Dark Fire

the shafts. Its huge hooves kicked out wildly, smashing tiles and raising clouds of dust. It neighed in terror, eyes rolling at the gathering crowd. I heard someone say more carts were backed up almost to cripplegate. It was not the first such scene in the City of Late. Everywhere there was a crashing of stone as the old buildings fell. So much land had become vacant that even in overcrowded London the courtiers and other greedy men of spoil into whose hands it had fallen scarce knew how to handle it all. I turned Chancery round and made my way through the maze of narrow lanes that led to Cheapside, in places scarce wide enough for a horse and rider to pass under the overhanging eaves of the houses. Although it was still early, the workshops were open, and people crowded the lanes, slowing my passage, journeymen and street traders and water-carriers labouring under their huge conical baskets. It had hardly rained in a month. The butts were dry, and they were doing good business. I thought again of the meeting to come. I had been dreading it, and now I would be late. I wrinkled my nose at the mighty stink the hot weather drew from the sewer-channel, then cursed roundly as a rooting pig, its snout smeared with some nameless rubbish, ran squealing across Chancery's path and made him jerk aside. A couple of apprentices in their blue doublets, returning, puffy-faced from some late revel, glanced round at my oath, and one of them, a stocky, rough-featured young fellow, gave me a contemptuous grin. I set my lips and spurred Chancery on. I saw myself, as he must have, a way-faced hunchback lawyer in black robe and cap, a pen-case and dagger at my waist instead of a sword. It was a relief to arrive at the broad, paved way of Cheapside. Crowds milled round the stalls of Cheapmarket. Under their bright awnings the peddlers called, "'What do you lack?' or argued with white-coiffed good-wives. The occasional lady of wealth wandered round the stalls with her armed servants, face-masked with a cloth-visard to protect her white complexion from the sun. Then as I turned past the great bulk of St. Paul's, I heard the loud cry of a pamphlet seller. A scrawny fellow in a stained black doublet, a pile of papers under his arm, he was howling at the crowd. "'Child murderess of Walbrook taken to Newgate!' I paused and leaned down to pass him a farthing. He licked his finger, peeled off a sheet and handed it up to me, then went on bawling at the crowd. "'The most terrible crime of the year!' I stopped to read the thing in the shadow cast by the great bulk of St. Paul's. As usual the cathedral precincts were full of beggars, adults and children leaning against the walls, thin and ragged, displaying their sores and deformities in the hope of charity. I averted my eyes from their pleading looks and turned to the pamphlet. Beneath a woodcut of a woman's face—it could have been anybody, it was just a sketch of a face beneath disordered hair—I read, "'Terrible crime in Walbrook. Child murdered by his jealous cousin.' On the evening of May 16th last, a Sabbath day, at the fair house of Sir Edwin Wentworth of Walbrook, a member of the Mercer's company, his only son, a boy of twelve, was found at the bottom of the garden well with his neck broken. Sir Edwin's fair daughters, girls of fifteen and sixteen, told how the boy had been attacked by their cousin Elizabeth Wentworth, an orphan, whom Sir Edwin had taken into his house from charity on the death of her father, and had been pushed by her into the deep well. She is taken to Newgate, where she is to go before the Justices, the 29th May next. She refuses to plead, and so is likely to be pressed, or, if she pleads to be found guilty, and go to Tyburn next hanging day." The thing was badly printed on cheap paper, and left inky smears on my fingers as I thrust it into my pocket and turned down Paternoster Row. So the case was public knowledge, another half-penny sensation. Innocent or guilty, how could the girl get a fair trial from a London jury now?