The Man Who Drew London by Gillian Tindall

Author:Gillian Tindall [Tindall, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Britain, History, Non-Fiction, Social History, Social Science, Sociology, Urban
ISBN: 9781446496183
Google: bNTUhMy9RDMC
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-07-30T23:00:00+00:00

She died the next spring. The babe she was carrying, with much pain and sickness, would not come, and at the last she was taken with strange fits. Wensel wanted to call upon his friend Dr Harvey, a most skilled physician, but he was old by then, and sick with the gout, and could not come. Then the midwife said that the child was surely dead within, so we called our neighbour, the surgeon, but by then a high fever was already upon her and there was naught he could do.

I had been so anxious for her, and had cared for her to the best of my ability, as if she had been an elder sister to me, and she so grateful, that when she went I truly mourned her. The summer that followed was a drought summer, desperate hot, with water lacking in the conduits and the water carriers raising their prices eightfold, to twopence a tankard. Oft-times I caught myself thinking of Margaret and how much more she would have suffered, and feeling glad for her that she was now far away, in a better place well above that hot, blue sky.

After that, Wensel and I took our time, not to put any one out of humour. We were old enough, God knows, to be reasonable people, and so it was more than two years afore we wed. Tho’ I will admit that Wensel’s passionate nature, and my own weakness for him, had made us man and wife in the sight of God afore we stood before the altar in St Giles. William Faithorne and my brother John stood witness, and Meg was my bridesmaid. She had turned fourteen then, the prettiest thing imaginable, and through the good offices of Mr Aubrey, who knows all the world, she went afterwards as maid-in-waiting to my Lady L––, who had known her mother and had taken a fondness to her.1 So my anxieties on her score were appeased.

With Jamie, I had no such doubts. A lad is different, and this lad had lost his mother and was glad to accept such mothering as I could offer. I believe I had understood by then, what has become still more clear to me as the years have passed, how much Wensel had suffered from the loss of his own mother (another Margaret) in Bohemia, when he was but six years old. He told me once, as we lay abed, and there were tears in his voice, this man of fifty years, that it had grieved him terrible as he grew up that he could no longer truly recall the sound of her voice or the lineaments of her face, and it grieved him still. I believe that his father’s second wife, of whom he would not much speak to me, was unkind to Wensel and favoured her own child (as so often is the case) and that his father was wont to take her part. I have come to think that this

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