The crowd thins when they reach the other side of the Thames. Beatrix follows the warm scents of smoke and spices down a cobbled street lined with ramshackle stalls, Oliver one step behind her.
She discovered the riverside market a few weeks after she arrived in the city. The food is good and cheap, and all that she can afford most days. She loves the bustle of travelers and traders from all over the world, the perpetual newness of it. Her pulse quickens. She never knows what she’ll find.
Today, Dutch fishermen sell eels pulled from the Thames next to Spanish sailors with barrels of bright oranges beside Frenchmen hawking salt and wine and pottery. Born-and-bred Londoners work the cookshops, pulling all sorts of food from the squat brick hearths. Beatrix’s stomach growls.
“Take your pick.” She points out each stall. “Oysters are fresh from the river, meat pies are your best value, as long as they haven’t spoiled, and the pretzels are good luck.”
“Oh?” Oliver raises an eyebrow at her.
“If you believe in that sort of thing.”
“And do you? Believe in that sort of thing?” he asks.
“I used to,” Beatrix admits. “A long time ago.”
Oliver considers her. “You strike me as someone who makes her own luck.”
“I suppose I do.” She takes it as a compliment, though she’s not entirely sure he meant it as one.
She gestures to a hunched old woman scowling behind a stall that looks one good gust of wind away from falling over. “Don’t believe a word the brewster says about her sick husband. He’s been dead for twenty years. And don’t pay more than tuppence for her ale.”
“What about you? What do you want?” Oliver asks.
He sounds slightly panicked, but he needn’t worry. She’ll eat any of it, especially if she doesn’t have to pay. “Surprise me.”
Oliver heads into the market, and Beatrix claims an empty bench set between two stalls. She has become an expert at reading people over the years, but he is a mystery. With his fancy clothes and more money than sense, she would have sworn he was highborn, except he doesn’t carry himself like a lord or speak like one. And she can’t place the accent.
When he joins her, his arms are overloaded with food. Beatrix takes a bucket of oysters and a pot of ale from him. “Did you buy everything?”
“It all looked good. I couldn’t decide.” He sets some sort of meat pie, a hunk of gingerbread, a warm pretzel, a basket of Kentish cherries, and two Spanish oranges between them. “So, I didn’t.”
Beatrix stares at the food, wide-eyed. “You bought a feast.”
Oliver grins at her, a dazzling, contagious thing. He tears the pretzel in two and offers her half. “I thought we could both use a little luck.”
“Cheers.” She bites into her pretzel, and it is warm and doughy and deliciously salty. She devours it in three bites.
They split the oysters next. Beatrix makes quick work of prying the shells open with her knife.
“So, where are you from?” she asks, her curiosity conquering her desire to keep Oliver at a distance.
“Near Cambridge,” he says. “What about you?”
She hesitates, remembering the man and his potion, how he looked at her with no sense of recognition when she asked him about her home, even though he knew of the Wye and the abbey. “Lancaut.”
She’s not surprised by Oliver’s blank expression, only by the sinking feeling in her guts. “It’s a tiny village on the Welsh border, in Gloucestershire. No one’s ever heard of it.”
He drops an empty oyster shell into the bucket. “Tell me about it.”
But the memories of her lost life are too fresh in her mind after yesterday—too raw. Better to leave Lancaut buried. “There’s nothing to tell.”
They sit in a heavy silence. Beatrix doesn’t mind. Silence is better than whispers. Oliver shifts under the weight of it. He picks through the basket of cherries sitting between them. “What did you think of Shakespeare?”
Beatrix is glad for the change of subject. “That’s the third time I’ve seenA Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s an audience favorite.”
“But not yours, I take it?” Oliver asks.
Beatrix shrugs. “I don’t care for the faeries.”
