London Falling

TWENTY-TWO

FOUR HUNDRED AND

SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

Mora Losley stood at the window of the master bedroom, at the top of what the locals called ‘the tower’. She was sixteen years old, full of fear and foreboding. She could feel London in the distance tonight, she was sure. For the first time, she could see the glamour of it, the light of heaven that flickered between the meadows and the villages and the gardens of the great, all the way to the great palaces along the river, York Place and the Palace of Westminster and the Tower, which radiated importance and threat. The musician had claimed it was the light of heaven. She had heard people at court talk about it as the very opposite: as something one must never see if one was to retain one’s soul. Or perhaps it was still only her imagination. Perhaps she wanted too much to be like her mistress Anne, the Queen. She was kinder to Mora than even her mother had been, who had herself served as maid to an earlier Queen. But perhaps this royal kindness would soon result in horror.

Anne Boleyn had been the best wife King Henry ever had. He had split the Church for her, for her mind as well as for having her in his bed, since he had read all the books she’d given him on the evils of Rome. She had borne him a daughter, and that had pleased him, for a while. But he wanted a son, he wanted a son, till that desire and those words echoed around every corner of Hampton Court and Greenwich. Mora had watched her mistress’ desperate struggles to do as he wished, the care she took when bathing after she had been to his bed, the horrors of her howling in grief at both miscarriages. The sand was trickling through the glass. The King’s patience was stretching thin. He now looked at other women in the same way that he looked at fillies of good stock. One day, Mora had entered the Queen’s chamber to find her with one of her musicians, and at first she had thought they were practising some new dance. He was rehearsing gestures with her, over her stomach. Mora had noticed how her mistress had turned every holy icon in the room to face away from them, and she began to fear. Strange smells wafted from a brazier and, to Mora’s horror, blood was dripping from the Queen’s palms. She had then stepped forward, afraid that he had wounded her.

‘Don’t be scared,’ the musician had said. ‘This is what is called sortilege, the creating of obligations in the world, the weaving of the pressures.’ She had been shocked then by the coarseness of his accent. She had seen him play instruments at the court, but had never heard him speak. ‘It is learned in cities. But I hope,’ he smiled, ‘that it will be of benefit to the country.’ Mora’s mistress had made eye contact with her then, to assure her that all was well.

Mora had not been able to ask the question in her mind: was this not witchcraft? Back then it was never mentioned at court, but Mora had heard it said in the streets that her mistress was a whore, even that her mistress was a witch. She had changed the peoples’ age-old religion, had whispered of change in all sorts of ways into the ear of the good King, and they hated her for it. But Mora could not believe that anything Anne did was wrong, so she instead asked, as she did with every art used around the Queen, if she too might learn it, so she could be of service to her mistress whenever the musician was absent. The Queen agreed, as long as, and Anne managed a scared smile as she said it, it wouldn’t make the girl conceive a child. It took some effort, but the Queen then persuaded the musician to begin tutoring her. Mora was angered by how boldly he spoke back to her mistress, but Anne needed him, and he knew it. Mora noticed the coins jangling in his purse.

And that was how she had learned of the other tides surging through London, sweeping down the river and off the hills and round the buildings, and in the minds and hearts of. . well, women more than men, beggars more than courtiers. That was how desperate the Queen had become. During that time of learning, the whispering started to be heard in the palace too. As Henry grew more distant, everyone became interested in who visited the Queen’s apartments, and when, and the maids were warned to be careful who was paying court to them. Even the Queen’s brother George, who came and went freely, started to be looked at in the way that Mora started to be afraid of: that look given by dangerous dogs sizing up a weaker member of the litter.

Anne had become desperate, sensing every eye in the palace on her, sensing them acutely now, as she seemed to look through the walls and into a great vault beyond. ‘A gigantic prison, this London is,’ she told Mora. She requested that she be allowed to take her retinue to one of the King’s houses outside the city, in the village of East Ham. To everyone’s surprise, the King agreed. And for the last few weeks, it had been fine, and the weather had become better as winter turned to spring. Anne had brought with her a merry court of musicians, dancers and debaters, though sometimes Mora thought that was more to distract her courtiers than to entertain the Queen herself, who concentrated on her studies with her special musician and with Mora, and for days at a time would stay in her chamber, calling only them to her side. And the things Mora had seen there, the way she started to be able to see, by angling her hand, the weight they were all under all the time; the ocean they were at the bottom of. She dreamed one night of London as an underwater kingdom, itself with pressures and tides and waves, and at the centre of it all was the King, the whirlpool itself. Mora wondered, on waking, what the King looked like to informed eyes like the musician’s. Did he shine like the sun? Did he reflect the forces of London, like the moon was said to reflect all the lights below it? (That was a dangerous thought.) Or, more dangerous still, was his light the infernal kind that the Queen sometimes talked of seeing, when she grew frightened of what she had taken on, and would desperately ask Mora if what they were doing was a sin?

Now, as Mora looked out towards London one noon, she tried not to think of what had happened during the last few days. The musician had suddenly vanished, could no longer be found anywhere in the house or the village beyond. Then, early this morning, while Anne had been distracting herself from her growing fears by watching a game of tennis, a messenger had arrived from the King at Westminster, ordering the Queen to appear before the Privy Council. The tone of the message itself was at least basically courteous, but it was the attitude of the messenger that spoke loudest to Mora and, judging from the look on her face, to her mistress. His expression was like that of a goodwife in a whorehouse.

Anne promised she would obey, then she rushed back to her chamber, accompanied by Mora, and the two of them had spent the next few hours ripping blood from Anne’s palms, desperately seeking a pregnancy through whatever means, crying out for the Queen’s womb to bear fruit, even though they neared the end of the time when it could reasonably have been Henry’s child. Finally, Anne had sent Mora off for an hour of troubled sleep.

She had been woken by one of the other maids telling her that the Queen’s menses had come. Anne didn’t summon Mora to her company, so she had come up to this highest window to gaze out in the direction in which they would all depart later that day. . and to consider a fear that was gathering inside her.

And now she could see — she was sure she could feel as well as see it — that danger was coming. She could feel the tide of the King’s will. And then, across the pastures, she saw the first banners approaching. Then the tiny figures that were huge to her with meaning now. The oncoming horsemen.

The escort was led by three members of the Privy Council sent to fetch Anne, and they pounded on the door of Green Street House with all the watching mob, starting to shout, ‘Get the whore, get the witch.’ Mora heard the other maids screaming and running, and she feared that her mistress would be dragged outside and killed in the street, and maybe all of them along with her. Mora stood where she was. She looked down at her hands, and she searched everywhere through her eyes, and she felt the pressure of the city around her, and she sought something she could do. And she found it.

She ran down to the kitchen and found a blade, and then went to the pigsty in the courtyard. She could feel in the air what her course of action had to be. It was the only hope for all of them. ‘Mistress!’ she called out, projecting her voice along a path that wound through the battering tides about them, from her mouth to Anne’s ear, and she knew her mistress heard her. Mora bent towards the pigs, and slit the throat of three of them, their desperate squeals flying past her. She arranged the bodies in a pattern which seemed to complement and at the same time complain about the London massed around it. It just seemed the right shape. The blood intertwined in a knot at her feet.

And then Anne arrived, all alone. ‘Mora, what have you done?’

Mora hadn’t done it yet, but she did now. She planted her feet into the pool of blood, into the soil directly beneath it, her life locked into that spot, like a tree growing into the earth. She knew now that she could never be moved. ‘Take my hand now, mistress, and they won’t be able to budge you either.’

Anne hesitated. And then she put her hand, cool and calm and beautiful, the hand of a mother, into Mora’s feverish grip.

‘They insist we have babies,’ declared Mora. ‘They insist it — and they will realize their error!’

Anne looked uncertain, even fearful. ‘They are saying our teacher has confessed to. . to what he did with us, and to more that he certainly did not. But this is more than he ever showed us. Where did you learn it?’

‘Out of the air. Or I call it air, at least. We can’t breathe it as it is, so we have to change it first.’

‘Mora, this is going to be bad — for you and for me.’ And at that moment the soldiers, followed by the mob, burst into the courtyard, and the three Privy Council men strode towards the pigsty, looking astonished. The mob started to call out that this was a fit place to find such a Queen. But one of the councillors yelled for them to be silent, that Anne was to be accused, not convicted. Mora felt the heat of the mob, felt their hunger for blood. It felt as if they hated her mistress, yet loved her at the same time. They loved her for being something they could hate. They might love her entirely if she became a victim, but for now she was still someone who had made them suffer. They had their own tide of opinion which rolled like a sea around them. They started to question why the Queen was clasping the hands of a maid in such a demeaning place. The councillors, standing at the fore, could see, more clearly and were desperately asking for the Queen to let go of Mora’s hands. Two of them, Mora decided, had her mistress’ genuine interest at heart, but in the face of the third what she saw was only violence. He opened his mouth, pointing at the pigs, and started to bellow about witchcraft.

The shout went up all around them then: Witch! Witch! Witch!

‘She isn’t a witch!’ yelled Mora. She was looking straight into Anne’s eyes, pleading with her to stay, knowing that as long as she held on to Mora, they couldn’t take her. She realized that they thought the pigs were a sign of Anne’s witchcraft, not Mora’s, so she repeated. ‘She isn’t a witch!’

Anne gave her a look which tried to say sorry and thank you and to bless her to God. That glance was full of worry and fear, like a mother’s. She was going to show them her innocence, like pearls cast before swine! Mora screamed at her not to. The Queen muttered a prayer under her breath, then she let go of Mora’s hands and turned, and the mob almost fell on her, but the soldiers held them back, and the councillors led her away.

Mora grabbed hold of a post. The mob tried to haul her away too, but their hands simply slipped off every time their fingers tried to clutch at her. Mora could feel the fabric of London itself getting in the way. The Queen vanished into the crowd, the official body escorting her. Mora didn’t see her look back. She herself stood there firmly as the mob started to throw things at her, hard objects which all missed her, mud that splattered back at them. She was like a mirror they had fashioned, as she stood there looking back right into their eyes and their yelling mouths.

They even brought instruments to try and prise her away. They dragged her sobbing fellow maids along to plead with her. She watched as some of them suffered instead of her. They brought fire, too, until the remnants of the soldiers warned them that this was the King’s property, and burning it would be a hanging offence. Mora stood there steadfast. She was standing for her Queen. She was planting something in this soil, to take root there and boil them — and all the mobs they would later breed. They deserved nothing better, not the mob itself not even the maids with their pleading words that they would just as soon turn against her.

They waited there for days, and even took turns in standing watch. Having heard of it, the King sent several courtiers to observe. They questioned her with words that Mora largely didn’t understand, and even asked her if she had given her soul to Satan. Mora then replied, saying she had not, that she didn’t know what a soul was, that she thought Satan might possess many faces, and how did they know they themselves didn’t serve him? They grew wonderfully, impotently angry at that. They replaced the local guards with soldiers, and gave orders that nobody should feed her. But Mora experienced no need to eat or sleep or shit. Something enormous was happening to her, and she concentrated on it alone, and made an inner joy out of it. She was binding herself to the soil.

Two weeks passed thus. They taunted her with what was happening to the Queen, how she was imprisoned in the Tower and sentenced to die. The musician was dead already. Mora saved her breath to scare them with sudden noises. Her only power over them now was fear. She was stuck here, she knew, but she was stuck here as a demonstration. She and the guards were alone in the great house, apart from the crowds that came to see her, that spoke of her far and wide. Then one day a guard, himself not looking too pleased, told her that Queen Anne was dead, though her sentence had been commuted from burning to beheading. The crowds that came now looked sad for her, for she was something that remained of Anne, who had suddenly become the ‘good Queen’.

Finally, a priest came, and tried to bless her; all the while she yelled at him. She was afraid they were going to burn this place after all, but then they all went, and they locked the gates behind them. They locked every exit that Mora might use, in fact, and bricked up every window, as Mora discovered two days after they had left, when she started to feel confident that this wasn’t a trap to get her to move from her vigil, and went to look inside the house. Walking away from that spot where the bodies of the pigs had started to fester, and the blood had become an old stain, was surprisingly difficult. Mora found herself strangely restrained, as if wrapped immobile in sheets. She barely made it to the upper rooms before having to run back, feeling an exhaustion like death about to descend on her.

She sat down, panting, in the pigsty. She wasn’t hungry, and felt full. But she realized with horror that her stomach was cramping with the pain of emptiness. Her body wasn’t used to this new life that had been forced on her. And now she couldn’t see how there would ever be an end to it.

It took her five years to break free, walking slightly further from the pigsty every day. In that sleepless time she came to inhabit the empty rooms of the great house. She sat amid the ruins of nobility. She found nothing of use. She had no windows to look out of, but she was able to feel the world beyond. She felt it in more detail all the time. She could feel what the mob thought of this house now: that it was haunted. But they didn’t quite remember Mora. The bigger idea of Queen Anne overshadowed her. Eventually they probably only knew that a woman haunted the place, but didn’t know why, and they didn’t even consider that she might still be alive inside the haunting she had been sentenced to.

One night, when she was sure of her power, when she had considered and refined it, Mora walked to the great doors. . and through them.

She stopped once she saw and felt the presence of London outside. It had changed. It had got much bigger, much closer, in just that passage of time. It had changed like she had, twisted up by all her cramps and tensions, becoming old before her time. Walking away from the house proved difficult, so she made a short first expedition, in secret, and then searched her heart for how she could do it more easily. She took soil from the pigsty and put it in her pockets, and now she could walk at least a little way further abroad.

She heard locals still talking about Anne, about how she’d lived here, and Mora would say under her breath, as she passed them, ‘She wasn’t a witch.’ Some wench was now on the throne. On a couple of occasions, the people she passed happened to be talking of witches, and they looked at her and saw her in some strange way, and started to chase her, terrified but eager.

At some point, without ever really deciding on it, Mora accepted that she now probably was a witch. She had become this thing that her mistress had never been. She had been led to it by her mistress’ honest wish for motherhood. Mora had had no choice in the matter. It was like a wheel running downhill.

She took to hurting the people in secret, to going about absolutely unseen, learned by constant experiments with the gestures of her hands, copied from the musician, and flashing a knife from a pocket, hurting them with small cuts, killing their dogs and cats, and pledging them like she had the swine; sending them on somewhere and feeling the tide washing hard into her at the moment of their deaths.

The locals started to talk about her again. And it seemed that someone at court had remembered, because one day when Mora had returned to her sty and was standing there in pain during the night, she heard the gates open again, and soldiers entered.

That night, Mora learned that her power was not as great as she had thought it was. Now that she had stretched the weave to let herself move out and about, so others could move her too. They were here to kill her, ultimately, but first they raped her many times, having to straighten out her curled-up older self to find the soft young girl concealed inside.

They were so pleased with themselves at having conquered the witch that they decided to keep her captive, and made one of the stables into a cage where they could visit her. They put her in chains of cold iron forged in London, and those felt as if they would hold her, at least for a while. The house was opened up again, and the mob came back to see her, too. She seemed to be a gibbering old lady, she realized from inside herself sometimes, whenever her mind came to the surface. The mob handed her food, which she put down beside her. She felt that taking it would lead her back to normality, where she might be destroyed even more, split apart on the rocks of expectation. The mob seemed to like her as a thing they could come and view.

One day a child, a little girl, came along to see the witch. Mora smiled at her, and took the bread she offered. She complained that the chains were so rough on her, and she was so weak and would be dead soon, and asked if she could be set free of them, just for a few moments. That wicked, cunning child went and found the key, perhaps off her father, and she took off Mora’s chains.

Mora killed her with her bare hands, and dedicated the child’s death with the correct gestures, enjoying the feeling of what had been the child’s mind being swept off to face punishment. And so much more strength flooded into her then, more than she had ever felt before. She could suddenly see it all, see the tides and the angles, see how buildings and people altered them.

She killed all the soldiers, one by one, dispatching as many of them as she could as sacrifices. She became something even greater with every moment. And now she was able to glimpse who she was sacrificing to, and to hear a distant laughter. Mora didn’t care. They deserved it. She raped those who had raped her, and then sentenced them to die forever.

When they were all dead, she closed the gates of this charnel house behind her, and walked out through the wall, invisible and mighty, into the white sepulchre that was London.

With the Sight, she could see that the soil she carried would let her go no further than the bounds of the city. But, by carrying it, she could travel anywhere within it. She was like a great predatory fish being let loose into a large lake. She was master of this expanse and no further.

She turned to look back at the locked gates of the house. ‘She wasn’t a witch,’ she announced for the last time.

Centuries passed, and Mora experienced too much life. London grew around her too, astonishingly, her small pool becoming full of more and more of ‘the mob’. In a tavern one evening she counted the years of kings and queens, and realized she was seventy. And though she now looked it, and looked back to her youth as a woman of seventy would, she had not a single new ache that had crept up on her, only those that were old friends. The same was true at age one hundred, and then passing through the decades to two hundred, and then she let thoughts of that go too, and forgot she had an age.

She would take three children, and make a good sacrifice, and feel life flooding back into her, and she wanted to laugh at the mob at the same time, knowing that she again had vengeance on them for what they had done to their Queen, and to Mora herself. They claimed they so loved their children. They loved them enough that they would kill innocents like her mistress to have more. So she loved giving them fewer. She would sacrifice adults too now, in a way she had learned when the city burned. . and she had stayed among the flames, dancing and learning the skill of giving someone whole to the flame, so that the moment of striking and of sacrifice became one, spending and receiving in the same instant. That was like being in love with the destruction, having congress with it.

In order that people would know what she was about when they glimpsed her, she learned what the people most feared from such as her, and made herself into that. She therefore fabricated herself a cat out of so many sacrifices that she lost count, all of them boiled together at once in a cauldron that she stole from the back of a cart, and then infused it into a dead mog she’d found lying in the street. She made it as something that would reflect what she herself was back at her, something that would not argue, not offer her any distraction that might lessen her purpose or stay her hand. It was to provide all the good things about having company, and none of the bad. It was nothing like a child, for it was nothing of her, and yet only her.

In the aftermath of the Great Fire of London, she gradually became aware that, in this small pond, there were starting to be others who did as she did. They came with all the buildings that were now shutting out the sky. Some of them hid in the shadows, as she did, but some walked around in silks and hats. With civilized gestures of the right hand, they described to their servants where they would place such a building, while crafty, secret gestures of the left hand were making sure the angles of that building were right for the unseen tides which only they and Mora knew of. Mora herself did not feel inclined to meet those of either kind, but she feared the latter more, seeing immediately that they worked for kings and had the stuff of kings about them. She hated kings half the week, and the mob for the other half. She recognized the irony that, as people flooded into the small pond she was trapped in, they all seemed to feel the same, thus hating themselves as being part of the thing they hated, or at least all of them did a little. As more of them came, more buildings appeared, and so more of the crafty architects who knew the same secrets as she did arrived, until Mora found herself feeling limited. It was as if they were fencing off more and more of the tiny space she survived in.

So she was on nobody’s side, remained just the thing that took away children, and she took steps never to be revealed, which meant the parents seldom realized. Hers were the children that got lost in the cracks of the city. She was on no side until, returning one day, as she often did, to her mistress’ house — which had come to be called, to Mora’s great pleasure, Boleyn Castle — to take more soil from its grounds, she saw a group of men outside it, kicking a ball. That also gave Mora great pleasure, because it would have angered the King mightily to see the game he had forbidden being played over one of his properties. They weren’t playing at archery now! She therefore stayed in shadow and let those men live, and made sure always to seek out her sacrifices far away.

As the years passed, what the men did there grew and grew. One day they stuck in the ground a flag with an image of a castle on it, which was now to be their emblem. The spot where they played became known as ‘the Boleyn Ground’, and when they built a stadium for spectators, it had big towers standing outside it. Mora had long since started to attend these matches, hidden at first, and then later in disguise and having paid money. She was increasingly tempted to support them with her craft, and to ensure they were always victorious, but she managed to resist that urge. In truth, she didn’t want to diminish the joy at genuinely winning and, yes, also the sorrow of losing. They became increasingly bound together, occupants of the same soil, and the team’s victories were also Mora’s. When wireless became commonplace, she saw those around her in the stands listening to it, so she stole a set for herself, and started to listen to the commentaries, and eventually to other things that told her stories about the old world. She switched it off rather than hear of the new. The new was what limited her and bricked her in. The cat even started to talk with the voice of the radio, but still only told her the news she wanted to hear.

She hated witnessing the team’s defeats, hated the loud celebrations of the filthy scum that scored against them. So every now and then, but taking care not to do it too often, she would send the worst of those shits to Hell early. She became well known to a few of the spectators, and in time had stories told about her.

It was only a few years ago that Mora started to have a distant feeling that something around her was changing. The secret tides of London were moving almost imperceptibly in some new direction; only one as sensitive as she was might have noticed. One autumn morning she was gathering soil near the stadium when she realized that someone who should not be there was watching her. She turned, ready to send a force slapping against him from her palm, but then realized immediately how little such a tiny reflex would mean to him. He was smartly dressed, having the stuff of kings about him, yes, but he was common too. So he was either both of those things she hated, or neither. But he was smiling all over his face, and that made her choose neither. He was smiling about her, which was something Mora was only used to, sometimes, on her beloved terraces. He told her she had made a contribution to what he called his stocks, and that he applauded her. And he did applaud, and every clap of his hands sent joy flooding through her, and she realized who he was. And finally she knew that here was the creature that, with her visions of Hell, she had long suspected existed. He told her there was a possibility that soon, because of all they were doing to contain and limit London, the descendants of those men in fine gloves, who were always meddling, would stop her from being able to reach her beloved ground.

Mora was horrified. He asked her whether she would owe him service if he removed, as he was planning to do, those who might block her from the Boleyn Ground. She told him with certainty she would. He told her that a man who’d made him good sacrifice had just, at his suggestion, bought the season-ticket seat next to hers. She was to work for him for ten years, and then stop, and the work would serve a higher purpose than it seemed to. He licked his palm and held it up; Mora saw a streak of blood there. Hesitantly, but aware that she was in the presence of, for the first time in centuries, a power that could harm her, a power that asked very little and was being civil, Mora kissed the palm offered to her and tasted blood like water and ashes.

And then he was gone, and Mora found herself weeping, shedding black tears that scorched her face and marked her beloved soil. Because she had now met the power of another king, and, just like that, he had reminded her how she was a victim.

But she did what she was told, and she met with the man Rob Toshack. She even told her name to him, so that he might know it. She found that, despite her anger and hatred at her own weakness, they had much in common, that this was easy work indeed, and that she could therefore remain herself. And so she let herself forget that she was merely a victim. Except at somewhere close to her heart, where she always remembered. ‘She wasn’t a witch,’ she would still insist. But now she didn’t know whether she referred to her mistress or herself.