The Fair’s infirmary was a canopy of old sailcloth on four poles, pitched at the corner of the outer ward where the wind came round the wall and blew the smoke from the cooking-pits back over the stalls. Sella had hung her horehound from its ridge, and set a brazier at its foot to keep the wet out of the bandages, and laid her instruments on a trestle covered with a clean cloth. Her black book lay open beside them, its lock-string looped once round its spine. She had been at the booth since the first bell of her Turn, and she had dressed four cuts, two sprains and a stall-boy’s scald before the sun was a hand above the wall.
Her fifth patient was a Lowgate baker with a swollen great toe and a face the colour of dough.
“The gout,” said Sella, before he had properly sat down on her bench. “And you have eaten the goose.”
The baker opened his mouth to protest and then shut it again, because the goose was on his breath, and he had not yet learned to hide it from the Hold’s bonesetter. He was a broad, cheerful, sheepish man with flour in the creases of his knuckles, and he had come to the Fair to sell his loaves and had instead bought the Fair’s goose, roasted on a spit by a Coldharbour cook with a grudge against the Lessary wine. He had eaten the whole of its breast with his fingers…
