The Maiden's Hand

“Come see the show of nature’s oddities,” a woman called. “We’ve a badger that plays the tambour.” Reaching out, she grasped Oliver’s shoulder.

Patting her hand, he pulled away. “No, thank you.”

“A goose that counts?” the hawker offered.

Oliver smiled and shook his head.

“A two-headed lamb? A five-legged calf?”

Oliver prepared to move off. The woman leaned close and said in a loud whisper, “A bull with two pizzles.”

Oliver de Lacey froze in his tracks. “This,” he said, pressing a coin into her palm, “I have got to see.”

He made Lark come with him, but she steadfastly refused to look. She stood in a corner of the stall, her eyes clamped shut and her nostrils filled with the ripe scent of manure. Several minutes passed, and she closed her ears to the whistles and catcalls mingling with the animal noises.

At last Oliver returned to her side and drew her out into the bright light. His eyes were wide with juvenile wonder.

“Well?” Lark asked.

“I feel quite strung with emotion,” he said earnestly. “Also cheated by nature.”

Lark shook her head in disgust. For once, Spencer was wrong. This crude, ribald man could not possibly be the paragon of honor Spencer thought him to be. “‘An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations,’” she muttered, “‘feet that be swift in running to mischief.’”

“I beg your pardon?” Oliver weighed his purse in his hand.

“Proverbs,” she said.

“Why, thank you, my lady Righteous.” With an insolent swagger, he plunged down yet another narrow lane, and Lark had no choice but to follow or be left alone in the crowd. They passed flower sellers and cloth traders, booths selling roast pork and gingermen. Oliver laughed at puppets beating each other over the head. He dispensed coins to beggars as easily as if he were passing out bits of chaff.

After what seemed like an eternity, they reached the boundary of the fair. In the distance they could see the horse fair at Smithfield.

“We’ll venture no farther.” Oliver’s face paled a shade. “I mislike the burning grounds.”

She followed him obligingly from the area. Though the blackened stakes and sand pits were not yet visible, she felt their proximity like the brush of a cobweb against her cheek.

“That is the first sensible thing I have heard you say,” she announced. “Think of the condemned Protestants who have been martyred here.”

“I’ve been trying not to.” As they walked past the fringes of the fair, Oliver heaved a great sigh. “I have failed.”

“What do you mean?”

“I wanted to make you laugh and smile, and you have not. Where did I go wrong?”

“Well, you could start with our near drowning while shooting the bridge.”

“I thought you’d find that exhilarating.”

“I found it foolish and unnecessary. As was your greeting to the woman called Nell.” Lark lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “Heaven in her lap?”

He had the grace to blush. “She’s an old friend.”

“What about your treasonous little exchange with a monkey?” Lark continued, enumerating the outrages. “And your prurient interest in a bull’s, er, his two…”

“Pizzles,” Oliver supplied helpfully.

“Hardly a cause for great mirth from me.”

“I know.” He had a rare gift for looking both sulky and charming at once. “I’ve failed you. I—” He broke off, glancing over her shoulder. The sulkiness disappeared, and his face glowed with sheer delight. “Come, Mistress Lark. Here is something you’ll like.”

Pulled along in the wake of his enthusiasm, she found herself at the stall of a bird seller. Wooden crates of burbling doves, huddled robins and moth-eaten gulls were stacked about haphazardly.

“How much?” Oliver asked the man.

“For which one, sir?”

“For all of them.”

The man’s jaw dropped. Oliver grabbed his hand and dumped a small fortune of coins into it. “That should keep you in your cups a good while.”

“My lord,” Lark said, “there are hundreds of birds here. How will you—”

“Watch.” He drew a silver eating knife from the leather sheath attached to his belt and pried open each cage. With a flourish he removed each little door.

“Oliver!” Lark barely noticed that she had used his Christian name. The bird seller uttered a blue oath.

Like a great, winged cloud, the once-captive birds rose. The sound of beating and whirring feathers filled the sky above the fair. It was an awesome sight, darkening the sun for a moment, then turning light as the flock of liberated birds dispersed.

Oohs and aahs issued from nearby fairgoers.

“‘The stars compel the soul to look upward,”’ Oliver de Lacey recited, “‘and lead us from this world to another.’ Plato.”

“I know.” She squinted up at the birds, now mere specks in an endless field of marbled blue. And against her will, a smile unfurled on her lips.

“Eureka!” Oliver spread out one arm like a seasoned showman. “She smiles. Eureka! Archimedes. When he first said ‘Eureka,’ he went running naked through the streets.”

“That,” she said, “I did not know.”

“It is said he made his discovery about the displacement of water while in his bath. The insight so aroused him that he forgot to dress himself before running to tell his colleagues.” Oliver lifted his face to the winter sun as the last of the birds disappeared. “There, you see, my angel. They can soar. I have set them all free.”

“All of them,” she agreed, feeling strangely content.

“Well, not quite.”

She peered at the cages. Not a single bird remained. The bird seller was already stacking his crates in a two-wheeled cart.

Oliver slipped one arm around her waist, and his other hand rested on her bodice, the fingers drumming on the stiff corset of boiled leather.

“There is still one little lark in a cage, eh?”