After a while, Alice’s mother said the washing wouldn’t do itself, and we must excuse her, and she went out, with a look at Alice. And Alice and Father sat holding their bowls and looking at the fire.
“You’ve a big family,” said Father, and Alice said yes, she had three little brothers and sisters, and one older, who was Agnes.
“But that’s what I like,” she said. “I’d feel strange in a house that wasn’t full of children.”
“We’ve four in our house,” said Father. “And the baby. It’s a lot to ask a woman to come to.”
“I certainly wouldn’t ask Agnes!” said Alice, and she laughed. “That fat fool didn’t know what he was letting your lot in for, if you ask me.”
“Would you have them?” said Father, and Alice looked at him, not at all surprised.
“I’d want my own as well,” she said, and Father nodded.
“Of course.”
“Well then,” she said, and that was that. They were married after mass at the church door. And it wasn’t long before we all loved her, apart from Richard, who I think was jealous, being the oldest. But at least he didn’t have to look after us any more.
Alice nearly had a baby three times before Edward. Twice the child came too early. Once she had a little girl who only lived a day. But last year, Edward came and stayed.
“Edward’s my name!” said Ned, when the baby was introduced to us. Ned’s really an Edward, after his godfather, Edward Miller, who is baby Edward’s godfather too. Father hopes he’ll apprentice them both at the mill when they’re older.
Richard doesn’t like Alice much, but he hates her baby. The more children Father and Alice have, the less land there is for everyone, and without land we’ll all go hungry.
“Maybe Edward will marry a lord’s daughter and keep us all instead,” I say to Richard, but he just scowls at the crib, as though he’s working out exactly how many acres baby Edward will take from his inheritance.
3. Sunday Mass
The church is full for mass today, but no one is listening to Sir John – our priest – as he drones away in Latin. The news about York runs from body to body, crackling in the air like summer lightning. Nobody can talk of anything but the sickness.
“In London, they don’t bury the bodies any more, they just leave them lying in the streets. Anyone who can leave has left.”
“What about the ones who can’t?” says John Dyer, in a whisper. There’s a pause while no one says anything, and then the muttering starts again.
“You can’t outrun it. It travels with you. I heard about a man who fled from Lynn. Went to his sister’s. He thought he’d escaped . . . didn’t have a mark on him. Two weeks later he was dead. So was his sister and all the children.”
“In the south there are dead places where nobody lives any more. All these little villages, all the houses empty . . .”
“York!”
Amabel and I stand with Robin and listen.
“Everyone isn’t dead in London, are they?” says Amabel.
“They can’t be,” says Robin. “How many of those men have been to London? They’re just telling stories.”
“York, though . . .”
When I grow up, I’m going to marry Robin. We’ve been betrothed all our lives. Mother was friends with his mother, and his father, who died of the quinsy when Robin was small. Robin will inherit his land when he’s twenty-one.
The tone of the conversations in the church have changed. William-at-the-Wood is talking in his loud voice to Father. He’s leaving the village, selling his land to his eldest son.
“I’ll not stay around to watch God destroy my children,” he says. “I’m off up north tomorrow.”
“Where?” says Father. “Where will you go?” I close my eyes and picture it, William-at-the-Wood off into the wild north where no one can ever find him again. He’ll make his fortune selling ribbons or fool’s gold, and his daughters will come back princesses and ladies with ermine cloaks and white skin.
William spits and shakes his head. “Up to Newcastle,” he says. “Then Scotland. It’s a wild land, Scotland – we’ll be safe there, I reckon. I wouldn’t stay here if I were you, Walt. I’d pack up while you still can.”
Now the picture has changed – Robin’s family and mine, all our household on the back of our oxen, Stumpy and Gilbert, marching down the wide, grassy roads to the land of the mad Scots. Sleeping in inns, running ahead of the pestilence.
But Father sucks in his teeth.
“Maybe,” he says, and I know we won’t be going. We can no more leave our land than Geoffrey can leave his abbey. On the road, we’d be beggars, or hired labourers at best.
“Good luck to ye, then,” says William, and he turns away.
“Can you really believe,” says Amabel, “that the pestilence could come here?”
“No,” I say, and I mean it. Plagues and rains of frogs and thunderbolts and sieges where everyone dies happen, I know they do – I’ve met people who’ve seen them with their own eyes. But they happen a long way away, in foreign countries where everyone is a heathen and no one has heard of Jesus Christ. I have tried to imagine such a disaster happening here – in Ingleforn! – but my mind cannot hold it.
At the front of the church, the musicians are playing the opening notes of a hymn. The choir – with them my brother Ned – begin to sing. I close my eyes. I believe God punishes the wicked, just as I believe He speaks to his prophets through burning bushes and cures the lame by laying His hand on them. I believe that.
I just don’t believe it could happen here.
Afterwards, we stay behind to admire the new painting on the church wall. Sir John hopes that a holy painting might appease God’s anger, and we’re not about to argue. The young artist has painted Noah, standing in his ark, watching with mild interest as the sinners are swallowed up and drowned. You can’t see much of the sinners, just their arms waving about as the waters cover their heads.
“Which is the most pious of God’s creatures?” says Sir John.
Emma Baker answers, “The pelican.”
“The pelican,” says Sir John. “Who tears her own flesh from her breast to feed her young ones.
“Pious Pelican, Lord Jesus,
Cleanse me the impure, in your blood,
Of which one drop can save
The whole world of all sin.”
Maggie likes this new picture, with the elephant and the chimera poking their heads out of the ark, but Ned prefers the one on the other wall, of the sinners burning in hell and the devils poking them with pitchforks.
“Does the pelican really eat its own stomach?” he asks Alice. “Why?”
“You do such things for your children,” says Alice. She’s holding Edward across her chest, his head bobbing out of the top of his swaddling bands. He opens his mouth and dribbles down her shoulder.
“Would you? For Edward?”
“If I had to.” Alice isn’t like Mrs Noah in the mystery play, who wails and screams when they try to get her onto the ark. If her children were in danger, Alice would be out there chopping down trees and sawing up planks, as fast as the rain fell down around her.
“Would you do it for me?” says Mag. Alice laughs and ruffles her hair.
“A big girl like you?” she says. “I’d send you off to get us a pelican for the pot. Pelican stew, how’s that for a feast?”
4. The Exiles
Robin and I go up to the woods after church to gather wood.
“Imagine William-at-the-Wood in Scotland!” says Robin. “Do you think Robert the Bruce will chop him up? I told Mother we should go too, but she says she’d never be able to get enough for our land, and she doesn’t like to run away and leave Grandmother with the fines.”
“You’d leave Ingleforn?” Just the thought makes me dizzy. Ingleforn is all I know – the fells behind us, the wood below the village, the funny little church with the bent spire. I’ve worked in Father’s strips of field since I was smaller than Maggie,
stumbling behind the reapers, picking up the fallen stalks of barley. How could Robin think about leaving so lightly?
Robin smiles at me. “You’ve got your farmer’s face on.”
“Farmer’s face?”
He purses up his mouth and beetles his forehead. “Why don’t you care about the oats, Robin? We’ve got beans, isn’t that exciting? Look, Father’s bought another four acres, so we can work twice as hard this year, won’t that be wonderful?”
I shove him. “Better than your face.” Actually, Robin has a lovely face, always moving, always laughing, but I do asleep-Robin, head lolling, tongue out, eyes closed.
“Is there – work—? Can’t – Isabel – do that—? It’s – so-o-o nice here . . .”
“Sounds right to me,” says Robin, but he bends to pick up another branch. My own bag is nearly full. “And yes, I’d leave. I’d rather be poor and alive than here and dead. Did you hear about that convent—”
“Yes, I heard!” The convent story is the worst of all the stories we’ve heard this year, and it’s been a year of horrors, stories of villages empty except for the dead, of corpses lying mouldering in the streets, eaten by ravens and pigs, of children starving surrounded by fields of unharvested grain, of family leaving family to die and no one left to ring the passing-bells or say the mass.
“I don’t believe half the things people say,” I tell Robin. “And anyway, you can’t leave. You belong to Sir Edmund like me, so unless you want to leave your grandmother to pay for your freedom, we’re staying here. So what’s the point in worrying?”
I push past Robin and start climbing up the rise, the bag of wood bumping against my back, the sticks digging into my spine like unwelcome questions. Maybe the pestilence won’t come to us. It might not.
I come out of the edge of the wood. And stop.
There’s a caravan of people coming down the road from York. The road isn’t too dangerous, except in bad winters, but you do occasionally get highwaymen and outlaws in the woods, so most people travel in convoy. This convoy is bigger than any I’ve seen before. There are men and animals; voices calling, pigs shrieking, children wailing. There are riders with nothing but what they can fit in their saddlebags, packhorses laden with all of a family’s possessions, even what looks like a hay cart piled with bedding and furniture, chickens in boxes and geese skittish with walking, people alone and people in gangs, minstrels and holy men, lepers and beggars next to families with servants and even a canopied litter, drawn between two horses, wobbling precariously as the horses stumble in the potholes and the mud.
Robin’s feet sound behind me. His breath catches and wheezes in his throat.
“Where are they going?” I say, without turning my eyes away from the road. Robin leans forward, hands on his knees. He draws in a long breath.
“Duresme. Scotland. Here.”
“They can’t come here!” They can’t. I know how the pestilence is spread. It lives in the houses of the poor and wretched. It’s passed by breathing miasmas – bad airs. If you get too close to the miasmas of the sick, you catch it too. That’s why if you want to be saved, you have to wear lavender and rosemary and rose petals and other sweet-smelling things, to keep the dead air away.
“They’ll bring it here!” I say, and Robin shakes his head.
“They know. Look!”
He points. Two men from our village are talking to the caravan. Even from this distance I can see Gilbert the reeve and Philip de Coverley, the bailiff. They’re talking to a little knot of men, pointing down the road.
“They’re sending them away,” says Robin, but . . .
“They’re sending them to the abbey!”
St Mary’s Abbey is nearly three miles east of Ingleforn. The monks won’t turn the travellers away. They give shelter to anyone – soldiers, beggars, even one of King Edward’s messengers once. But—
“The abbey’s where Geoffrey is!”
Robin looks away, back out towards the road. “I’m sure he’ll be all right, Isabel.”
But he’s remembering the convent story. And so am I.
The convent story came from a troop of minstrels, who passed through Great Riding in the spring. They were full of the horror of it – a convent in France, where all but one of the nuns caught the pestilence and died.
“They say the nuns were sleeping with devils,” the flautist said, but the drummer shook her head.
“They took in all the sick of the village,” she said. “That was what killed them.”
“All but one died,” said Alice, amazed.
The drummer said, “Just one left to bury the dead, write their names in their big book and drown herself in the river.”
That was the story that made us shift and stir uneasily. Nuns – good women – helping the sick and taking in the strangers, like God asked them to. Nuns, killed for their piety, the last nun drowned in the water, with her long hair floating loose around her like a madwoman and her soul pulled down to hell as a suicide.
That was the worst story of all.
5. Boundaries
Will Thatcher is standing with his back to me, watching Gilbert Reeve and Radulf the beadle rustling their bits of parchment. His back is straight, but his helmet is on crooked and there’s mud all down the back of his legs. One of Edward Miller’s dogs is sniffing at his boots. He looks straight ahead, pretending he can’t see.
“He likes you,” Amabel Dyer whispers to me.
“Shh! He can hear you,” I whisper back, slightly too loudly, and we both giggle.
Will Thatcher is sixteen and one of Sir Edmund’s soldiers. He was part of the baggage train in King Edward’s army at the battle of Crécy, in France. Now he just guards Sir Edmund’s manor, but some of the glamour of Crécy still clings to him. He’s one of the best archers in the village and he is nice-looking, but whenever he sees me he goes bright red and I just want to giggle. If only he talked more. Or at all.
The whole village is gathered together on the green, under the manor oak. Sir Edmund isn’t here, of course – he lives in London. I met him once when I was very small, but I can’t remember much about him. He was riding an enormous chestnut palfrey, and he had a fur coat, and he and his steward talked together in a strange language, which Father told me was French.
Someone’s taken the table out from the tithing barn and set it up under the manor oak. Gilbert and Radulf are sitting behind it, murmuring to our priest, Sir John. Sir John has the pen and ink from the scriptorium in the tithing barn, and he’s playing with the quill, running it between his fingers. Radulf and Gilbert are arguing – Gilbert’s hands are waving in the air. I can’t see what they’re saying, but Radulf is shaking his head and muttering. Alice glares at them.
“Who died and made them King of England?” she mutters, shifting Edward on her hip. Edward holds out his hands, trying to tug at her veil, and she pulls them down irritably.
“Half of Europe,” says Father drily.
Ned clutches at his throat and makes choking noises.
“And Gilbert the reeve – is going – to be next—”
We’re a smaller gathering than we ought to be. Four or five families have left already, selling their land and heading off north, like the exiles we saw from York.
Can the pestilence really be in York?
Sir John the priest is getting to his feet.
“They say the pestilence is in Felton,” he says, and a ripple of fear runs through the crowd. Felton is only a day’s walk away. I turn to Alice, and her face is white. She’s muttering the Pater Noster under her breath.
“Our only hope is that the Lord spares us,” says Sir John, raising his voice above the hubbub. “We must repent of our sins and humbly ask the Lord’s forgiveness.”
He starts talking about extra masses and prayers and barefoot processions. I try desperately to think of something to repent for. I’m sorry for being rude to Alice. I’m sorry for snapping at Ned and Mag. I’m sorry for being jealous of Alice’s yellow hair and for
caring so much that mine is limp and orangey-reddish and my nose is covered in freckles and for wondering what it would be like to be kissed by Will Thatcher.
It doesn’t sound like very much.
Now Gilbert Reeve is standing up. Gilbert is Sir Edmund’s voice and hands in the village – he makes sure we all get to the fields on time and pay our rents and heriot taxes when someone dies, and he buys all the things Sir Edmund needs for the manor – ploughs and yokes and grease and nails, hinges, harnesses, hammers and herrings. Radulf the beadle is his assistant, a tall, waxy-skinned, mournful-looking man, with a long, heavy face and a sticks-and-stones sort of wife, all elbows and nose and pinching fingers. I like Radulf, though. He doesn’t say much, but he always has a kind word for Mag and Edward.
Gilbert is stroking his beard as though he doesn’t quite know how to begin.
“Ah,” he says. “Well. You all know why we’re here. Something needs to be done – yes – they say Great Riding is shutting itself off, turning all travellers away. We think – ah – we think we should do the same here.”
Radulf’s head is down and his mouth is screwed up at the corners. I edge over to Robin.
“Look at Radulf the beadle! What’s worrying him?”
“Don’t you know?” Amabel isn’t listening to Gilbert either. “Radulf’s sister lives in York,” she says importantly. “He was telling Mother yesterday that we ought to let the exiles stay here. He’d bring the pestilence here and kill us all.”
“He couldn’t turn his sister away,” says Robin, and Amabel bristles.
“He can’t let her come to Ingleforn!” she says. “What sort of selfish person would bring the sickness here? She should just stay in York and leave us alone!”
Robin shifts uncomfortably, but it sounds like the other villagers agree with Amabel. The men are talking about organizing work parties to guard the roads into the village.