Read 11 - The Lammas Feast for Free Online

from a chapman’s pack when traders would soon be arriving with their goods from all around the country, from every part of Wales and even from abroad. (As I trudged along Welsh Back a few minutes earlier, I had noticed at least two of the flat-bottomed barges the Welsh call trows tied up at the wharfside.)
    For the second time that day, I was walking up High Street. At that hour of the afternoon, the drain in the middle of the road had become blocked with refuse and stank to high heaven. Again, this was something I did not usually notice, but which now, irritable and tired as I was, offended my senses. I was feeling extremely sorry for myself, and I could just picture Adela’s wry smile as I staggered into the cottage wanting to be petted and cosseted and told what a brave young fellow I was to be working in all this heat.
    As I once more drew abreast of Saint Mary le Port Street, I glanced across the road to Master Overbecks’s bakery. There seemed to be nothing amiss. Women were still crowding round the counter, and both Master Overbecks and Dick Hodge were serving them pies and cakes and pastries. I wondered what had happened concerning the two strangers, and would have gone across to enquire, but business was so brisk that I decided against it. The baker wouldn’t thank me for the interruption: I should just have to wait for news until Richard Manifold called on us, as he had promised, that evening.
    A yard or so further on, to my left, was Jasper Fairbrother’s bakery. He had already ceased trading for the day, the counter drawn up, the shop shuttered. This did not surprise me. Jasper had so many other irons in the fire – gambling, extortion, whoring and having innocent citizens beaten up – that it was a constant source of wonder to his fellow inhabitants that he found time to run a bakery at all. I think most people secretly hoped that he would one day be caught selling underweight loaves, and be dragged through the streets with the offending bread hung round his neck, a target for all the stinking rubbish that could be thrown at him. Unfortunately, if he did give short measure, or flout the city ordinance regarding the hucksters, he got away with it. His victims were too frightened of him and his bravos to complain.
    As I passed the shop, a door opened and Walter Godsmark came out, crossing the street with his long-legged stride. He entered the shadows of Saint Mary le Port Street and I guessed that he was hurrying home, for I knew that he lived with his widowed mother near Saint Peter’s Church, in the lee of the castle.
    If Walter had a saving grace it was his care for this elderly parent, who, so I was told, had been almost past the age of childbearing when her only son was born. Her husband had died shortly afterwards, and, with the help of a daughter, some twelve or so years older than Walter, had managed to rear him from a sickly infant to the strapping great lout he was today. Now it was his turn to look after her, his sister having long ago departed from the town. What Goody Godsmark thought of her son’s association with Jasper Fairbrother no one knew, for she would never be drawn on the subject; but he was the apple of her eye, and I doubt that she would have blamed him had he been in league with Old Nick himself.
    I slowed down a little as I reached the top of High Street, then skirted the High Cross before entering Broad Street, almost directly opposite. Here stood a house I knew well, the former home of the late Alderman Weaver; a house which, since the Alderman’s death just over a year ago, had stood shuttered and empty while his brother and heir decided what to do with it. But now, at last, it had a new occupant. One of Bristol’s richest citizens, Peter Avenel, who made his money from making soap, had bought it for his son, Robin, recently married to the daughter of another wealthy local merchant. (Bristol is a very rich city, and approves of its sons and daughters marrying one another.