Widow Joane Whitcombe

She wrote that a basin city is remembered by its mishaps: bad cargo, wrong fog, late fire, drowned custom. The river keeps her name for the moment when something has begun to go wrong and nobody wants to be first to say so.

Joane Whitcombe was a waterside widow of Southwark in the 4200s, and her Waterside Remembraunces, written about 4288, are the river's own account of itself, set down by someone who lived by it. They are not a chronicle. They are a list of the things the city could not hide: the cargo that came in bad, the fog that came in wrong, the fires and the drownings and the customs that went under with them.

The book survives in the Southwark copy of 4424, and it gave her a second life. In the lower wards her name became a kind of warning: when the river begins to smell wrong, the old women say Widow Whitcombe's name, the way other streets say a prayer, and nobody has to be the first to call it unlucky.

A Joane Whitcombe of Deadman Steps appears among the names of the First Syndicate War of 4406, more than a century after the Remembraunces were written. She is a later woman of the name, of the same stair, and the river tells the two together without minding.

In person

About fifty, square-faced and sharp-eyed, grey hair under a white linen coif and a black French hood, a small white ruff at the throat. A black wool gown with a fitted bodice over a kirtle, a white apron and a widow's black veil, a basket on her arm; she stands at the top of a wet Southwark river stair.