CHAPTER 46

ON WITH THE SHOW

The rhythm of life on the road suited Lucy well. The wagons and carts travelled from town to town and fair to fair, sometimes en masse, sometimes splitting off from one another as they diverted to smaller villages and hamlets along the road. From listening to the Pyefinches she learned that this progress around the country was an annual routine, and was in its own way as inflexible and predictable as the seasons themselves: just as spring led to summer and then winter, so the circuit that began the touring season at Reading led eventually to Lansdowne Fair at Bath, which in turn led to Bristol and Devizes and so on. They talked of this as a “circuit” because most of the showpeople overwintered in London and attempted to head back there before the bad weather and the snows made the journey treacherous.

She learned from Charlie that in the winter months the Pyefinches put up in a big yard attached to the “King Harry” public house in the Mile End Road and turned traders and costermongers until spring, repairing and improving their “show” in the long evenings, repainting their wagon and hoardings and planning new draws to attract the next year’s customers. In the touring season, the big fairs were the main events where every showman would attempt to attend and pitch his tent, but between the hiring fairs at the start of the farming year and the harvest fairs at the end, there was plenty of time and space for individual showmen to branch off to try their luck at smaller opportunities like market days and local galas.

It was at one of these lesser festivals where Lucy got her first taste of the Pyefinches’ show. After three nights on the road they arrived at a cheery little town tucked in a fold in the heathland at a point where the river they’d been following acquired a tributary. They arrived late, having spent all of a long and tiresome day on the road. They found a spot on the centre of a wedge of empty common bounded by river on two sides and the town on the third, and barely had time to water the horses before everyone was asleep.

When she woke in the morning, Lucy found that the field had sprouted tents and wagons while she slept, so that what had been a patch of bare land was now a canvas village all a-flutter with bright flags and pennants and gaudily painted frontages promising all the unimagined wonders of the world for a ha’penny.

It was a sight to make anyone smile, and Charlie told her to have a walk round “before the flats get here”. Charlie divided the world into “flats” who were unwary simpletons or sheep to be shorn, and the enterprising “sharps” (in whose number he counted himself as one of the very keenest) who did the shearing. Lucy looked at Pyefinch and Rose, conscious that although she had provided rabbits on her first night, they had been feeding her ever since.

“Let me help you set up,” she said.

“We can set up in a jiffy,” said Pyefinch. “You can help later.”

“You can help Charlie sell the rock,” said Rose. “People’d rather buy from a pretty young lady than a half-washed ragamuffin.”

“I have washed!” protested Charlie.

“Maybe,” said his mother, pointing at his neck, “but you didn’t stand very close to the soap.”

Lucy left them to argue about Charlie’s washing habits and walked through the small fair which had sprung up as she slept. She wondered if she might find a stall selling gloves as she had indeed split Sara Falk’s when she had hit Georgiana, and though she had stitched them up they were old and already beginning to fall apart again. She did not want to find herself glinting by mistake and revealing herself to her new companions.

It was not only the sights and the colours and the variety of the attractions on offer that pleased the senses as she threaded her way through the temporary lanes bordered by wagons and tents, it was the smells: after three days on the road Lucy felt as if all the open air had washed through her and left her empty and ready to be filled with this new rich assault on her nose: underlying the clean smell of wood-smoke which always attended the camp there was the smell of new ale and cakes and boiling sugar and pies and cinnamon and roasting meat and spices whose names she did not know. It was a heady, holiday smell, and as with all holiday things it made her feel a little bit happy, which was not a normal state for her. A harassed latecomer was edging a wagon through the fair looking for a pitch and she stepped out of the thoroughfare into the gap between two tent sides to let him pass.

Alone and unseen among the guy-ropes, she allowed herself to pause in the middle of everything and stop, just closing her eyes so she could concentrate on drinking in the smells and the rising noise all round her as the first fair-goers were spotted by the barkers and patterers who began pitching and counter-pitching the attractions of their rival shows.

It was an unguarded moment, and one she regretted the moment she opened her eyes.

Georgiana Eagle stood right in front of her, her eye still blackened from Lucy’s punch. Her face was unreadable. For a moment Lucy thought she was going to slap her again, and bunched her fist to retaliate.

Then Georgiana’s face changed in an instant, like a lamp igniting.

“I’m sorry I slapped you,” she said with a bright smile. “I find it so very hard when people laugh at Father, and you laughed first. I have a terrible temper.”

She held out her hand.

“If you can forgive me, let us be friends.”

She was, despite the black eye, which was now fading to mauve, perilously beautiful when she grinned. Her smile and her eyes seemed to dazzle Lucy and fill her head with such delight that there was almost no room for any other thought than just wanting to reach out and shake her hand and start a friendship.

Something stopped her and kept her hands at her sides.

It was her sense of self-preservation, and it was telling her to cancel the unbidden smile, which was even now trying to twitch up the edges of her mouth, and think.

“Why?” she said.

“Why?” echoed Georgiana. “Does there have to be a why? Is not friendship a good thing all by itself?”

“No,” said Lucy. “It is dangerous. It is not something to be given unthinkingly.”

Georgiana’s brow crinkled, and she looked so suddenly hurt and betrayed that Lucy’s fist twitched open and almost reached out of its own volition. She took a breath.

“But I am sorry for the shiner.”

“Shiner?”

“It’s Charlie’s word for it. For the black eye.”

Again Georgiana looked hurt and unsure of herself. Her hand fluttered up and smoothed the hair around her bruised cheek.

“You and Charlie have been talking about me?”

“No,” said Lucy. “Yes. Just about me hitting you.”

“Did you laugh about it?”

“No,” said Lucy.

“You laugh at my father,” said Georgiana, her face curdling back towards something cold and proud.

“No,” said Lucy. “Why would we?”

“Because people do. You all do. But he is a genius and a good man,” she said. “He is a kind man. He told me to seek you out and apologise for striking you. He said it was no way to treat a newcomer and a stranger.”

Lucy didn’t know what to say.

“Well,” said Georgiana. “I have apologised. And Father says you are welcome to visit. Rabbits or no rabbits.”

And with that, she turned an elegant heel and stepped quickly and daintily away down the canvas passage between the two tents, never looking down but still managing not to trip on any of the criss-crossed guy-ropes. Lucy watched her go, and when Georgiana turned the corner she felt as if something good had been taken out of the day.

“Rabbits or no rabbits, indeed!” snorted Rose later as she was filling Lucy’s basket with rock for the third time since the pleasure-seekers had begun to pour into the fairground in serious numbers. Rose had made the rock the previous two evenings, boiling up damp sugar and peppermint oil over the camp-fire. Lucy had a lump of it in her mouth and didn’t want to risk her teeth by trying to crunch it, so she just nodded. She hadn’t found any new gloves but had decided to pocket the ones she did have and not wear them out whilst in the country so as to keep them as much as possible for villages and towns. There were certainly advantages to this new world of canvas and wood that she had fallen into, one being that the past didn’t seem to lurk in wood or canvas the way it did in stone walls, and so she felt freer and more relaxed.

“That Barney Eagle don’t miss a trick, for all that he’s trying to drown himself in a sea of gin and tinctures,” said Rose. “You get nothing from an Eagle that doesn’t come at a price.”

Lucy sucked on the rock and raised an eyebrow.

“Oh, I’m not saying Georgiana doesn’t want to be your friend–I’ve never seen a girl who likes to be liked so much as she does–but the bit about the rabbits is the tell,” said Rose.

“What’s a tell?” said Lucy, transferring the minty lump to her cheek.

“It’s a clue. Watch people close and they all got a tell, something they do when they’re lying, or when they’re uncomfortable, or when they’re trying not to show they’ve been sneaking peppermint rock instead of selling it,” grinned Rose, sticking her tongue inside her cheek and bulging it out in mimicry of Lucy. “Now get along and sell another basket. Barney Eagle’s too lazy to trap his own rabbits and too keen to spend his money on drink to buy enough food for the pair of them. He was hinting that you should bring them some supper one of these nights. He’s always used that poor girl like a bright little lure to draw people in. Same as he did with her mother, may she rest in peace. She had the dazzle and something of the glamour too, did Sally Eagle… and it’s her passing that turned Na-Barno to the drink.”

Her eyes had gone away into the past for a moment, and when they came back they saw Lucy looking at her.

“The glamour?” said Lucy.

Rose rubbed her hand over her face as if to clear her head. Lucy wondered if that was a tell, and if so what it meant. Rose shrugged as if it was nothing.

“Oh, glamour… glamour’s just another word for beauty. Beautiful people catch the eye, and it’s easy to lead others once you’ve caught them by the eyes,” she said. “The rest of us have to work for a living. Go sell some more lovely peppermints!”

As she walked back into the open, which was now teeming with people, Lucy thought about what Rose had said. She was sure of two things: firstly, Rose had just lied about something to her, and though she wasn’t sure what it was, it was important. And then she thought about Mr Sharp’s eyes and the way the brown flecks in them seemed to tumble like autumn leaves—

—and then a drunken ploughboy caught at her arm and asked to buy some rock for his girl, and she put both thoughts away in the back of her head and took his money with a smile.