11 - The Lammas Feast Read Free

she and her sister arrived in Bristol.’
    Once more, I decided that silence was golden. After all, what I knew of Jane Overbecks was mainly hearsay, gleaned from listening to the gossip of Margaret Walker and her friends. I knew that the Baldock sisters, Marion and Jane, who was the younger by some ten years, had arrived in Bristol from Devon in 1473, not long before I myself made my second visit to the city.
    Jane must then have been about fifteen years of age, but with less sense than a child of ten. Moreover, she spoke so seldom that many people thought her dumb. No one seemed to know anything for certain of the sisters’ history because Marion, taciturn and wary, kept her own counsel, deftly fending off all questions from her neighbours. She set about renting a room over Master Overbecks’s bakery, and became one of his hucksters.
    Unlike his rival, Jasper Fairbrother, John Overbecks was a decent, law-abiding man, keeping to the city ordinance that no bread should be hawked around the streets except by these women, who sold bread from door to door and received a penny in the shilling profit for their labours. It was hard, tiring work, humping the heavy baskets of loaves around the town, but I guessed that Marion Baldock was not the sort of woman to complain. And there had been no Mistress Overbecks to scold and generally make her life a misery, John being one of Bristol’s most confirmed bachelors.
    Or so everyone had thought.
    I had once overheard Bess Simnel remark to Goody Watkins that she suspected Master Overbecks of being sweet on Jane Baldock; an idea that had been scouted with scorn and derision, not just by Maria Watkins herself, but also by everyone else present at the time. Bess Simnel, however, had been proved right when, the year previous to this story, Marion had been accepted by the Magdalen nuns as a postulant. It was, it seemed, what she had always wanted, but had been unable to achieve because of the responsibility for her younger sister. But now that Jane had passed her nineteenth birthday, John Overbecks had offered his hand and heart in marriage, leaving the older woman free at last to pursue what she felt to be her true vocation.
    I had been from home at the time, but had returned to a city humming with speculation, and chewing over the juiciest morsel of gossip that had landed on its plate for many a long day. The Redcliffe Goodies were well to the fore in prophesying doom and disaster; assuring all those who would listen that the marriage would not last a month. So far, it had survived the best part of a year and showed no sign as yet of running into trouble.
    My family and I were, by now, almost abreast of the opening to Saint Mary le Port Street. This was a narrow alleyway of crowding shops and houses, clustered around the church of Saint Mary le Port and eventually leading, by various byways, to the castle. Master Overbecks’s bakery was on the corner, the shop frontage being in High Street, almost, but not quite, opposite the bakery of that other master baker, Jasper Fairbrother.
    I think I have mentioned this gentleman – I use the word in its loosest sense – once before, somewhere in these chronicles. Jasper constantly flouted the law, particularly where the women hucksters were concerned, refusing point-blank to pay them more than a quarter of the rate laid down in the city’s Great Red Book, and threatening to set his gang of bravos on them if they went to the authorities with their grievances. Jasper was also a great gambler – a lucky one by all accounts – and these hefty young men were employed by him to collect his debts, as well as to menace anyone to whom Jasper took exception. He had once tried to recruit me, but I had declined his pressing invitation, in spite of the generous wages I was offered. He had never troubled me again: I was too big and too handy with my cudgel to make into an enemy. For similar reasons, or so I guessed, he lived at peace with his rival across