‘We could do that now. Or as soon as the festivities start. I have my eye on a sturdy little crab boat that should get us to Fortunate Valley without too much trouble. You can sell those books you’ve set aside, and if that don’t cover the train fare we’ll ride the rails the rover way, as previously discussed. I don’t see,’ Gentle said, with the sleepy look that meant he believed that he had the better part of the discussion, ‘why we need these women at all.’

‘We’ll wait to see what the Invisible College has to offer,’ Pilgrim said. ‘It should give you enough time to woo your widow.’

‘She’s already wooed. It’s just a question of waiting until she’s warmed up.’

People from outlying farms and villages had begun to arrive in town, pitching tents or roofing shallow trenches with scrap lumber to make temporary burrows. Rival gangs of young men in elaborate costumes got up from straw, rags and feathers were parading with drums and fifes and staging dance-offs against each other: rehearsals for the adjudicated competitions after the Season officially began. Gentle, returning from exchanging his catch from a day’s fishing for rice and bottled pickles at the chandler’s, told Pilgrim how one dance-off had ended with the chiefs of the rival crews shaking in ecstatic trances face to face, while the rest hollered and whooped and beat every kind of percussion instrument.

‘I’ll be glad to quit this place,’ he said. ‘But I have to admit that they know how to have fun.’