The celebration in the courtyard of St. Jude’s was not a wild, drunken carnival of wine and fireworks. It was the quiet, deep, and sacred gathering of working people who had survived a sixty-year famine of justice. At seven o’clock on Tuesday evening, four long frame stand tables were laid end-to-end beneath the ancient lime trees of the churchyard, lit up by fifty tin lanterns hung from the lower branches.
On the scrubbed pine boards sat no roasted venison, no imported peacocks, and no vintage wines from the High judge’s cellars. The feast consisted entirely of the working food of Crown-Reach. Steaming loaves of coarse rye bread baked fresh that morning in the parish ovens, wooden bowls of coarse gray river salt, crock-pots of sweet churned butter from the western farms, and large tin kettles of hot, dark chicory tea steeped over open fire bowl fires.
Fifty elders of the Forty-Eight Crafts sat along the benches, wearing their clean Sunday woolens, their gnarled, work-worn hands resting upon the tables. At the head of the center table sat eighty-year-old Maura Pence. It was wrapped in a warm shawl of fine blue wool purchased with her grandfather’s gold. Her grand-nephews sat on either side of her. Beside Maura sat Tomas Reed, Hester Quill, Scribe Olla, Nessa Vale, and Sile Rook.
