Indeed, all of that was a welcome distraction from the intensity of my mind. The intensity seemed to have spilled out of me, infecting the grass and the trees and every brook and stream. Every time I closed my eyes I thought of my mother on that last day, high in the air, her hair blowing in the wind towards me. And her cries still echoed in my ears.
I had been a ghost of myself for three days. I’d gone back to Edwardstone a free man, but I couldn’t stay there. They were murderers. Every single one of them. I went back to the cottage and picked up mother’s lute and searched for some money but there was none. Then I left. I just ran. I couldn’t be in Edwardstone. I never wanted to see the likes of Bess Small or Walter Earnshaw again, just as I never wanted to walk by the Giffords’ cottage. I wanted to run away from this feeling of terror and loss inside me, of infinite loneliness, but of course there was no running away fromthat.
But now I was getting close to London. I had been told by a man with a lisp in the village of Hackney that if I was heading into London I would pass by the Green Goose Fair, at Fairfield Road in Bow, and there would be food there, and ‘various madness’. And now here I was. Fairfield Road. And there was the start of the madness: a cow, standing square in the road, eyeballing me. As if trying to communicate something that was too easily lost in the chasm between animals and people.
As I carried on walking, beyond the cow, there were houses on either side of me. And unlike in other villages, the houses just kept going on and on, in a straight line, on either side of the road. There was hardly any space between them. This was London, I realised. And I saw crowds and crowds of people ahead of me, filling the street.
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.
