Kate Sedley: The Lammas Feast

‘You’ll have plenty enough of that shop-bought stuff at the feast,’ she scoffed, ‘without eating it at home. Since Master Overbecks was chosen in preference to Jasper Fairbrother to provide the bread sculptures for the main tables, I hear he’s working all the hours God gives him to produce the most elaborate creations the mayor and aldermen have ever seen. Castles, three-decked warships. . Someone — I think it was Goody Watkins — told me the centrepiece is to be a depiction of the Garden of Eden.’ She sniffed. ‘Let’s hope he can shape a decent fig leaf, that’s all I have to say!’

Adela and I avoided one another’s eyes. I finished my draught of ale and rose to my feet, stretching.

‘It’s very kind of you, mother-in-law,’ I said — I still addressed her in this way because I knew she liked it — ‘but we wouldn’t dream of putting you to so much trouble, would we, Adela, my love? Besides,’ I lied, ‘I’ve already arranged matters with Master Overbecks. And now I must get back to work.’

Adela, sensing a sudden chill in the atmosphere, begged, ‘Wait for me, Roger, if you would. You can walk part of the way home with us. We really must go now, Margaret, my dear. I — er — I promised to call on Mistress Marshall sometime this morning to give her my recipe for mulberry wine. Elizabeth! Nicholas! Pick up your toys and kiss Grandmother goodbye.’

She lifted Adam and laid him across her shoulder, ignoring his scream of indignation at being so rudely parted from his food, and rubbed his back until he quietened. He also belched very loudly, once more giving me an unpleasant reminder of myself.

‘Running away?’ Margaret jeered, and Adela suppressed another smile.

‘No, no, my dear, of course not. You haven’t forgotten that Saturday is the first day of Saint James’s Fair? You’ll take your dinner with us before you brave the crowds?’

‘Oh, very well,’ Margaret agreed, her manner growing less frosty. ‘And thank you. There won’t be any getting near the stalls selling victuals, I know that. People will be coming in from miles around. They always do. Will you be worshipping at the priory in the morning?’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘We’re its tenants. We could hardly choose another church on Saint James’s feast day. I can make up for lost time by taking my pack around the fair with me in the afternoon.’

Margaret frowned. ‘Don’t give me that nonsense, Roger. You’re not that short in the pocket if you can afford to have your Lammas bread baked by Master Overbecks.’

I decided that it was time to be on our way before this sore subject was opened up again between us. Adela was evidently of the same mind, for she was already laying Adam in the box on wheels that I had made for him. I was very proud of this contraption, entirely of my own devising — or, at any rate, as far as I knew. I had certainly never seen another. As I said, it was a wooden box with a solid wooden wheel at each corner and a long, stout handle topped by a substantial crossbar that Adela could grip with comfort whilst trundling the cart behind her. In it we had placed a goose-feather pillow for Adam to lie on, and he seemed to find it perfectly comfortable.

‘You’ll addle his brains,’ Margaret remarked glumly, watching our preparations, ‘rattling the poor child over the cobbles in that thing.’

‘He likes it,’ I retorted, nettled by her criticism of my masterpiece. ‘Look! He’s already closing his eyes.’

‘He’s sated,’ was the crisp rejoinder. ‘He’s as-’

‘As big a glutton as I am! Yes, I know! So Adela informs me.’

My wife laughed and kissed her cousin’s cheek. ‘We’ll see you before Saturday, my dear. The children won’t last a week without wanting to visit Grandmama again.’

‘You’re a witch,’ I said, when the five of us were finally in the street and Margaret’s cottage door firmly shut behind us. I put an arm about Adela’s shoulders and squeezed them. ‘You know just how to get round her. Unlike me. I’m afraid I rub her up the wrong way.’

‘Never mind the flattery,’ Adela smiled, as we began walking along Saint Thomas’s Street towards Bristol Bridge. ‘What was this tale about asking Master Overbecks to bake our Lammas bread?’

‘Sudden inspiration,’ I admitted. ‘It occurred to me that you’ve enough to do at the moment without the extra baking for Lammastide. But I’m glad you’ve reminded me.’ I ignored her stare of amazement at such unlooked-for consideration on my part. ‘I must call at Overbecks’s shop and make good the lie I told Margaret.’

We crossed the bridge, with its row of houses and shops on either side, and its central chapel of Saint Mary the Virgin, and emerged on to Saint Nicholas Backs, where, as always, a number of ships, both English and foreign, were tied up at the wharves. One had obviously only just arrived on the morning tide, for the sailors were still making the vessel secure and lowering the gangplank. They were calling to one another in a language that contained echoes of the Welsh and Cornish tongues, and which I recognized as Breton. (I had once, some years back, undertaken a mission to Brittany for Duke Richard, and had picked up a few words of the vernacular.)

As we paused to watch, a man descended the gangplank to the harbour wall and began walking towards us. There was nothing very remarkable about him — in his mid-twenties, I judged, brown hair, stockily built — but for some reason, he caught my eye, even though, as usual, the quayside was teeming with people. He was plainly dressed in hose, tunic and cloak made of that coarse brown cloth known, when I was young, as burel. The fact that he was wearing a cloak at all on this warm July day, as well as the pack he carried on his back, suggested that he had come ashore for longer than a few hours, and would not be returning to the ship that night. He passed us and started up High Street, soon lost to view among the crowds.

A small black and white mongrel scampered out of one of the houses opposite the bridge; and immediately, as I had known they would, Elizabeth and Nicholas set up a whine about wanting a dog. Again, it seemed to me that a previously vague wish had only become an urgent necessity since Adam’s birth. But I was only a man. What did I know?

‘I want that dog,’ said Nicholas.

‘Well, you can’t have him,’ I answered tersely. ‘He lives in that house over there.’

‘How do you know he lives there?’ demanded my daughter belligerently. ‘He might just be visiting his cousins.’

There was no answer to this, so I wisely kept quiet, which was just as well, as things turned out. Adela, choking back her laughter, said, ‘As a matter of fact, the dog doesn’t live in that house, Roger. I happen to know he belongs to Master Overbecks. He bought the animal recently as a present for his wife.’

‘Then he’s a fool!’ I exclaimed impatiently, as we began trudging up High Street. ‘Why doesn’t he give her a child? It’s what she really wants.’ I grabbed the handle of the cradle-cart from Adela and began dragging it instead.

My wife rubbed her aching arms and marshalled the two older children to walk in front of her, where she could keep an eye on them.

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Roger,’ she reproved me. ‘It would be foolish in the extreme for Jane to have a child, and Master Overbecks knows it. To begin with, he must be over fifty. He was soldiering in France for years before he came home and took up baking. Secondly, he’s at least thirty years older than she is. Not that either of those things really matters. What’s important is that Jane Overbecks is simple, and totally unfitted to look after a baby. She can’t even look after herself properly. Margaret insists that she’s got steadily worse during the five years since she and her sister arrived in Bristol.’