say should he see me shouldering my cask along dressed this way. Would he have me haul water in the clothes he has paid good money to have tailored for me? It is a brassy move, of course, but I have begun to feel the brass in me, as has James. We are growing up, we two.
Then I begin to laugh so hard that I actually have to sit down on my bed, because I’ve realized that the shoes don’t fit me, not nearly,and that my own new boots would give away the whole show. And that consequently there is nothing to be done except to go in my bare feet, which is done by a great many in this city, but, needless to say, never by a Boswell.
Never, ever. It is just shy of a hanging offense in our household.
I pull the bonnet down over my head and deliberate about it. But after only another second, I think of something that is simply too tempting to be resisted. If I go barefoot, I can tell James later that not only did I wear his secret suit, but that until he himself wears it without shoes, he hasn’t seen
anything.
T HE JOKE GOES cold by the time I am halfway down the Parliament Stairs, quite literally. A nirly breeze is rushing through the Closes, an early taste of what the fishermen in the autumn call the shrinking wind. A tricky wind, the kind that dies and roars at precisely the right moments to upend tables in the market, hats and skirts, and occasionally to strip a sedan chair clean away from its chairmen.
But mostly what sours the joke is what I see as I descend the long line of stone stairs: a small crowd of people, maybe twenty-five or thirty of them, grouped around the gray granite well, which looks like an eight-foot sentry-box but for the fact that it has no windows. The vessels these people have brought are spread out over the cobblestones in a long, ragged snaking line.
It is mostly women, maid-servants and caddies and fishwives, and the men are mostly boys a good deal younger than myself. The few grown men are on the oldish side, smoking pipes or seated in the windbreak where the stairs empty out into the Cowgate.
Most of the crowd stands together in small knots of talk, only their casks and buckets holding their places in line. Some turn their faces up to look as I draw down nearer, but they turn immediately away as the suit works its magic.
I can hear the pump water itself now and again, not rushinginto the bucket as it should, but pulsing slowly, weakly and then a bit stronger and then weakly again, like blood pumped through a sickish heart. I will be most of the afternoon at this, I think.
There are, however, a number of interesting things about this scene below me that I will only come to know tomorrow afternoon. Not only the surgeon, but several friends of the family will drop by to look in on me then, to see how I’m faring and to try to raise my spirits. They will bring me Spanish figs and cluck their tongues and provide me with facts I can have no way of knowing now, yet things my father knows very well and from many sources.
This year’s drought is no ordinary harvest drought. The Castle reservoir, ordinarily topped off by water piped from Pentland Hills, has fallen dangerously low, low enough to cut the flow to wells down the Royal Mile by something like three-quarters. Some of the old lead piping carrying the water has also chosen this past summer to decay. Gangs of workmen are still digging it up here and there in the city, searching for the phantom drain on the system.
In the lower end of town, farmers are selling water hauled in from the country. A half-penny for each four pints, William will tell me tomorrow. It is a price he has paid more than once to avoid the crowds.
William will also tell me that it is not unusual to wait an hour or more to fill your buckets, partially because the stronger and larger often don’t wait their turn, and that in this way the line itself is only a partial indication of how long one must idle there. Sentries have been posted, every now and again, in response to
Then I begin to laugh so hard that I actually have to sit down on my bed, because I’ve realized that the shoes don’t fit me, not nearly,and that my own new boots would give away the whole show. And that consequently there is nothing to be done except to go in my bare feet, which is done by a great many in this city, but, needless to say, never by a Boswell.
Never, ever. It is just shy of a hanging offense in our household.
I pull the bonnet down over my head and deliberate about it. But after only another second, I think of something that is simply too tempting to be resisted. If I go barefoot, I can tell James later that not only did I wear his secret suit, but that until he himself wears it without shoes, he hasn’t seen
anything.
T HE JOKE GOES cold by the time I am halfway down the Parliament Stairs, quite literally. A nirly breeze is rushing through the Closes, an early taste of what the fishermen in the autumn call the shrinking wind. A tricky wind, the kind that dies and roars at precisely the right moments to upend tables in the market, hats and skirts, and occasionally to strip a sedan chair clean away from its chairmen.
But mostly what sours the joke is what I see as I descend the long line of stone stairs: a small crowd of people, maybe twenty-five or thirty of them, grouped around the gray granite well, which looks like an eight-foot sentry-box but for the fact that it has no windows. The vessels these people have brought are spread out over the cobblestones in a long, ragged snaking line.
It is mostly women, maid-servants and caddies and fishwives, and the men are mostly boys a good deal younger than myself. The few grown men are on the oldish side, smoking pipes or seated in the windbreak where the stairs empty out into the Cowgate.
Most of the crowd stands together in small knots of talk, only their casks and buckets holding their places in line. Some turn their faces up to look as I draw down nearer, but they turn immediately away as the suit works its magic.
I can hear the pump water itself now and again, not rushinginto the bucket as it should, but pulsing slowly, weakly and then a bit stronger and then weakly again, like blood pumped through a sickish heart. I will be most of the afternoon at this, I think.
There are, however, a number of interesting things about this scene below me that I will only come to know tomorrow afternoon. Not only the surgeon, but several friends of the family will drop by to look in on me then, to see how I’m faring and to try to raise my spirits. They will bring me Spanish figs and cluck their tongues and provide me with facts I can have no way of knowing now, yet things my father knows very well and from many sources.
This year’s drought is no ordinary harvest drought. The Castle reservoir, ordinarily topped off by water piped from Pentland Hills, has fallen dangerously low, low enough to cut the flow to wells down the Royal Mile by something like three-quarters. Some of the old lead piping carrying the water has also chosen this past summer to decay. Gangs of workmen are still digging it up here and there in the city, searching for the phantom drain on the system.
In the lower end of town, farmers are selling water hauled in from the country. A half-penny for each four pints, William will tell me tomorrow. It is a price he has paid more than once to avoid the crowds.
William will also tell me that it is not unusual to wait an hour or more to fill your buckets, partially because the stronger and larger often don’t wait their turn, and that in this way the line itself is only a partial indication of how long one must idle there. Sentries have been posted, every now and again, in response to
Similar Books
