Bartholomew Fair (12 page)

The men did not answer, but at a command from one of the other leaders standing in the front line, they wheeled about and marched off down Pie Corner. I thought that if they had been so well disciplined on our expedition, we might have fared better despite the follies and mistakes of our leaders.

As they marched away, I caught sight of another man I recognised, although I had never known his name. On that terrible march from Peniche to Lisbon, under a gruelling sun, with little food or water, we had been attacked one night when we were encamped, by a party of Spanish soldiers. As usual I had been sleeping away from the main body of men, anxious that I should not betray myself or my sex in my sleep. This man had come to find me and hustled me and my horse away from the attacking Spanish. Earlier he had also helped the man I had treated for snake bite, who later died in my arms aboard ship. The last time I had seen him, he was boarding one of the ships chosen to sail on Drake’s deceitful voyage – not to the Azores but home to England. He caught my eye even as I recognised him, and raised a hand in a kind of half salute.

‘Well!’ said Ambrose, letting out his breath in a great gust. ‘I think we have escaped quite a nasty encounter.’

‘The Lord Mayor managed matters better than I would have expected,’ I said. ‘At least he is prepared to consult with the men.’

‘Probably merely delaying matters,’ Ambrose said, ‘and protecting the Fair. It would not look well for him if it were to be ransacked during his term in office.’

Anne looked distressed. ‘Do you not think he means to help them, then?’

He shrugged. ‘I think it was politic to seem to do so.’

‘I wonder where the men will go,’ I said, as the dust kicked up by their marching feet settled again and the crowd of fairgoers began to drift back toward the stalls and entertainments awaiting them in the Fair. All the traders and performers must have heaved a mighty sigh of relief.

‘And I wonder whether they will disperse, as they have been told,’ Ambrose said. ‘It seems unlikely, for how would they learn the outcome of the consultations?’

‘Nay, I am sure they will stay together.’ I bit my thumbnail, as I am ashamed to say I am apt to do when I am worried. ‘They will have to find some large area, large enough to hold them all. They must have gathered together before they marched on Smithfield. Probably when they are out of sight they will turn aside to the fields north of here, out near the old Charterhouse and beyond. Finsbury Fields, perhaps. They’re likely to return there.’

‘You are right, Kit. In this hot weather, it will be no hardship to sleep out of doors.’

‘No hardship for these men at all,’ I said drily, ‘after what they endured in Portugal.’

‘Do you think the Fair will carry on now?’ Anne said. ‘Should we go back? Mama said she would come after all the hurly-burly of the opening was over. She won’t know of all this disturbance and I promised to meet her here.’

Ambrose shook his head. ‘I am not going back into Smithfield now. I must discover what has happened to Mistress Hawes. If I find her, I will seek you out. We said we would watch the puppet show of the Commedia dell’Arte, did we not? Why do you not both go back and find Peter Lambert and the young lady, and if I return, I will meet you at the puppet show. I think it was not to take place until the afternoon.’

It was agreed between us that this arrangement was the best we could think of for the moment. Ambrose set off down Pie Corner in the wake of the vanished army, while Anne and I turned back to the Fair.

‘Well,’ she said, slipping her arm through mine as we passed again down one of the alleys of stalls, ‘that was not what I expected at the first day of the Fair. I used to come with Mama when I was small, but we always came after the opening, so I never saw that dreadful wrestling or the madcap running about after rabbits!’

‘And certainly none of us have ever seen the Fair threatened by a massed group of armed men,’ I said, ‘bent on looting it if they did not get justice.’

‘Do you think they would truly have broken down the Fair and stolen the goods?’

I looked at her soberly. ‘They have been very badly treated, Anne. I am not as surprised as some that this has happened. I was there. I saw how they suffered. Indeed, I even told Sir Francis that I thought the matter might not be finished with, that there might be more trouble. I cannot say that I wanted to be proved right.’

‘But it will be settled now, won’t it?’ She looked at me hopefully. Anne and I were of an age, but sometimes I felt twenty years older.

‘Let us hope so,’ I said, for I did not want to spoil the pleasure of her visit to the Fair. ‘Look, there is your friend the toy man. Nicholas Borecroft, he’s called, and he’s an impudent rascal. Shall we buy something for Anthony? A drum?’

She laughed, her sunny good humour quite restored.

‘Don’t tease, Kit! We might buy him a pipe, or one of those little fiddles, or a Jew’s harp. Something that will not make too much noise.’

‘And I want to buy some gingerbread for friends,’ I said. I had a plan to surprise Phelippes and Gregory. ‘Then we will go in search of Peter.’

Chapter Seven

A
nne and I began to make our way back into the fairground, jostled on every side by the crowd which had gathered out of curiosity to see what was afoot with the extempore army and the Lord Mayor. Now that free spectacle of their confrontation was over, everyone was hungry and thirsty and eager to spend their chinks in the taverns or on little penny dogs of crude pottery or toy dragons or hobby horses. The cunning men who had their premises every day in Cow Lane had set up shop in tents at the Fair, offering to cast your horoscope or read your future in your palm. Anne was tempted, but I managed to persuade her against having her fortune told. Such antics I find both deceitful and alarming.

‘Better not to know your future, I think,’ I said, ‘for surely it must hold sorrow as well as joy. Our natures being more inclined to melancholy than to happiness, if we are foretold sorrow, that is what we will dwell on.’

‘Perhaps you are right.’ She gave me a smile in which there was more than a little pity. She knew something of what my life had already held, though not everything. Like all the rest of her family, save Sara, she thought me a boy. I gave her a cheerful smile in return. I do not care to be pitied.

‘Buy any ballad! Buy my new ballads!’

The shout came so close to my ear I jumped.

‘Buy a ballad for your pretty wench, sir?’ The ballad singer was swarthy of complexion and his speech had an Italian lilt.

I shook my head, but a gaggle of girls coming up behind us gathered around him, begging him to sing something for them, so that they might know whether they would like to buy the music and words. At once he flourished one of the sheets from his satchel under their noses and began to sing. More people stopped to listen. In truth, he had the elements of a fine voice, thought I thought he had used it too much in fairs and in hawking his ballads on the street, for it was beginning to wear thin on the high notes. Anne insisted on buying a copy of the song for a penny, though it was in Italian, of which she knew not a word.

‘You can turn it into English for me, Kit, so that I may understand it,’ she said as we walked away. She was humming the tune, for she could read the notes.

‘What if I were to tell you that it is a scurrilous song, common amongst drunken oafs in taverns, roistering late at night?’

Her face fell in dismay. ‘Oh, no! Have I wasted my money?’

I laughed. ‘No. It tells of a shepherd singing about his lady love. She is drawn to another, but he begs her to return to him. It is perfectly respectable, though somewhat sickly in its sentiments.’

‘Oh, you are cruel!’ she exclaimed, punching me lightly in the ribs. ‘For a moment I believed you.’

A coster monger was walking toward us, with a large heavy tray hanging from his neck. The way was so narrow here that it was nigh impossible to sidle past him, which was what he no doubt intended.

‘Buy any pears!’ he cried, drowning out the ballad singer. ‘Pears, costards and pears! Buy my fine, my very fine pears!’

‘I don’t see any costard apples,’ Anne whispered to me. ‘And the pears are very small.’

‘And probably unripe,’ I said. ‘An unripe pear is like chewing on wood.’

Fortunately the group of girls overtook us and crowded round the coster monger. They seemed determined to buy a little of everything.

‘This way,’ I said, drawing Anne after me through a gap between two stalls and into the next row of shops. ‘I think if we follow this lane along to the end it will bring us to the Cloth Fair and we may be able to find Peter and Mistress Winger.’

She followed me willingly enough. The adjacent row contained some of the better quality of stalls – some selling embroidered gloves and silk handkerchiefs, some pewter plates and apostle spoons, some lengths of cushion lace to trim ladies gowns. Anne lingered over these stalls, while I looked about for a gingerbread woman. A little further along there was a tooth drawer whose stall displayed a huge pair of forceps as its sign, enough to make your jaw ache at the sight of it. Beyond it a man sat on a stool with his right foot in another man’s lap, having his corns cut away with a small, sharp knife. I hoped the fellow knew what he was about and would not cut so deep that he did his client an injury. There was a man selling mouse traps from a wheel barrow.

‘Buy your mouse traps here, goodwives! No more thieving from your pantries. The best mouse traps, invented by a scholar in Leipzig!’

He did not appear to be doing much business. Little wonder, for the gimcrack mouse traps looked as though they had been glued together on his kitchen table out of scraps of cast off wood.

Anne caught up with me.

‘I have bought some lace,’ she said, opening the paper to show me. ‘It’s very fine work and I beat the man down on price.’

‘Good.’ I grinned at her. ‘Now help me find a gingerbread woman.’

‘Look.’ She pointed to some children walking towards us. They each held a gingerbread figure in their hands. Like Phelippes and his sister, some were biting into them already, while others cradled them protectively, intending clearly to take them home uneaten.

‘They must have come from a gingerbread stall,’ she said. ‘If we go further along this way, we’ll surely find it.’

We passed the corn cutter and the mouse trap man, and soon I began to smell the warm spicy scent of gingerbread. It was a large stall, sturdily built, almost as solid as the best booths in the Cloth Fair. Laid out along the counter flap was a dazzling selection of gingerbreads in every shape imaginable – figures of famous people, horses, dragons, ships, castles, musical instruments, fairy tale creatures. A few at the front were plain gingerbread, at a farthing each, for the poorer children who could afford no more. The rest were covered with real gold leaf and glittered in the sunlight, despite being partially shaded by an awning of stripped green and white cloth. A buxom, motherly woman was drawing a large tin out of a portable oven, on which there were half a dozen freshly baked figures, which she lifted on to a metal grid at one end of a table to cool. At the other end of the table sat a younger woman, by her looks a daughter. Her face was screwed up in concentration as she used a soft brush to lift a whisper-thin sheet of gold foil on to a ginger horse and then brush it all over until the gold clung to every line and fold in the gingerbread. The older woman reached down a handful of moulds from a shelf and began pressing dough into them, to make the next batch. The wonderful scent of spice and baking biscuits made your mouth water with anticipation.

Anne and I examined the finished gingerbreads carefully.

‘Mama will certainly buy some for Anthony and the little ones,’ she said, ‘but no one can have too much gingerbread.’ She chose a selection of gilded animals and paid the woman, who came to the counter, wiping her hands on a voluminous apron.

‘I will take these,’ I said, handing her a large gilded castle and a ferocious dragon. ‘And these.’ I chose two of the plain gingerbreads, a ship and a smaller castle.

Anne raised her eyebrows at me as the gingerbread woman handed me my purchases wrapped in paper.

‘Do you have a lady friend, Kit? You have kept her secret!’

I laughed and shook my head. ‘The gilded ones are for my friends at Seething Lane.’

I told her Phelippes’s tale of how he and his sister had been bought gingerbread when they were children.

‘He’s so serious and absorbed always in his work,’ I said, ‘I’ve bought him the castle to remind him of his childhood. The dragon is for Arthur Gregory, the quietest, mildest man you have ever met! And these,’ I said, handing her one of the plain figures, the castle, ‘are for us to eat now.’

We walked on, nibbling at our gingerbread, then turning the corner past the gingerbread stall, we found ourselves near the Lord Mayor’s platform again. All the dignitaries had gone, but a group of gaudily dressed acrobats and jugglers were performing there, while a child went around with a pewter mug, asking for twopence for the show. It seemed a lot, but we paid our share and watched for a time as the men threw the woman about in the air, juggled with balls and knives, and finished by forming themselves into a human pyramid. The child with the mug was casually thrown straight up into the air, caught by the woman at the top, and then stood on her shoulders, waving the mug triumphantly in the air.

Anne closed her eyes. ‘I cannot bear to watch. I am sure he will fall.’

‘These acrobats’ children are as agile as African monkeys,’ I said. ‘Come, there is your friend, the toy man, Master Borecroft.’

We walked past three stalls to reach the toy shop. Borecroft must have been doing good business, for he was unpacking more goods from boxes at the back of his stall. As he turned to lay them out on the counter, he noticed Anne and grinned at her.

‘It is the fair maiden from yesterday,’ he said, ‘who scorned my wooden beads.’

‘Trinkets for children,’ Anne said, but not unkindly. Despite his impudent manner, Nicholas Borecroft’s cheerful air forestalled any annoyance.

‘And how may I serve you, my mistress and sir?’ He gave an exaggerated bow, nicely shared between us. ‘What do ye lack?’ He made the standard shopman’s cry into a parody.

‘Something for the lady’s young brother,’ I said. ‘A school boy. We thought a musical instrument, but nothing too noisy, or his father will not approve.’

‘A pipe?’ he said, disappearing below the counter and reappearing with a handful of pipes in wood and metal, which he laid out before us. ‘Or . . .’ he disappeared again. ‘A pipe and tabor?’

He laid the small drum beside the pipes.

‘Nothing too noisy!’ I reminded him with a laugh.

‘Ah, but this is the softest and sweetest of little drums.’

He tapped it lightly with his fingers, picking out a soft marching rhythm, which reminded me of the men who had just marched away down Pie Corner. By now they would have circled north and east to Finsbury Fields, I was sure.

‘Every young lad loves to play at soldiers.’ He lifted a metal pipe to his lips and played a few bars of a marching tune on it, fingering the holes with his right hand, while he continued to tap out the rhythm on the tabor with his left.

‘A pretty trick,’ I said, ‘but not one a young boy could imitate, unless he had gone for a soldier.’ I looked at him keenly, but he only grinned.

‘Or of course,’ he said, diving into one of the boxes, ‘I have Jew’s harps. Anyone can play this.’ He thrust it into his mouth and demonstrated.

‘And if you speak with it in your mouth,’ he added, in a strange squeaky voice, ‘you may go for a puppet master’s assistant.’

He removed it. ‘They use such instruments to change their voices.’

‘So that is how it is done,’ Anne said. ‘My elder brother was wondering only yesterday, when we saw the puppet show over there.’ She gestured across the way to the puppet show tent, still firmly laced up, still with the board outside announcing the Commedia dell’Arte at two of the clock that afternoon.

‘The grand gentleman who was with you yesterday?’ Borecroft asked, all innocence. ‘That was your brother? And this, of course, is your lover.’

Anne coloured and I snapped, ‘Don’t be impertinent!’

‘Kit is a friend of our family,’ she said, in a colder tone than she had used before.

‘My apologies,’ the toy man said, though he did not look particularly apologetic.

‘We’ll buy a Jew’s harp for Anthony, shall we?’ I asked Anne, and she nodded.

‘Not the one you have just had in your mouth,’ I said austerely. ‘I am a physician and do not like to risk spreading diseases.’

I was being somewhat rude in return, though I meant it seriously. The man took it good humouredly enough and fetched another Jew’s harp from the box. Before we walked away, Anne turned to the man, smiling politely.

‘The puppet show, have you seen it?’

‘They have not performed yet, my lady.’ He was back to his flowery manners again. ‘I saw the puppeteers last night, when the hawkers came round with pies and ale. Foreign, they are. Four men and a woman. I’d say they were Italian or maybe Spanish.’

‘Spanish?’ I was alert at once. This was just what we had discussed at Seething Lane. Spanish spies or priests slipping in under cover of the Fair.

‘Nay,’ he said, leaning back against the one of the posts supporting his stall and crossing his arms. ‘Nay. I do not think they really were Spanish. I heard them speaking together. I know little of either language, but I think more likely it was Italian. The Commedia is Italian, is it not? And the Italians are great masters of puppetry, so I’ve heard.’

I nodded. ‘Most likely Italian,’ I said indifferently.  I did not want to draw attention either to myself or the puppeteers, before I found out more. I was worried by the suggestion that they might be Spanish. We would attend the afternoon’s performance, and then I would be able to judge for myself from their speech. Even Italians might be dangerous. The papal state, after all, was in Italy, and the Pope sought the downfall of England and our Queen.

We thanked the toy man for showing us the musical instruments and as we walked away I heard a plaintive tune start up. Looking over my shoulder, I saw that he was playing one of the small fiddles. He had it tucked into his shoulder and his face wore an expression of exaggerated soulfulness. I could not suppress a snort of laughter.