“You have a niece,” says Richard quickly, seeing my frown. “She’s called Sarah. A red-haired niece!”
It’s like he doesn’t care about Geoffrey at all. He’s more interested in Joan’s horrible baby.
“A baby!” says Mag. “Another new baby!”
Richard is looking at me expectantly. I’m supposed to be pleased, I know.
“What’s going to happen now?” I say, instead.
“You’re coming home, of course,” says Richard.
39. The Star
We pack up all of our things on to old Stumpy. We leave Thomas’s fine clothes behind – they won’t be much use when we have to work for our living again. Ned takes Thomas’s chess set and Margaret takes the wooden doll that they stole from some dead child. Robin takes his wax tablets and three of Thomas’s big leather books. I take nothing except some bread and cheese and the salt pork from the kitchen. Everything else I need, I can find at home.
When I go up to find Robin, he’s standing in Juliana’s chamber. Open on the bed is the jewellery chest full of gold and silver – a golden necklace set with green stones, a ring dazzling with diamonds, a bangle set in the shape of a serpent eating its own tail. Robin holds up a necklace made of chains of silver.
“Look what I found.”
I come over and let the necklace fall through my fingers. The jewels here must be worth more than Father’s lands and house and everything he owned.
“It was under the bed,” says Robin. “Ralph must have missed it. Thomas wanted you and Maggie to have them. He told me so, ages ago.” He picks up the serpent bangle and hands it to me. I slip my wrist through it. The serpent’s eyes are set with rubies and all the scales are marked along its back. I look across at him and see that there are tears in his eyes. I wonder if this is what Thomas was trying to give us, back in the castle. There’s a prince’s ransom here. He can’t have wanted it to go to the City of York.
“Why did he do it, Robin?” I ask, tears blinding my own eyes. “Did he go out looking for children to bring home?”
Robin shakes his head.
“I’m sure he didn’t,” he says. “I don’t think he had any plan at all. I think . . . well, I think I reminded him of William – you know” – I nod – “and I think he was lonely, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I don’t think he ever really knew what to do with us, once he had us.”
He touches the serpent with his long finger.
“He was a good man, Isabel,” he says.
“I know,” I say. I put my finger on top of Robin’s, and press it into the serpent’s scalloped back.
“You should wear it,” he says, but I shake my head.
“We’ll buy good land with it. And oxen and bees and a pig and some geese for Maggie to play with. It won’t be wasted.”
Robin nods, but the tears roll out of his eyes and down his cheeks. I reach out and touch them with the back of my hand. Robin lost two families in less than two months, and then Thomas came and gave him everything he ever wanted. And now he’s gone too.
“You’ve still got me,” I say. “Robin. I’m still here. We’re your family now, remember?” He nods and rubs against my cheek, but doesn’t answer. “I’m not going to leave you,” I say. “I promise. And it’s time to go.”
It’s a dull, grey, misty day. All of the joy and gladness of yesterday has gone. We walk, trying not to notice the dead crops in the fields, the dead animals. Trying not to wonder what we’ll find in Ingleforn when we return.
We sleep in the same inn that Thomas brought us to on our way here. It looks the same as last time – the long, smoky room with the tallow candles and the dirty straw on the earth floor. There are more people here than there were last time, although the room is still half-empty.
“People are getting braver,” Richard says. “They’re moving around again – leaving their old villages and looking for work.”
The talk at the long table and the fire is all about land and work. Lord Hugh is offering three and a half pence a day to anyone who’ll work his land. Lady Christina is offering three and three quarters. Lord Randolph only offers two pence and a farthing, the skinflint.
My father gave his labourers two pence a day and a bed in the barn, and they were grateful. Things are different now, it seems.
“We can ask for what we want,” a big, red-faced man by the fire says. “If they won’t give it to us, we’ll go elsewhere, and they know it.”
The old man opposite is nodding. “It’s our world now,” he says. “If we want it. They need us now.” He turns and glares at Richard. “Make the most of it, lad!” he says. “It won’t last. All this good land for sale! And the beasts! They say the gentry have so many heriot beasts, they can’t give them away.”
“I’d heard that too,” says Richard. He perches on the end of one of the benches and leans forward. “I want good land,” he says. “I can pay – plough land first, and pasture afterwards. I’m not afraid to work, but I want to go as a free man – and my brothers and sisters with me.”
“Ahh.” The other men lean forward too. “I heard St Helen’s were selling good land – did you hear that, Harry?”
“Everyone is selling land!” snorts the old man. “But you wouldn’t want to farm St Helen’s – little mucky bits of earth and stone. Lady Christina – that’s who you want to go to. She—”
Richard lifts his mug to his lips. To Richard this is the promised land of milk and grain. And I can’t complain too much – isn’t this what I’ve always wanted too? But there’s something indecent in Richard’s eagerness. I know he’s lost people too – Father and little Edward and all the other people in Ingleforn that I haven’t dared ask about yet. But something inside me rages at the idea that something – anything – good can come out of this. It’s too soon. It’s not fair.
I can see that Robin feels the same, or something like it. He sits hunched up on his bench, pushing at his pottage with his spoon. Magsy is tugging at his arm.
“Can you tear my bread for me? Robin? Robin! My bread’s too hard.”
Robin pulls his sleeve away.
“Not now, Mag!”
Magsy’s face crumples. I can see her making up her mind to start wailing. I lean over the table.
“Here, Mag, whist. Look, there you go. Eat that and be quiet.”
Maggie’s lip is still wobbling. “I’m not hungry,” she says, pushing my hand away. I want to tip the bowl over her head, but I don’t. I break the rest of the bread into Mag-sized pieces and drop them into the pottage.
“Dolly’s hungry even if you aren’t – why don’t you give them to her, eh?”
“No, she’s not,” says Mag sulkily, but she’s not going to cry, and that’s all I care about right now.
At least I don’t have to worry about Ned eating. He’s finished his bowl and half of Robin’s bread, and he’s eying up Mags’s bowl with a calculating expression.
“Are we going back to Ingleforn?” he says. “Or are we going somewhere else?”
“We have to go home to pick up Joan and the baby,” I say. “But then Richard’s going to buy some new land somewhere. We’re going to be free men and women. We won’t have to work the lord’s land any more. What do you think of that?”
Ned shrugs, but he looks pleased. “When I grow up,” he announces. “I’m going to be the reeve like Gilbert. I’m going to have the biggest strip in the village – and servants to plough it all for me.”
He looks so determined. Sturdy, wiry little Ned, chewing on Maggie’s bread with his red hair spiked up and his face red and white with the cold.
“I believe you,” I say, and I do.
The bar is getting busier as the night begins to draw in. Richard turns away from his friends by the fire and orders us all another mug of ale.
“Is there still pestilence in Ingleforn?” says Ned. He tips the top of his ale mug up slowly so the ale trickles down his throat. All you can see over the rim are his round blue eyes.
; “Some . . .” says Richard. “Much less than there was. It’s going – I promise.”
But people are still dying. I feel my throat tighten.
“How do you know?” says Robin. He’s scowling at the tabletop. “I bet it hasn’t gone – not really. That’s not how sickness works – it goes, and then it comes back.”
“If that’s true, there isn’t much we can do about it,” says Richard, far too cheerfully. I want to hit him.
Robin’s face darkens. “I’m going to bed,” he says, pushing his end of the bench back, jolting Magsy so that she drops her spoon in her lap with a surprised “Oh!”
Robin doesn’t stop. His face is red. He’s left most of his pottage in the bowl. I know I ought to go after him – make sure he’s all right – but I’m so fed up with all this sadness and anger that I let him go.
A little band has set up in the corner of the room – a fiddle player and a drummer and a horn player. They’re good. Ned bats his spoon on the table in time. It’s getting dark. The girl who served the ale comes along and lights the rushlights along the walls. Magsy climbs under the table and on to my lap. She’s a warm, heavy weight against my stomach. I hold her without moving, listening to the music, watching the shadows on the wall rise and dance as people move across the fire and the rushlights, thinking how fragile all this is. Here one day and gone the next.
It’s late when we go up to bed. Robin is asleep at one end of the long room, in a bed with a red-faced woman and her child. The only beds left are right at the other end. Richard takes Ned in with him, and Mag and I have to share with a skinny little girl who scratches at her flea bites even in her sleep.
It takes me a long time to fall asleep. The long room is warm and dark and stinks of ale and sweat and stale rushes. Whenever anyone goes to the latrine, you can hear them cursing and stumbling down the aisle between the beds.
When I do sleep, I dream about our little house, with the hearth-fire smoking and the lavender and rosemary drying from the beams, and Stumpy and Gilbert Pig sleeping behind their wattle wall. I dream about Alice, holding Edward and crooning to him as she bends over the cooking pot. I dream about the chickens scratching in the straw, and the rustle from the birds nesting in the thatch, and Ned kicking a ball against the wall, calling, “One, two, I’m with you! Two, three, you’re with me!”
I wonder if this dream is going to carry on coming back for the rest of my life. I wonder if I will ever forget them, if one day I’ll ever be glad – like Richard is – that they went and left us this bright, empty world for our own.
I wake to the sunlight shining through the narrow windows, and the sound of someone – I think it’s a child – screaming hysterically at the other end of the sleeping room. Around me, people are waking up: complaining, grumbling, blinking in the sunlight.
I sit up. A small huddle has gathered around the child, who looks a little older than Mag. One of the women is holding her arms down, but she’s struggling to get free, kicking with her bare heels at the woman’s shins. Then another woman says, “She’s dead!” and it falls in one of the silences between the child drawing her breath and beginning to scream, so that the whole sleeping chamber is suddenly still, even the little girl, who hiccups and shudders in the stranger’s arms.
“Is it . . .?” someone says, but of course it must be; what else can kill so silently and so suddenly? You go to bed alive and you wake up dead. I expect panic, folk gathering together their things and fleeing, but no one seems even surprised. You live with death for so long that another body is just that – a dead weight to be disposed of somehow. We’ve all walked among the dead for too long to be frightened any more. Only to the dead woman and her child, who has begun to scream again, does this matter now.
“We should get going,” says Richard. “We’ve a long way to go today.”
“I’ll tell Robin,” I say.
I pull on my clothes and shoes and make my way down the sleeping chamber towards Robin’s bed. All around me, people are muttering in low voices. The group around the little girl whisper to each other, and look across at the child. They’re wondering what to do with her, probably. Does she have a father somewhere, or other family? As I get closer, I see that it’s the child who was in Robin’s bed. The woman is lying flabby and white on the bed like a plucked chicken, the fingers of the big hand hanging down from the bed turning black with the sinking blood. Her mouth is half open, but her eyes are closed. Her skin is white and plucked and faintly horrible.
Robin is lying curled up on his side beside her. He looks asleep. His hands are neatly clasped under his chin and his eyes are closed. I wonder how he has managed to sleep through the screaming and shouting. I touch his arm to wake him, and I know. His skin is cold. He’s dead.
One of the women from the huddle is watching me. She comes over to the bed now.
“Was he a friend of yours?”
I nod.
“And the little girl?”
“I don’t know her.” I swallow. I want to shake Robin, to try and wake him somehow, but I don’t dare with this bright-eyed woman watching me so intently.
“Pity.” The woman doesn’t turn away. “Something will have to be done with her.” I don’t answer. She shrugs. “And you’ll have to do something with him,” she says, nodding to Robin. I nod again. If I open my mouth, I’m either going to cry or hit her.
“Well then,” says the woman. But she doesn’t stop watching me.
I crouch beside Robin, and stroke his arm awkwardly. It’s very cold. His face already has the parchment look of dead skin. His black hair is loose and hangs over his forehead. The world seems to swim in and out of focus. My hand shakes, violently, on the bed, and my teeth start to chatter. I knew, I think. I knew this would happen. I knew that nothing could be trusted, that nothing would hold. But in truth, I didn’t know. I thought I was safe. I thought it was over.
Nothing is ever over, I think, with a sudden certainty, and a sudden sadness. And I know, sitting there by Robin’s bed, that after today I will never feel safe again. I will never be able to love simple and sure and sweet without remembering this moment, and being afraid. I stand up, sick of it all, and go back to Richard and the others, to tell them that we can’t go home just yet.
40. Goodbyes
There’s no church for another three miles. We bury Robin and the body of the dead woman in the pasture at the back of the inn, where the landlord’s cows graze and the horses are let loose to flick their tails and pull at the thick, tussocky grass. There’s a big oak tree and a hedge of hawthorne and brambles. Cow parsley and thistles grow in the ditches. The pasture slopes down to a beck with a ford and rushing water. It’s evening, and the sunlight sends long shadows stretching out across the grass. The sky is peach and pink and pale orange over the hills, the long clouds coloured like the inside of an oyster shell. It’s quiet and cool and still.
There’s no one at the graveside except for Richard and us, and the landlord’s man, who helped dig the graves – the landlord moved the bodies to the cow-byre, he was so desperate to get them out of his house – and the woman’s little girl, whose name is Beatrice. Beatrice is seven. She had a father and two brothers, who are dead as well. She and her mother were travelling to Felton, where her uncle lives. Later, I give one of Juliana’s golden bracelets to a carter at the inn, to take her with him as far as Felton. Richard looks disapproving – how much land could that bracelet buy? – but I don’t care. I think of Juliana, whose little girls were killed. I think about Robin, with nowhere to go, and Alice, with all of those children who weren’t hers. I try not to think about what will happen to this child if her uncle is dead.
Beatrice spent most of the morning screaming, but she’s quiet now. She sucks on a bit of bread and honeycomb and holds on to Mags’s hand.
The men carry the bodies to the grave-mouth on a tabletop from the inn. They’re wrapped in winding sheets, so I can’t even see Robin’s face. I’m glad.
There isn’t a priest, an
d nobody heard Robin’s confession, but I don’t believe he’s going to hell. I refuse to believe it. I don’t want anything to do with a God who would send Robin to hell.
The men lower the bodies awkwardly into the grave, one on top of the other. It’s clumsy, and the hole is too small, but at least it’s not a plague pit.
“Do you want to say something?” says Richard, to me.
Yes, I think, but my mind won’t work, my voice is stuck, my words won’t come. What can I say that will make sense of this? I look at Ned and Mag, and they’re silent too. Neither of them is crying. Richard shrugs, and begins to shovel the earth back over the bodies. Wait, I want to say, but I don’t. Wait for what?
Later, when the others are finished, I want to stay here awhile, but Richard looks astonished.
“Who will look after Mag and Ned?” he says. And so I have to go.
*
The next morning, we leave for Ingleforn. I wonder if I will ever come here again. I wonder how long anyone will remember the two bodies in the cow pasture.
I think about what I would have liked to have said by the graveside, if I’d been brave enough.
I love you.
There was never anyone like you in all the world.
I would have been happy, married to you. We would have made a good family.
I’ll never forget you.
But the words sound cheap, and inadequate. All over England, people like Beatrice and I are standing by grave-mouths, saying the same things to those they have lost.
I love you.
I’ll never forget you.
There was never anyone like you, in all the world.
41. From a Grave-Mouth
It’s evening when we come back home. Richard has a lamp on a pole, which sends long shadows swinging over the wattle walls of the houses. Even in the darkness, I know what everything is, where everything is. That’s the well. That’s Emma Baker’s oven. Those are Sir John’s beehives, all in a row. That’s the forge, and those are the stocks. It even smells the same as it always did: wet grass and pig dung and straw and earth. The air is cleaner here, wetter, richer.