More girls arrive. The piss pot overflows again. Lots of thieves in the new lot, including four sisters who worked in the royal kitchen and had a good side custom selling the uneaten food from off Queen Bethany’s tables when she and her court were staying in town.

On the hip bones of the year, spring and autumn, Queen Bethany and her court come up the river from the big city in great barges to live here. We all turn out to watch her arrive with her servants and ladies and trunks upon trunks of baggage. It means work and money. But the town sort of swells up in an uncomfortable way, the roads thickening with folk and carts and horses, pantoboys performing the news, tinkers and trinket sellers setting up stalls, vagabonds and beggars skulking about, like in the rhyme:

Hark, hark the dogs do bark,

The beggars are coming to town,

Eaters of sin, and drinkers of spirits,

And players in velvet gowns.

The four sisters who worked in the kitchen are a small society unto themselves, talking and laughing and sometimes holding one another through weeping. I sit on the fringes and pretend I’m a part. It makes me feel like I have friends. They seem not to mind.

‘Selling leftover food weren’t against the law in our mum’s day,’ says the eldest sister one morning. ‘Was part of the job!’

‘Everyone’s feeling the squeeze now,’ gripes a younger sister. ‘Queen makes her court ladies pay their own keep, you know’ – she speaks to those of us who don’t – ‘food, candles, firewood, even – though they serve at the Queen’s pleasure. The spiteful Queen!’

‘Hush, Lila!’ scolds the eldest.

‘Those are words to say inside your head,’ I suggest aloud.

‘Gemma saw the Queen stick a knife in a lady’s hand for smiling at her favourite! The blade went clean through and got stuck in the table,’ says Lila.

‘You still don’t say such things if you don’t want your tongue cut out and hung up on the castle wall,’ says the eldest.

‘A wedding would solve it quick,’ says another sister. ‘No more favourites.’

‘If the fighting over her hand doesn’t bring us into another war,’ moans the eldest.

‘Oh, think of a royal wedding,’ says Lila. ‘Plenty of money and plenty of eating.’

‘I hope she’ll not marry a stranger,’ says the eldest. ‘Such a wealth of countrymen. From south and west and up north.’

‘Up north’s not strangers?’ I say. Everyfolk knows Northern men wear skirts, eat nought but bag pudding and will fug anything, man, woman, even their own sheep. The sisters go on together as if I haven’t spoken.

‘Do you recall the young suitor with the red stockings?’ says the youngest, and they all fall to laughing. Then a sigh settles over the group, and they nestle in together like doves in a cote.