Bankside

Christopher Southworth had arrived in London. He came through the turnpike at Highgate, sold his horse and walked down into the city.

Stables, kennels, breweries, carpenters’ shops, pudding dens, low-roofed sheds where they sewed jerkins or rolled candles. Inns, taverns, bakers, cook shops, men and women smoking clay pipes carrying fish baskets on their heads. Dogs running in and out of the cartwheels, a parrot on a perch, a woman selling bolts of cloth from a cart. A tinker with pots and pans hung round his thin body. A fiddler playing a melody. A sheep on a rope, the smell of mutton flesh cooking, the smell of iron being heated till it glowed. A little boy with bare feet, a girl carrying a baby, two soldiers, ragged and thin.

Soon he reached the River Thames, wide like a dream, jammed with boat-craft and bodies, like a nightmare.

There was a boatyard at Bankside. Boats upended, sanded, oiled, the smell of pitch heating in a vast pot. At the boatyard two men in dresses were joking with a charcoal burner who wanted to go and see a play.

Christopher Southworth went up to them and asked where was the House at the Sign. ‘What’s it to you?’ said one, and he gave them a penny, and they pointed to a stumpy pier where a cowhand was branding his cow in a hiss of steam.

The house was timber. Pitch-painted frame, in-filled with plaster, with handsome glass and lead windows. A woman was leaving the house. He introduced himself, showed her Alice’s seal and letter and key, and although she seemed surprised, she let him in. He told her his name was Peter Northless.

‘If it is True North you are looking for, you have come to the right place,’ she said, reaching down and feeling for his balls. His hand stopped her. She laughed. ‘We shall not disturb you unless you wish to be disturbed.’

He went in. He understood. This was a brothel.

And a handsome brothel. Well appointed. There was a staircase up to a gallery with neat doors leading off it. So this was how Alice kept up her income. She said she got a good rent for the place.

He went up to the gallery. This was not the floor she had described. A room at the top, Alice had said.

He came to a little swing door. He pushed through it and found a flight of stairs, narrow and unused, if dust was a guide. His footsteps left prints on the treads.

He went up, and up, impossibly up, it seemed, and at the top of the stairs he was faced with a big sturdy square door entirely painted with a face. The keyhole was in the right eye of the face. He looked at the face. The face looked at him.

Christopher went in.

There was a high bed against a square-panelled wall. A table by the window set for two people but thick with dust. A portrait of a beautiful woman with green eyes. ‘Elizabeth Southern,’ he said, amazed that this was the hag he had pushed away in Lancaster Gaol.

He felt he was intruding on another life. A secret life.

There was a calfskin book on the table. He opened it. It was Alice’s handwriting.

John Dee has returned to Poland to rejoin Edward Kelley. There is no news of Elizabeth. I have succeeded in making the mirror.

The mirror?

He looked around. There was a mirror on the wall, but nothing unusual about it. There were no cupboards in this room. No drawers in the table. Perhaps she had taken the mirror with her. Perhaps it had been stolen or lost.

Well, she would be here tomorrow or the next day, and on the day after, they would ride to Dover and sail to Calais.

The room had long windows to the side that opened onto a rough square balcony. He freed them from years of neglect and went outside. He could see the river winding through the city, and all the teeming life of London rolled out like a carpet. He felt peaceful and suddenly very tired. He had ridden hard, changing horses, hardly sleeping. Now he could sleep. After all, it was Alice’s bed.