14 October, 1893 — Pop-Up Bazaar, Padmore Park

Ford felt as though he'd emerged on the other side of something recently; the election was almost over (though not quite), the dragons and the fallout had been mostly cleaned up, the season was over. In many ways this was the first chance he'd had to actually relax; he wasn't worried that Clementine would get Aggressively Political now that the campaigns were winding down, and he didn't have to buy the girls any new dresses for months, and everyone was safe and healthy. Today was a good day, and Ford was in an accordingly good mood.

But most people weren't, he recognized; half of the people who'd made it out to the market were weighed down in heavy black. Ford had already expressed condolences to half a dozen people he was only passingly acquainted with, and then he'd spotted Cash.

He'd been meaning to talk to Cash since he'd read in the paper that some of his family members had been among the casualties. He was worried about Cash, of course he was worried about Cash, but they weren't — quite at the point yet where Ford could worry about him openly, so he was trying to walk that tightrope. He couldn't just ask Cash to pick up and go to a crossroad in Ireland to talk with him, like he once had. He didn't have a membership at Black's any more, and both the Ministry and either of their houses were far from ideal in terms of places to have conversations. The next best private place was in public, as it turned out, so Ford had written and asked if Cash was going to be at the market.

They'd wandered down towards the water and away from the crowd, such that it was. Ford had a smooth stone in his hand that he was thinking about trying to skip, and he tossed it lightly in the air. He would probably embarrass himself trying to do anything even mildly athletic around Cash, but maybe it would help diffuse some of the cloud that hung over everything. "We don't have to talk about it," he said. "But we should talk about something."

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