This book was a finalist for the 2025 Colorado Book Award for Romance.

Ohhh!”

Gazing in wonder at the transformation of what was usually open ground (not for nothing had Smithfield been named for the “smooth field” outside the walls of the medieval city), Penelope breathed a sigh of pure ecstasy.

A temporary city of booths had been erected cheek by jowl on the site, forming an almost unbroken ring around the perimeter. Inside the ring, a double row of tall booths built up on stilts stood back-to-back, separated from the outer ring by a wide avenue of what had once been mown grass, now looking rather the worse for the many feet that had trampled it during the fair’s first day. Beneath the booths, tables had been set up wherever their owners could find a place, some offering fresh gingerbread or succulent roast pork for sale, others inviting fairgoers to risk their pennies on games where one might win such prizes as oranges, ribbons, handkerchiefs, or whistles.

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The cloth market that had once drawn merchants from all over England and even some parts of Europe could still be found here, near the street to which it had given its name—Cloth Fair—but the mercantile beginnings of the fair had long since yielded pride of place to more frivolous attractions.

And what attractions they were! One booth was papered with posters announcing the comic genius of Merry Andrew, along with feats of balance and dexterity displayed by a team of acrobats and tumblers all the way from Russia; another promised a reenactment of the story of Judith and Holofernes, performed entirely by puppets. A barker on a raised wooden platform announced that a new musical play in three acts would be starting in only ten minutes, and urged all those with a taste for the dramatic arts to purchase a ticket before all seats were filled. Meanwhile, another, striving to outdo his fellow in volume, invited fairgoers to feast their eyes on a collection of exotic animals from all over the world, while overhead, the talents demonstrated by a rope-dancer—a young woman who performed upon a rope strung from the church tower to the corner of the nearest booth—were scarcely more astonishing than her costume: a tight-fitting bodice of gold satin that made the most of her slender but curvaceous figure, worn with scarlet knee-breeches cut very full through the hip and thigh and tied with knots of ribbon, leaving her lower limbs bare save for spangled stockings that caught the sunlight and threw it back.

“Fairest of the Fayre”

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Nor were the attractions limited to the circle of booths. One could see a comic play at the George Inn Yard featuring the very same actors one would see at Drury Lane, for a fraction of the price. Enterprising residents of Long Lane and Cloth Fair sold ale and gingerbread from their back doors, while nearby pubs such as the Hand and Shears housed such human wonders as the Beautiful Albiness or the famous Miss Biffin, a skilled painter of miniatures in spite of her complete lack of hands or arms.

And the people! Ladies and gentlemen clad in silks and satins promenaded along the broad avenue separating the rows of booths as if they were taking the air in St. James’s Park, and Penelope, recognizing several of these persons, avoided making eye contact and resolved to give them a wide berth. A man on tall stilts, standing head and shoulders above even the tallest of the fairgoers, tipped his hat and bowed with exaggerated courtesy to a family all dressed in their Sunday best, from the stout, red-faced father to the six children and even the baby in its mother’s arms. Some little distance away, a woman in a low-cut satin gown made coy advances to a fellow whose weathered complexion and bow-legged stance suggested that he was a sailor returned to port. Suddenly, the man on the stilts was almost knocked off his balance by a youth, dressed in rags and none too clean, who darted through the crowd with a prosperous merchant huffing and puffing in hot pursuit and shouting “Stop, thief!” whenever his breath would allow it.

A smattering of applause broke out as the stilt-man regained his footing (or whatever one called it), and he acknowledged his audience’s approval with an elaborate bow, clutching the brim of his tall hat to his heart. As he straightened, he spied their little party and blew a kiss in their direction, sending Patsy into fits of giggles and prompting Jim to playfully put up his fists, provoking laughter as well as more applause from the crowd.

Penelope hardly noticed this exchange, for she was still dazzled by her surroundings. She wanted to see and do it all, and hardly knew where to begin. With so many delights clamoring for her attention, it was perhaps fortunate that Patsy and Jim, having sampled a number of these the day before, took charge of their itinerary, charting a clockwise course around the field that would allow them to revisit favorite attractions as well as take in new ones.

They marveled over a magic lantern show that portrayed the fall of Troy (during which Penelope reasoned with herself that Mama could surely find nothing to object to in so educational a presentation), then exclaimed with delight at the discovery of the raree show, a long wooden box punctuated at intervals with holes through which one might, according to the announcements painted in bold red letters on the box, view scenes from the battle of Trafalgar. Upon being informed by the barker that this treat would require a payment of one ha’penny each, Jim gallantly paid not only for himself and Patsy, but for Miss Fayre as well. Penelope might have objected—she suspected that she might be more able than he to afford the expense, despite Mama’s claims of poverty—but as she had no desire to embarrass the young man (and certainly not in front of his sweetheart), she accepted with a good grace and resolved to repay his kindness at the first opportunity.

She had not long to wait. As they walked away from the raree show, exclaiming over the detailed model of HMS Victory, right down to the tiny figures swarming about her miniature deck, they drew abreast of a large theatrical booth with “Richardson’s” painted in bold letters over the proscenium arch. Here a man stood on the edge of the makeshift stage, calling to fairgoers and demanding in lurid accents to know if they were brave enough to face the Skeleton Spectre.

Patsy ran to examine the posted broadsheet. “Monk and Murderer! or, The Skeleton Spectre,” she read aloud with ghoulish zeal, then, seeing that her beau had come up behind her, clutched his arm and exclaimed with a shudder, “I’m sure I would be scared to death!”

“I would be there to protect you,” Jim pointed out, patting her hand reassuringly. “I wouldn’t let the Skeleton Spectre get you.”

While they debated (in flirtatious tones) Jim’s ability to best the Skeleton Spectre in a fight, Penelope drew a little apart and spoke to the barker.

“How much for the three of us?” It was unlikely that the young lovers would have heard, caught up as they were in each other, but Penelope pitched her voice low all the same.

Sheri Cobb South discovered the author Georgette Heyer at 16, and came to the startling realization that she had been born into the wrong century. Since Heyer was dead and could not write any more tales of Regency England, South decided to do it herself. After honing her craft on five young adult books for Bantam’s long-running Sweet Dreams series, she tried her hand at the genre she had loved for so long. Her first Regency romance, The Weaver Takes a Wife, was published in 1999. A native and long-time resident of Alabama, Ms. South recently moved to Loveland, Colorado, where she has a view of Long’s Peak from her office window.