Book Description
But the fragile balance of Abbie's world is set to change, when Owen moves into the flat above. Newly separated, Owen too is dealing with the sudden loss of family life. Missing his children desperately, he becomes drawn to his lonely neighbour, intrigued by her sad story. Could Owen and his children's arrival prove the catalyst that will enable Abbie to let go of Nick, heal, and move on?
But Abbie and Nick's marriage was not the perfect union she remembers. Abbie is finding it increasingly hard to paper over the cracks in her memories. And the intrusion of Owen and his children will force her to confront feelings and memories that have long been frozen...
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Introduction
THE SEABIRD SHORE
EDWARDUS PRIMUS SCOTTORUM MALLEUS HIC EST PACTUM SERVA
Inscription on the tomb of Edward I, Westminster Abbey
('Edward I Hammer of the Scots Keep the Faith)
Edward I, the ruthless 'Hammer of the Scots', persecutor of the Jews and conqueror of the Welsh, was stricken with grief. It was early December, and Edward rode at the head of a melancholy procession carrying a coffin across the streams and through the mud of the rutted track to his royal palace at Westminster. They were on the last leg of their journey, and could see the great north window, steeples, arches and flying buttresses of Westminster Abbey that had been raised at vast expense by his father, Henry III. The Abbey loomed, grey and austere, above the thatched roofs of a hamlet on the muddy banks of the Thames near Westminster that had been known since Saxon times as Enedehithe - Seabird Shore. They were bringing home the body of Edward's devoted Queen, Eleanor of Castile, to her last resting place behind the Abbey's high altar. Eleanor had been with Edward on the Crusades, borne him fifteen children, and had been a source of strength to the King throughout his years of carrying the crown of England, but she had succumbed to 'winter sickness', probably malarial fever contracted on a summer visit to Gascony. On a progress north, almost certainly to pray for relief from her illness at the shrine of St Hugh in Lincoln Cathedral, Eleanor's condition suddenly worsened and she died in the house of a knight in the village of Harby near Lincoln on 28 November 1290. She was forty-nine and had prepared for death, issuing instructions for her heart to be given to the care of the Black Friars in London.
After the journey home, her body was entombed in the holiest corner of the Abbey, by the shrine of St Edward, the King known for his piety as Edward the Confessor. Henry III believed in the power of St Edward, and though the name was no longer fashionable, being Old English, he had christened his eldest son after the saint as a sign of his devotion. In 1254, Edward had been married to Eleanor to seal an alliance with her Spanish family to settle a dispute over Henry III's lands in Gascony, on the west coast of France. She was a few weeks short of her thirteenth birthday and he had just turned fifteen but Edward had grown deeply to love his wife and at the places where her funeral cortege stopped each night of their journey, he ordered a cross to be erected to her memory, twelve in all. The last of the Eleanor crosses was erected at Charing, the hamlet within sight of Westminster by the Strand that was to become known as Charing Cross and the starting point for all measurements from London.
The muddy road from Charing to Westminster along which her body travelled for the last time is now known as Whitehall. Her tomb lies in a dark corner of the Abbey but the gloom is lifted by a glowing effigy of Eleanor, cast in bronze and covered in gold by London goldsmith William Torel in 1291. It shows Eleanor as she was in her younger life, a slender and beautiful woman lying serenely with her hair cascading over a pillow covered in the lions and castles of Leon and Castile, her hand gently holding the neck cord of her cloak. When Edward died in 1307, aged sixty-eight, from dysentery in a windswept settlement at Burgh by Sands, Cumbria, his body too was brought back to Westminster to lie in his coronation robes near his wife by the shrine to Edward the Confessor. Even today, the austerity of Edward's plain black sarcophagus is striking, but it is more famous for the inscription: 'EDWARDUS PRIMUS SCOTTORUM MALLEUS HIC EST PACTUM SERVA' - Edward I Hammer of the Scots Keep the Faith. The flaking words, which are barely legible now, were probably painted on the side of Edward's tomb in the sixteenth century, but it is believed they repeated an earlier message. It is normally translated as 'Keep the Faith' but according to Marc Morris in his biography of Edward it may be more accurately rendered as 'Keep the Troth' for it was more than an exortation to remain faithful to their cause. The year before Edward died, he had suffered a series of reverses at the hands of the Scots and held a feast in the great hall at Westminster at which his supporters swore an oath to avenge the rebellion of the Scottish leader Robert Bruce. The words on his tomb are a warning to keep that vow.
When Edward laid his wife's body in her tomb, Westminster was already a place of ancient power. It had been the centre of England's ecclesiastical, judicial and political power for 300 years but its origins extended beyond the conquest by the Normans and beyond the Saxon settlements along the river. There had been a religious settlement at Thorney Island since AD 600, and probably before that it was the site of a Roman pagan temple. The river at Westminster was wider and more sluggish than it is today, which made it fordable and a favourite crossing place for travellers who may have paused at Thorney Island, one of the few dry points on the marshy north bank of the Thames, to pay their religious homage, before taking the track around the bends in the river to the Saxon market town and port, Lundenwic, or north to the old Roman road, Watling Street. Thorney Island was enclosed by two tributaries of the Tyburn River, creating the ground on which the Abbey and the Palace of Westminster now stand. Peter Ackroyd, the expert on the history of London, suggests nearby Tothill Fields was an ancient centre for ritualized power, and around 960 a small Benedictine monastery was founded by King Edgar and St Dunstan at the place regarded by fearful travellers who paid their tributes there as 'terrible Westminster', for the sense of holy terror which they felt in this hallowed place.
King Edward, after a religious vision, moved his entire court from Winchester to a new palace at Thorney Island and in 1060 ordered the existing abbey to be reconstructed in the Romanesque style, with rounded arches and massive towers, which have survived in the undercroft in the cloisters, now the Abbey's museum, once used as the domestic quarters for the monks. Its height was limited by its semicircular arches, the extent of the architectural technology known to the Romans, but it must still have awed the Saxon people who lived in modest houses by the river. It became known as the 'West Minster', to distinguish it from the 'East Minster', St Paul's in the city. The invention of load-bearing flying buttresses and pointed archways led to the creation of the great soaring Abbey we see today with its pinnacles, towering walls, windows and arches pointing to heaven. It was started in 1245 for Henry III in an age of great cathedral building which saw Gothic architecture taken to a high art in France, with cathedrals at Amiens, Evreux and Chartres. Henry III dedicated the rebuilding of West Minster to its creator, Edward the Confessor, who had reinforced its ancient powers with holy relics including sand from Mount Sinai, soil from Calvary, pieces of the cross, blood from Christ's side, St Paul's finger, and hair from St Peter. Edward was too ill to attend the reconsecration of his great Abbey on 28 December 1065 and died in January 1066, to become the first in a long line of monarchs to have their bones buried at Westminster. Harold Godwinson seized the crown, but by Christmas 1066 he too was dead, killed by an arrow in the eye at the battle against the Norman invaders by the coast near Hastings. Remnants of King Harold's defeated army may well have splashed across the ford in the river at Westminster on their stocky Saxon mounts before the Norman army of William arrived in full cry to make the Conqueror the first monarch in an almost unbroken line lasting a thousand years to be crowned in the Confessor's Abbey.
With the Normans came the first recognizable vestiges of the civil service that was to become synonymous with the rutted track called Whitehall. The houses along the track to Westminster that became known as King Street also quickly grew with its importance. A settlement of eighty-six households was listed in the Domesday Book of 1086. William Rufus built the great hall at Westminster, and the Abbey monks granted the land along the river at Enedehithe to Gerin, an administrator to Henry II. His house and land passed to Henry II's Treasurer Richard FitzNigel, one of the first of the civil servants of Whitehall. FitzNigel recorded that he used a chequered cloth like an abacus on a table five feet by ten to count taxes due to the King from the accounts set down in the Domesday Book. It is the reason the chief finance minister at the Treasury in Whitehall is still known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Hubert de Burgh, one of the most powerful men in England (men who were to make Westminster and Whitehall he power centre of England for the next thousand years), built his house close to the royal court by the Thames on the land where the Ministry of Defence now stands. De Burgh was King John's chief minister and powerbroker with the barons. He remained loyal to the King, but persuaded him to sign the treaty limiting the Sovereign's powers, known as Magna Carta. When de Burgh died in 1243 he left his house near Westminster to the Black Friars as a penance for not fulfilling a pledge to go on a Crusade, though he could never be accused of cowardice - he had fought the French to a standstill at the sieges of Chinon Castle in France and Dover Castle. It was granted by the Black Friars to the See of York, and would be home to successive Archbishops of York for the next three centuries as York Place. King Street and the Strand, linking Charing to the old city of London, were about 200 yards from the river, to avoid flooding, and became the site of other ecclesiastical residences, including those of the Bishops of Durham, Norwich and Arundel. As the power of the church declined, these houses were taken by courtiers, including the Dukes of Buckingham and Northumberland, whose titles survive today in the street names of the area. York Place gr...
