“Go back to sleep, Eve.”
I sat up, pulling the blanket from her. She tried to yank it back, but I was holding it tight.
“Listen, Mama! The rain’s stopped!”
“What if it has?” she grumbled.
“It means we can go the fair!”
I scrambled out of bed and looked out of the window. A faint line of light spread up from the east. A dog barked and it started all the others barking too. Mistress Sleet opened her window and shouted at them. She should have known better. The dogs just thought she meant “bark louder”.
Mama sighed and sat up. “Are you sure it’s not raining?”
“Yes! We can go, can’t we?”
“We’ll see, mpendwa.”
Mama’s “we’ll see” could mean “yes”, but I had to be patient. It wasn’t just down to her to decide. Master Horstead usually had a long list of chores for Mama to do and then Mistress Horstead had an even longer one on top of that. Mama had to do them. If she didn’t, they’d make us pay more for our room, and we couldn’t afford that. We didn’t want to end up fighting rats in the grain store again. We knew we were lucky that we even had this. So, Mama set off to change the bed linen in the rooms that had been occupied while I cleaned the chimney grates and built up the kindling and wood ready for fresh fires. After that, we went down to help prepare the day’s food. Then we waited and waited. Finally Mistress Horstead gave us permission to go to the fair, so long as we returned in time to help serve the guests in the evening.
At last! I was really going to the famous Bartholomew Fair! First though, we had to get there. On fair days the bridge across to London was more crowded than ever. I thought we would at least try, but Mama said no. By the time we’d managed to get across to the other side, she said, we’d have to turn around and come right home again. I’m sure she was right and that was one of her reasons for saying no, but I also knew that there was something on the bridge that she didn’t want to see: the traitors – or what was left of them.
You see, I was born in 1558, the same year that Queen Elizabeth became queen. Mama hadn’t been in England very long, so didn’t really know what life had been like here before, but the old people in the taverns still talked about it. It had been a hard time for everyone. The Portuguese on the island where Mama was born were Catholics, like England had been, but when Elizabeth became queen, England didn’t know what it wanted. Queen Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII, had been Catholic, but then he’d stopped and made himself head of a new Church of England so that he could marry Elizabeth’s mother. When he changed his religion, everyone else was meant to as well. When Henry died, his son Edward didn’t change things, but Edward died when he wasn’t much older than me. Then his Catholic sister, Mary, became queen and everyone was supposed to be Catholic again. I’d heard that she’d wanted to kill everyone who wasn’t a Catholic. Now it was Elizabeth who was queen and it was forbidden to be Catholic again.
It didn’t bother me so much as nobody had bothered asking Mama and me how we worshipped. But Queen Elizabeth had upset many people who had thought they could be Catholic again. The ones that were caught found themselves locked up in the Tower of London. Once they’d confessed to being Catholic, their heads were chopped off and stuck on pikes on top of the gateway to the bridge as a warning to others. You couldn’t see their faces because they were covered in tar, but Mama still thought their eyes were watching her.
So, no going over the bridge. That meant crossing in a wherry boat. I was nervous, but reminded myself that this was part of the big adventure. As we walked towards the river stairs on Pepper Alley, we soon realized that we weren’t the only ones with that plan. The whole of Southwark seemed to be heading to the fair, jostling on the jetty for a boat to take them across the water. The tide was low. It looked like we could almost walk across the stones and mud to London, but even like this, the water could be deadly. Mama held me tightly. People sometimes look at us because our skin is browner than everyone else’s, and Mama always worried that something might happen to us. I think that was because of what had happened to her in the past.
At last we reached the front of the queue for the boats. I couldn’t help smiling. The sky was bright blue and tiny clouds looked like smudged fingerprints. A gull dipped down into the water and flapped away with a fish in its beak. I held Mama’s hand tighter and she smiled down at me. Even the wherrymen were smiling. Of course, fair days were their favourite. They would have a heavy purse of money by the end.
We found ourselves sharing a boat with a farmer and a live goose. The goose was in a basket, but was far from happy about it and showed its displeasure by trying to peck the farmer through the reeds. I could feel the river’s strength beneath our little boat as the wherryman weaved between the other vessels. I counted eight more wherries heading back to Southwark. Through the bridge’s arches, I glimpsed a galleon, a huge sailing ship, anchored at the wharf on the other side of the river. I asked
