Chapter 7

It wasthe same, and yet it was not. Lily sat once more in state upon her horse-drawn cart, but in the torchlight her face looked somehow older, sharper. In the daylight, her features had seemed insipid, but the light of the torches lent them a darker definition. There was an almost fey cast to her now.

The Morris men were no longer in their gleaming white shirtsleeves; to a man they had blacked their faces and donned their ragged coats, and the bells were silenced. The clash of their staves together now seemed to Arthur sinister, almost threatening. He shivered in the cool of the evening.

“I thought only one of the men was to have a coat of rags—their, ah, wardrobe master, or whatever they term him?” Arthur ventured to Mrs Ives, who stood proudly by his side as her husband and daughter processed past.

“That may be how they do things in some parts,” she told him with a sniff, “but it’s not the way of things here. You ask Bob Goodman, he’ll set you straight.”