London - Edward Rutherfurd [228]
Young Gilbert Bull had gone to London. He had become a trader in linen and imported cloth, a mercer. With money and family connections he soon prospered. And now he had chosen a wife.
His choice could not have been more sensible. The daughter of a prominent goldsmith with gentry connections, she would bring a handsome dowry. She was short, pleasant-looking and if the large dark rings around her eyes made her look a little worn, her temper was cheerful. She shared all his opinions about life and, as far as he could see, would give him no trouble at all. They were destined to be very happy.
Gilbert Bull was a very agreeable fellow. Everyone said that he was sound; like a true Bull, he never broke his word; and if, in private, he sometimes liked to read books or indulge a taste for mathematics, these were small weaknesses which he had under complete control. Was there no flaw, then, in his ordered universe? Perhaps only one: a dark memory, shared with many others, that made him too cautious, too anxious to control the world around him. But as he would say himself, with typical soundness, no one is perfect.
1361
It was spring, and the sign of the Zodiac was Taurus, the Bull. For the previous two evenings, the planet Venus had risen over the horizon, glowing with love.
There had been a shower earlier that morning, but now a moist breeze from the south was driving the puffy clouds across a pale blue sky; over the river, London was glistening in the warm sun, and steam was coming up from the ground as two men stood at the southern end of London Bridge and looked at the baby.
It was propped up in a sitting position against an empty barrel beside the busy road. It appeared to have been fed, and wrapped in a white shawl which was still fairly clean. The baby seemed to be contented, but there was no sign of any parents.
“Abandoned, do you think?” the younger man asked. He was not yet twenty, but already his dark brown beard was dividing into a fork. He had a broad, intelligent face and eyes which seemed to take in everything. His companion nodded. Whoever had placed the infant there was probably hoping some passer-by would take pity. “How old would you say?”
“About three months,” Bull replied.
“He’s looking at you, Gilbert.” There was something about the little baby, even now, that suggested he was a boy; and certainly, he was gazing at Bull’s burly figure with interest. “It’s a pity to leave him,” the younger man continued. Unwanted babies sometimes ended in the river.
Bull sighed. He had a large house. He could certainly afford to take the child in. “I’d save him,” he said, “but the risk . . .” There was no need to finish the sentence. They both understood.
The baby might mean death.
The dark memory. Thirteen years had passed since it first arrived. The astronomers had warned of a terrible calamity, but had not been heeded.
The year before, the harvests had been bad and many poor folk in London had gone hungry. Winter had been harsh. And then the rain had come. Rain for days on end. Rain enough to make the Thames overflow and climb halfway to Ludgate; rain in rivers down the slope of Cornhill, and in streams along the gutters in the West Cheap; rain washing over the runnels as it poured down the lanes and turned the alleys into pools of black mud; rain filling cellars with slime whose smell came up, pungent through floorboards; rain in undercrofts drowning rats. The rain seeped down into the very roots of the city. But no city, not even