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Margaret Campbell Barnes
Published by Good Press, 2021
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Tired though she was, her sleepiness had gone. The worst of the distant thunder had passed over, and the few heavy drops of rain which were falling had already cooled the air. Gratefully she leaned from her window, with its small leaded panes. Above her head finely carved timber came to a point beneath a roof of blue local tiles, and within arm’s reach below her, from its spiked iron shaft, hung the inn sign. In the still air the familiar White Boar, which usually swung and creaked, looked dead as their diminished fortunes, and—even Tansy had to admit it—sadly in need of a coat of paint. Beyond the city walls strips of unharvested corn in the peasants’ fields gleamed whitely against thick forests, and to the west occasional flashes of lightning played over the flat land around Bosworth beyond the river Soar. But light streamed comfortingly from the tall windows of the Abbey and twinkled in dozens of windows along the darkening streets and in the market place, where vendors were still setting up their stalls and where on Monday she would go marketing. It was the newly entrusted treat of her week, going to market on her pony with a purseful of money for the inn’s provisioning and Jod lumbering on a packhorse behind. There would be chaffering and chattering, and all manner of pretty things on the chapmen’s stalls, a performing bear perhaps, and plenty of impudent apprentices bringing blushes to the cheeks of every pretty girl. Apprentices and their like were beginning to loom large in Tansy’s secret, personal life. Their calls and whistles had become a kind of judgment, like the apple offered by the shepherd Paris to the most beautiful goddess. And by the way they looked at her, Tansy was beginning to realize that, in spite of her stepmother’s unkind teasing about a tiptilted nose and straw-colored hair, she could not be so plain after all.
If I wash with the rose water which that extravagant Tom Hood bought me last May Day, and put on my rose-sprigged gown, I shall look very different from how I do now, she thought, unfastening the crumpled bodice of her workaday linen and fastidiously shaking her slender body free from a clinging, sweat-damp shift.
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