He didn’t look at her, but set down the oar, steadying the boat long enough for Mary to settle onto the seat beside Ester. Then he climbed in, drank heavily from his flask, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, his gestures animated by some pent fury.
Standing on the bank, John pushed them off and leapt the boat’s gunwales, then settled on the narrow seat at the front. The river carried them.
Mary was staring at the current. Her eyes had regained a hard focus, the effects of the belladonna drops gone. A front lock of her hair had uncurled, and she chewed slowly on its end.
The boat traffic traveling upriver had grown heavier during their outing, as though some unseen tap had opened and London begun to empty of its people even as Ester and her companions returned to it. Some of the barges and skiffs they passed were heavily laden with hastily packaged household possessions, even fine furnishings.
“See the rolled tapestries stowed aboard!” John said, gesturing at one boat. “The river’s full of the uppermost sorts fleeing, and they’ll be sending back their servants to load up their households into wagons. I’ll guess the roads will be full of carts.”
Ester didn’t know what made her speak thus, but she didn’t seem able to help herself—something pushed her to be sure of John. “Is your family of the uppermost sorts?” she asked.
He laughed uncomfortably. “Yes,” he said.
But Thomas hooted. “You are a little fury.”
Mary continued to look toward the deep center of the river.
Thomas hoisted his oars out of the water and rested them on the gunwales, letting the current carry the boat. “Little silver-haired fury with the great gray eyes,” he said. “You’re either a fairy or a witch, and John and I disagree as to the correct answer.” He drained his flask, then spoke again, a bite in his words that Ester had not heard before. “Your John is indeed the uppermost sort, Ester. As am I, if you wish to know. Perhaps Mary doesn’t know that as well—that I have prospects of my own, elsewhere.” He looked only at Ester as he spoke—she could make no sense of it. “Your John there was to be the third in the line of family judges. He might still—only John fancies himself a man of poetry and hasn’t yet settled his mind on whether to throw away his fortunes alongside the rest of us in London, or go safely back to his uppermost sort of people. Tell me, John, has your mother written yet to beg you return from dirty, diseased London?”
From the seat where he watched the river, John turned. His cheeks were pink but his voice steady. “I’m my own master,” he said.
For several minutes, they floated downriver in silence. As they neared the city, bits of wood and paper and offal appeared once more in the current, and here and there excrement. After a time Thomas resumed rowing.
Without turning her gaze, Mary addressed Ester quietly enough so the men could not hear. “My father writes that he won’t return to London until after the sickness lifts.”
“Doesn’t he ask you to join him?”
“He asks,” said Mary. “But I won’t go. He has a new lady.”
“But”—Ester shook her head, puzzled. “Your father’s new lady doesn’t wish you to join them?”
Mary spoke haughtily. “I don’t go because I don’t wish it,” she said. But behind those words some other unvoiced reason seemed to hide.
The wall of the city loomed, and they were within London once more. Ester twisted to look back at the green hills, but already they were vanishing, occluded by the river’s thick traffic. The heavy odor of smoke wafted over the water. She closed her eyes to hold the colors: the green of moss and grass and tree, the deer’s soft brown coat.
“Thomas.” John’s voice roused her. “You’re passing the stair.” Ester opened her eyes to see John pointing—the set of stone steps where they’d acquired the boat was even now receding in their wake.
Yet Thomas rowed as though he hadn’t heard. He kept them at the center of the river, in a current thick with paper rubbish and some soft floating black mounds whose origins Ester didn’t wish to know.
“Thomas!” John called.
Mary’s eyes were on Thomas now, and her upper teeth bit so firmly into her lip, Ester was surprised it didn’t bleed.
They were approaching the bridge. Even from this distance, Ester could hear the water boiling under the starlings.
John turned on his seat, his arms braced on the sides of the boat, and cried to Thomas over the din. “You don’t mean to shoot the bridge, man? Not with ladies on board.”
Thomas did not answer.
“It’s not done!”
Thomas steered them to the center of the river. Ester felt the boat quicken as a swifter current took it.
“Thomas.” John half-rose in the boat. His voice, lowered, took on an urgent note. “Take that hazard with your own life, not theirs. Take us to a stair.”
The traffic of boats about them had thinned. Those heading downriver were docking to discharge passengers, leaving only the boatmen to brave the rapids that crashed between the bridge’s starlings. Some of the boatmen, rough-looking men, glanced curiously their way as they joined the queue of boats in the center of the river. On the Southwark bank, a small knot of people had stopped to watch them. Ester knew why. The bridges’ starlings were many and some of the passages between were blocked by mills, and the restriction of the water’s course so raised the river’s level on the bridge’s upriver side, and so lowered it on the downriver, that a waterfall coursed beneath the bridge. Boats attempting to pass beneath London Bridge smashed on the starlings; they smashed inside the bridge’s stone arches; those that made it through might capsize in the precipitous drop on the other side. It was a passage dared only by practiced boatmen.
On shore, someone was pointing at Mary and Ester and shouting something unintelligible.
“Thomas!” John yelled again. But Ester could see it was too late.
Thomas was working the oars with a harsh smile. “Let’s see how this boat can dance, shall we?” Mary gripped Ester’s forearm so tightly that Ester cried out, as with a grunt Thomas gave another vicious pull at the oars. “Shall we put a few scratches in the man’s precious vessel?”
“Thomas!” Mary screamed—but he was intent on the starlings ahead. Now the water was a black glassy chute rushing them forward, and Thomas could not have turned them back if he’d wished to. Ester could see the opening he’d chosen: a dark, churning channel of wet rock and spume. Above them the bridge loomed with its tiered shops: a small city perched over the roiling river, yet its sounds were obliterated by the rushing of water. Ester had an instant to view the muted buildings, their glinting windows, their smoke-haze—a last glimpse of daylight. And Thomas’s face, a hot fury settled there. John, thrown forward in the boat. John, clinging to the boat’s gunwales at a strange angle as the bow dipped steeply, then the stern flung itself high, and they pitched into the dark—Ester’s chest slamming the boat’s floor and Mary’s weight a blow atop her. Water whipped, cuffing Ester’s cheek as the boat crashed, then jolted, one way then another, and she thought, Now is my death. The pang of regret she felt shocked her.
A grinding, a reckoning with unseen stone, a cold flood. And then, they slipped.
A long slide, into bright, bobbing light.
The skiff half-turned and listed as the current shoved it onward. Then, improbably, it righted, low in the water.
The world returned to her: color and foam and, last of all, sound. As the boat lurched in wave after wave of the bridge’s spew, Ester helped Mary raise her head to vomit over the side of the boat.
Thomas and John were bailing with their hands. Two boatmen in nearby skiffs rode close. One was laughing. The other, grave, tossed a bucket for bailing. “’Sblood man, what provokes you to take ladies beneath the bridge?”
Thomas stopped his work for a moment. “These,” he said, “aren’t ladies.”