The Country Mouse would say untoward, I think. My mother would offer up a handful of cockles for having an honest heart. He would ask if she would like to join him on his barge. The wharf is busy enough that she slips aboard without a nosy wherryman making hay about it, and she, no, I am alone on the barge with the Country Mouse. He wears the same slashed sleeves as the day I first saw him. He tells me how tedious he finds the ladies of the court, how they don’t know simple country-folk things like how to wash a wool blanket without turning it to felt.

Then I tell him how court ladies bloody their short breeches just the same as country girls do, and he laughs. He has a cup of strong beer that we share, and I think how his lips are touching the same place as mine as we pass it back and forth. He looks at me, and I don’t feel nerves because it’s like he’s always known me. His eyes crease when he asks if we can’t just take the barge all the way past the town and on down the river until we find a wild place no folk knows about. We moor the barge by a green bank and play hide-and-catch in the long grasses. I run so quick he admires me for it. We part the branches of an old willow and find a shadowy little place where we can be ourselves alone.

I’m drawn out of my dreaming by two boys minding a butcher’s stall nearby. The elder’s swinging a bull penis around trying to swat the younger with it. Who knows how my mother and sire met? For all I know he cornered her in an alley.

Up ahead I spy the sweets man. He’s got all sorts of jars with delicacies in them. When I was little I’d imagine which I’d choose if ever I had the money. Sugar-paste flowers. Candied grapes. Pearled comfits. So many sorts, but I always wanted the same thing. Today, I go right up and stick my hand into the jar of orange suckets. I pull out a handful, the sugar on them gritty, like sand.

‘Hey now!’ the vendor calls out, then sees my sin eater collar. He turns to the other stall keepers around him. ‘Hey! Hey-o! What’s this?’ A man selling pickled vegetables shakes his head in startlement.

The orange suckets taste nothing like sand. The sugar grit on the outside melts on my tongue so sweet my ears tingle inside like when you eat honey, but even more so. And the orange! It’s got a taste that’s tart, but sweet, like you ate a bright marigold.