I, Coriander
Authors: Sally Gardner
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #Europe, #General
Table of Contents
Chapter 2 - The Stuffed Alligator
Chapter 6 - The Pearl Necklace
Chapter 9 - The Power of Bindweed
Chapter 12 - The Hand of Wrath
Chapter 18 - The Terrible Scream
Chapter 25 - A New Suit of Clothes
Chapter 27 - The Invisible Rope
Chapter 28 - The Night of the Fox
Chapter 29 - The Light of Shadows
Chapter 32 - The Sweetest Little Fingers
Chapter 33 - To the King his Own
Chapter 35 - A Fool and his Periwig
I, Coriander eBook
SALLY GARDNER
Orion
AN ORION CHILDREN’S EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Orion Children’s Books. This eBook first published in 2010 by Orion Children’s Books.
Text copyright © Sally Gardner 2005
Illustrations copyright © Lydia Corry 2005
The rights of Sally Gardner and Lydia Corry to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the copyright, designs and patents act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eISBN : 978 1 4440 0272 0
This eBook produced by Jouve, France.
Orion Children’s Books
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
I
n loving memory of an irreplaceable friend
Maria Björnson
T
he world we live in is nothing more than a mirror that reflects another world below its silvery surface, a land where time is but a small and unimportant thing, stripped of all its power.
I
hope to find you there. S.G.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank from the bottom of my heart Jane Fior, for all her support, wisdom and brilliant ability to keep me on the right path and help me back after I had gone up several blind alleys; my agent Rosemary Sandberg for her encouragement over the years; my publisher Fiona Kennedy for her zest and loyalty; Lauri Hornik at Dial Books for her enthusiasm and commitment; and Judith Elliott, whose skill as an editor is quite incredible and who has picked up, spotted and shaken words and sentences that haven’t been up to muster, always believing that I could go further than even I thought possible. Without her and Jane this book would have been pale by comparison.
S
weet
T
hames, run softly till I end my song . . .
Edmund Spenser Prothalamion
PART ONE
1
A Tale to Tell
I
t is night, and our old house by the river is finally quiet. The baby has stopped its crying and been soothed back to sleep. Only the gentle lapping of the Thames can be heard outside my window. London is wrapped in a deep sleep, waiting for the watchman to call in the new day.
I have lit the first of seven candles to write my story by. On the table next to me is the silk purse that holds my mother’s pearls and beside it is the ebony casket whose treasure I am only now beginning to understand. Next to that, shining nearly as bright as the moon, stands a pair of silver shoes.
I have a great many things to tell, of how I came by the silver shoes and more. And this being my story and a fairy tale besides, I will start once upon a time . . .
M
y name is Coriander Hobie. I am the only child of Thomas and Eleanor Hobie, being born in this house in the year of Our Lord 1643. It is just a stone’s throw from London Bridge, with the river running past the windows at the back. To the front is my mother’s once beautiful walled garden that leads through a wooden door out on to the bustling city street. The garden is all overgrown now; it has been neglected for too long. Once it was full of flowers and herbs of all description whose perfume could make even the Thames smell sweet, but now rosemary and nettles, briar roses and brambles have reclaimed it as their own.
It was this garden, the like of which no neighbours had ever seen, that first set tongues wagging. My father had planted it for my mother, and built her a pretty stillroom that backed on to the wall of the counting house. My mother in her quiet way knew more about herbs and their powers than anyone else, and together with her waiting woman Mary Danes she would spend hours in the stillroom, making all sorts of potions which were distilled and stored in tiny bottles. When I was small I used to hide under my mother’s petticoats and listen to friends and neighbours as they brought their ailments to her like posies of sorrows, to be made better by one of her remedies. Later on, when I was too big to hide, they came to ask her other things, for by this time her reputation as a cunning woman with magical powers had spread as thistledown does, blown on the hot winds of gossip.
My first memories are of the garden and of this, my old bedchamber, whose walls my mother painted with fairy places and imaginary beasts. She wrote under each one in her fair script, and for every picture she had a story, as bright in the telling as the colours in which they were painted. When I was small I used to trace the letters with my finger, to feel how the spidery writing was raised above the wood panelling, and I would say the names to myself like a magic charm to keep harm at bay. All the pictures, like the garden’s blooms, are gone now, washed and scrubbed away. Only the faintest trace of the gold letters remains. They still shine through, like the memories.
I used to believe that my mother’s life had started with me and that before I made my entrance into this world there was nothing. Nothing, that is, until the midsummer’s day when my father, Thomas Hobie, first saw my mother standing under an oak tree in a country lane.
This is the story he told me, and the story I loved the best. When he was a young merchant with a head full of dreams, he put his hard-earned savings, together with what money his father had left him, into a ship bound for Constantinople, banking on her returning with a cargo of silk. Alas, news reached him that she had been lost in a great storm at sea, so that now he owned nothing but the clothes on his back.
In despair, my father walked out of the city and some ten miles into the country, on the chance of being able to borrow money from a distant cousin, a Master Stoop. When he arrived he found that Master Stoop had given up the never-ending struggle to live and had joined the ranks of the dead, leaving a wife and several small Stoops to be looked after.
My father had not the heart to ask for anything. Having paid his last respects, he set out mournfully on the road to London, resigned to his fate.
It was getting late when he met a strange-looking man with a long beard tied in a knot, holding a lantern as round as the moon. The stranger told him he had been robbed by a highwayman who had taken all he had owned, leaving him just the lantern. My father felt sorry to hear of this misfortune and offered him his cloak to keep the chill off. The stranger accepted it with thanks.