I remembered how much my mother hated crowds, and felt her fear inside me, like a ghost emotion.
And then, as I got closer I noticed the noise. The competing shouts and cries of traders. The drunken laughter of the ale-sozzled. The grunts and moos and hisses of assorted animals.
Pipes. Singing. Mayhem.
I had never seen anything like it. It was chaos. The scene was made more intense by my delirium.
There were so many people. So many strangers. Laughter flapped out of people like bats from a cave.
An old red-cheeked woman sighing like a carthorse as she carried two panniers dangling from a wooden brace and loaded with fish and oysters.
Two boys fighting near an impromptu pen of pigs.
A pie stall.
A bread stand.
Radishes.
Lace.
A girl, no more than ten, carrying a basket full of cherries.
Roast goose stalls on both sides of the road.
A lettuce lying in a puddle.
An amused man passing me and pointing to a drunkard struggling to get back on his feet. ‘Two of the bell and mark him, boy, whip-cat tippled already.’
Rabbits.
Two live geese, hissing and widening their wings at each other.
More pigs. More cows. More drunks. Many more drunks.
A well-dressed blind woman being led around by a scruffy-looking orphan girl.
Lame beggars.
A woman, coming in close to a random stranger, grabbing between his legs and whispering a drunken offer.
The rowdy bustle around the ale stalls.
A giant ‘from the Nether Lands’ – cried a man, hawking the novelty – and a dwarf ‘from the West Country’, side by side, to maximise the money-making effect.
A man swallowing a sword.
A fiddler. A piper. A flautist, eyeing me with suspicion, with dexterous fingers playing ‘Three Ravens’.
And the smells: roasting meat, ale, cheese, lavender, fresh shit.
The dizziness was back, but I kept on staggering forward.
My hunger, presented with the scent of so much food, was now actually a kind of pain. I walked over towards one of the goose stalls. I stood there, inhaling the roast meat.
‘How much is the goose?’
‘Three shillings, lad.’
I didn’t have three shillings. The truth was: I didn’t have any money at all.
I staggered backwards. Stood on a man’s foot.
‘Mind yourself, boy!’
Boy, boy, boy.
‘Yes, I am a boy,’ I mumbled, even though eighteen was positively middle-aged at that time.
And that is when things began to spin.
I was generally quite strong. One of the many quirks of my biology was that I was never really ill. I’d never had a cold, or the flu. I’d never vomited in my entire life. I’d never even had a bout of diarrhoea, which, in 1599, was an incredibly, suspiciously rare thing to be able to say. Yet right then I was feeling dreadful. There had been rain earlier, but now the sun was out and the sky was a hard blue. The same oblivious blue it had been above the River Lark. The heat added to the intensity of everything, which was intense enough to begin with.
‘Maman,’ I muttered, delirious. ‘Maman.’
I felt like I could die. And, in that moment, I was perfectly fine with that.
But then I saw her.
She was standing holding a basket of fruit, frowning at me. She was about my age, but looked it. She had long dark hair and eyes that shone like pebbles in a stream.
I walked towards her, staring in wonder at the plums and damsons in the basket.
I felt a strange sensation, like I wasn’t in my own body.
‘Can I have a plum?’ I asked her.
She held open her palm. I thought of Manning’s hand and the outstretched fingers that kept my mother under the water.
‘I don’t . . . I . . . I . . . the . . . I . . .’
I saw the stray cow I had seen earlier, walking through the crowd. I closed my eyes and my mother fell through the sky with the weight of timber. I opened them and the fruit seller was frowning at me, cross or confused or a little of both.
I wobbled a little, as the street sped in circles.
‘Steady thyself,’ said the fruit seller.
Those were her first words to me.
Steady thyself.
But I couldn’t steady myself.
I could see why my mother needed walls to lean onto after Father died. Grief tilts you.
Things went very light and then very dark.
The next thing I knew – a moment, or five minutes later – was that I was lying flat on my front, half my face in a muddy puddle, surrounded by plums and damsons. Most of them were in the mud too. Some were getting crushed underfoot by passers-by. One was being eaten by a dog.
I slowly got to my feet.
A crowd of boys were laughing and mocking me.
The girl was scrabbling around on her knees trying to salvage any plums she could.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
I picked up a muddy plum and walked away.
‘Ho! Hey! Ho! You!’ She grabbed my shoulder. Her nostrils were flaring with rage. ‘Look what you have done!’
I thought I was going to faint again, and decided to keep moving, so I didn’t do any more damage.
‘Stop walking! You can’t just walk away!’
I bit into the muddied plum. She grabbed it out of my hand, fast as a bird, and threw it on the ground.
‘That basket was a week’s money. A good week. Now I have to pay Mr Sharpe for fruit I never sold.’
‘Mr Sharpe?’
‘So, you can pay me now.’
‘I have no money.’
She was red-faced with humiliation and anger. She looked confused about the money situation. Maybe it was because, despite the dirt on my clothes and compared to most of the crowd around us, I was quite well dressed. My mother had always made sure that, even though our circumstances had drastically changed since moving to England, we looked as noble as we could afford. Which was, with hindsight, one of the many reasons we had struggled to fit in among the raggedy villagers of Edwardstone. Not the main reason, obviously.
‘That,’ she said, pointing to the lute on my back.
‘What?’
‘Give me that. That can be your payment.’
‘No.’
She picked up a rock. ‘Well, I shall break it then, the way you broke my basket.’
I raised my hands. ‘No! No.’
She must have seen something in my face that made her think twice. ‘You have no food but you are worried about a lute.’
‘It was my mother’s.’
Her face softened, went from anger back to confusion. ‘Where is your mother?’
‘She died three days ago.’
She folded her arms. Yes. She looked around eighteen or nineteen years of age. I can tell you that she wore an ordinary white dress, a ‘kirtle’ as folk used to call it, and a simple red neckerchief, worn at an angle, with the knot tied at the left side of her neck. I can tell you that she had very clean skin – a rarity among this crowd – and had two moles on her right cheek, one smaller than the other, like a moon in a planet’s orbit, and a small constellation of freckles over her nose. Her dark hair was half inside a little white cloth cap, half free and wild.
She had the kind of face that had spent most of its time frowning, but there was also a glint of mischief to her that played around with the corners of her mouth, as if a smile was always in the process of wanting to emerge but being tightly regulated by some disapproving authority inside her mind. I can tell you she was tall too. A quarter head taller than me at that time, if shorter than me when I became, physically, a ‘grown up’.
‘Died?’
‘Yes.’