Free The Newgate Jig by Ann Featherstone

accommodating, but I could not be all the time away from
my stand, otherwise he would give it to someone else. Or I'd be forced to share
it. All of this was ravelling through my head whilst we walked, but I was glad
to have something heartening to dwell upon.
    Our
route took us along Fish-lane, a strange, crowded street of dark, little shops
selling stale cakes and flat ginger beer alongside candles and coal, and a few
establishments which considered themselves a cut above the rest. Freeth's, a
theatrical bonnet-maker's, was the first one we came to. And a little further
along, Hadzinger who dealt in boots. And Miss Bailey, a mantle-maker and
hair-dresser. Then a wine shop and a barber's and a tiny tailor's shop - all
without a name, wanting to keep themselves quiet, as it were. Then Pilgrim's
bookshop, which was thin and tall, with a bulging window. The glass was thick,
like bullseyes, so that trying to see the books
and engravings behind it was like looking through a bottle bottom, where
everything was out of shape and woolly about the edges. Outside, flapping in
the wind, were art journals and old serials pegged on sticks, and little trays
of books on a table covered with sacking to keep out the damp. Pilgrim was an
old friend (we met long ago in a place we never speak of) and he told me that
he inherited the shop from a distant cousin and, though he was not at all
bookish, resolved to keep the business because of family 'obligations'. It was
wedged between a rusty-looking hardware shop on one side and the blank windows
of a shop which changed owners as often as dogs barked in this neighbourhood.
Long ago, this neighbouring shop had been a dairy, with a single
miserable-looking cow stalled in the rear. Then it became an undertaker's, a
fruiterer's and last, and most recently, a haberdasher's. Even that had failed,
and now it was closed, though never unoccupied, for the yard was always
crowded, and these days it was impossible to leave anything out, for whether it
was the crown jewels or a feather duster, it would be stolen in a blink.
Pilgrim had been concerned about this empty place for some weeks and not just
because of the rats, which had increased fifty-fold. The neighbourhood was
losing its character by the week, he said darkly.
    He
was peering from his doorway as we hurried down Fish-lane, a curious sight in
his tasselled smoking hat, embroidered with fabulous birds, and a knitted
comforter complementing his fir-green working coat and fingerless gloves. And,
of course, there was no creeping past for, as if he had been expecting us, he
nodded us into the shop, bolted the door and drew the blind.
    'Now then, Bob. Nero. Brutus.'
    Now
then indeed, I thought, stepping around the piles of books and papers, the
teetering towers of three-deckers and two-parters, and charting a course
through the shop in Pilgrim's wake. He had already disappeared into the gloom,
where the flame of a solitary candle was the only beacon for us lone sailors.
Shelves and stacks lined the walls, tables were buried under volumes which had
not been opened let alone read for many a year, and in the darkest depths of
the shop, a veritable cavern of books which, had they been piled by Sir
Christopher Wren himself and cemented by his own dust and cobwebs, could not
have been better built. Pilgrim's bower was a masterly example of books laid in
good English bond, and it fitted around him like his own skin. He was already
in there pouring tea into two cups (I was glad I couldn't see their condition,
for my friend was a stranger to the scullery) and nodded me to a fifteen-volume
history of the Macedonians (arranged vertically), on which I perched.
    Pilgrim's
oddness didn't present itself simply in his curious shop and odd appearance.
The towers of books and mouldering pamphlets, those oddments of velvet and chinoiserie,
the hats, the regal Benjamins and sub-species britches, were only for display.
When he spoke, you would realize that there was more to