Excerpt

TWENTY ONE

A quarter hour before One

A ship bounded through the Fair, complete with rigging and English flags; it was made of paste board, nicely fitted, and painted, and borne in the shoulders of boys who surged forward against another pasteboard ship fitted with Spanish flags. Delighting the cheering crowd, they fired little wads of paper at each other accompanied by hammering sheets of iron for noise.

Clowns followed them, riding on the back of a kind of elephant made of more clowns balled up or on stilts, with curled arms as the trunk, and outstretched breeches for ears.

Men dressed as turkeys appplauded and drank their health; a giggling woman with the pasteboard nose of an anteater rushed ahead to catch sight of the Procession of Queen Mab.

Shee de Queen!

Mab was borne on her little flowery chair above the heads of the crowd, followed by a dozen of Captain Whit’s fairies casting blossoms in the air.

The Queen was in her fairy best: gauzy finery and glass jewels catching the light, enormous wings of wire and silk and a crown of roses. “Shee de Queen!” Captain Whit waved at the crowd as she made her round, trying to bring customers into her tent “Shee de Queen!”

“What is’t you buy?” a hawker sang.

Shee de Queen!

“Fiddles!” piped a fiddler, sawing away “Fiddles and drums!”

Shee de Queen!

“Pins! Points! Garters!” called a man with a basket.

Shee de Queen!

“The drunkards they are wading…” sang Nightingale in front of Ursula’s, strutting back and forth on the narrow walkway “The punks an’ chaps trading… Ballads!” he hawked his printed broadsides “New ballads and songs!”

Ursula’s boys barked out their patter pulling customers in to her pavillion for bottle ale, roast Bartholomew Pig and pipes of tobacco.

“Oh fie!” Ursula roared in the back as she singed her finger unloading a finely roasted piglet onto a trencher; she licked her thumbs, wiping her hand on her smock.

Sweat slithered down her temples and her neck was creased with sweat and soot “Who would wear out their youth doing this if they could do something colder.” she spat at the heat, spat at the pigs, spat at her lost youth “Hell’s a kind of cold cellar where I’m going!” she said with a wet laugh “Where’s my Mooncalf?” Her man monkey sprighted out, struggling to pull her cart away from the roasting pits.

“How now Urse.” called Nightingale “Thou’rt all in heat.”

“Get me a draught to quench me fire!” she pricked Mooncalf with her whisk and he disappeared for a moment to fill a big metal can with ale from a rotund cask in the back of the booth “I’m all fire an’ fat, Nightie!” she said “I’ll melt away and be the First Woman—a rib! I water the ground as I go, look—she flicked him with sweat from her glistening tit “Like a waterin’ can, y’may follow me by the sssss I make, ha—?” she roared along with her customers.

Turning the corner, the Justice found himself stopped short right against Ursula’s; he leaned forward as he recognized her—she’d be another piece of evidence, the Justice wrote in his Looking Glass.

She’d appeared before him at the Piepowders, convicted of whoring and bawdry for twenty years in a row: She is as cold and mean of spirit as any who peddled a girl’s flesh, she lusts for profit, cheating, scorning, stealing from poor fools, he wrote. It was now on the record.

“Fie, where be me creetur…” she called for Mooncalf “I’ll waste away, I’ll dwindle down to nothing afore this Fair is done, look on me!”

“Sit back and have a pipe.”

“Aye,” she said “My pipe!” she said loudly enough so that her customers would hear and she might make more sales of the smoking weed…she grasped Mooncalf by the hairy throat and whispered “…and mix some coltsfoot weed in my pipe as well.” she said.

“Colstfoot, whatever for?” Nightingale asked.

“…to water down the tobacco.” she said under her breath “Who can afford the real stuff?” Tobacco was a rare and expensive commodity: it was a fad more than anything, available as a fancy gewgaw at the Fair “I pick the coltsfoot free of charge by the roadside an’ smokers don’t know no difference.”

“Whoever heard of smoking a weed!”

“There are a hundred little tricks to bring me a penny.” she said; the Justice heard her and edged closer, sitting at the table under her canopy. “I do it with ale.” she said, “I make it froth to fill the cups and take the cup away before it’s half empty and fill ‘em again at full price.”

“Devil!”

“Helps if they think you’re drunk.” she said “Y’may excuse yourself if they catch you.”

…this is the very bed of enormity, the Justice was writing As gross as she is herself, rooted in that whellbarrow chair of hers like a female Bacchus!

“I charge sixpence for me roasts.” she said “A sow gets me ninepence and if some poor wife drag her husband for Bartlemy Pig to bless their marriage bed, I’ll see and charge’em sixpence more for the luck it brings.”

“O tempora!” the Justice groaned to himself “Oh mores!”

When he opened his eyes again, the Justice was staring into the gaze of the woman herself—he knew her close by, he’d sentenced her often enough. But Ursula didn’t recognize him in disguise. “What duzzit say, then?”

The Justice rose to his feet with some dignity, closed his notebook and cleared his throat: he would find a means of worming himself into the enormities of the world and he would begin like any Fair goer. He would order beer.

“By your leave, good fat woman…” he addressed her “You who drip oil like the constable’s lamp, you who shine like a shoeing horn…”