The potshotten woman tangled in the sheets beside me looked and smelled like a corpse. Paler than the moon which, against nature, still sat in the heavens, and colder than Papa’s stare, she lay unmoving, mouth gaping, arms and legs akimbo. It wasn’t until I nudged her a few times and she emitted a foul-smelling groan that I saw with no small measure of relief she was alive. I knew where the blame would have fallen had she indeed gone to meet her Maker.

I squinched out of the bed, scratching and wriggling in my night shift, which was now inhabited by the fleas that called the mattress home. The innkeeper had sworn this was his best room. Easy to declare — even honestly — when standards were so low.

Before I washed, I checked my travelling companion once more, pressing my fingers to her scrawny neck. A pulse knocked the tips. What was I supposed to do? We’d a tilt boat to meet.

My mind chirped and wheeled, much like the swallows outside, who rose in a mighty flock to greet the dawn. First breaking through the ice coating the washbasin, I quickly dragged the frigid cloth over my face and under my armpits, rinsing my mouth and rubbing my teeth for good measure.

‘God save me.’ The words rasped like a blacksmith’s chisel.

I swung around and faced the relic stirring in the bed. Abstinence Gumble. A widow and distant cousin of the Bishop of Canterbury, she’d been paid to accompany me to London. With her chicken-coop hair, bleary eyes and shaking hands, she wouldn’t have been able to accompany a hymn let alone a person. Why, when a person has been cursed with a Puritan name, did others assume the appellation defined them? The only thing Mrs Gumble had abstained from as she drank the thirsty sailors under the table last night was any modicum of self-control.

Then again, I was called Tribulation and, for some reason, trouble always followed me.

Or, as Papa repeated ad nauseum, I caused it.

Continue reading the extract here…

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