The Death of a Bachelor

Chapter Thirty-four

The centre of attraction in the city was The Square. It was divided into the Northern Square and Southern Square. The Southern Square was the streets, with cobbled ground and buildings including shops, taverns and rest houses, all decorated and painted with the colours of autumn, along with leaf based decorations.

The most outstanding feature was the strings of lanterns that ran over the buildings, creating quite the canopy, as well as the luminous light against the dusk.

Elena marveled at the sight above her; to her left, her right, and ended up making a rotation, the skirt of her dress spiraling around her.

Kieran watched her with a small smile as her wide eyes appraised the sights, her feet shuffling back and forth. His arms were crossed over his chest, and his mind related Elena to a humming bird that had landed in a field of beardtongue flowers, with how cheery she looked.

At last, she turned back to him, her beam brighter than the lanterns. She rushed over, and her dainty fingers encircled his forearms.

“It’s…it’s…!” She let out a squeal, followed by a laugh. “Terrific! Superb! Star-dazzling!”

He laughed lightly. “Are you that happy?”

“Let...let’s, let us go!” Elena sputtered, finding it difficult to control her excitement. “I want to play the kicking games and the grabbing games and I want to…I want to eat the sweets and the meats and the foreign foods and I want, I want to dance with everyone and play more games and, and I want to go to the stalls and see what they have prepared and I want to see the theatre!”

She was left breathless after all that rambling.

Kieran tilted his head to the side, amused. “Will you do it all at once?”

“Yes!” she shrieked. “No! I want to do it all but I should be systematic, right? Then let us go eat first. No, let us play the games first. Wait! I am kind of hungry…”

“We have time, Elena,” Kieran assured her. “We will do all that you wish to do. And I have a solution to your problem.”

“Will you make the choice for me?”

Kieran held her hand. “Just come.”

He led her away from the streets to the Northern Square. It was a wide stretch of lawns that was now packed with tents, stalls and merry folk. Lamps on tall stands provided the light, along with the strings of lanterns stretching from one tent to another, from one stall to another.

“We shall play the games where the reward is food,” Kieran informed her, leading her through the area as she kept looking around and bowing in salutation to a few people.

Elena had never had so much fun in her life. She made sure to try out every game she came across, from grabbing eels in a makeshift pond (tub) which earned them meat kebabs, to ‘kick the can’ that earned them skewered beef. She was the player and thus the breadwinner for the both of them.

Kieran turned out to be a meat glutton, so she had to play more to win more – which she enjoyed a great deal.

For enabling him to eat his favorite kind of food, Elena was able to blackmail Kieran into accompanying her to visit the stall of her beloved friend Patrick Caparo, much to both the men’s dismay. Nevertheless, their interaction was a lot more civil than it had been before.

After undertaking quite the meat diet from a variety of games, Elena suggested a change.

Kieran bit off the last piece of meat from his skewer and used it to point to a stall. “There’s darts over there. It’ll earn you foreign fruits.”