Free Bartholomew Fair by Ann Swinfen

his family.’
    I made a face and shrugged. It will always be thus. The greater men will always take the credit for a success but shed the blame for any failure on those of lower rank. It was the Portuguese expedition all over again. Essex would claim imaginary credit, while the common soldiers perished or were turned away empty handed. As for my own success in bringing William through both his physical injury and his state of despair? Well, I was gone from Bartholomew Hospital now, so I was of no account.
    The service was mercifully short. Some of these parishes in the heart of the City have a Puritan tendency, and their sermons are known to be interminable. It seemed this parish priest was a firm adherent to the Queen’s own moderate stance on religion. The service, like the church, displayed none of the flamboyance of those secretly inclined to the old faith, nor had it stripped away all beauty and grace in favour of the aridity of Geneva.
    Less than an hour made the young couple man and wife, properly blessed and preached over, and saw our cheerful company making its way a few hundred yards along Eastcheap to the Fighting Cockerel inn. This was an old building, sagging a little on its timber frame and beginning to sink into the Thames clay, so that you must step down through the front door into the main parlour. The room was somewhat dark, for the tiny ancient windows admitted little light, and the ceiling, once white-washed, had taken on the colour of caramel from the smoke of many pipes. It is surprising how men even of the small shop-keeping class can find the chinks to buy the new smoking weed from the New World, but they say that once you have taken up the habit, you cannot leave off. Two old men sat here now, with mugs of beer before them and pipes in their mouths, so that their heads emerged from a smoky cloud like a species of humanoid dragon. Surely it must spoil the flavour of the beer?
    However, the marriage feast was not to be held here. The inn had somehow managed to retain its garden at the rear, despite all the greed for building land in London. It was a fine, sunny summer day, and we were to take our refreshment out of doors. Trestle tables were set out in the shade of some apple trees which looked as crooked and loaded with years as was the building. Fresh white tablecloths covered what were probably rough boards, and the inn servants were now laying out platters and bowls of good, substantial fare, not the delicate and exotic titbits served at Sir Walter Raleigh’s evening meetings at Durham House, but slices of beef and pork, chunks of pease pudding, purple and white carrots seethed in butter, vast two pound loaves fresh and warm from the baker’s oven, pats of butter yellow as primroses, two great cheeses nearly as big as wagon wheels. There were more refined dishes to follow, probably made by Bess Winterly and her gossips – bowls of flummery, plum tarts, dried apple pies, candied orange slices, and round-bellied jugs of cream. For a moment I felt queasy, and the ground shifted under me, remembering how we had starved on board ship, not many weeks before, but Peter dragged me forward and we joined the rest of that happy, jostling crowd, filling our wooden platters to overflowing, and finding a couple of stools beneath a pear tree where we could turn serious attention to the meal.
    The crowd milled around the tables, then resolved itself into small groups. Glancing up, I saw Dr Stephens approaching us. We both stood and bowed. Peter offered his stool to the elderly physician, while I fetched another from beside the inn door. Once we were all seated, Dr Stephens turned to me.
    ‘I was sorry to hear that you had lost your father, Christoval. He was a good man, though we did not always see eye-to-eye.’
    I thanked him, recalling with a rueful smile, how often they had bickered over the treatment of a patient, though I knew that they had always respected one another.
    ‘And I have now lost my place