There were shards of terracotta, smoothed by the river, all the same thickness, many with a hole in them about the size of a pencil. Old roof tiles, I thought. The hole was for tying the tile onto the battens. Maybe very old. From Wiseman’s time? From Wiseman’s house?

I picked one up. A bulge along one side recorded where someone had flattened it against a straight edge. The inside of the hole was grooved where a rough stick had been pushed through the clay. Feeling guilty, I slipped one into my pocket. There could be some special ordinance that forbade the pocketing of historical shards from the banks of the navigable River Thames.

I made my way between the muddy rocks and grit to the water’s edge. Down there I could see what I hadn’t from the steps—that the water was running along the side of a thick beam, the edge of some ancient dock that over the years had rotted away to this line of black wood, inches above the water.

As if someone had nudged me, I suddenly realised, he was here. This, right here, where I’m standing, is where it happened.

I stared at the wood: hard, shiny with slime. How old was it? How long did it take timber in the Thames to turn to stone? If it was as old as it looked, it could have been where Wiseman’s foot rested as he called up, ‘Damn your eyes, Ned, why did you not give me a hand with the lighter?’ But perhaps wood decayed quickly on the tide-line of the polluted Thames. Perhaps this was only a hundred years old. Or fifty.

Maybe I should save my awe.

But what did it really matter if Wiseman’s feet stepped on this exact piece of wood? Anything in the world has been trodden on by someone or other now dead and gone. The dust blowing around London must still contain molecules of Dickens’ whiskers.

The tide was extremely low. This slimy wood, those broken bits of roof tile—all of it would usually be under the water. At almost any tide but this, there would have been nothing to see but brown water lapping against the top of these steps. By chance I was there at the one moment when the curtain of water was drawn back.

Later, the writers I was travelling with had a drink together and I got out the bit of roof tile to show them. It went from hand to hand, everyone’s thumb smoothing the surface, everyone trying to fit their finger into the hole. ‘Is this all?’ someone asked. ‘You didn’t find anything else?’

Melissa looked at it for a long time, turning it over and over as if she were searching for something. She handed it back to me. ‘So where will you go next?’

8
Lightermen

Not far from Three Cranes Wharf was the Watermen’s Hall, home of the Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames. It was on St-Mary-at-Hill, a short steep street near Billingsgate fish market.