LONDON BRIDGE IN PLAGUE AND FIRE

A Novel

By David Madden

THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS

Copyright © 2012 The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57233-870-8

Contents

1. Lucien Redd, a Child of Civil War…………………………………12. Daryl Braintree, Poet-Chronicler of London Bridge…………………..73. Shopkeepers on the Bridge Meet to Report Its Condition………………414. Morgan Wood, a Child of the Bridge, at Sea…………………………535. The Brotherhood of the Bridge Meets to Repair the Bridge…………….636. Father Peter de Colechurch Steals the Murdered Body of Archbishop
Thomas à Becket……………………………………………………757. Lucien Comes onto Morgan’s Ship…………………………………..1098. Voices in the Great Plague of London………………………………1199. Plague Aftermath: The Brotherhood of the Bridge…………………….15910. Lucien Torments Morgan at Sea……………………………………17511. The Poet Builds London Bridge of Stone……………………………18712. Voices in the Great Fire of London……………………………….20513. The Brotherhood of the Bridge: Cabalistic Meetings…………………23114. The Brotherhood Hires Lucien as Kidnapper…………………………26315. Lucien Kidnaps Blythe, Dark Lady of the Bridge…………………….27316. Morgan Wood, a Child of the Bridge, Returns……………………….28317. Morgan and Lucien on the Bridge………………………………….30518. Lucien Kidnaps Gilda, Fair Lady of the Bridge……………………..31519. The Search for Gilda……………………………………………32120. Light Is God’s Shadow…………………………………………..331

CHAPTER 1

LUCIEN REDD,A CHILD OF CIVIL WAR

This Bridge stretched below us—on its twenty piers and arches—issupporting 138 shops, each with a three-to-six-storey house above it,the tallest bridge in England, and eight hundred inhabitants, somesuch. Quite sick, but not fatally ill, she stands still, in defiance of overtwo thousand years, time told by sundial, hourglass, and clock, for allof the bridges built at this site over the past are one London Bridge.Chronicled assaults of tides, gale, frost, flood, foreign and domesticbombardment, and the very tension and stress of its own structure fulfillingits function, have taken their toll, aggravated by human and mercantiletraffic and royal, municipal, and ecclesiastical neglect.

Come onto the Bridge from London to cross over River Thames toSouthwark.

Come on at Southwark to cross over to London.

Built of stone, will she fall?

In time.

Though not of her own free will.

But in 1649, her fatal hour has not yet come.

* * *

Oliver Cromwell stood alone in the open space on the long-defunctdrawbridge. Looking toward Westminster, he came to watch the sunburn through the mist and shine on a new era, one that his own willitself—”May God’s will prevail”—will fashion. He has come to feel thetide race between the starlings under the arches to his left and to his right,feel it in the soles of his boots. The resistance to the tidewater of the narrowopenings under the Bridge is an inspiration, tempered only by hismemory of the severed heads on pikes above the Great Stone Gatewaynear the bridge foot at the Southwark end, stuck up there on pikes towarn, he knows, such as he to restrain the fist raised in rebellion.

The marching feet of civil war fall upon thousands.

* * *

“Come out or burn with the house!”

As Radford obeyed the soldiers’ command, he slipped in his father’sblood on the threshold, felt the first of a multitude of blows.

“Stand up, you little shank of Catholic carrion!”

The shouting soldier stood astride him, the toes of his glisteningboots becoming clearer as Radford, on his knees, wiped at his tears.

His knees were too weak. He fell on his belly and immediatelyheard and felt a rushing of cloth that exposed his bare buttocks to thestinging icy wind. A great weight fell upon his back—his body exploded.He screamed, “Mother!” and raised his head, saw his father’sface, his head, hurtling through the smoke, heard somewhere behindhim an answering scream from his mother, whose stare caught in thesame instant the sight of her husband’s severed head flying and her son’sbare flesh flashing in the smoke. Inhaling the smoke that billowed overhim, the boy fell into a searing, painful swoon.

When Radford awoke, the weight on his back was so much greaterhe could scarcely breathe. Twilight had turned to utter dark by the timehe twisted his wounded body, constricted not only from above, he discoveredby touch alone, but from below and on both sides by the coldflesh of other bodies. The sharp teeth of mouths frozen open pressedagainst his back, his sore ribs. He saw faces crusted with old blood, recentblood, and now his own blood. Dirt, snot, food in teeth, pieces offlesh—he imagined human flesh—mud and food in folds and threads,weaves of clothes, a seed, a flower in hair, fresh or wilted, not placedthere but caught as a soldier passed through field flowers, then snaggedin bristly hair.

He lifted a hand away from his face, shoved an arm aside, pulledhis legs out from under the crowns of three heads, a hairy chest, onebare breast whose twin had been hacked away, shouldered through thelimbs of other bodies, until he stood up and walked away—his bungholestinging as if afire, but his buttocks icy from some spilled liquid,his tongue recoiling from the open gashes in his gums, his legs deeplybruised, ribs broken, flesh all over lacerated—into a village that wasdead in flames.

Feeling out a narrow pathway through the burning village, mourninghis father, calling for his mother, and his brothers and sisters,Radford turned away from the dying but collected from the dead ashirt too small, pants too large and, wearing shoes that did not match,walked out into a world totally different from the one he had enjoyedearly yesterday morning as a daily blessing.

On a road strange to him, between the town in ashes at his back anda town yet to come that he envisioned afire, he witnessed, by morninglight, the emergence of a new world, a world more of darkness suffusedwith smoke than of light.

War cries and the detonation of bombs and firearms and screamsand curses and Catholic pleas to the Virgin Mary Mother of God andPuritan pleas to Christ Our Savior made that world known to him inits total darkness.

Over Radford’s body, at the start ignorant of carnal rapture, thecivil war between Puritans and Royalists, Roundheads and Cavaliers,raged back and forth in miniature across four more years. His beauty—”It’sthem eyes!”—cursed him. Resistance provoked the rage of manymen, submission inspired his own shame, and both exposed his faceand body to violence so extreme he awoke each time to the wonderthat he was still able to breathe. Exposures to extremes of cold and heat,to wind, rain, frost, and sufferance of starvation were enemies as vividas the men and women and older boys who abused him in every wayimaginable, and in many ways he could never have imagined. As balmyweather soothed his body and spirit from time to time, so kindness laida gentle hand only now and then upon his cringing body, his shiveringmind.

An old man once asked Radford whether in all his wanderings hehad ever clapped eyes on Cromwell.

“A soldier pointed General Cromwell out to me one day after theBattle of Naseby. I was limping. The General’s lip curled in disgust atthe sight of me.”

Having crossed over many moors and bridges and passed throughmany towns, Radford wandered into Southwark, responded late thatnight to the mysterious lure of a narrow street, over which houses hungin mist on both sides like arches, passed under the sign of a fish and anchor,and came to an opening that he took for a dock, saw high above,behind a parapet balustrade, a face he mistook for his father’s and oneach side the heads of men, eyes closed as in prayer, mouths open as ifin awe of the face of God, and then he turned away and stood under ashop sign, Golden Needle, gazing East by starlight upon a vast array ofships huddled together at anchor in harbor. Suddenly, seized, lifted, hewas flying out in the very air over swift water toward the ships.

He awoke in the morning on the stern of a ship. He stood up andlooked back West up a river nameless to him, at a strange cluster of highhouses that stretched over an open space, a sight that passed from viewas it dawned on him that what he saw bizarrely resembled a bridge. Outof pure wickedness, someone had tossed him into the water.

At sea a few days later, an old sailor who looked long past ready togo ashore for the final time told Radford that a waterman had pluckedhim from River Thames and sold him into service on this merchantship in the Pool bound for Venice.

Prisoner, slave, orphan, Radford realized, two years later, on his fifteenthbirthday, that what he suffered among Puritans and Royalists inthe civil war had served as a cruel apprenticeship to the miseries of dailylife at sea and even days at liberty in ports around the known world.

He told his story once and once only, to a shipmate on that birthday.”I had thought we were fervent Puritans, but I didn’t learn until ayear or so later that my father had played both sides, but lost his life tothe Royalists, and his son—myself—to both scourges.

“Cavaliers raped me one day, Puritan soldiers the next. An assholeon fire, a mouth gorged know no allegiance. Is that a stake he is shovingup my ass or his own cock? First one, then the other, raped repeatedly,until I am so bleeding raw and painful sore, I can’t tell the difference.I am cursed with a piercing imagination. As if living on the dark sideof the moon, that day I turned to the dark side of my nature and surrenderedto the experienced fact that, like all my tormentors and eventhose who betimes gave me comfort, the soul is a fiction. Soulless, Iresolved to take possession of my body and mind. I christened myselfwith the new name ‘Lucien,’ to mock God and Englishmen, and Ibaptized myself in my own piss as Lucifer’s very orphan, and was thusreborn, a new being.”

Lucien Redd’s listener exposed the most enormous erect cock thathad ever threatened him. He was the first man Lucien killed, and withhis bare hands.

* * *

In the secret Chronicles of Old London Bridge, possessor and locationnow unknown, kept from 1209, the year the stone version opened,to 1831, the year the dismantling of the much-modified bridge began,neither the name Radford Croft nor the name he adopted, Lucien Redd,appears. Nor the name of the boy, Morgan Wood, who suffered Lucienon the ship, nor of the two thirteen-year-old virgins, Blythe Archerand Gilda Shadwell, who survived plague and fire but suffered LucienRedd on London Bridge. Nor even the names of the Brotherhood ofthe Bridge Merchants who hired Lucien Redd. Not even the names ofthe Chroniclers themselves, not even the name of the old Chroniclerof the Bridge, Lloyd Braintree, missing during the plague of 1665, noreven his son, Daryl, who had exalted dreams of fame as a poet, but whofinally, reluctantly, and then obsessively took up his father’s task, noreven the last Chronicler, unknown, if one ever existed, who watchedthe demolition of the Bridge from November 22, 1831, to August1832.

The name of the architect of London Bridge, yes. Peter deColechurch. Mark it well. But no more than the name. No more thana single nib dip into ink.

Not until Daryl Braintree imagined and recorded what he discoveredmissing.

CHAPTER 2

DARYL BRAINTREE,POET-CHRONICLER OFLONDON BRIDGE

Night seeped into every crevice of the Bridge, night crept into thebrain of each inhabitant. Lloyd Braintree, reclusive Old Chronicler ofLondon Bridge, the heavy Chronicle ledger in his arms, fear of fadingmemory oppressing his mind, descended the five flights of stairs,passed through his antiquarian bookshop, into the Bridge roadway andwandered away from Nonesuch House, off the Bridge and into a countrystrange to him—the City of London—in search of young MorganWood among the ships in the Pool, to beg him not to sail away, to conferon him now, before God’s terrible voice speaks the word and “fire,””tempest,” or “plague” strikes the City once again and even the Bridgeat last and destroys the Chronicle, and with it, the venerated task ofkeeping the Chronicle.

As a child, Lloyd accidentally found his father’s secret Chronicleledger and committed each fabulous line of it to memory, a habit hecultivated even after his father, on his deathbed, handed the book itselfon to him, memorizing as he recorded each event. Lloyd’s now ill-fatedintention had been to dictate events after his father’s death, frommemory, an act of filial piety, a monument to Memory itself at first,to his son, the would-be poet, but then, certain of Daryl’s refusal tocarry forward the family tradition since 1209 when the first shops andhouses began to appear on the Bridge, his intention had become topass the Chronicle into the hands of Morgan Wood, who lived on theBridge and loved it, the events of the Bridge’s history in times of war,plague, fire, frost, and glory, that had been his provenance for fifty-fouryears, from 1611, the year of the publication of another history, theKing James Bible.

Forgetting that Morgan Wood had been gone seven years at sea,turning around and around and around on the wrong side of the Bridgefor going to the ships in the Pool, Lloyd Braintree recognized nothing,but felt in his very bones that he should be able to. Frenzied, he wanderedthe streets, searching for a familiar shop sign as for a familiar faceand, finding none, still looking up, as if searching now for familiar starsoutside his own high window, took one step down, slipped down OldSwan Steps into River Thames—his mind at that moment as blank asthe Chronicle’s pages for the future—into the mind of God.

* * *

The long needle in the Poet’s father’s hand, pulling up on the threadwhen sewing book bindings, often flashed in the light that fell just rightthrough the window to catch that long lifting movement at its zenith,the needle flashing in the hand by the light made mellow.

Now that his father was gone—no, only missing!—Daryl Braintreeregretted that his own attitude had, in effect, rendered his father gone,missing, far too many irretrievable days and evenings. Why, never havingknown the mother who died birthing him, had he not turned, evenmore often than one normally might, to the father? His father, he alwaysknew, was preoccupied with his book binding business, his customers,with history. But his shell was vulnerable. Anyone could seethat. Why had he not gently broken through to the man, the father,who was probably waiting inside for him?

And then the rupture, and the sudden substitute—the mere boy,Morgan Wood—not even a month after his father had confided toDaryl that he was the secret Chronicler of London Bridge, that whenhe must leave off, his fervent last wish was that his son would be eagerto take it up.

Remembering his father’s hesitant offer to pass on to him the chargeof keeping up London Bridge Chronicle and his own contemptuous rejectionof a task so mundane and mechanical, the Poet was conscious offeeling something akin to shame.

Expecting to live another ten years, at least, his father had then, thePoet knew, conferred that honor upon thirteen-year-old Morgan Wood,only days before the boy went to sea, originally for only five years, towork off his father’s debt to another tradesman on the Bridge, MisterClinkenbeard, the goldsmith. Gone now seven years.

Daryl knew he would never forget what his father calmly said tohim. “This noble task is not for a drunken, whoring, irreligious, cursingyoung poet, anyhow. I trust a boy’s love of the Bridge over the grudgingobligation of blood kin such as you.”

Having searched for his father for three months, exposing himselfto the plague that had begun in April when his father disappeared,having failed to find him, Daryl searched for his father’s Chronicleof London Bridge, supposing it to have been hidden somewhere intheir rooms in Nonesuch House, considering the possibility his fathermay have destroyed it, then have left the Bridge deliberately to wander.Lloyd Braintree never told anyone, neither his son nor the boy MorganWood, that the last fifty-four years of the Chronicle existed only in hismind, memorized, to be dictated to Morgan Wood and thus recordedin the ancient Chronicle book.

At sea, Morgan Wood wrote in his own journal and in the marginsof his books after the journal was full about nothing but LondonBridge, and would continue that ritual until Lucien came aboard.

Having failed to find the Chronicle, moved by the disappearance ofhis father and confined by the plague to Nonesuch, his famous houseon the Bridge, the young poet, hung over and reeking of bad whiskeyand night-long rutting, with a “Goddamn me for a fool,” visitedMorgan Wood’s father’s stationer’s shop under the sign of the Quill andMoon across the bridge roadway from the edifice that had been SaintThomas Chapel until its defacement during Henry VIII’s dissolution ofthe Catholic churches.

As Daryl stepped out of Phelan Wood’s shop onto the roadway, theleather-bound book of blank, fresh pages seemed heavier than it oughtto have, but by the time he had climbed the five flights of stairs to hisfather’s bedroom, his resolute intention had dissipated his sense of guiltand the book had lost its unnatural weight. He sat at his father’s deskby his window on the world and began to write, first “Dedicated to thememory of my Father, Lloyd Braintree,” and then:

In the beginning is the Word, but the Word can never, for theLondon Bridge Chronicler, be his name. We (with this initial act ofwriting, I am, after all, reluctantly, perforce, one of the legion of chroniclers,ancient and modern, hands moving all over the civilized worldas my hand moves) have been, for four centuries, twenty generations,a nameless brotherhood, just as the Chronicle is secret, hidden away, Imust imagine, because, I suppose, its scandals are included, with thedeath of each Chronicler, so that this one may be found somewhere onthe Bridge ages hence, or disappear into Irony should the Bridge fallto an act of God. And so, five months after my father’s disappearance,I have come to this day. This start. This first crossing on paper. Withsome fear of inadequacy, certainly.
(Continues…)Excerpted from LONDON BRIDGE IN PLAGUE AND FIRE by David Madden. Copyright © 2012 The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS.
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