At ten minutes past six on Monday morning — while the rest of the city was still composing itself for the dramas of the day ahead — Orna Vesely lifted a crate of cold-smoked mackerel from the back of a handcart and set it on the counter of her stall in the eastern wing of Bramblegate Market.

She has done this, or something very like it, approximately seven thousand times over twenty-eight years. On Monday it felt, she said, like the first.

“Five days,” she said, arranging the fish with the practised economy of a woman who has arranged fish in all weathers and most moods. “Five days without a stall is five days of fish I have smoked and cannot sell. The fish does not wait for roofers. The fish does not wait for anything.”

The eastern wing — home to roughly a third of Bramblegate Market’s forty-seven permanent stall holders — had been closed since last Tuesday, when a squall associated with the March gales tore away a twelve-metre section of galvanised-iron roofing above the fish and provisions aisle. Three stalls were flooded, including Vesely & Sons. No one was injured, but the wing was declared unsafe until emergency repairs could be completed.

The heavy canvas sheeting installed over Thursday and Friday by a crew from the Municipal Works Office is, by everyone’s candid assessment, a temporary measure. It blocks the rain but not the wind, and flaps audibly when gusted. Market Warden Phillip Catton, who was on site before dawn, acknowledged that conditions were “not ideal” but “entirely adequate for trade.”

“The canvas will hold,” Catton said. “It’s been tested against worse than a March breeze. The permanent repair — the full iron section, timber framing, drainage work — that’s fourteen thousand two hundred florins and three to four weeks. I’ve requested an emergency allocation from the Markets Board; they meet on the eighteenth.”

By 7 AM, eleven of the eastern wing’s fourteen stall holders had returned. The remaining three — a poulterer, a preserve maker, and a seller of maritime sundries — are expected by Wednesday.

The western and central wings of the market, which were unaffected by the roof damage, had continued trading throughout.

Mrs Vesely, asked whether she had been worried during the closure, considered the question with the gravity it perhaps did not deserve.

“Worried? No. Annoyed. There is a difference.” She gestured at the canvas overhead. “My grandfather sold fish under an open sky. A bit of cloth is an improvement.”

By 8 AM, the market was busy. The canvas flapped. The mackerel did not seem to mind.