Chapter 4 Excerpt: Market Day, 8 May 1800.

Foot and cart traffic spilled from the bridge into a road thronged with people from town and country, the quality in imported finery, commoners in striped drugget and coarse woolen frieze, dyed in the muted colors of plants.

A row of tall, narrow shops stood like soldiers as patrons bustled in and out.

Bakers’ prentices wandered the crowd hawking loaves and treacle-smeared barmbrack. Scattered buskers and balladeers rasped out songs in cracked-lung voices, and pipers piped for willing dancers. In another place, gamblers cheered when a sparrow mumbler finally bit off his crippled bird’s head.

Beggars called out for alms, competing with limbless invalids from the continental wars, their threadbare uniforms still bearing the stain of empire.

Rambunctious lads chased each other through the multitude, sticks high, now and then repelled by teens with curses, cuffs, and kicks.

Market Day gave life to a shivaree of snorting, bleating, braying, and barking—a drum tattoo here, a fiddle squeak there. Notes from a pennywhistle, timbres from a squeezebox, all under the screaming paperchase of sickle-winged gulls vying for scraps.