Our church has two silver candlesticks, which sit on the altar at mass. They’re sitting there now.
“The candlesticks are still there,” I say. “Emma. Look.”
Emma glares at me, then carries on as though I haven’t spoken.
“That little girl,” she says. “What will happen to her when she dies? Without a priest to hear her confession.” I shiver. If you die without confessing your sins, and without receiving absolution, you carry your sins into the next life, where you have to pay for them with years and years of burning in hell. Receiving absolution is one of the most important things you can do, if you want to get to heaven. “What’s going to happen to us all?” says Emma, and her voice rises. “What’s going to happen to us without a priest?”
Father presses his lips tight together, the way he always does when he’s angry or upset, but before he can say anything, there’s a movement up at the front of the church. One of Sir John’s chaplains is calling, “Hello? Hello!”
There are some nudgings and shufflings and everyone quietens right down, which almost never happens in church. Usually it’s just Sir John mumbling to himself in Latin while we all carry on talking about the weather or the harvest or how ill Agnes Harelip’s new kerchief suits her, and how Edward Miller shamed Emma Baker by taking his new wife up to the altar before her to take the communion wafer.
“As some of you may have heard,” the chaplain says, “Sir John is unfortunately no longer able to perform his duties as priest of this parish.” There’s some grumbling at that, and a little laughter. “We’ll be sending a messenger to the bishop asking for a replacement to be sent. In these difficult times, we can’t know how long that will take” – the voices rise, then sink into silence again as the chaplain continues speaking – “so in the meantime, the monks from St Mary’s have agreed to come and help with the services.”
The murmuring grows louder. In these difficult times. Priests are dying, that’s what he means.
The chaplain hasn’t finished speaking yet. He’s only Alice’s cousin from Great Riding, but he knows how to read, and he’s holding a piece of vellum with writing on it.
“The Archbishop of York,” he says, “has asked us to tell you that any member of the laity – man or woman” – there’s a little ruffle of sound at that – “will have the power to hear confessions and grant absolution so long as this disaster is visited upon us.”
Now no one is even pretending to be quiet. Women, allowed to hear confessions! Alice looks like somebody has slapped her. I’m filled with this odd mixture of shock and excitement, like the world is shifting and moving below my feet and I’m not sure where we’re all going to end up when it settles. I like it and I don’t at the same time. What sort of a world will it be, if people like me and Alice can do all the things that priests can?
“For shame,” Alice is saying.
“Listen.” The chaplain is shouting over the hubbub. He has to shout twice to get everyone to calm down. “Listen. As you know, many of the monks at St Mary’s are ordained priests. After speaking to us, they have agreed to help in our time of need. Any of you needing the services of a priest should come to the abbey, where they’ll do all that they can to help you.”
Quiet. If anyone needs the last sacraments, that’s what he means. Like that poor little girl in Radulf’s house. The fear churns at my stomach. There are a few mutterings and shuffling of feet, and then Emma Baker calls out, “So you don’t support this abomination, then?”
“We hope that no one here will have need of it,” says the chaplain evasively.
“Those foreigners in York can do what they want!” Edward Miller shouts. “It’s turning the world upside down, it is, and we’re not having it here!”
I see Father shaking his head in frustration and I edge over to him.
“What do you think?”
Father sighs.
“I think the world is turned upside down,” he says. “And no matter what Edward Miller thinks, we are going to have it here.”
For the first time I can remember, there’s something almost like quiet while the chaplain gives the service. Afterwards, he says we can all take communion. There’s a ripple of excitement through the church at that, and Alice starts muttering the Pater Noster to herself very fast in Latin.
I know it’s horrible, but some evil part of me hopes I will have to hear someone’s confession. Not anyone in my family, but a stranger, maybe – a traveller from York, dying on the road. Geoffrey says you serve God by making the bread and bringing in the harvest, but giving absolution through God – what would that feel like? I might never get another chance again.
When it’s my turn to receive the host, I shut my eyes and try to think holy thoughts, but it just tastes like dried-up paper, like always. I don’t think I’m really holy inside, like Geoffrey, that’s my problem. I try to be, but then I start thinking about something else, like my vegetable patch, or Robin, or whether I really like Will Thatcher or just pretend I do to annoy Robin, and suddenly prayers are over and I haven’t said anything to God at all.
Afterwards, everyone stays outside the church for ages, talking. The pestilence in Ingleforn – Sir John – women to hear confession – Radulf! – Sir John – the pestilence in Ingleforn.
“They should be banished!” says Agnes. “Bringing the sickness here! We should turn them out of the village like lepers and let them rot.” She spits a chewed-up clove on the dry earth. The spittle sits there in a wet mound, bubbled and foul.
“We should hang them,” says Dirty Nick. Dirty Nick is lank and long and ragged, and filthy around the edges. He lives by idling and drinking, paying for his bread by begging and by pieces of day and half-day work here and there. I hate him.
“Hang them!” says Alice. “Lord, where would you find men in this village willing to hang Radulf and Muriel? And what purpose would it serve?”
I hope Alice is right, but I see the dark expressions on the faces of one or two men, and I wonder.
“What is going to happen to Radulf and Muriel?” I ask Margaret, Robin’s mother. I tried asking Father, but he told me to keep my nose out of other people’s business. Margaret sighs.
“Gilbert Reeve wanted to banish them,” she says. “But I expect they’ll stay. People will have more things to worry about soon anyway.”
Radulf – Edith – the church candlesticks – the monks. The pestilence in Ingleforn.
I grab Robin by the arm and drag him to the side of the church.
“I saw her,” I whisper. “It was me who found her. I went and asked Sir John to go and see her, and that must have been when he ran away!”
Robin’s face is serious.
“What did she look like?” he whispers back.
I think back to Edith. All I can think of is her red face and her tears.
“She smelt,” I remember at last. “That part’s true. A horrible sort of rotten smell. Robin, what are we going to do? It’s here! In Ingleforn!”
“I think we should run away,” says Robin. He sees the look on my face and sighs. “I knew you’d look like that. Mother pulled exactly the same face when I told her. I don’t care. If I was a man, I’d go tomorrow.”
“But how—?” I begin.
“I don’t know how I’d live!” says Robin. “Maybe I wouldn’t. But it would be better than staying here, wouldn’t it?”
I’m silent. Alice wanted to leave, I know. But every part of me screams that if we leave our land, if we leave our fields, it wouldn’t matter if we survived the pestilence. We’d have stopped being ourselves already.
I turn away from Robin and look over the churchyard. Ned and Maggie are running through the graves with the other children. They run up to us, Ned charging straight into my stomach, making me gasp.
“Ned! Behave yourself!”
Ned pulls himself away.
“Why is everyone so angry?” he says.
“Because of what that chaplain said,” I tell him. “He said that anyone
could hear confession – like the priest does. You could, or Magsy.”
Ned sputters. “Not Mag!”
“I could!” Mag bounces up on to her toes. “I could, couldn’t I, Isabel?”
“That’s what the chaplain said,” I tell her. “And so can I, and so can Alice.”
Ned splutters again into his hands. You can see his mouth stretched wide with laughter behind his fingers.
“Alice might be able to talk to God,” he says. “But Mag – never!”
12. Miracles and Magic
Ned and Maggie are finding it hard to take the pestilence seriously. When Father and Alice go over to one of the alewives’ houses to argue and whisper about Sir John with the rest of the village, they decide to prepare our house for its coming. I’m working in my garden, but they come and grab my hands and insist on showing me all the things they’ve done.
“We’ve got a cross on the door, look—” So they have – a wobbly crucifix drawn with a burnt stick, Jesus with a downturned mouth instead of his usual patient expression.
“He’s upset because he’s been nailed to a cross,” Maggie explains. “And look—” They’ve put a bucket half full of piss on the doorstep.
“Don’t tread in it!” says Ned.
I step over the bucket. It stinks.
“Why . . .?”
“It’s to stop the miasma. You get sick because you smell the pestilence smell, don’t you? That’s why Alice has all that rosemary and juniper to burn. But we thought piss smells much stronger than juniper, so it’s double the protection.”
“You have to sniff it,” Mags explains. She bends over the bucket, takes a deep breath and immediately starts coughing. “Eugh!”
“I think I’ll avoid that one,” I say. “What else have you got?”
“Old beardy-Bede.”
Alice’s little pewter St Bede stands by the loom. Alice bought it on a pilgrimage to Duresme Cathedral. She lights candles by it and prays to it, and once, when Mags took it and dressed it up in a bit of fleece and took it for a walk all round the croft, she was so angry that she boxed Mag’s ears and called her an imp of Satan and not worth the breath she’d wasted in prayers for her. St Bede is still standing on his shelf, but he’s got an extra candle and he’s knee-deep in daisies and dandelions and forget-me-nots. Ned and Mag have added a pile of clumsy little figures as offerings, made from the slimy riverbank clay that Mag likes to play with when Alice and I are washing. “Father, Alice, you, me, Maggie, Edward, Geoffrey and Richard.” Ned points to the clay people in turn. I see that the bulge in one of the figure’s arms is supposed to be a baby. Alice often gives St Bede offerings – a clay arm when I sliced mine open on a scythe, a clay eye to cure her father’s blindness – but this set looks ominously like a pile of corpses on a battlefield. One of Father’s feet has already fallen off.
“More crosses—” They’ve drawn wonky black crosses on all of the beams, and at the head of Father and Alice’s bed. Alice isn’t going to be happy. “And this is for you.”
Maggie hands me a bit of cloth – one of the leftover pieces of Alice’s dressmaking. It’s tied into a bundle with a bit of string.
“Smell!” Ned commands.
I sniff. It smells of dried lavender and woodsmoke, the scent of home.
“It’s got lavender in it,” Mag explains. “You’re supposed to tie it round your neck.”
“We’ve thought of everything,” says Ned, and suddenly my eyes fill up with tears. Because foolish though Ned and Mag are, do any of us have anything better?
And then Father comes in at the front door with Alice behind him, and steps straight into the bucket of piss, proving that Ned and Mags haven’t thought of everything after all.
13. Those We Remember and Those We Forget
When I thought about the sickness coming here – which I’ve thought about a lot, this past year – I’d thought of it coming like the styche, or the flux – maybe a child catches it, and then perhaps another child in the family, and then the mother, and then after a few days, it moves to another family in the road, or then to the mother’s sister, and so is passed like a rumour or a secret from one house to the next.
When I go down to the well on Monday morning, Amabel Dyer is there. She’s got a full bucket of water already, but she’s not going anywhere. She waves at me as I come over.
“Did you hear?” she says, in a half-whisper.
“Did I hear what?”
“Radulf and Muriel both have it! Gilbert Reeve went over there yesterday and he found them. And now Gilbert has it too, my sister says.”
“Pssh.” The woman next to Amabel – it’s Agnes Harelip, Alice’s sister – blows the air out of her mouth with a disgusted noise. “Gilbert Reeve doesn’t have anything! I saw him this morning going off to the market. Your sister’s talking nonsense, girl.”
Amabel looks abashed, but only for about half a moment.
“Little Joanie Fisher has it too. Her mother bought some of Muriel’s honey from them only last week. She’ll get it next, I reckon.”
Joanie Fisher is three years old. Her mother, Sarah, is a friend of Richard’s Joan. I feel the ice sliding down my back.
“You can’t go near someone who has it,” says Alison Spinner, who’s half a year older than me, “or you’ll get it. They pass it through the eyes – look in their eyes and you’re dead for sure.”
“How can you not go near people? You have to! How can you not go to the well – or to the fields – or to church?” I wouldn’t mind so much missing church, but I’m trying very hard not to annoy God at the moment. “You’d starve!” I say.
Alison Spinner shrugs. “Then you die,” she says.
I’m quiet. So are Amabel and Alison. This is happening too quickly. What I need is something like the pause after the minstrels have finished playing, the space where everyone breathes in and comes back from whatever place the music has sent them. This is too much.
Alison Spinner passes her pail of water from one hand to the other with a look of unconcern.
“Mother heard,” she says. “They’re going to send us a new priest. By the end of the week, Sir Edmund’s steward told Gilbert Reeve. They’d better be quick, he said to the messenger. Or we’ll be all be dead by the time he gets here.”
“Alison!” Amabel looks shocked, and a little bit like she wants to giggle, like Alison has made a rude joke or something.
“He didn’t say anything of the sort,” I say to Alison, cross suddenly: with Alison for not taking this seriously, even – yes, I admit it – with Muriel and Radulf and little Joanie Fisher for falling sick, and me with nothing I can do about it. I’m like Alice – I like making things better: scolding the children, bandaging the cut, cleaning up the spilt ale. But this? There’s nothing you can do about this.
We have our first death the next day – little fair-haired Edith, Radulf’s niece. One of the monks from the abbey performs the mass, but only her mother and her baby brother come to pray for her soul. And then we hear that the mother is sick too.
“But who’s looking after the baby?” I’m on the floor playing with Edward, walking my fingers across his belly, then tickling him until he squirms, and the thought of this other baby – alone, hungry, crying to itself in an house full of the dying – is too horrible to think of.
Alice is chopping leeks at the table. She won’t meet my eyes.
“People have their own families to think of, Isabel. They don’t want to bring the sickness into their houses. And it’s not a baby anyone knows . . .”
Alice, with all her talk of Christian charity! I stare at her, horrified. She fusses with her kerchief, then says, defensively, “It’s bound to catch the sickness soon, anyway, Isabel.”
But somehow that baby is the most horrible thing that’s happened yet, more horrible than Edith and her mother, who at least nobody could have helped anyway. I can’t stop thinking about him – crying and lying in his own filth while his mother lies dying. Something tugs at me ??
? should I go and help him? But what would I do with him, if Alice won’t let him here? Would the monks take a baby?
I’m so angry with Alice about it, angry with myself for not going. I rage about it to Amabel as we go down to the archery butts with Robin and Ned, to watch their shooting practice.
“They just left it . . . left it to die. A baby! It’s probably there now, with no one looking after it, everyone too scared to go into the house with them all sick.”
“I wouldn’t go,” says Amabel. “And I don’t think your Alice should either. People have their own children to think of. They can’t bring the sickness into their own houses.”
“You don’t think that, Robin, do you?” I beg.
“I think it’s terrible,” says Robin, and my heart lifts. Dear, kind, Robin, friend to small children and lame puppies. “I’ll go there now with you, Isabel, if you want,” he says, seriously. “I’ll go and see, if you want me to.”
“Are you mad?” Amabel screeches. “You can’t just take someone else’s baby home! You’ll catch the pestilence!”
“I know,” says Robin. His dark eyes watch mine, under his thatch of dark hair. “I’ll still go, Isabel, if you want to.”
I hesitate. My heart starts beating faster.
“Would your mother take a baby, if it wasn’t sick?” I ask. Robin shrugs.
We’re walking past the mill. The waterwheel is turning in the millstream, flecks of bright water splashing us as we pass. Birds are singing in the trees above our heads. We’re alive. We might not be soon. Probably that baby is sick already anyway.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what I want.” And I run forward, before Robin can answer.
Three days later, they ring the passing-bells for Radulf and Muriel, and for Edith’s mother. We hear them as we’re taking the oxen out to pasture, and we grit our teeth. There are twelve more cases in the village now, and still no priest has come.
No one mentions a baby.