Helen Humphreys - The Frozen Thames

Copyright 2007 by Helen Humphreys

Cloth edition published 2007
Emblem edition published 2008

Emblem is an imprint of McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
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All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Humphreys, Helen, 1961
The frozen Thames / Helen Humphreys.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-481-9

1. Thames River (England) History Fiction.
2. London (England) History Fiction. I. Title.

PS8565.U558F76 2008 C813.54 C2008-900904-5

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

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v3.1

In its long history, the river Thames
has frozen solid forty times.

These are the stories of that frozen river.

M atilda is under siege. For more than three months now shes been barricaded inside this castle in Oxford while her cousin, Stephen, circles the ramparts with his men, waits for slow starvation to force her out and into his capture.

They have eaten all the horses and burnt all the furniture. They have retreated through pockets of cold, to a small room without windows at the base of the tower. At night they huddle together like dogs.

Matilda is Queen of England, but her cousin has stolen the Crown, and now she is locked into battle with him. She has been locked into battle with him for almost seven years.

Stephen would never have been able to race to London to claim the Crown if Matilda had been in England at the time, not stranded in France with her child husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, who everyone agreed had descended from the daughter of Satan. She would never have had to marry a fourteen-year-old if her brother, William, had lived, instead of drowning in the Channel in 1120 on the White Ship, rowed across by drunken men who, in their drunkenness, hit a rock and holed the boat. Their father, Henry I, King of England, was so grief-stricken that he never smiled again, and decided to pass on the throne to his daughter, Matilda, even though it was unheard of for a woman to inherit the Crown and govern the realm.

Matilda would never have had to think about being Queen if her father hadnt died suddenly. Her father wouldnt have died suddenly if hed listened to everyone around him and not eaten such a huge helping of stewed lamprey eels.

It is night at Oxford Castle. Usually Matilda makes the rounds, visits her men slouched by the narrow windows, their longbows leaned up against the stone, but tonight she is too weary, cannot think of anything appropriate to cheer them further onwards in her service, towards their very deaths, so she goes instead into the interior of the castle to find her maid, who will prepare her for sleep.

Her maid, Jane, is not in the room at the base of the tower. Matilda finds her out in the courtyard, staring up at the sky, Matildas nightshirt slung over her arm.

Look, maam, she says, as soon as she sees the Queen. Its snowing.

So it is. Big, lacy flakes that swim down out of the darkness decorate the shoulders of the Queens maid.

Maam, says Jane. The snow is the same colour as your nightshirt.

Matilda takes her three strongest knights. They make a rope out of their leggings and they wait until the hour is the darkest, the snow is the thickest. They are lowered to the ground from one of the castle windows by the men they have left behind. All four of them are dressed in nightshirts and they move like ghosts, softly and slowly, towards the edge of the river.

The Thames is frozen. Matilda saw it freeze. These days and days of the siege, she has spent a good deal of time looking out at the enemy camped on the edge of the river. A week ago the temperature dropped, and now Stephens men walk up and down the ice on horseback. They have even built two fires there, near the shore.

In order to get to the other side of the river, Matilda and her three men will have to walk between those signal fires. They move in single file, a man in front, then Matilda, two men behind her. They move slowly and carefully, do not speak, keep close together.

Through the swirling snow, Matilda can see the glow of the fires, can hear the voices of Stephens army. If they can just pass between those fires they will cross to the middle of the river, out past the sentries, and from there they can walk to the other side. Matilda is equally opposed and equally supported by the people of Britain, and there will be someone who will help them, give them horses so they can ride to Wallingford, where her ally, Brien FitzCount, is waiting.

They are almost at the fires when a sentry on horseback comes towards them. They instantly stop, locked into position, heads bowed against their chests. They are wearing white bonnets and white nightgowns. The snow erases their bodies, but perhaps it doesnt completely erase their outlines, for the sentry halts before them. Matilda can hear the horse breathing, can hear it snort. The horse knows that theyre there. She raises her head a little, can make out the upright figure of the man in the saddle. She sees him lift his arm, thinks he is going for his sword, but he blesses himself instead, blesses himself and rides right past them. He must have thought that they were ghosts.

In that moment when Matilda is standing perfectly still, trying to be invisible, she realizes that this is what shes learned from the three months in the castle. Shes learned how to watch and wait. Shes learned how to choose what burns, how much heat there will be in her maids sewing box, in the wooden bowl that used to hold apples. She saw the river freeze, that moment when the water took hold of itself and wouldnt let go. All this time she thought the siege was chaos, but she can see now that it was really calm masquerading as chaos. If she gets away, the control she thinks she has in riding to Wallingford, in going back into battle against Stephen that will prove to be the real chaos.

Matilda holds her breath. She lets it go. The horseman has passed and the knight in front of her has begun to move them, once more, across the frozen river. There is nothing to do but go forward.

W hen Thomas goes into the storeroom behind the alehouse, he sees immediately that they are in trouble, rushes upstairs to wake his brother.