It was only later, when I was older, that I wondered why she had not dealt with me in the same way or smothered my infant body before giving me to the river, one pale leaf amongst many in its swirling brown eddies. But she bore me and she kept me, and though sometimes I think I should be thankful for that, there are other times when I believe I should have hated her for it. In truth I did neither, I simply accepted what she gave and what she withheld. She never treated me differently from the others, I was expected to run, hide and thieve as well as they did, I was given no more food than they and no less bruises. At night, when she was feeling warm toward us, when we had worked well and our bellies were full, I would sit at her feet with the others and listen enraptured as she told us stories of the King, our King, John Uskglass who was gone but not dead and who would return one day. Then, as the river sang its lullaby we would sleep and dream of dark kings and of magic, of the raven banner flying in the grey Yorkshire sky. Even now, all these years later, I still sleep better if I can hear the sound of water; and when we left the city I would miss the river, miss its constant murmur, miss its stink and its sadness.
When the beadles, the law and the hempen rope got too close our mother would take us out across country to Hessle or to Beverley, west as far as York or north to Bridlington by the sea, and in these strange and alien places we would ply our trade until the heat died down at home. It was there, in the places between the towns, in the lush green of the fields and farms that we found a treasure which we felt was ours and ours alone, put there for our benefit, out succour and our safety. We found the fairy roads, over grown, long abandoned, going from nowhere to nowhere. They could have been made for us. If the river was our refuge and our sanctuary in the town then, in the country and the villages the fairy roads performed the same service. We soon learned that once we had entered those green lanes that no one would follow us. We could run and dodge through the nettles and the brambles; but they would stop, their dogs barking and howling, never entering between the guardian trees, never daring as we dared so that we could stay there, hidden until the night came and cloaked us in darkness. Many times we would sleep the night on those lost roads while the moon hung huge and white above us. There was only one rule regarding the fairy roads and we obeyed it absolutely and without question until it became second nature to us, done without thinking, done in a breath. It was simply this, to play the game as we did every time we entered a dark room or a ruined building, to say the words that were demanded of us. 'I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart'. Not to have done so would, we believed, have been to invite disaster.
It was an idyll, of course it was. We were children and we laughed and played amongst the ruins and decay. We thought nothing of tomorrow, we gloried in our victories and relished the warmth and food when we had them. The bad days, the cold and the hunger, the failures, these we allowed to pass, these we chose to forget. It was hell, of course it was. We saw terrible things. Swollen, flaccid corpses dragged from the river; diseases that ran rampant amongst us, scarring, marring and murdering; the rapists and the whore masters that took the girls who were not my sisters and the cut throat gangs that took the boys. But we enjoyed what we had when we had it, in the way that children do. Whether it was watching John Rogerson dance his last steps upon the empty air5 or the corpse of an unknown man in a forgotten cellar that we dared each other to visit, fascinated and repelled by the process of decay, we took our entertainment where we could find it. We were wise beyond our years, we were ignorant beyond belief, but it was the life we had and, like a poor hand of cards we either played it the best way we could or folded and left the game.
But nothing lasts, no idyll, no litany of horrors. Time passes and no muttered words in the darkness will ward off disaster forever. And disaster, when it comes, is always unexpected, always unexplained, the hand of God reaching down to crush his small creation. Our mother was arrested; she committed the cardinal sin and got caught. She was seen in Whitefriargate wearing a stolen necklace by the woman who claimed to have lost it. Unlike us children she could not run through the gaps in the crowds, sliding unseen through the alleys; the woman's husband grabbed her, his heavy crude hands bruising her arms, holding her there while I watched. I made toward her, ready to do anything, but she warded me off with a look and the smallest shake of her head so that I cowered in the shadows, waiting for the signal that would tell me what to do. She never gave it, they called the constables and they took her away to face the Justice. That was the last time I ever saw her, cursing and struggling, defiance and fear in her dark black eyes.
I never understood what had happened, from that day to this it remains a mystery. We never owned anything; she never kept what we stole. It was her rule, she said it often enough, 'If you own nothing they can take nothing from you.' She lived by that rule, until she didn't and it destroyed her. Until she found that even with nothing there was still life and freedom left to loose. What we stole was always sold, for food and candles and gin; it went on bribes and payments to buy us safety and silence. More than that, none of us had stolen that necklace; none of us had placed that cursed, golden noose about her throat. Perhaps she had found it, or it was the gift of a man of whom she was too fond or too afraid for her to sell it. I will never know but I believe that for all she had done in all the years of her life she was finally caught for a crime of which she was innocent.
1.
The
Land of Green Ginger
is an unusual and
ancient street name in the town of Hull in the East Riding of
Yorkshire at the confluence of the rivers Hull and Humber.
2. Staiths are privately owned lanes that run down to the loading docks on the River Hull. The nature of these lanes made it difficult for the duty men to collect the tax on imported goods and facilitated smuggling.
3. Lighter; a small boat bringing cargo to the landing stages on the River Hull from a larger vessel anchored in the Humber.
4. Tansy and Pennyroyal; two plants that grow wild in England, used to procure abortion.
5. John Rogerson; a coiner, hung in Thornton Street on 19th August 1778, the last public execution to take place in Hull.
