Treason's Daughter by Antonia Senior

Author:Antonia Senior
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

HEN WALKS THROUGH THE TOWER’S GREAT ARCH, PAST THE guards and the idle gawpers, past the cluster of ravens which gathers at the entrance, past the beggar woman who sits every day begging for coins and lamenting her lost husband. Just a week of this routine. It is incredible how quickly the extraordinary can become commonplace.

She walks under the shadow of the White Tower and ducks into a doorway in one of the further, smaller towers embedded in the wall. Even this place has its hierarchies. Her father is in a small room with a slit for a window and a bare stone floor. But he has the liberty of the Tower and can come and go within its walls. Hen has done her best with cushions and hanging cloths to soften the room. No shelves here, just books in stacks against the walls. A layer of dust is collecting on the surface of the uppermost books – they are horribly undisturbed.

Her father rises to greet her. She hates his forced smile. The light has gone from his dear face, and what’s left is a shell, brittle and empty. She lays down her basket of food and kisses him.

‘Dear one,’ she says. ‘How did you sleep?’

‘Fair, pudding, fair.’

She looks out of the thin window into the courtyard. A gang of children are playing an intricate game with a ball. Sunlight finds its way through the ramparts in patches; men and women cluster in the dappled light. An old man sits on a bench in the corner, turning his face up to catch the sun. A couple argues in a darker corner, the man waving an angry finger at the woman.

It could be a normal street. If you walk through the cobbled paths quickly, and try not to think about the darker corners, that is. There is talk of the Rats’ Dungeon, deep in the Tower’s bowels, where high tide floods the cell and draws the rats in, hungry and vicious. There is an old and crooked man who walks the cobbles and tells all who will listen of his time in Little Ease, the four-foot square hole which forces a man into a perpetual bestial crouch.

The Tower is safe enough, for most, above the cobbles and in the daylight. At night, when the ghosts roam, and below street level in its dark recesses, it reeks of evil. Tortured souls wander here, they say. Papists and godly alike, depending on which sister was on the throne. Their souls walk where their bodies were racked and stabbed, pliered and twisted and forced to recant. Every fire, here, carries the echo of flames past, when the kindling was heretics and the spark was a monarch’s righteous fury.

They say Archbishop Laud is here somewhere, but Hen has not seen him. The Tower is full to bursting. Thomas Hood, Challoner’s warder, wears the perpetual look of a man ordered to feed scores of mouths on two loaves. Not that she pities him; he is an unbending keeper.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.