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commanded Tom’s attention for the last fifty paces. ‘I expect you must come to know your neighbours very well, eh?’ he said. Tom knew his brother was trying to cheer him and felt embarrassed for sulking.
    ‘Some of them must go back eighty feet or more,’ he said, shaking his head in wonder. Most were two or three storeys high, the ground floors serving as shop fronts for cobblers, bakers, grocers, butchers, fishmongers, weavers, tailors, leatherworkers and smiths. Above the shops and clustering in the yards and alleys off the main street were the residential dwellings, home to the rougher sorts, Tom thought, from the looks of the characters lingering under dripping eaves, clouds of grey pipe smoke billowing from beneath tilted brims.
    A little further on he tugged on Mun’s cape, nodding towards two rakers who, their brimming refuse cart abandoned, were roaring drunk, swinging ale jacks and yelling abuse at passersby. Nearby, a well-dressed man was paying a black-toothed whore, and in the next corner an old woman, her sopping white hair so thin you could see her sore-covered scalp, sat with her face turned up to the rain, laughing like a lunatic.
    ‘Why does Father stay all the way out here?’ Tom asked in a voice Sir Francis, who was striding out in front, would not hear. They were into the commercial heart of Southwark now, where St Margaret’s Hill became Blackman Street, from which branched countless alleys, yards, and dead-end lanes.
    Mun shrugged, shaking his head at an urchin who had appeared from nowhere to offer some service or other. ‘He says it is his duty as a Member to know the people’s mood.’ He thumbed at the urchin to be on his way.
    ‘And so it is, boys,’ Sir Francis called behind him. ‘I already know how rich men think, most of them anyway. I believe I can better serve my king – my country, too, come to that – if I can understand what the common sort are thinking.’
    The street urchin was persistent and it took a growled curse from Mun to finally send him looking for custom elsewhere.
    ‘But the truth is, of course,’ Mun said, ‘that Father’s purse is a little light these days. That’s why he boards in Southwark whilst his friends dine on roast veal and venison in the town. He has spent too much money on horses. Isn’t that right, Father?’ His teeth flashed white in the gathered gloom and Tom braced for their father’s anger.
    But Sir Francis threw both arms out, palms catching the rain that was lashing down and bouncing off the cobbles and seething in the dark.
    ‘We all have our vices, boys,’ he said, never slowing. ‘We all have our vices.’
    The Ship Inn in St George’s parish was nothing special. But it was warm and clean and Sir Francis was a creature of habit. Having lodged there on a friend’s recommendation when he first became a Member of Parliament, he’d stayed there at least a dozen times since and told Mun and Tom that he saw no good reason to try another inn. Furthermore, he trusted the landlord’s weights and measures, which, he warned them, was not something a wise man took for granted in city or market town these days. Once, some years ago, he had broken with tradition and stayed at the Tabard Inn on Long Southwark where it fed into St Margaret’s Hill. It was from the Tabard Inn that the pilgrims in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales
had set off and this made the place famous, which was why Sir Francis had decided he ought to give it a try. But fame drew crowds and the Tabard took, in Sir Francis’s opinion, too many guests, so that the landlord recalled neither his name nor what he drank from one day to the next. He had been relieved when his work was finished and he could go home, leaving the Tabard to the wide-eyed country folk, the French and the endless stream of skilled labourers from the Low Countries who came to London looking for work.
    So the Ship it was. Mun knew that some of their father’s friends, especially those in the Lords,