Not far from where London Bridge and Castle Baynard would one day stand, in a dense tangle of river-alder and fern that future centuries would call Blackfriars, stood Bartholomew Browne.
Two days had elapsed since the unfortunate incident with the crystal paperweight in Red Lion Square—two days spent wandering through an inexplicable wilderness of giant ferns, unfamiliar fruit trees, deafening birdsong, and baking summer heat. His worsted stockings were torn to ribbons by brambles, his sober brown coat was caked in dried marsh- mud, and his stomach was rumbling with a lack of beef and small beer that bordered on the indecent.
Following no path—for there was none to follow—Bartholomew pushed his way through the thickets along the northern bank of the river. Everything about the waterway confounded him. He knew the shape of that great S-bend as well as any wharfinger in the kingdom; it was identical in breadth, current, and contour to the River Thames between Westminster and the Fleet. Yet this could not possibly be London. Where were the church steeples, the timbered wharves, the coal-barges, the taverns, and above all, the people?
Before he could puzzle the matter further, a tremendous crashing sound echoed from the forest fifty yards ahead.
Bartholomew halted in his tracks and ducked prudently behind the bole of a broad oak to see what manner of cart or dray was making such a racket.
Without warning, three young birch trees directly in front of him snapped like dry twigs and toppled forward, flattened by something of immense bulk pushing through the canopy. Terrified, Bartholomew took two hasty steps backward, half expecting a runaway brewer’s wagon or some monstrous engine of war to burst from the leaves.
Then he saw it.
Standing some two yards high at the shoulder, with a pair of curved ivory tusks sprouting from its face and a coat of coarse, rust-red fur hanging to its knees, was an elephant.
Bartholomew had once paid twopence to view an African elephant exhibited in a booth at Bartholomew Fair, and he knew the beast lacked hair. This creature, however, was bundled up like a Russian boyar in winter. As soon as it caught sight of the gentleman behind the oak, the woolly calf froze, eyeing him warily while snorting a cloud of dust through its curling trunk.
Before Bartholomew could so much as tip his hat, a second, far heavier crash shook the earth behind the first beast. The undergrowth parted and a second red-furred elephant lumbered into the clearing—this one at least three yards tall, twice the height of a tall man, with tusks the length of pike-staves. Even a lifelong bachelor from Camden could deduce at a glance that this was the creature’s mother, and that she did not care for strangers looking at her calf.
Trumpeting a blast that rattled the spectacles on Bartholomew’s nose, the giant beast swung her trunk aggressively and took two ponderous steps toward him.
Bartholomew took three tiny, trembling steps backward toward the water’s edge.
A heel caught on a slick willow root. With a frantic windmill of arms, a snatch at empty air, and a strangled cry of ‘Goodness gracious!’, Bartholomew Browne pitched backward off the bank and landed with an almighty splash in the brown, swirling waters of the Thames.
Fortunately for the house of Browne, Bartholomew had learned to swim as a boy in the ponds of Highgate. Spitting out a mouthful of muddy river, he struck out blindly as the powerful midstream current caught his coat-tails and swept him rapidly downriver, far out of reach of the indignant elephants.
Clinging for dear life to a fallen pine trunk that was drifting with the tide, Bartholomew tried in vain to kick his way back toward the bank. The current was far stronger than the embanked river he knew in 1682; unhindered by piers or bridges, the water carried him past the mouth of the Walbrook and all the way down to a gravel shoal beneath the rise now known as Tower Hill.
Half-drowned and shivering despite the sun, Bartholomew dragged himself out of the shallows onto the pebbles. Finding his heavy broadcloth coat and breeches sodden with river silt, he stripped down to his linen shirt and undergarments, spread his outer clothes across a boulder to dry, and sat down upon a log feeling quite exceptionally hopeless.
A dry rustle in the hazel bushes behind him made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.
Preparing himself for more furry monsters, Bartholomew edged back toward the water, ready to plunge into the Thames at the first sign of a trunk.
Instead of an elephant, a human face parted the leaves.
It was followed a second later by another face, and then three more, until five strangers stood shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the gravel, staring at him in silence.
‘Hello,’ said Bartholomew politely, attempting a small bow in his wet drawers.
The five strangers merely stared at one another and then back at Bartholomew. They were decidedly stocky individuals, dressed in scraped hides tied with sinew, with barrel chests, heavy overarching brows, and noses of truly formidable proportions that gave them a fierce, pugnacious aspect. They began to exchange low, rhythmic grunts and clicks—conversing amongst themselves, it seemed, regarding what to make of a pale gentleman in soggy woollen combinations.
Before Bartholomew could inquire whether any of them spoke the King’s English, a twig snapped directly behind his back. Two pairs of vice-like hands clamped beneath his armpits and hoisted him clean off his feet. Twisting his head round, he saw two more of the heavy-browed men—built like Smithfield blacksmiths—carrying him effortlessly up the wooded slope away from the river.
Between the shock of the elephants, the soaking in the Thames, and forty-eight hours without a crust of bread or a dish of tea, Bartholomew’s constitution finally rebelled. His vision swam, the green canopy spun overhead, and he fainted dead away.
Bartholomew Browne knew nothing of the Palaeolithic epoch or the Stone Age, and he certainly had never heard of the people whom natural philosophers would one day name Neanderthals.
He slept soundly for several hours. When he finally opened his eyes, he found himself lying upon a bed of dry heather inside a low shelter of woven branches and mammoth hides, surrounded by the same large- nosed strangers who had fished him from the foreshore.
Staring up at the smoky thatch of the roof, Bartholomew considered the evidence with the calm, deductive rigour of a London merchant: the incomprehensible language, the eccentric manner of dress, the ungodly heat, and the complete absence of a decent road.
I have somehow ended up in France, he decided firmly. It is the only logical explanation.
Satisfied that he had solved the mystery, though too exhausted to demand the nearest magistrate, Bartholomew turned onto his side and drifted back into a deep and dreamless sleep.
