Chapter 2: What the Thames Remembers

The Thames froze in 1683, and she stood on it.

This is not a figure of speech. This is not the soft impressionism of a woman who has lived long enough that memory becomes metaphor. She stood on the ice with her boots on it and felt the river underneath her, still moving, dark and tremendous beneath the locked surface, and she thought: this is what it is to be contained. To continue in the dark under the thing that has stopped you. The frost fair was already assembling itself around her — the printing presses and the ox roasts, the coaches running Southwark to the Temple, all the extraordinary mundane theatre of human beings doing what human beings do, which is to domesticate the impossible the moment they find themselves standing on it. Someone was roasting chestnuts. The smell of it came to her across the ice.

She remembers thinking, not for the first time and not for the last, that she admired them tremendously. The way they made the disaster into commerce. The way they would always, always, find a way to set up a stall.