by Jodi Taylor
I’ve often wondered if the bones didn’t belong to two other children and were buried there on Uncle Richard’s orders as part of some scheme he had, which, of course, never came to fruition because he himself was dead two years later and the bones just lay there until discovered centuries later. And we’ll never know, of course, because the establishment – for reasons it thinks are good, even if no one else does – refuses to allow any DNA testing.
But my point is – why take the risk when the Thames was not twenty yards away? Smuggle them out of the Tower, into a boat, out into the middle of the river, tip them overboard, alive or dead, problem solved. You wouldn’t even have to kill them in situ. Drug them, carry them out – having carefully turned all the lights out so no one sees you go – and throw them into the river. And then everyone involved pushes off to live abroad on their reward and thus is born the mystery of the Princes in the Tower.
Except that now we had a senior member of the English Civil Service leaping into the Thames, apparently hell-bent on changing all that.
Not only could she run fast – she could swim fast, too. Of course she could. She was North’s mother. She could probably bloody fly.
I didn’t hesitate. Dr Bairstow was behind me and I could guess at his reaction if I returned without our employer. I might as well cut out the middle man and just fling myself into the Thames there and then. So I did. I went in after her.
The water was quite warm on the surface but very cold underneath. The first thing I lost was my bearings. I could just make her out. She was swimming strongly off to my right. I could hear the men in the boat shouting. Someone on land was shouting back again and suddenly, there were lights. Lights began to spring up around the Tower. They’d be relighting the braziers on the Wharf soon.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. I could see better now the rain had slackened a little, but so could everyone else.
I heard that plaintive cry again. I had no idea whether Plantagenet princes were taught to swim or not. My guess would be yes. Or if not to swim, at least to stay afloat. I tried to tread water and take a look around. Sort out where everyone was. Get my bearings. Not drown.
A river is no place to be at night. You’re low down and you can’t see anything. You have no control over your direction. Although downwards would seem to be my best option. My woollen dress was heavy and pulling me down. The same would be happening to Mrs Brown. I had to find her quickly. Then I could get us both to the shore, get everyone back into the pod and back to St Mary’s. Which would also solve the problem of the little boy in the river. Either he would be rescued or he wouldn’t. But not by us.
There she was. Not that far away. I struck out towards her, trying to remember to keep my mouth closed.
Fortunately, the current was taking us both in the same direction. I struggled onwards, forgot all my good intentions, opened my mouth to call her name, got slapped in the face by a wave and swallowed a substantial amount of Old Father Thames before I could stop myself. Well, that would earn me some extra time in Sick Bay when I got back.
She heard me. I saw her head turn. Sensibly, she didn’t try to force her way towards me – she spent all her efforts keeping herself afloat. I kicked as hard as I could, feeling my dress come untied and begin to entangle itself around my legs. Which wasn’t good.
I was within an arm’s length. The current was carrying me to where I wanted to be. Another good kick and I would have had her when that cry came again. Not far away this time. Close. In fact, very close. I could see something. So could Mrs Brown. She struck out again.
Bollocks.
The sky flashed pink and white.
He’d seen her. I could see him struggling towards her. He must be tired because he was ineffectively pawing away in some kind of splashy dog-paddle that was getting him nowhere. His chin was raised in the traditional manner of someone not comfortable in water and his eyes were squeezed tight shut. He struggled and spat and struggled again. He was a game little tyke.
The boat. I’d forgotten about the boat. It was still out here, somewhere. I was sure I could hear the sounds of oars splashing but from which direction and how close, I couldn’t tell. My ears were full of what I could only hope was water. I decided to ignore the boat. My priority was Mrs Brown. Get her to safety, Maxwell. Everything else can look after itself.
Luck was with me. I hit a calmer patch of water. It was warmer, too. I kicked out towards Mrs Brown, reaching her just as she reached the little boy. I grabbed her. She grabbed him. Oh, for God’s sake. This was way above my pay grade. Grabbing her and, by extension, anyone she happened to be attached to, I kicked out for the riverbank and the safety of Dr Bairstow who could make an executive decision while I coughed up my lungs on the foreshore.
The water turned cold again closer to shore. And it seemed choppier somehow. Rougher. I couldn’t see the shoreline at all but I could see the lights of the Tower some way off to my left. We were being washed downstream. Had the tide turned? I was getting tired. Water slapped my face again, running down my throat. It burned and tasted vile. If I didn’t drown then I was going to die horribly of some ghastly waterborne disease. Or the men in the boat would find us. History didn’t actually need to do anything. There were a whole range of interesting ways to die lining up to have a go at us. History had only to bide its time.
Unexpectedly, my foot touched the bottom. I could hardly believe it. We were in the shallows. And the current was pushing me towards the shore. We were nearly there. Surely, we were nearly there. I kicked onwards, half-walking and half-swimming and hanging on to Mrs Brown. Who exactly she was hanging on to had yet to be discovered.
The sky flickered silently, turning everything pink and yellow. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The storm didn’t seem able to make up its mind.
Yes, I could feel it. There was solid ground under my feet. I heaved Mrs Brown to her feet and gave her a good push in the right direction, tried to stand up myself, failed and floundered backwards. Now the current was dragging me back into the river and the bottom was so rough I couldn’t keep my footing. Mrs Brown was ahead of me. I tried to give her one last shove and then Dr Bairstow was there, nearly up to his waist in water, his robes floating around him, holding out his stick to her. She seized the other end and he pulled her towards him, out of the water.
The river wasn’t willing to let her go. She stumbled, or tripped over her own skirts possibly, and lost her grip on the little boy. He fell backwards with a cry and disappeared beneath the dark surface. I stared around wildly, trying to see where he’d surface. If he surfaced.
The rain started up again, stinging my face.
‘Max – take my stick.’
He was leaning towards me. Mrs Brown knelt, coughing, on the shore. I reached out for his stick and just as I did so, a little head bobbed up, just to my left.
Dr Bairstow’s stick was equidistant between us.
I reached out for it and then . . . and then . . .
The little boy was just ahead of me, off to my left. Dr Bairstow was staring at him. He couldn’t take his eyes off him. I’ll never forget the look on his face. Shock. Horror. Fear. Real fear. His face was . . . I don’t know . . . as if the worst thing that could ever happen was happening right now.
He turned his head to look at me. A long, long look . . . as if he would never see me again.
I croaked, ‘Help . . .’ and used my last strength to reach out for him.
And then . . . then he turned away from me and held out his stick to the little boy.
He had a choice to make and he made it. He didn’t choose me.
He deliberately pulled his stick away and left me to drown.
My strength was gone. The water was tugging at me. My dress was wrapped around my legs. I couldn’t get out of the river without assistance and he chose to offer that assistance to someone else.
I saw him pull the little boy out of the water an
d then the two of them struggled together up on to the foreshore.
Behind them, back at the Tower, suddenly there were lights, blazing brightly after the darkness. The river was slapping at my ears but I thought I could hear shouting. I saw Mrs Brown stagger to her feet and she and Dr Bairstow both seized the little boy and disappeared into the dark.
That was the last I saw of them as the river whirled me away into my own darkness.
20
I lost all sense of time and space as I was carried first in one direction and then another. I gave up trying to fight my way to land. Simply staying afloat was the best I could hope for.
Without the protection of the Tower, the wind was strengthening and the water became colder and rougher, slapping me in the face with no warning as spite-filled waves buffeted me from all directions. Once, I went under completely and it seemed to take me a very long time to fight my way back to the surface. At one point I wondered if I was actually the right way up. Had I somehow managed to get myself turned upside down and was actually kicking myself ever deeper?
According to Major Guthrie, there’s a procedure for this sort of thing. If you’re buried in an avalanche and don’t know which way is up then you should dribble, because gravity will carry your dribble downwards and then you can dig yourself out accordingly. The same applies to drowning. Obviously dribbling in a river would be a bit superfluous so blowing bubbles is generally reckoned to be the right way to go. You’re supposed to blow a few bubbles and then follow them because while dribble will always go downwards, bubbles will always go upwards to the surface. Except the water here was so black I couldn’t see a thing and my lungs were bursting and there was no way I was wasting what little air remained to me by blowing bloody stupid bubbles – up or down – so I just kicked and hoped for the best.
I must have done something right though, because my head broke the surface. I opened my mouth to gasp for air and got another mouthful of river water for my pains.
As I sank again, I thought I could hear someone shouting, faint and far away, but whether it was Dr Bairstow from the riverbank or the men from the Tower, I had no idea. And the men in the rowing boat were still out there somewhere.
Somehow, I made it back up to the surface again. I was shaking with cold and my neck and shoulders ached with the strain of keeping my face out of the water. My legs were so entangled in fabric as to be useless. All I could do was concentrate on keeping myself afloat and let the current take me wherever it wanted. This was the mighty Thames. Next stop, the English Channel. I had visions of being swept all the way out to sea. Was that even possible?
Something brushed my leg. My first thought – obviously – was that some kind of submarine monster, living in the dark depths of the Thames, had awoken in the dead of night to prey on livestock, small children and the occasional drowning historian. Before going on to destroy Tokyo, presumably.
But that was a point. Not the monster destroying Tokyo bit, but stuff in the river. People had been chucking rubbish into the Thames since Roman times. Boats sank – accidentally or otherwise. Jetties collapsed. Corpses sank to the bottom, bloated and rose again. The river bed was certainly littered with more than fifteen hundred years of accumulated crap. Thick with it, probably. Even in my own time, mudlarks are always finding Roman coins, bits of pottery, nails, tools, clay pipes and so on. Even the occasional skull. In six hundred years’ time, one of those skulls might be mine. I had a sudden vision of catching a fold of my dress or my foot in something under the surface. The tide would turn again and I’d be trapped as the water began to rise, higher and higher, until it finally closed over my head and I was gone forever.
Instinctively I tried to lift my legs, which resulted in two not very good things. I sank again – which was not good – and the current whirled me even more quickly – which was worse. From the few lights I could see through the rain, I seemed to be moving at quite a lick. At this rate I’d be in France for breakfast.
The other thing I’d forgotten about – although to be fair I did have a bit on my mind at the time – was that this was a major shipping lane. There were dark ships everywhere, seemingly anchored willy-nilly around the river, although I’m sure someone had a plan. Some ships had hung a faint stern lantern as a warning but most of those had blown out in the storm. I wasn’t in mid-river so the boats swinging at their moorings weren’t a problem, but I would have to watch I didn’t collide with any of the smaller vessels parked nearer to the shore. I was willing to bet that although these boats might look tiny and fragile, in any sort of collision, I would come off considerably worse.
No sooner had I taken that particular thought on board than my face collided heavily with what felt like the medieval equivalent of a transatlantic liner.
I saw stars – which was useful because there certainly weren’t any in the sky – but instinct took over and I grabbed for whatever it was. Wide, round and slimy. Not a boat, but something solid and stationary nevertheless. A buttress or support of some kind, which was good enough for me. I wrapped both my arms around it and hung on for dear life. All around me the water slapped and splashed and gurgled. Now, the rain had a different sound to it. A hollow, drumming sound. And then I had it. I’d collided with one of the many wooden jetties constructed along the riverbank. I was underneath it and this was the rain bouncing off the decking above my head. This was a brilliant piece of luck. All I had to do was work my way from support to support, find my way back to shore, cough up a few gallons of river water and then stagger back upstream for a quick ‘What the hell?’ session with Dr Bairstow. Something to which I was quite looking forward.
It never happened.
I know that, so far, the evening had hardly been a resounding success, even by my low standards. Indeed, even I might be using the phrase disaster-magnet several times in my report, but now things were about to go really downhill.
I rather thought my first job was to ascertain where I was – especially in relation to the rowing boat and its occupants, which, now that I was safe-ish, had returned to the top of Today’s List of Things to Worry About. I crossed my fingers that it was off somewhere else continuing with its original plan for the evening. My plan was to use the cover of the jetty to ease my way through the jumble of old timbers and find myself some solid land, because I was certainly sick to death of the Thames. I couldn’t help thinking that rivers had, in one way or another, figured quite prominently in my life recently.
And then, clear as anything, I heard Matthew’s voice. ‘Stay away from the river.’ At the time I’d thought he meant the one at the remote site but it would seem that might be something else I’d got wrong. Was it this river he’d meant? Staying away from this river would certainly have been a very good idea. I made a mental note to talk to him about the importance of context. If I ever saw him again.
Clinging as tightly as I could to the slimy support, I tried to shut out the sounds of the wind and rain and listen. It was useless. The water sloshing around under the jetty and the rain hammering down made constructive listening almost impossible.
OK. Stop and think. How likely was the boat to be still out there?
Well, that rather depended, didn’t it? If they were here to kill the boys, then they weren’t going to hang around trying to rescue the one in the water. In fact, the second prince might well have been pitched overboard as well and they were rowing strongly through the rain, hell-bent on getting as far away as they could before the sun came up.
If, on the other hand, it was some kind of evacuation – if the princes were being moved somewhere else – for their own safety, say – then they were going to be rowing up and down all night looking for the one that got away. The one that had fallen into the river. Richard would be my bet. If the boys really had been drugged to make handling easier then I could easily imagine that bundle of energy overcoming the effects of whatever he’d been given and coming around at the most inconvenie
nt moment. He’d wake, confused, struggle, unbalance the boat and the next minute he’d be in the river. They’d be tearing their hair out looking for him. And even if their motives were benign and this was just an attempt to move them to safety, they still weren’t going to want any inconvenient witnesses hanging around, were they? In fact, no one, whatever their intentions, was going to want any witnesses to anything that was happening tonight.
Or had they seen Dr Bairstow and Mrs Brown pull him out? In which case, they’d be busy dealing with them right this minute. Good for me but bad for Dr Bairstow and Mrs Brown. Could they have reached the pod safely? Or were they too in the river, throats cut, bobbing gently past me at this moment? I had to face the possibility that if I did get out of this then I might be going home alone.
I pushed that thought away. I needed to get out of this and back to land. If I couldn’t hear the boat then they probably couldn’t hear me. If I couldn’t see the boat then they probably couldn’t see me. And they weren’t going to be flashing their light around because there were other ships . . . boats? . . . vessels around. Some, if not all, would have crews on board. If not a full crew then at the very least a night watchman to ensure nothing tore loose from its moorings and started bouncing off its neighbours. No – the rowing boat was long gone.
I let go of the wooden support and pushed myself gently away. The current caught me immediately. I let it carry me as it wanted, fending off the great lumps of wood that medieval jetty builders appeared to have just tossed into the water at random, and tried to get myself back into shallow water.
The thunder now was very faint and far off. I wondered if the storm had taken itself off somewhere else. Gone to beat up the Cotswolds, maybe. Time to emerge . . .
. . . just as a boat appeared to my right. Frighteningly close. I knew it was them. They still had the lantern and they were leaning out of the boat, scanning the water. The only thing that saved me was that they were peering in the other direction.