[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

being celebrated today. Little girls were bustling about the street inside
great flags of clothing. Boys were tripping over the arms of suits. The
mothers were out on their doorsteps as well, and they looked brighter than
usual. One was wearing a puffy-sleeved dress of candystripes. Another was
absently polishing a vase with a black feather boa. Ignoring my usual routine
of visits, I headed straight to Master
Mather's house, but sensed as I did so a guilty withdrawing, a closing of
doors. I looked up at his familiar frontage, numbered but resolutely unnamed.
A house, once you come to know it, needs to change little for it to appear
abandoned. I rapped his door, and heard the place echo as it had never done
when it had been filled with the laundry which his neighbours had now
pillaged. The notice pinned to it was rubber-
stamped with the cross and C of the Gatherers' Guild.
It wasn't so unusual for a tenant to be thrust out from the terraces of
Houndsfleet, and the reaction amongst the neighbours  be the cause trollism,
disease, bankruptcy or some arcane infringement of their guild's regulations 
was almost always the same mixture of horror and relief.
He's gone, ain't he? Pity, but wasn't our fault .. . Good riddance, I say.
Poor old blighter . . . Never did much wrong, did he?
And

Suppose he'll be off to St Blate's .. .
If Yorkshire and Brownheath had Northallerton, London had St
Blate's. In every sense, it was an institution, almost as famous as
Newgate or Bedlam and celebrated in the sort of bitterly lamenting musical
hall songs which were sung late-on in the last drunken house, although few
people ever visited it.
Number 19 Sunrise Crescent was now called
Hill House, although it stood on no hill, and I wondered today as I banged the
new brass knocker and a little boy scurried off to get his mum along the
familiar but strangely empty hall if its new residents had been told about
Master
Page 100
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Mather. I certainly wasn't going to do so. And here came Mistress
Williams, wiping the suds from her hands and scarcely looking at me as she
gave me a damp ball of money and closed the door. I ticked my collection book
and walked slowly off. After the vanished fog and that brief sense of sunny
warmth, London had drifted into one of those becalmed days which seem to hang
beyond time and season, when the hours extend and the traffic passes and the
faces go by and street turns into endless street without anything ever
changing. Summer, this coming New Age, seemed impossibly far away as my
satchel bit and blistered. Although my round was less than half-done, I turned
towards the estate office.
Beyond the traffic, beyond the iron bars of a counter which I was never
permitted to cross, the place had the characteristic smell, part sweat, part
paper, part warm metal, of well-handled money. The stuff was there in drawers,
piled up in gleaming columns, bound up in rubber bands and weighed in scales
like so much sugar as I tipped more of it from my satchel into the worn wooden
trough.
`Hey! That's not properly sorted!' A polished-trousered guildsmen scurried out
of the gloom. But I'd had enough  part of me even wished that I'd kept the
money, although I knew that the prison hulks or the gallows awaited those
marts who risked such a thing. I threw down the satchel and collection book
for good measure, and banged my way back out through the swing door.
Left with the small freedom of an afternoon to fill, and with no particular
way of earning any money, I toyed with the idea of going back along Sheep
Street to Black Lucy's basement, but my article still seemed stubbornly lodged
in an interminable first sentence. Contend what? And who cared? My steps, in
any case, were leading me in a direction I'd long considered and put off
taking. There was an odd profusion of hardware shops on this south-eastern
edge of Clerkenwell, and the pans and spades and buckets hung outside them
banged in the thin wind.
Otherwise, the streets were quiet, and I wandered semi-aimlessly along avenues
and cul-de-sacs until I saw twin weathercock turrets pricking above the
chimneys. Following three sides of a bluebrick wall, I reached large
iron-bound gates over-arched by soot-blackened stone which bore the dim
impression of a cross and a C. St Blate's. I pulled a bell chain and a little
door set within the larger one squeaked open. Still fully expecting, and more
than half hoping, that I'd be sent away, I began to explain to the woman who
poked her plump brown face through that I'd known, albeit remotely, a certain
Master Mather. But Warderess
Northover practically bundled me in and beamed back at me as she led me down
hoops of tiled corridor, her sporran of keys bouncing. And perhaps  a slide
of gates, a slam of doors, a faint roar of voices  I'd like to inspect their
little museum? She flung back shutters and tugged off dustsheets in a long
room filled with dangling bits of iron and glass cases. Nothing was too much
trouble.
`And you will sign the visitors' book before you go?'
She hefted antique chains which could have lifted a drawbridge.
More ingenious were these changeling restraints from the Second Age, which
seem  go on, feel, master, you shouldn't just take my word for it 
light as a feather in comparison. This little silver hoop at the end, scarcely
larger than an earring, was inserted through the client's tongue.
Things of steel and leather and iron. The propped-open pages of logbooks,
foxed and splattered with what might have been nothing more than flydirt. And
photographs, woodcuts, engravings along the walls much like those I had once
glimpsed in that book in Bracebridge library.
Ironmaster Gardler here, he was one of their most famous clients. We gazed at [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]