A Midsummer's Day Read online

  Still, if truth was told, Puck had himself a nasty reputation for stealing kisses from the pretty young lasses on Hill Street. But what harm rested in such innocent dalliances? Anne herself could not deny the want of such attention from the young men at festival.

  “My good Master Puck,” she said with a smile, elevating the man’s status with one simple word. “Methinks I do detect a strong lack of willing cheeks and ready lips upon the Hill Street.” She closed the uncomfortable distance between them, stopping at the edge of the cooling shade.

  “It be the truth, my Lady Halloway.” Puck smiled, stark white teeth showing in the center of a tanned and muddily handsome face. “I have runnest me out of conquests.”

  “Master Puck, name me Anne. I beg it of thee.”

  Mock shock split his surprisingly soft looking lips. “Ne’er would I presume to name a noble Lady in such familiarity.”

  “Tush, sir.” Anne flicked a chunk of dried mud from his hot shoulder. “Have I not e’er been thy close friend?”

  “Your betrothed shalt have me harshly in the stocks, or part me from my crown, should he see us now,” Puck whispered into her ear, though a smile swirled in his voice.

  Anne smiled, but she took a step back. He had a point. She would not see him punished on her account. “Prithee escort thee a Lady through the festival,” she said, trying not to laugh through her own absurd properness. “The Lord High Sheriff doth quake to think me wandering by mine own self.”

  Puck gave a bow equal in graciousness and regality to that of any of the noblemen of the Court. When he stood, they smiled at each other.

  There was no better way to break the rules of society than to do it properly.

  To the left of Anne’s position upon the Grotto Stage, beyond the glassblower, the only artisan to require seating because of the high volume of his constant audience, was the Grotto. It was a place of cutpurses and pirates, fortune tellers and gypsies. Very few nobles would shame themselves by lingering in such a place.

  As such, it was one of Anne’s favorite haunts.

  To the right was the Lover’s Bridge. Legend held that a man and woman, passing through the bridge together and sitting on the bench therein, would be connected in love throughout eternity. Half a dozen couples lingered beneath the bridge’s roof, but Anne had never been through the place, save to walk through it alone. She’d not even travelled through the bridge with Jameson.

  In the end, they turned towards the Grotto. Puck stayed a step or two behind Anne, and no amount of cajoling would have him walk beside her in public.

  Deep in the heart of the Grotto, bright red and purple tents sprang up like wildflowers. It was the Gypsy Way, the home of the fortune tellers.

  Anne stepped from the path and into the thick of the tents.

  “Pray pardon, noble Lady,” Puck whispered. “Shouldst you be in such a place?”

  “Seek thee not to chide me, Master Puck. Even the Queen of France hath dabbled oft in the art of fortune telling. I wouldst seek me my fortune.” She marched proudly towards the tents. There were no nobles here. No one brave enough to go to the Lord High Sheriff with tales of Anne being here.

  And she would not have another lecture to endure.

  Tent after tent was filled with peasant women seeking their fortune, wanting to know about future husbands, households, and children. Every tent had a line of at least half a dozen women. It would take ages to get inside to see a gypsy.

  Finally, at the end of the long row of tents, Anne found one made of threadbare red velvet decked with balding tassels that, at one time, must have been gold in color. No peasant waited in the doorway for their turn at the table. The fortune teller inside must not have seen a good influx of eager customers in a generation.

  It was as good a tent as any.

  The gypsy inside was not the old crone Anne expected to see, wrinkled and hunched and gray. The blond was younger and more fresh faced than Anne herself felt. She wore the purple skirt often identified with the gypsies, and her sun streaked hair was pulled back with a band covered in diamonds.

  “My good Lady Halloway. Long have I awaited your arrival,” the girl said, her voice heavy with the accent of the Romany people. Her worldly gaze pierced Anne’s very soul as she motioned to the chair opposite hers.

  Anne sat, her eyes briefly passing over the crystal ball on the table between them. “How doth thou know of me?” She’d never sought out a gypsy before. How did this girl know her?

  The gypsy turned her knowing blue eyes to the crystal. “This day bringest with it many changes, my Lady Halloway, that shalt strike upon your heart as waves strike upon the shore. The warm embrace of true love shalt find you before the sun doth lay its head upon thy festival.”

  Changes and love. It was a general fortune that could have fit the situation of any woman seeking their futures. There was no real prophecy in the gypsy’s words. Anne stood. “I do humbly thank thee for my fortune. The arms of love art already about me.”

  “Be it love in love’s most truest form?” the gypsy asked.

  Anne paused at the doorway. “I shalt think me upon thy thoughtful words, Madam Gypsy.” She nodded her thanks, and she and Puck moved on.

  Her skin trembled. The gypsy’s words haunted her down to her soul. There was no doubt that she loved her Jameson. But true love?

  Did such a thing exist?

  “Think you not on the gypsy’s haunting words, my Lady,” Puck said, reading Anne’s thoughts with more witchery than existed in Gypsy Way. “The day be young. The weather be glorious, and all of Sherwood doth lie before your feet.”

  Chapter 3

  Jameson sighed.

  Once a year, his peaceful Shire was flooded with lawlessness, mischievousness, reckless abandon, and a general lack of dignity that had not been seen in Nottingham since the days of Robin Hood and his merry men.

  It was the festival’s doing. The hundreds of people to come from outside Nottinghamshire, to come from her Grace’s own Royal Court, brought with them unfathomable behavior. The despicable way the nobility acted away from their castles…

  Public drunkenness. Scraps and brawls. Lewd language and lascivious behavior towards Ladies of the Court and Jameson’s own Nottingham women.

  Thank the stars his Anne knew well enough to stay away from the sinful young men at festival, especially when they were in any state of drunkenness. But the men, on the other hand… None of the men could be trusted to keep away from Anne and her tender virtues.

  Anne... Too long had it been since they were together. Too long had it been since she was at his side. He longed to feel her soft skin once again. The want of her beauty was painful.

  He would just go and find her.

  And on the way, he would find another criminal to send to the dunking chair.

  He headed down Caravan way, a place of strange exoticness from lands to the Far East. There were different spices and goods, an elephant and a camel for children to ride. Jameson didn’t trust these strange foreigners, but the Queen insisted on their presence.

  Two young boys scuffled in the path. Jameson separated them with threats of whippings from their parents and public whippings from him if he found them fighting again. They ran off, and he found himself back at the Crossroads.

  His Lord and Lady prisoners were thoroughly baked in the midmorning sun, the cloth of their fine raiment soaked through. They had seen their fair share of punishment and humiliation.

  “Have thou learned thy lessons?” Jameson asked, unlocking their stocks one by one. “Hath the shame of public humiliation cleansed all sin from thy hearts?” He looked to the Lord for this answer. The man was the most to blame. It would have been his words, his cajoling, that caused the weak and helpless maid to commit such a sin in such a holy place.

  The Lord stopped stretching his unyielding back and dropped his eyes to the ground in humility. “Aye, my Lord High Sheriff,” he said meekly.

  “Go forth and seekest thy freedom, with mine own bles
sing. Think thee to sin no longer or thou shalt be removed most publically from festival.”

  “My Lord High Sheriff,” the Lord and Lady said together. They departed in opposite directions.

  Jameson wiped his hands of the situation. He’d brought some decency back to his Shire.

  He wandered down the Queen’s Road and past the Poet’s Stage. His mouth watered as aromas assaulted him from every angle. There were giant turkey legs, the old King Henry’s favorite. There were apple fritters and battered and roasted chicken. The hour had grown long since he’d broken his fast. He’d find Anne, and they would take their midday meal here together.

  “Good day, my Lord High Sheriff.”

  “Good morrow, my Lord High Sheriff.”

  “Where beist your betrothed this noontime, my Lord High Sheriff?”

  It seemed every woman, be them from Nottingham or beyond, sought to wish him a kind greeting as he passed, creating disparaging looks from the men on their arms.

  He smiled and returned each greeting with a smile and a nod. He knew he wasn’t unpleasant to look at.

  Neither were any of these women. It was a shame, however, that none of them could hold a candle to the heavenly beauty radiating from his Anne.

  Not even the most beautiful of these women could come close to his Anne.

  Jameson passed the Woodland stage. A flight of faery performed Master Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” among the trees on the stage.

  Most people feared the faery, even humans in faery costume romping joyfully between the trees. But they were harmless enough, and his Anne adored them. There was something about them… Something that suggested the wild, heathenish times of antiquity.

  It was refreshing. From time to time.

  The cackles erupted on the back of Jameson’s neck. A portly figure dressed in a simple gray robe, with a wooden cross at his hip, roamed the aisles in the audience.

  “Brothers and sisters of Sherwood! Shield thine eyes from yon most Godless display. In the name of the Holy Mother, thine immortal souls be at stake!”

  “Brother Monk,” Jameson called. He clenched his fists. “Pray join me for a word apart.”

  The monk lumbered away from the audience. “My Lord High Sheriff?” The contempt in his voice was a plain as the sun’s glint upon the tip of his head.

  “Thou doth know thou art not to disrupt the proceedings of this festival. ‘Tis by mere lucky happenstance that the Queen doth not order thine arrest for thy mere presence. But know thee this. If thou doth cause any more trouble, thou shalt find thyself fortunate to be expelled from Sherwood with thy skull attached.”

  “My Lord High Sheriff, such base things,” the monk gestured madly towards the faery, dancing wildly upon the stage once again, “fly in the face of the one true religion.”

  “Still thy words if thou wouldst keep thine ugly head.” Jameson barely stopped himself from grabbing the man and shaking him by the bloated arm. “Go thee now. Let me hear no lingering talk of preaching during festival, or I shalt see in the dunking chair. Or worse.”

  All color blanched from the monk’s face. He bowed and backed away. “‘Tis well, my Lord High Sheriff.”

  “I shalt give thee no second warning, Brother Monk!” Jameson said as the monk disappeared beyond a hilly path.

  “Pray pardon, my Lord High Sheriff.”

  The voice came from Balmer, one of Jameson’s most trusted constables. “A situation most troublesome hath arisen upon the Court Pavilion. The Queen hath commanded your presence.”

  “Then let us make haste.”

  The Court Pavilion had been in the midst of a human chess match. Men and women of the Queen’s retinue took the roles of the various pieces. They were moved at the command of the Queen and her opponent, who was Sir Walter Raleigh today. But the game had gone silent. Those playing had retreated to the safety of the dais on either side of the Queen.

  The tall, spindly lower Lord on the chessboard was a known troublemaker. If he was not dallying with the young Court men, he was walking around drunk.

  Today he was drunk. He stumbled across the board, muttering to invisible beings, a bottle of rum in his hands. If he absconded the bottle from the pirates in nearby Brigand’s Den…

  “Stay the man ‘ere he slippest from our grasp,” Jameson told his constable. He turned to the dais. “Your Grace.” He bowed deeply before the Queen.

  “Thou may rise, my Lord High Sheriff.” The Queen smoldered, her face just beginning to turn as red as her Tudor hair. The fuse had been lit.

  Jameson would not see it explode.

  “This man hath proved the most abject distraction from the pleasant game before us,” the Queen went on. “Pray remove the louse from our most disgusted sight, and see him most soundly dunked.”

  Jameson bowed again. “‘Twill be done, your Grace.” He turned and grabbed the drunkard’s arm. “Come, Sirrah,” he said, pulling the man from the stage. “Let us see if a turn in the dunking chair shalt sober thee up.”

  On the path, Jameson released the dunk dandy into Balmer’s custody.

  The Grotto Stage was near. He’d ended up near Anne after all. He would find his love, and escape for a moment the ever present crime in the village. He went the long way, avoiding the Grotto and the lawless Gypsy Way within. It was a place of sin and vice, and it was painful to have his Anne sing on even the edge of such a place.

  But there was no other place to put her.

  The stage was deserted. Surely her show must have only just ended. She couldn’t be very far away. In this heat, away from the pond’s cooling breezes, a walk of any distance would have the vapours upon the poor, delicate thing.

  Jameson walked down the Lover’s Bridge. Not even Anne would ever dream of venturing into the Grotto.

  “Good morrow, my Lord High Sheriff.” A ragged beggar, covered in mud, met Jameson on the other side of the bridge. Kaiser, as the man was called, gave a shaky, awkward bow.

  “Fair thee well, Good-my-man Kaiser?” Jameson was not unfond of the mud beggars. He gave them their place in the festival, and he tolerated the three so long as they caused no trouble. And they were well behaved. For the most part. “I hope to hear me no talk of thee and thy brethren seeking to sully the virtues of pure young lasses passing through yon Hill Street.”

  The beggar’s brown face shone red. “If any such rumors do fill your ears, my Lord High Sheriff, knowest you it be my cousin Puck that stealest the most kisses.”

  “I most kindly thank thee for thy notice, Goodman Kaiser.” Puck had proven more than problematic over the years. A day did not go by during festival where words did not reach Jameson’s ear of Puck’s exploits.

  “So by what great honor bringest the most noble Lord High Sheriff Kent to my most humble Dregs?” Kaiser asked.

  “I did come to seek me the Lady Halloway, but it doth seem her performance hath ended ‘ere I did arrive. Dost thou know thee in what direction the Lady hath travelled?” Jameson asked. Kaiser’s eyes were better than his own constables’ sometimes.

  “Aye, my Lord High Sheriff. Cousin Puck did fetch the Lady and the two did go strolling together. They did depart from yon Gypsy Way not ten minutes past.”

  Red flooded Jameson’s vision. His fingernails threatened to carve deep grooves into his skin. Ever did the blasted Puck seek to corrupt Anne’s gentle mind against common sense. “I do thank thee once again, Good-my-man Kaiser.” He stalked away from the Dregs and up the Hill Street.

  He knew where Puck led Anne. He had to reach his betrothed before the bastard stole her virtue. Or before he did something worse.

  Beyond Hill Street, beyond the Village Green, was a building little used by those at festival. Anne leaned against the hidden door, looking radiant today in a rich plum kirtle and crème overdress.

  A breath’s width away from her face stood that dirty beggar Puck.

  Chapter 4

  “I have heard me a rumor that her Majesty Queen Elizabeth hath broken from t
ending to the timely matters of the realm and dost attend the festival. Be there any truth to these most surprising words, my Lady Halloway?”

  Puck had said very little since they left Gypsy Way. Anne realized why. The number of peasants had dwindled down to almost none. The space between the stone paths was the land of the nobility. There were few, if any, people here who looked upon the likes of Puck with any amount of kindness.

  “Thou hath heard thee true, Master Puck,” Anne said with cheer. She would not see anyone, least of all her friend, so painfully uncomfortable. “Already her Grace the Queen hath commanded me to attend her at the joust anon.”

  A child near Anne heard her. She tugged on her mother’s sleeve. “Did you hear, Mommy? The pretty lady says there’s a queen here!”

  “I heard, Kendi.” The mother unfolded a well-used piece of parchment. “The schedule says there’s a human chess match. I bet the Queen’s there. Let’s text daddy and have him and Kale meet us at the chessboard.”

  The mother took the daughter’s hand, and they walked down a path as the mother pulled a sliver of a phone from the pocket of her denim capris. They passed a pair of teens snapping photos of the jousting field, each with differently colored pastel digital cameras.

  A giggling gaggle of peasants passed by Anne. Their festival clothing was immaculate, safe for an occasional spattering of mud no doubt gained at one of Puck’s morning performances. Anne caught glimpses of the random running shoe or festively colored flip flop peeking out from beneath a the cuff of a breech or the hem of a dress.

  These were strangely magical devices to behold. These were strangely attired people to populate Sherwood Village. Yet no one of the Court or of Nottinghamshire gave the strangeness a second look.

  They were strange things to see during a Midsummer Festival in 1586 England. But not so strange to see at a Renaissance Faire in 2012 America.

  Lady Anne and Puck, or Sammie and Vaughn, as they were better known the other three seasons of the year, had their pictures taken with a mid-aged couple in matching Renaissance Festival tee shirts. Then they turned to climb one of Sherwood’s two stone paths.