The Frozen Thames

by Helen Humphreys

  I do not think it is fair to bring what is meant for the field out onto the ice. The hare is too visible. The surface is too slick. There is nowhere for the hare to run, unless he can make it to shore. But to do this he must cross a vast, flat expanse of frozen river, and the dogs will almost certainly run him down when he gets to this part of the course.

  There is a point for the lead dog at the first turn, a point for the dog that leads the hare, a point for the dog that turns the hare, and a point for the kill.

  The hare was scooped from a field yesterday morning. It has been kept in a box covered with a horse blanket until now. It will be frightened and confused, will run as hard as it can to get away. I saw it shivering in its box before it was set loose. A large hare, all baggy skin, starving from this long, cold winter.

  The dogs are the dogs of noblemen. They are well fed, kept indoors, treated with more kindness than most men. It is considered an act of murder to kill a greyhound. There is a law in place that states exactly that. It is murder and a man may be put to death for it, just as if he had killed another man.

  The dogs are more important than I am. No one would care if I froze to death this winter, but the dogs will never be allowed to suffer as I’ve been suffering. The dogs will lie on velvet cushions by a blazing hearth. They will be fed from the tables of lords. Some say the dogs even sleep in bed with the noblemen.

  The dogs are racing one another. The noblemen will ride up behind them and keep mind of their score. The dog who catches and kills the hare will undoubtedly be the victor.

  A fewterer’s job is to loose the hounds at a precise moment, the moment when the hare is just out of reach. It is a moment that is felt rather than measured. I know it in my bones, and the dogs know it too, know when I have waited too long, strain against their leashes to tell me that I have waited too long to release them.

  The thing about ice that I have noticed is that it is hard to judge the distance of a moving object upon it. In a field there are markers to gauge that movement. It is easy to see how fast the hare is running, how much ground it is covering, how far ahead it is. The big, empty whiteness of this frozen river makes all of that harder to judge. Only a man with a keen eye, a man who was used to the feeling of distance, or a dog who had run a coursing, would know that the hare has been allowed a longer run than it should have been allowed.

  This is the most I can do without being caught and punished, without my small wage and the loaf of bread and bottle of ale I have been promised being kept from me. The hare has good instincts. He has started across the wide part of the river towards the far shore. I slip the leashes of the hounds and let them go.

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  1363

  —

  I look for you along the banks of the river, where the great fires have been laid. Each fire a pyramid of coal, taller than the tallest man, and blazing with a fierceness that seems to match my need to find you.

  You’re not there, by any of the fires, nor at any of the tables that have been set upon the ice for this enormous feast. You promised you would come, and yet you haven’t, and so I cannot settle, walk along one bank to the end of the coal fires, and then back along the other bank.

  Here at Reading, the Thames has frozen so thickly that it will hold up the pyramids of burning coal without a quiver. It will hold up the long tables laden with food, at which sit all the poor and weak in the town. For one night only, for this night, we are to be treated to a great feast by the Abbot and the Grey Friar monks. The brothers themselves are acting in our service for the evening, fetching us food and drink when we so desire it.

  I would be enjoying this, but I am too worried about whether or not you will arrive as promised. I know your family has been ill. You might have stayed to tend to them.

  I am standing on the ice, a little way out from the fires so that I am not blinded by the flames, so that I can still see you if you come walking from the north end of the river. I am wearing a new black cloak I have fashioned from a blanket. It is not the green cloak you are used to seeing me in, and I worry that you will not recognize me, so I am determined to recognize you first. I don’t like the new law that has been passed this year, decreeing that only the nobility are permitted to wear coloured clothing, and that each of the colours is coded with meaning. As the lower orders, we are only allowed black or grey. They can have red to signify their superior position, blue to show their fidelity, yellow to flash hostility, pale grey for sorrow, and green for love.

  It seems an impossible law to enforce, and yet I have complied, and in my acceptance I show my fear of disobeying.

  All around me, at all the tables set upon the frozen river, there is great merriment. The monks have provided each table with a hogshead of ale, and some of the merriment is caused by the generous taking of this ale.

  And suddenly, there you are. You walk towards me over the ice, the fires throwing you into shadow, lighting you boldly with each surge and ebb of flame. You have recognized me, even in the new cloak. You walk towards me without hesitation, and my body feels suddenly weightless, as though I could float up like a bird, look down upon this little stretch of ice with the orange puddles of light bleeding at the edges, and the black lines of the tables laid out in the centre of the river.

  When you are almost upon me, I move forward so that I may clasp you in my arms, but you hold out your hands to stop me. You, too, are wearing a black cloak, and there is frost decorating the ends of your hair where it touches your face. Not frost, I realize with a start, not frost but frozen tears.

  “What?” I say, and my breath unknots in the cold night air, drifts off into threads of smoke.

  You pull back the sleeve of your cloak and hold your bare arm out for me to see the black boils that are pockmarked over your flesh.

  The Black Death.

  It seemed as though the plague had passed. For more than ten years people died. Every second house in London seemed affected. There were so many dead that they were just tossed into massive pits, piled one on top of the other with no ceremony or marker. The nobility fled to the country, and then, when it all seemed to be over, they came back and passed this law about the clothes. This is to keep us in our place, because, with so many dead, the poor have become less so, have inherited money and property from those who have died.

  You hold out your arm and I see the black spots, know that you probably already have the fever, that you will be dead in two or three days, and I cannot bear it.

  All around us I can hear the sounds of people being happy – laughter and talking. I cannot remember this kind of happiness, not ever, and it seems so wrong that a moment so good could lie peacefully alongside a moment so bad.

  If I touch you, I will be infected. You probably shouldn’t have come here, because you now carry the disease, and because it has most likely taken all your strength just to get here. But I am glad you kept your promise, and I am more than glad to see you. I don’t know how I can live without you, or if I will. It was only days ago that I last saw you, that I touched you. The plague could be bubbling under my skin as we stand here.

  I lift my cloak so that you can see the lining, so that you can see what I’ve wanted to tell you. I have sewn pieces of my green cloak into the lining of this black one. Green for love, under the new law.

  It seems strange that this is the end of the world, this scene of feasting and happiness, something that is so outside my usual days. But perhaps that is good, perhaps if I had to leave a world that was my own it would be harder.

  You lower your arm and smile. You have understood. I step forward into your embrace and kiss you.

  1408

  —

  The birds fall from the trees. They tumble from the roofs and chimney-pots where they have perched. They are heavier in death than they were in life. Solid and flightless, they fall to the ground like dark, feathered apples, with exactly that weight, the weight of an apple.

  There has been a frost for fourteen weeks straight
and everything is starving. The Thames has frozen solid. The fires burn so fiercely in the hearths of the houses that sometimes the houses themselves catch into flame, a bright bloom of red flaring up in the field of white that is now London.

  Everyone, everything, is starving, but it is the birds that are dying. They die fast and the songbirds go first, all the delicate notes of the thrushes and blackbirds stopped in their throats. They drop from the trees, songless. They fall from the railings of the bridge onto the frozen river below. At the threshold of every house, the hinge of every gate, the surface of every road, lie the small, cold bundles of bird.

  A woman walks on the ice below London Bridge. She is hunched against the weather, keeping her head down to avoid the wind that whistles between the stone arches of the bridge. A bird falls at her feet. Another hits her shoulder and bounces off her body onto the river.

  The woman goes home and tells her husband: “I was hit by a bird that fell from the sky.” And later on – the next morning, or the morning after that – she will be dressing herself for the day and will see the bruise that has flowered on her shoulder. A bruise as dark and rich as the colour of a blackbird’s wing.

  1434

  —

  It is almost the same distance by road as by river from Gravesend to London, but it is a completely different journey. Moving the wine by barge was a peaceful, slow drift up the Thames. It was fishermen and green fields and cows drinking at the water’s edge, lifting their heads to watch the boat sail by.

  Now that the whole length of the river has frozen, all the way from London Bridge to Gravesend, John must make the journey overland. The wine has been loaded onto a cart, and the driver seems determined to take them over the roughest roads he can find. The wheels of the cart groan and squeak, clatter against the hard, rutted earth. The jugs of frozen wine knock together like stones. The horses shift in their creaking harness, and the driver whistles a low, tuneless whistle all the way, except for when he tries to engage John in mindless chatter about the pain in his legs. The noise is all too much, and once John has delivered the wine to the merchants and made it home, at the end of a very long day, he is in a foul temper.

  “I can’t abide any more tumult,” he says, striding into his house and slamming the door so hard that the dog begins to bark and wakes the baby.

  Annabelle looks up at him blankly. She has been sitting quietly by the fire with the middle boy on her lap. The dog had been lying at her feet. The baby had been sleeping.

  John kicks the dog and lumbers towards the warmth of the hearth, collapsing into a chair with a long, dramatic groan. He pulls a jug of frozen wine out from the inside pocket of his coat and sets it in front of the fire.

  “All of it bloody frozen,” he says.

  Annabelle continues to regard him blankly, and it occurs to John that her name, which she’s proud to consider as French, is really the name of a cow.

  The winter has been long and harsh and very cold. The small house they live in has only one fireplace, this one, downstairs, and so, over the course of the winter, everything has migrated towards the hearth. Chairs are pushed right up to the grate. The table is spitting distance from the fire. Clothes are hung above it and boots are warmed before it. All the beds have been moved downstairs and are arranged in an arc around the flickering coal. No one has been upstairs in weeks. The last time John climbed the stairs to the attic it was so frigid up there that he might as well have been scaling the tallest mountain peak.

  “I’m hungry,” he says. He has been gone two full days, living on bread and cheese and beer, which at the time seemed well enough, but now seems to have been a great and painful deprivation.

  “Supper’s in the pot,” says Annabelle, but she makes no move to disturb the sleeping child in her lap and fetch the food for her husband.

  “Well,” says John, hurt that she has refused to serve him. “I’m hungry, but I’ll wait for the wine.” He glares at the jug by his feet, nudges it a little closer to the fire with his toe. It still seems completely frozen, although the outside of the jug has started to bead with water.

  “Suit yourself,” says Annabelle. She shifts the boy on her knee, and he whimpers in his sleep like a dog.

  “We are living in the fireplace,” says John, looking around at the cluster of furniture huddled up against the hearth. “It is not proper for a man to have to live in the fireplace.”

  Annabelle says nothing. The dog, with a wary glance at John, slinks back towards the fire and settles down on a scrap of rug by Annabelle’s feet.

  John stares at the jug of wine, willing it to melt. The freezing of the Thames has changed everything for him. All that once allowed him, included him, has now locked him out. Once, he moved up the slow water of the river, moved in the soft embrace of his wife. Once, the sweet relief of wine released his good humour, flushed him warm, full of happiness.

  “It’s cold out here,” he says, but no one hears him.

  1506

  —

  The three boys have come down to skate on the river. The water above the bridge has set fast and smooth. There is no snow on the surface and the ice glistens black under the winter sun. It is early in the morning and there is no one else moving on the Thames.

  The boys sit on the ice at the edge of the shore and strap the skate bones onto their boot soles. They push off from the bank, at first tentatively, and then with stronger and stronger strokes, until they are flying, like crooked birds, up the centre of the river.

  At first Samuel thinks he is just heating up from the exercise, from the effort of pushing his body across the ice. But the sweat starts to run from his face like rain. His hair is wet and plastered to his head, and he can feel, by their heaviness, that his clothes are soaked. He stops. His legs feel shaky, uncertain about holding him upright. His friends are now far ahead of him, swooping and gliding up the river, moving fast and far away from him.

  It is most surely the swetynge sykenesse, and the thought of this makes Samuel wobble and crash to the ice.

  The swetynge sykenesse has suddenly come back this year after many years of being absent. This second outbreak is not as virulent as the first, but people are still dropping dead in terrifying number.

  The sickness kills swiftly and without warning. There is a sudden, burning sweat, and then a fever, and the person thus afflicted could be dead within the hour. It kills people as it finds them – sleeping in their beds, gathering firewood on the heath, walking to market. Unlike the Black Death, it seems to be a peculiarly English disease. There has been no word of it affecting the French.

  Samuel is now too weak to cry out, to call loud enough for his friends to hear him. He curls up on the ice, presses his cheek against the surface. The cold feels good, but soon the ice beneath his cheek turns to water. He is burning a hole through to the river below, and he imagines falling into that water and floating there amongst the fishes. He closes his eyes. He can hear the fish swimming, the scrape of their fins moving through the water. They brush against him and lift him up, drag him along the bottom of the river.

  Samuel opens his eyes. His friends have him by the arms, one on one side of his body, one on the other. They are lifting him and pulling him. He can hear their laboured breathing. He can see the ice spray up from their skates.

  But he still feels like a fish, swimming in his own sweat, gasping for air. They have hooked him, caught him, are reeling him in. He starts twitching, trying to wriggle free of their grasp. If they get him to shore, they will kill him. They will split his head upon a rock and run a knife along his belly. They will sink their plundering hands deep into his flesh and haul out his steaming entrails. His only hope is to shake them off, here in the water, where he can still get away, where he can still save his life.

  1515

  —

  He has walked the frozen river every day, all this long, cold winter. He doesn’t walk to watch the skaters on the ice, or the carts and oxen crossing from one side to the other with their lo
ads of grain or apples. He doesn’t look at the sky, empty now of birds, or up at the arches of the bridge, each one gaping open like a hungry mouth. None of these things is as interesting to this man as the river itself. He walks along, only looking down at the ice in front of his boots.

  He is an explorer. Well, not quite an explorer yet, but he wants to become one. All this year and last year there has been talk of a passage through the polar ice at the top of the world, and he has listened to all of this speculation and pondered upon it. Several attempts have been made to find the way, but all have ended before they reached the polar seas. This man wants to be on the next ship that leaves England for such a purpose.

  And so he is studying the properties of ice in order to prepare himself for the vast stretches of it that await him in the Northwest Passage. Every day he treks along the Thames as though he were walking in the Arctic wastes. He keeps his eyes down to observe the ice, and so he won’t have to see any other people, the chimneys of the houses on the banks, so he can imagine that he is the only living, moving creature in an endless white landscape.

  He has made a vow to himself to keep walking on the ice until he falls through it and he intends to keep this vow. It makes him feel that what he is doing is dangerous, and he needs that feeling of danger to keep the image of himself as an explorer alive.