Blood on Paper 🩸

The water was so cold that Idonea could barely feel her fingers anymore. She knelt on the rough floor of the chancery on Fleet Street, dreaming of nothing more than becoming something better. She had been cleaning the same floor for several years, yet the same hateful emptiness remained in her heart.

She continued working until one of the clerics violently grabbed her by her tangled brown hair. Idonea's vision nearly went black as she was dragged along the long passage through the scriptorium, where a protruding nail tore into her skin. She screamed in pain, but was angrily ordered to shut her mouth. Her blood smeared across the floor she had only just cleaned as the furious cleric shouted, "You useless cow! You can't even clean properly!" He pointed out a fresh ink stain that was so new it still glistened in the light.

Her frail body lay on the cold floor, her skin covered in scars and marks that served as reminders of the difficult times she had endured. With the last of her strength, she got back to her feet to fetch her bucket of cold water and prepared to clean the floor once again.

Again and again, the same faint cry echoed in her ears, reminding her of the day that had changed everything. The desperate scream of her mother, Joan, who had learned that her beloved husband, Piers, had lost his precious life while trying to help his family. The men who had robbed Joan and Idonea of their precious land had coldly informed them that Piers had been hanging from the royal oak since sunrise. Then they had brutally driven the two women from their home.

These memories never left Idonea. They had given rise to a deep hatred that grew stronger with every passing day. Whenever she prayed before a cross she had made herself, she begged for her life to get better. But hope had disappointed her too many times.

She continued wiping the floor and scrubbing the scriptorium until late in the evening. Finally, she left the chancery beneath the moonlight and made her way through the streets of London toward home.

The cold wind made her hands feel frozen, and her frail body struggled through the narrow alleys toward London Bridge. The bridge's cramped construction and towering buildings created a sense of claustrophobia that stirred her fear of confined spaces. Yet the young souls of the bridge provided a sense of stability.

She crossed the bridge until she reached Drawbridge Gate, a place that never failed to make her heart turn cold. Every day, looking up filled her with a feeling of deep unease: the freshly severed heads, boiled in tar, alongside older, rotting heads of men and women who had been beheaded by the king. They had been mounted on wooden spikes above the archway, serving as a warning to others to learn from their mistakes.

Ravens circled the tower, pecking at what remained of the flesh on the heads. The stench was unbearable and made Idonea retch again and again. She continued across the remaining stretch of the bridge until she passed Great Stone Gate and arrived in Southwark.

Here, she lived in a multi-storey timber-framed house in one of Southwark's many narrow alleys, where the buildings stood tightly packed together. The smell of human waste in the streets and rotting fish drifting up from the Thames filled her nostrils.

She shared a small attic room with her mother, a space barely large enough for the two of them. In winter, cold air seeped into the room through the gaps in the walls. They owned a straw bed and a small hearth, which they considered a small luxury, even though they could barely afford enough firewood to use it.

They lived a life in chains, trapped in a place that had taken everything they had once called home. While Joan clung to the few memories she had left, something else was growing inside Idonea. A hatred that grew stronger with every passing day, one that even time could not bury.

Again and again, she thought of the same old farmhouse, her father's voice, and the days when she had still believed that the world was just.

But those days were long gone.

And so was the girl she had once been.