A crowd of boys were laughing and mocking me.
The girl was scrabbling around on her knees trying to salvage any plums she could.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
I picked up a muddy plum and walked away.
‘Ho! Hey! Ho! You!’ She grabbed my shoulder. Her nostrils were flaring with rage. ‘Look what you have done!’
I thought I was going to faint again, and decided to keep moving, so I didn’t do any more damage.
‘Stop walking! You can’t just walk away!’
I bit into the muddied plum. She grabbed it out of my hand, fast as a bird, and threw it on the ground.
‘That basket was a week’s money. A good week. Now I have to pay Mr Sharpe for fruit I never sold.’
‘Mr Sharpe?’
‘So, you can pay me now.’
‘I have no money.’
She was red-faced with humiliation and anger. She looked confused about the money situation. Maybe it was because, despite the dirt on my clothes and compared to most of the crowd around us, I was quite well dressed. My mother had always made sure that, even though our circumstances had drastically changed since moving to England, we looked as noble as we could afford. Which was, with hindsight, one of the many reasons we had struggled tofit in among the raggedy villagers of Edwardstone. Not the main reason, obviously.
‘That,’ she said, pointing to the lute on my back.
‘What?’
‘Give me that. That can be your payment.’
‘No.’
She picked up a rock. ‘Well, I shall break it then, the way you broke my basket.’
I raised my hands. ‘No! No.’
She must have seen something in my face that made her think twice. ‘You have no food but you are worried about a lute.’
‘It was my mother’s.’
Her face softened, went from anger back to confusion. ‘Where is your mother?’
‘She died three days ago.’
She folded her arms. Yes. She looked around eighteen or nineteen years of age. I can tell you that she wore an ordinary white dress, a ‘kirtle’ as folk used to call it, and a simple red neckerchief, worn at an angle, with the knot tied at the left side of her neck. I can tell you that she had very clean skin – a rarity among this crowd – and had two moles on her right cheek, one smaller than the other, like a moon in a planet’s orbit, and a small constellation of freckles over her nose. Her dark hair was half inside a little white cloth cap, half free and wild.
She had the kind of face that had spent most of its time frowning, but there was also a glint of mischief to her that played around with the corners of her mouth, as if a smile was always in the process of wanting to emerge but being tightly regulated by some disapproving authority inside her mind. I can tell you she was tall too. A quarter head taller than me at that time, if shorter than me when I became, physically, a ‘grown up’.
‘Died?’
‘Yes.’
She nodded. Death was nothing remarkable. ‘So who do you have?’
‘I have myself.’
‘And where do you live?’
