Chapter 3: Asha's Stall, Third from the End

Portobello Road on a Thursday morning smelled like wet cardboard and someone else's attic, which Mara had always found oddly comforting. She arrived at half past ten with the self-rewriting map folded open to the relevant section in her notebook and the list of names in her coat pocket, and she walked the length of the market twice before she let herself stop.

She was cataloguing, which was what she did when she was uncertain and didn't want to show it. The stalls closest to the Notting Hill end were the tourist-facing ones — vintage cameras that had never been used, Union Jack prints that had never been near a flag, silver spoons arranged in rows like arguments. Further along, the goods got stranger and heavier, and the vendors looked at you the way people look at other people they have outlasted. Mara noted this. She kept walking.

The stall third from the end had no sign. Most of the stalls had signs — handwritten, or laminated, or branded with the particular aggressive cheerfulness of a small business surviving on enthusiasm. This one had nothing but objects, arranged with a curator's precision on a length of dark green baize: two small painted icons with gold leaf worn to ghosts at the edges, a bronze hand mirror that might have been decorative or might have been a weapon, several pieces of jewellery in dark settings, and, at the far end, sitting on a wooden mount like an exhibit, a Roman cavalry helmet with cheekguards intact and a plume holder worn smooth as river stone.