Cannonbridge by Jonathan Barnes

Author:Jonathan Barnes [Barnes, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781781082973
Google: pvy4oAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1781082979
Barnesnoble: 1781082979
Goodreads: 22609309
Publisher: Solaris
Published: 2014-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

1853

HAMPSTEAD HEATH LONDON

A STRANGE INTERSECTION of country and city, eight hundred acres of well-tended green. “Heath” seems somehow too modest a name for this proud sprawl of grass and tree, of undergrowth and gentle, wooded hill. It is rather as if a piece of rural England has been carved from its bucolic homeland and set down, with little mind for the incongruity of the act, as a parkland at the heart of the greatest metropolis on Earth.

Yet the city has not allowed this rustic space to flourish unchallenged. Rather, it has peopled it with Londoners, who swarm on this bright, sunny day in June, along its paths and up its inclines, who linger by its lake and stroll amiably beneath its trees. All here is variation and diversity: grand ladies and gentlemen arm in arm, families on happy expeditions, working people, on a rare few hours of rest, slouched, squinting miserably up at the sky. There is a darker, more sorrowful element also—itinerants and beggars, homeless children scouting for change, brokendown old soldiers pleading for alms—as well as a class of person who are brazenly criminal in their demeanour and deportment (pickpockets, cut-throats, ladies of the night) together with that breed of indefinable person which is altogether timeless: sad-faced women of no detectable class or occupation, ruddy-faced single men who exist perpetually on the knife-edge between eye-bulging joviality and unchecked aggression, glimpsed figures moving between the tree-trunks, strange faces at the edge of the crowd, sombre outsiders, who might just as well be an incognito lord or a Clapham bachelor, watching the mêlée with expressions of such weird intensity that those who venture near them are compelled at once to move discreetly away. It is, in other words, the city that has won this battle in the interminable, doomed war with the countryside. It has placed five hundred individuals upon this shard of meadow, stamped without compunction on the sod, filled the woodlands with refuse and spoiled food, chased the birds away with screams and sounds of unthinking entertainment.

London the victorious, London the undeniable, London the true eternal city.

Amongst all of these who have come upon this warm, bright afternoon to gambol upon the heath there is only one particular party who require our attention, labouring up the steepest of the hills in this place, towards the urban view that is promised by its pinnacle. There are six in this party: three children (a boy and two small girls, all under ten), two women (one tall and dark-haired and with a certain nobility in her bearing, the other smaller and more timid, her hair worn close to her scalp) who, between them, labour with a ratty-looking picnic basket. Evidently in charge of the outing is a stout, full-bearded man, dressed, even according to the customs of the time, too formally for the temperature and for the nature of the trip, perspiring heavily yet still contriving (perhaps because, unlike the women, he is unburdened by their wicker-bound luncheon) to stride some

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