I made my first night’s supper on the wharf, putting my back to unloading ships full of cargo: wheat and barley, woolens and hides, waiting to be shipped to England and beyond. There had never been the likes of this fortress, so I thought, with eight angled towers, thirty feet or higher, braced walls punched through with murder holes, gates, arrow loops, and spy corridors. To look upon it was to know the shame, and the pride, of being a Welshman—shame that an English fort sentineled our fairest port, pride that it had to be built so high and so stout to keep our great-grandsires from overrunning it again.
I made my bed in the shack of an old crippled seaman named Darius in a court off Newgate Street hard by the jail. For weeks I bent my back to loading off bales by the outer postern. I lifted those bales to my shoulders and walked like a mule up King’s Head Street to High Street, day upon day. Mornings as I walked to the wharf, I carried the old lame man on my back to the western wall of the castle. At the foot of Eagle Tower he would sit, there to beg the day through.
The soldiers posted in the tower would greet us by calling down, “Look, there is Darius with his Black Dog.” For idleness sake, they threw at us roots and stalks and once a bottle which cracked open my skull. Seeing the blood, Darius called up through his fist, “My Black Dog against any two of ye. A shillin’ a throw-down, ye damnable whores. Tonight on Market Green.”
By that evening I had lifted a quarter ton of iron and a hundredweight of wool from two ships and had walked six miles to a nearby town and back again. The king’s men had gathered between the market sheds and the smithy shop when I came walking onto the green, Darius on my back. I placed him on the ground and turned to face them. There were eight gray-coated soldiers, but seeing me up close, they quickly sent for a bigger man. The man they found was near as tall as me, with the bulk of unkind livelihood, but he was spindle-shanked and angled poorly for hand-to-hand. He spit into his hands and made a run for me, grinning, showing the whites of his eyes. There was some grunting and circling about and I would have put him gently to ground, but for the knee he put in my groin. I broke his arm before I brought him to his knees and pounded his skull with my fists. The rest of the men backed off a ways and soon moved, grumbling, on to their suppers. One man stayed, a hardened corporal, a Welshman named Jones, who paid Darius his wager and led us to Green Gate Street for a pie and ale.
Laughing, Jones watched us eat like the starving men we were, and he said in Welsh, “You’re a fierce dog, all right. Black Dog is a name the Englishers fear well. It’s the stalking spirit of Newgate Prison, a dungeon in London dug deep into the ground and full of horrors. No light, swarming with vermin and other creeping things, the condemned lying like swine on the ground, howling and roaring. And when the Black Dog comes on paws of madness and despair, sweet death is welcome.”
The corporal gave us more ale and recounted his memories of London. “It is the fairest of cities to those who have the mettle. It matters not whether you are Welsh, Cornish, or Scots. All are welcome. Even the damned Irish can find a motherly teat to feed their base and ugly natures. The city is like a great forge that takes in pig iron and puts out fine instruments of every kind, instruments of peace and war. It’s a fire-filled, loud, boastful place. Hammers beating in one yard. Pots clinking in another. And tumbling bodies of water turned by wheels, rushing through the heart of it. Church bells clamoring at all hours. Wagon wheels beating the coppered streets into an alchemist’s dream. Dogs and horses and men braying for dominance. The huzzas of soldiers out for a drink and a piss at all hours of the night.
“And the women, Great God in Heaven, man. The whores are like nothing you’ve ever seen. Not like these little kitchen morts here, girls who will lift their skirts for the smallest brass mirror. The doxies of London have great silken thighs and breasts to make a man cry for his ma. Even the Welsh milkmaids are game for a proper backwards toss. All a man needs is his infantry wage and voice enough to say, ‘After you, my dear.’ ”
Jones walked with us along Castle Ditch Street to our nightly hovel, Darius falling to sleep as I carried him, snoring wetly against my back. When we approached King’s Gate, Jones said, “Here I must leave you, Thomas. I have a mind to billet you into the fort so you can serve the king, and make me a handsome sum throwing to ground every last one of the Englisher bastards. But you are Welsh, as I am Welsh, and I would say to you as a friend—or as a father—might: walk, ride, or crawl from this place and get you to London. Live in this place and you’ll die a wharf rat like Darius here, or lose your nose from the French disease got off some dock whore. The king takes into his own bodyguards able men of great height and strength, which, by God, you are such a one. Make yourself known. I will give you a packet for a captain that I’ve served with in the trained bands. He is Welsh and will be glad for another countryman.”
He bade me good night and knocked heavily with his fist on the gate. When the night watch opened to him, he called out over his shoulder, “The world’s gone all English, Thomas, and Welsh e’now is but a barley-bread tongue.”
By midmorning the following day I had my letter from the corporal and some small coins pressed into my hand. It was in the first days of April when I left the city walls, and at the first mile marker, I peered back through the laggardly fog at the towers of Caernarvon and for a time felt myself to be at liberty.
Past thirty miles, I walked through the great castle of Conwy and then, in a needling shower, pushed my way into the vale of Clwyd. I worked from farm to farm, fallowing and herding, pressing on to the border lowlands in Denbigshire, where I lambed forty lambs for a great lordly house. But I burned to see London and so, not wanting to end my days in Wales, I passed beyond the fair pasturelands of Wales into England.
I made my way among the white chalk downs and gleaming hills of the Cotswold farmers and there my path crossed a brawny, pock-faced man, loaded with the hides of rabbit and lamb. He offered to show me the roads into London if I would stand his guard during the night. By noontide the third day we had traveled down Tyburn Street to the gallows, the westward portal to London.
The Tyburn gallows were three great posts joined topmost with stout beams. They rose up, tall and menacing, from the middle of the road, so that any cart or footman must pass around them. So large were they that three prison carts could have been backed into them at one time. There, dangling from the beams, were three bodies, freshly hanged: a man, a woman, and a boy. A few village women were yet gathering up their baskets of food, lingering long after the last of the struggling feet had stopped. Their children played in and out of the hanging posts, stuffing themselves with nuts and singing, “Hangman, hangman, one, two, three. Hangman, hangman, you can’t catch me.”
The hides trader took his leave of me at a crossroads and, pointing the way, told me how to find my way to King’s Gate. But because I was threadbare, I was then kicked and beaten to the stables, and finally to the king’s coal pits behind the Scottish Yard. Because of my size, I was set to loading and carrying coal for the cook fires hard by the Thames. Day upon day I corded wood and off-loaded barrels for the small-beer brewery. I slept crooked in a stairwell under the bake house and fought off wharf rats as great as bull mastiffs to keep what little bread I was thrown.