Читать книгу The Silence - Joss Stirling - Страница 16

The turf peeled away revealing the black soil beneath. In the first spadeful – not that anyone noticed – was a scrap of ribbon let fall by a careless maid who once attended the fair on this very spot. She should never have trusted the promises of her sailor. Next came a penny from Sir Thomas Wyatt’s pocket. He dropped it when he pulled out gold coins to bribe his flagging supporters as his rebellion against Mary Tudor faltered. Further digging turned over the blood, sweat and tears of yet more thwarted revolutionaries: Lord Audley, the Yorkists, Jack Cade, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. Over the centuries, so many came to dream their impossible dreams on Blackheath’s open space, lost in blue sky thinking that the capital was theirs for the taking. They believed that this was the day when society would change for the better. They were, as axe and sword went on to prove, mistaken.

The spades dug down to more primitive times. The cutting edge severed in two a discarded leather sole from a Dane’s boot. That bloody-handed man abandoned it, a casualty of the long march from Canterbury where they’d done away with the archbishop.

Go deeper yet, I begged from the rolled paper in which I gestated, tucked under the architect’s arm. I need my foundations to reach further back if I am to stand steady.

One digger unearthed a fragment of a stone age tool. The pick was fashioned from antlers by a practical man squatting in his round house on a cold winter’s evening. Chucking it aside, not caring what it was, the labourers carried on until they passed through the thin level of human habitation and reached down to that of the terrible lizards.