We’re home.
I don’t care.
We aren’t going back home, though. We spend the night in Joan and Richard’s little house, which looks just like it always did, except that now there’s a crumpled little red-faced person sleeping in a cradle by the hearth. Joan – who Alice always said gave up half her wits when she got married – comes running to the door when we knock and flings her arms around Richard.
“You came back!” she says, and then she sees the rest of us crowding in behind him.
“You found them!” And it’s all kisses and caresses, without so much as a “how-was-the-journey?”
And there’s the baby by the hearth. A baby girl, a frail little thing, not half as sturdy as Edward was. My eye keeps shifting towards her and then away, as though I’m frightened to look. Edward used to lie just like that – his tiny eyelashes and tinier fingernails and his serious sleeping face. I sit hunched by the fire, my hand on Mag’s back for comfort, but she wriggles away to admire the baby. Richard gives me an odd look, as though he expects me to be celebrating. But the village is a place of empty houses and unploughed fields, and the baby scares me, and my heart can’t seem to understand that Robin is dead – I keep expecting him to be here, in this room – and I’m going to have to go to the abbey and find out what happened to Geoffrey, and I don’t know why, but Joan’s neat little one-room house just makes me want to cry.
“You’re an auntie now, Isabel,” Joan says, and I clench my lips tight together and don’t say a word.
We’re leaving soon. Joan’s sister married a tanner in Kirby Felton, and she’s found a house for us to stay in while we’re looking for land to buy. Richard’s eyes gleam as he talks about pasture land and wheat fields and all the heriot animals, and the beasts with no owners that the new lords are desperate to get rid of. I feel empty.
I thought everything would be all right if we just got home, but maybe nothing will ever be right again.
I used to think I’d spend the rest of my life in this village, but now I’m glad to be leaving. Ingleforn is a strange, half-deserted place. The empty houses watch me with empty eyes, and everywhere I go I see reminders of the dead: the empty forge, shut up and unworked, the pigs and chickens wandering half-wild and ownerless through the village, slowly vanishing as villager after villager claims them for the pot, the houses with the shutters closed tight against the wind, the gardens already hazy with uncut grass and weeds. Sir Edmund is dead in his house in London, and a new boy heir is coming, a cousin from Duresme, so the rumours say. Church on Sunday is half-empty, and there’s a new priest that I don’t know, who’s giving the mass to our church and the church at Great Riding. He says the mass without stumbling, unlike poor Simon, and the congregation listen dully and dutifully before wandering away to talk of other things, as always.
After church, Will Thatcher comes over to speak to me. He’s gotten taller than ever just in the weeks that I’ve been gone – he’s not a boy any more, he’s nearly a man. Maybe I’m a woman.
“I’m glad to see you,” he says, more directly than I remember, and with little of his old shyness. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
I clench my arms tight across my chest. I don’t have anything to say to him. I don’t have anything to say to anyone. I don’t want to live in this world any more, I think, very clearly, and I’m so startled by the thought that I blink. Is that true? Really?
“We’re not staying,” I tell Will, dully. “Richard’s wanting us to move to better land,” and he nods.
“I’ll be gone soon too,” he says. “The new lord – he’s looking for men to garrison his castle down south. Most of his troops were killed in the pestilence. I’ll not stay here.”
I wonder if he remembers that kiss. I wonder if he’ll miss me, in his new castle with the new lord, who doesn’t look like he’s going to stay in Ingleforn any more than Sir Edmund did.
He shifts from one foot to another, the way he used to, then he says, “I’m going to be married too. To Maude Baker.”
“Oh!” I blink at him. Then I say, “I’m glad, Will, really.” Though I’m not. Maude Baker is lumpen and fish-eyed and stupid. She’s still scared of rats and spiders and moths, even though she’s a great girl of almost twenty.
“I hope – I hope you’ll be happy,” I say to Will, and this I do mean. He nods his head up and down a few times and says, “You too, Isabel. You too.”
Nobody seems to know what happened at St Mary’s. Joan thought all the monks died of the pestilence. Richard thought that a few had survived but they’d packed up all their holy books and taken them to the priory at Felton. The new priest, when I asked, said he thought there were a few monks left, “but they’re leaving soon, I think, before the winter comes.”
On the last day before we leave, I go up to the abbey. It’s cold. Autumn’s here. The abbey sits as it always does in the dip in the road, low and quiet under the white-grey sky. The big wooden doors are closed. I bang on them with my fist, but nobody comes. Weeds are growing out of the cracks between the stones, and in the chapel, one of the beautiful coloured glass windows has been smashed wide open against the rain. It should be sad, and it is, but mixed up with the sadness is the calmness and the sense of peace that always surrounds my abbey, and that old, tugging sense of home that Geoffrey always raises up in me.
There’s a tree that I used to climb when I wanted to visit him and didn’t want the monks to know. It’s still there up against the orchard wall. It’s easier to climb than I remember. I must be getting taller. Little green-and-brown specks of bark and moss come off on my hands and my skirts, but I don’t mind. This gown is too short for me anyway. I need a new one. I must remember to ask Joan about Alice’s loom. More work for the long winter that’s coming.
There’s no one in the orchard, but there are noises coming from the gardens, someone whistling, and a thud, like metal on stone. I follow the sounds, noticing all the signs of decay, the dead leaves beginning to fall, dirty and unswept in the earth and the mud, the withered heads of the leeks in the herb garden. I’m filled with a great weariness, a heaviness. I wonder if it will ever really leave me. There’s so much that needs to be done, here and everywhere, and I’m so tired.
The monk is in the field behind the graveyard. He’s digging a grave. He’s knee-deep in the earth, and it’s slow going. The earth is stony, and he’s forever stopping to dig out the stones with his spade. He looks cheerful enough, though. His hood is down and he’s whistling.
He doesn’t stop working as I come up to him, though he must have heard me.
“Where are the monks?” I say, a little too loudly.
The monk gives a bark of a laugh.
“Where’s everyone?”
It takes me a moment to realize.
“They’re dead? All of them?”
“Well, I’m here, aren’t I?” The monk digs his spade into the ground and throws the load of earth back over his shoulder. “But yes, there’s me – and poor Brother John – and that’s the last of us.”
I’m silent. I’d expected this, but somehow I hadn’t expected it. I feel the way you feel after you lay down a load that was too heavy ever to pick up in the first place – weak and shaky and breathless. The monk glances at me, but he doesn’t say anything. He goes back to digging the grave. I’m silent, watching. The day smells of wet grass and wet earth. My hands are stained with bark from the tree, and there’s a green smudge all down the front of my gown. My feet are wet. My brother is dead. Shadows from the branches of the tree fall across the monk’s face, shadow-brown, then white, then shadow-brown. Water is running in the brook, the last of the apples are ripening in the trees around me, and my brother is dead.
“Were you?” I say bitterly to the monk.
“Was I what?”
“Sleeping with devils. Is that why God killed you all? Was it worth it?” My voice rises. The monk carries on digging.
“If they were, they never invited me along. Pity. My
bed got awful cold, those long nights.”
“It’s not funny!” I say shrilly. The monk looks up.
“No,” he says, “I don’t suppose it is.”
I scuff the toe of my shoe in the mud at the edge of the grave. It’s good, thick earth, soft and crumbly and full of worms and the white, wriggly roots of grass.
“I hate God,” I tell the monk. He ignores me. He looks like Alice, lips clenched, getting on with her weaving while Mag has a screaming fit.
“I don’t believe in God,” I say instead. I’m not sure this is true – can you have a world without God? – but at least it makes the monk look at me.
“If you don’t, you’re not the only one. I’ve had boys from Ingleforn throwing stones at the windows all last week. As if there isn’t enough sorrow in this world already.”
“How can you still believe in Him?” I say. “After all this . . .” And I swing my arm around in a gesture that’s supposed to include the graves, and the empty abbey, and York with the corpses lying in the street, and Alice and Father and Edward in the grave with the rats, and Thomas swinging from the gibbet in the square.
The monk is quiet. The spade lifts the earth out of the grave and drops it on to the grass with a splat. It’s strangely comforting, like being out in the fields with my father. My father is dead. My brother is dead.
“You know,” says the monk, “I was a child in the Great Famine. Did you ever hear about that?”
I did. Lots of people in the village remember the famine, when the rains came like they did last harvest and all the crops were ruined. Father lost a grandmother, and a baby cousin, and a little sister smaller than Mag.
“And then their parents cut them up and put them in the pot!” Dirty Nick used to say, his teeth white in his red mouth, his long, grimy face screwed up as his muscles worked under the skin. But Father says no, they didn’t eat his little sister, they buried her in the churchyard under the east window. But Will Thatcher says he’s heard that people ate each other too.
“People are funny souls,” says the monk. “They chop down the trees above their houses and wonder why the floods come. They eat all their barley and then wonder why their children are starving. They look at the Signs in Europe – the pestilence and the rains of fire and the plagues of frogs – and they say, ‘That won’t touch me. That can’t come here.’”
“There was a man I knew in York,” I say. “Watt. He said the people in France thought the pestilence was coming for the heathens, until it came to France. And then the people in England through it was coming for the French, until it came to England. And then the Scots rejoiced and thought it was coming for the English . . .”
“And now it’s in Scotland,” says the monk, and he spits. I nod. Now it’s in Scotland.
“No one thinks disaster is coming to them,” he says. “But it does. And it will. It came to Jesus, and it came to the Israelites and the Egyptians. Four hundred – five hundred – six hundred years from now, men and women will still be chopping down the trees and eating all the barley and hoping Providence will save them. But disasters will come to them too, all the same. And this has been a cruel trouble, I know, more sorrow than we ever thought we’d have to carry. But look! You’re still here and so am I, and I’ve got a new abbey to shape and you’ve got land to work, I wager.”
“We’re going away,” I say. “Before the new lord comes home. My brother Richard says nobody will care if we’re villeins or free, so long as we’ve hands that can plough the fields. We’re going to be rich, he says.”
“Aye,” says the monk. He throws up another spadeful of earth. “He mightn’t be wrong, either.” He looks up at me. “You should be grateful, my girl!”
I crouch down in the wet grass, ducking my head so I don’t have to look at him, there in his grave. I remember the Bible story about the lilies in the field, who need not plough or weave or bake or sow, because of the grace of God who knows and loves them all.
“I’m scared of the baby,” I say, through my hair.
“Scared of the baby!” The monk laughs. “A big girl like you! You can weather the end of the world, but you’re scared of a baby!”
He’s right. I’m a fool. But the truth is, the end of the world is easy to weather, if you don’t expect to survive it. If all you have to do is wrap your mantle tight around yourself and live another day. Anyone can do that, I reckon. After Alice died, I never really thought I’d do anything but die too.
Living is harder than dying. I think of Joan’s baby, Sarah. I don’t want to live in a house with a baby and not love it, but I can’t love Sarah without remembering Edward, and I’m not sure that I’m brave enough to remember all the people I have to remember, and carry all the grief I have to bear.
“Maybe I’ll come with you to the other abbey,” I say, to the blades of grass. “Maybe I’ll be a nun instead. Nuns don’t have to think, do they?”
“All the time,” says the monk. “All the time.” He stops in the hole and rubs at his forehead with his muddy hand. “Come,” he says. “You don’t look like a coward to me.”
I hunch up my shoulders and crouch forward until my face is nearly touching the wet grass. I’m Isabel. I’m not a coward. But just for now I’m going to lie here and let my fingers soak up the droplets of water clinging to the underside of the grass and remember what it felt like to feel completely at home, and completely safe.
“What am I going to do?” I say to the grass and the little black ant which is climbing up a dandelion. It’s an ant-mountain, that dandelion, but he’s going to climb it anyway. I know what the answer is, and I’m not surprised when the monk gives it.
“You’re going to live,” he says. “What else are you going to do?”
Finis
Richard is proud of his new land, and he wants to show it off. He holds Joan’s hand as she clambers over the earth, baby Sarah in a length of cloth strung over her shoulder. Sarah is beginning to take an interest in the world. She holds her head up and her blue eyes watch everything. Her hair is beginning to grow: fine, coppery-red strands, like Ned’s.
“I thought we’d have rye all along here,” Richard is saying. “And I want to try beans too – Father never had much luck with beans, but I think here—” Joan’s face is cocked up to his, like Sarah’s. She isn’t at all interested in rye, but in the way his mouth twists as he speaks, the miracle of him being here, and happy, and alive.
The earth is hard with the winter cold. The sky above us is heavy and grey. Frost glitters on the weeds and the briar. It’s going to take a lot of work to plant all this earth, and tend it, without the hired labour we could rely on in Ingleforn, but it’s good work, purposeful work. Making something out of nothing – the best sort of work that there is. If I half-close my eyes, I can see what this field might look like, full of rye and beans and oats, and whatever else Richard thinks we should try.
“We could really make something here,” Richard is saying to Joan, his eyes bright and proud. And he’s right. We really could.
He to whom God has given knowledge, and the gift of speaking eloquently, must not keep silent nor conceal the gift, but he must willingly display it.
The woman who wrote those words was an abbess and a poet, and the poems that she wrote are still read and sung a hundred years after she died. Emma the baker’s wife is as good a baker as John ever was. She was still baking bread when we came back to Ingleforn, she and her daughter. She baked us three flat loaves with the end of last year’s rye.
We didn’t stay long in Ingleforn. At Lady Christina’s, Richard heard, they were paying three or four pennies to anyone who would help with the ploughing and the sowing for the year ahead. We were just labourers, paid hands, but no one asked too many questions about where we’d come from, and we were paid as free men and women. Sir Edmund’s heir is a boy from Duresme with no more idea of who his villeins are than I have of how to build a cathedral. Gilbert Reeve is dead, and no one has the heart to come chasing after us.
/> “So are we free then?” I ask Richard. He shrugs.
“As close as makes no difference. No one’s ever going to make us work for them again, and that’s all that matters.”
It’s a fine thing to be free. At first, everything is so strange and grey and topsy-turvy that I can’t make sense of what it is we have. But when winter comes, I look around and see that here we are, in our own little house, with our own land, and Joan’s little girl crying by the hearth. And every day, Richard and Ned and I are out in the fields, learning the lie of the land and the depth of the soil and the places where good crops will grow almost without tending and those where poor crops struggle up even with all the care we can give them. Richard was right to move us. This is good land. It will reward all the work we can give it.
Soon spring will be here again. A new harvest. A new year.
“The world is getting bigger, Isabel!” Richard says. “Look at all these people, coming here, living as free men. Look at the land we have!” He chucks baby Sarah under the chin. “What sort of world are you going to live in, eh?”
Richard is already a richer man than Father ever was. He’s talking about using Thomas’s money to buy some of the animals that no one has a use for, to make some gold for us until I’m old enough to run a farm for myself. Sheep need fewer hands to rear than barley does.
Joan grumbles. “If you wanted to be a shepherd, why did you buy all this plough land?” But Ned likes the idea of tending sheep instead of working on the land.
It’s a strange thing, surviving, living when so many of the people you love are dead. Not everyone here can stand it. There was a woman who hanged herself over the winter, and a man who went mad and started talking to the leaves on the trees, calling them by the names of his children. Mostly what I feel isn’t so much sadness as a great tenderness, as though the smallest knock would bruise me, as though a careless word would destroy me.