To everyone whose story has never been told.
CONTENTS
Cover
Dedication
The First Dive
A Poppet for a Penny
The Carpenter’s Tale
A Boat and a Cart
Visitors in the Night
The Bag of Beads
The Pearl Earring
A Gold Coin on the Common
A Splash in the Dark
May Day
Two Stones and a Rope
Afterwards
Author’s Note
Copyright
THE FIRST DIVE
I hit the water. No, it hit me. It slapped me in the face then pulled me under. My head filled with its stink. I tried to hold my breath, but the water’s wet fingers were in my nostrils, inching up and up. I couldn’t open my mouth to scream; if I did, I’d be dead. But at this rate, I was going to be dead anyway. The River Thames’s strong arms yanked me, away from the boat, away from my mother, away from my life.
Below the surface, the Thames talks to you. It’s the stab of beaks as the gulls dive for fish. It’s the sound of oars plunging in and out of the heavy water as pilots guide the merchant ships up to Wool Quay. As I sank further down, I thought I heard different sounds, proper voices, children’s voices like mine. If I could open my eyes, I was sure I’d see those children floating on the current, children like me who’d wobbled and fallen.
“Tell us your story, Eve,” they whispered. “Tell us your story.”
A POPPET FOR A PENNY
My name is Eve. I’m twelve years old and I’m surprised I’ve lived that long. I’m a Southwark girl, born and bred – just outside London across the River Thames – but I’ve lived in other places too.
Sometimes I still wake up in the middle of the night gasping for breath. In my dreams, the bed linen turns to water, pressing against my eyes, blocking my ears to everything apart from my slamming heart. Then I hear my mother calling.
“Mpendwa, you are safe.”
She calls me mpendwa, her beloved. I surface out of my nightmare into the morning.
Three times I’ve ended up in deep water, so far. Twice I nearly drowned. The third time – well, I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll start by telling you about the first time.
It was the last day of the Bartholomew Fair. I’d never been to the fair before, even though every year Mama had promised to take me. You know what adults are like. They look you in the eye, make you a promise and then forget it by the time they look away. But Mama isn’t like that. She doesn’t make promises that she doesn’t think she can keep, because so many people have broken promises to her.
There was a good reason why Mama hadn’t kept her promise before. The fair lasts for three days in August and on the first day, every year, I’d wake up, lie still and listen. Every year, I’d hear the same thing: rain. I could hear it dripping into the pots Mama had lined up under the eaves. That is, the years when we even had eaves, of course. The August before, we’d had nowhere to sleep and we came close to being arrested as vagabonds. Eventually we’d sneaked into a grain store, but we spent the dark hours fighting what must have been the King Rat of Southwark. I knew that we definitely wouldn’t be going to the fair that year.
The summers when we did have somewhere to live, I’d creep out of bed and check outside to see how bad the rain was and it would always be the same. Mud and dung oozing across the cobbles, trampled into a slippery mix by horses’ hooves, with little rivers of mud running along the pathways, mixing the muck into a special sticky mess that never wanted to let go of you. Even the dogs looked sideways at it and tried to find a way round it. Mama and I didn’t have fancy leather boots or even a pair of clogs to get us through that mess. I just had my old pumps and no matter how many times Mama tried to sew it back, the seam kept unravelling, so my toe stuck out the front. By the time I’d walked three steps in that mud, I’d have been barefoot.
Even if we had braved it on the muddy streets, we would still have had to cross the river to get to London. The quickest way was by wherry boat, as the bridge was always jammed with carts and traders. But who wanted to sit in a small boat on a wild, deep river in the rain? So every year, instead of going to the fair, I ended up doing chores. Last year, I churned butter from dawn to dinner. After that, my arms were so strong I could have squeezed the butter straight from the cow.
This day was different. We’d been lodging at the Boar’s Head, an inn off Tooley Street, up under the eaves again. I woke while it was still dark. Mama had left buckets out, but I couldn’t hear the drop, drop of water. I squinted into the darkness. I could just about see the dark shapes of the dresser and Mama’s sewing basket on the table. The travellers in the room below were laughing and singing and someone in another room was coughing hard. I could hear the ostler, who looked after the guests’ horses, humming to himself in the courtyard and then the clop of the horses’ hooves as he led them to the stables. Next to me, Mama was still sleeping so I knew it must be very early in the morning. I didn’t want to leave my warm place in the bed because it had taken me a long time to get comfortable last night. The inn had been busy and Master Horstead, the landlord, had Mama serving guests long into the night. It was hard for me to sleep when Mama wasn’t next to me. It still is.
I had turned on to my side to try
