It was a clear day, the Friday of the holiday weekend, and as such, a red-letter day for carnies. The whole caravan had been ‘staunched’ for four days beforehand without any noticeable flow of punters. But it did its thing, if not happily, at least with a patience born out of five thousand years of practice. And yes, carnies were almost Roman in their reservoirs of endurance. The crowds may have been desultory, the income frugal, the mildew harvest only appropriate for home consumption, but that patient breed knew they had the bank holiday to look forward to. And it was odd, Mona pondered, as the Friday morning trickle threatened to become a flood, how often the mistermed ‘bank’ holidays fell on the same day as far older, long-forgotten feast days. Swithin, Brigit, Patrick, Lugh, whatever impulse those banks followed, when they deemed a day appropriate to holiday, they followed, like carnies themselves, old forgotten patterns that they didn’t care to understand, or examine. Did it matter what they called it, she asked Jude, who herself had a holiday named for her, as she helped her prepare her stall and saw reflected, in one of her many crystal balls, a figure from her own long-forgotten past. She recognised the sloping shoulders, the grey gabardine flapping in the summer heat, and remembered the tedious, never-ending and ultimately self-defeating enquiry into all things carnie. Burleigh? Could it possibly be he? Under what rush of insanity would he attempt a return? She turned quickly, on instinct, and saw a pair of heels vanish, round a canvas tent.
He would never, she thought, and made her way through the jumble of stalls to the big-top entrance. Inside, in the lazy mid-morning gloom, she saw Monniker exercising a pair of Arabians in a cinched jacket and a pair of riding chaps. There was a discarded gabardine coat lying on the bleachers beside a diamanté-studded caparison. It must have been left by one of last night’s punters, she thought, and returned to Jude’s tent and her preparations for the coming weekend.