People start behaving differently now that sickness is here. They keep to themselves. If they see someone coming from a house of sickness, they step aside and look away. The Sunday after Sir John leaves the church is full – unusually so – but everyone stands as far away from everyone else as they can get. The brother who’s leading the mass has nearly six feet between him and the front of the crowd. At the well, people mutter, “God keep you” and keep their eyes down. Everyone is frightened. When Joanie Fisher died, hardly anybody went to her mass. The brothers wouldn’t let her body lie in the church, for fear of the miasmas gathering, but they held a funeral procession through the village and a mass at the graveside. Joan went, and she said the only people following the coffin were Sarah, Sarah’s sister, the monk who led the service and a beggar she’d never seen before, who asked for 2d just for ringing a hand bell.
“Godspeed they send us a priest soon,” grumbles Alice, standing in the doorway with Edward, who’s wailing fit to bring down the thatch. “Isabel and Ned, I told you, we’re brewing ale today. How are we going to do that without some water? And Isabel, you come straight back and don’t stand there gossiping to Amabel Dyer. I won’t have you bringing the sickness here, you hear me?”
Ale means a lot of water – two buckets each and a pole across our shoulders to carry them home. Ned scuffs his shoes along in the earth. He’s worried, you can tell.
“Isabel?” he says. “If you catch the pestilence – can you get better?”
“No,” I say. “You always die.”
Ned hunches his shoulders. I wonder who he’s anxious about – Philip-at-the-brook, who he plays with sometimes on the green, or old John Adamson, or ourselves, when this thing comes to us.
“Ned?” I say, but he pulls away.
“I don’t care,” he says. “I don’t care about you or Alice or any stupid pestilence.” And he runs off to the well with his buckets swinging.
The women by the well are swapping bad news. Stupid old besoms. As we come down towards them, they stop their talking and look at us over their shoulders. Bad news coming to us. I feel something cold settle in my stomach. The pestilence coming to someone I love. Robin. Richard. Geoffrey. Amabel Dyer. There are so many possibilities.
“Isabel, did you hear?” one of them calls. “The new priest has come. Arrived late last night. Just a boy, Beatrice Reeve says.”
“That’s good,” I say, and some of the tangle of fear in my stomach loosens itself. The woman looks as though she’s about to say something else, and I tug on Ned’s arm before she can work herself up to it.
“Come on, Ned. Alice is waiting.”
I drag him over to the well. The women watch. I move restlessly as we wait in the line, stretching the muscles in my arms. The women talk, their wimples nodding, their shoulders moving restlessly. No one says anything to us. It’s only as we’re done filling our buckets that a woman calls to me.
“Isabel, wait a moment.”
It’s Emma Baker.
“Does your father know?”
Ned answers before I can stop him. “Know what? About the priest?”
“Margaret is sick,” says Emma.
Margaret. Robin’s mother. My belly tips, as though I’m standing at the edge of a cliff, about to plunge over the edge into nothingness. Robin. My Robin, with his black hair falling in his eyes and his wide mouth open and laughing. The sickness in Robin’s house.
“Brother Simon from St Mary’s was there this morning. It’s the sickness all right. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay away from there, you hear?”
“We’ve got to go,” I say. “Alice is waiting!” And I’m almost running, fast as I can with the buckets on my shoulders, Ned running after me.
“What did you do that for? Why are we running? Isabel – wait for me!”
“How dare she?” I say. I’m shaking. “How dare she tell me what to do? What’s it got to do with her?”
“Are you going to see Margaret?” says Ned. “Isabel?”
“I’m not going to do what those old hags tell me,” I say, and I stamp off back home before he can ask me any more questions I don’t have the answers for.
Alice is crushing the malt at the table when we come back. Ned is full of the news.
“Margaret at Brook has the pestilence!”
Alice lowers the pestle and stares at him. Her face is red, and a strand of hair has escaped her wimple and is stuck to her cheek.
“Oh, Ned,” she says.
“Can we have Robin here?” I say. “While his mother’s sick?”
Maggie, who is rolling Alice’s spindle across the floor, looks up.
“Yes!” she says. “Can he? Can he sleep in our bed?”
“I’m sorry, Isabel,” says Alice. She looks tired. She brushes the stray strand of hair off her forehead with the fleshy back of her hand. “I’ve got Edward and you children to think of. What if he brought the sickness here?”
“Will Thatcher says we oughtn’t to speak to anyone who’s sick,” Ned pipes up. “He says we ought to stay at home and just lock our doors and—”
I remember all the people who have come down the road from York – the preachers, the carters, the beggars and lepers and holy men and refugees. There is nothing to be done. I remember that baby – what did happen to him? I remember Robin, my kind, anxious Robin. Locked in with the miasma and no one coming.
“I don’t care what Will Thatcher says!” I shout, so suddenly that Maggie looks up, startled. “I don’t care what anyone says! You can’t stop me!”
I push past Ned blindly and run outside. Alice calls after me, “Isabel! You come back here!” but I don’t answer.
Robin lives across the green from us, the middle house of a row of three with John Baker and the oven at one end and the forge at the other. The two little Smith girls are playing in the garden as I come up to the house – they stop to stare at me over the fence. I ignore them. I’m trying not to listen to the voice – Alice’s voice – in my head telling me to walk away and not bring the sickness on our family. The voice that tells me that these people are in God’s hands now, and there’s nothing I can do for them.
“Robin,” I call, and I rap on the closed door with the back of my hand. Then, when no one answers, “Robin!”
No one comes. The chickens carry on pecking at the earth around my feet.
There are noises inside the house, scuffles, then the door opens, and Robin appears. He looks smaller than I remember, and paler. He’s got a posset of something – herbs, probably – in a little sack pressed up against his nose to protect him from the pestilence scent.
“Isabel!” he says, alarmed. “What are you doing here?” I come closer, and he retreats into the house. “No, get back! Don’t come any nearer!”
“I wanted to see you,” I say. “Don’t go away! Otherwise I’ll come right inside the house and kiss you. And you won’t be able to stop me, so don’t try. How could I not come and see you?”
“You oughtn’t to have come,” says Robin, but he’s smiling a little, and I know he’s pleased to see me. Robin doesn’t have any family left in the village except us, and his mother, and an old, blind, addled grandmother who is no use to anyone.
“Listen, Robin,” I say. “You’re going to need food. And water. I don’t think you want to go to the well, do you?”
“Oh . . .” Robin clearly hasn’t thought about food. But I’ve seen how the villagers gathered their skirts up away from Sarah Fisher when she tried to go for her water, and wouldn’t speak to her, and I couldn’t bear it if they turned away from Robin too.
“Perhaps . . .” he says.
“I can get you whatever you need,” I say. “If you need anything, just ask me.” Then, all in a rush: “Robin, be careful, won’t you, please. Don’t—”
Don’t die, is what I want to say. But how can he avoid it, living in that miasma?
“Don’t look in her eyes,” I say, instead, and he gives a hiccuppy laugh.
&nb
sp; “I’ll be fine, Isabel,” he says. “Don’t worry about me. Please.” And I want to weep. What right has Robin got to be worrying about me, when he’s stuck in a pestilence house with a mother who is almost certainly going to die? “I’ll stick my head in the pig dung,” he says. “I won’t wash!”
I try to smile. “They should send you up to the infirmary at the abbey,” I say, trying to play along. “You’ll give them all Robin Fever instead of the pestilence.”
Robin smiles, but half-heartedly.
“Is it—” I say. Is it terrible? is what I want to ask. Your mother, has she gone mad? Does she piss herself? Does she stink? Is her flesh rotting on her bones? Are you all right, cleaning up the blood and the vomit and worse? But how can I say these things? And what would Robin answer if I did?
He doesn’t let me finish.
“Listen,” he says. “You mustn’t come here again. Promise me. Behind the fence is fine, but not like this again – not so close that you can smell the miasma. If anything happened to you – if anything happened because of me – I couldn’t bear it. I mean it, Isabel.”
I nod, the tears rising in my eyes.
“Take care,” I say. “Please, please, Robin, take care.”
“You too,” says Robin, and he shuts the door, so suddenly that I don’t even get a chance to say goodbye.
14. The Boy-Priest
It begins to rain as I’m coming back home – a greyish drizzle that soaks into my mantle and reminds me of last year, when it rained without ending and all the harvest was ruined. I wonder gloomily if the world really is ending. Sometimes it absolutely feels like it.
I feel like I’m trapped in a cage, a cage which is closing tighter and tighter around me, until I’ll have nowhere left to turn, and then the black thing, the miasma – in my dreams, the miasma is black, like a cloud, and it seeps under the door and coils up over the fireplace and into our solar – then the miasma will come and find me, and I won’t have anywhere to hide.
My head is full of . . . what? Rotten corpses, that stench in Radulf’s house, the taste of blood and the thought of Robin alone with . . . all that . . . the pus and the blood and the vomit. What can I do with that? I want to scream, to smash something, to get as far away from this place as I can.
I like fixing things. Mending things. Most of the things in my life get better if you work at them. This doesn’t. How can I help Robin if I’m not even allowed to visit him?
It’s only as I’m at the gate that I remember the new priest is supposed to have arrived. Priests visit the sick, even those who are sick with the pestilence – this priest can visit Margaret and Robin even if I can’t. I’m so pleased with this thought that I turn straight around and head back towards Sir John’s house. No priest would leave Robin to look after his mother on his own, would he? Apart from Sir John.
Nobody comes when I knock on the door. I bang on it with both fists. What will I do if he doesn’t answer?
I’ll go to the abbey and find a monk is what I’ll do. I don’t care if he’s praying, or in church, or writing in his scriptorium, I’ll make him come to Margaret. I’ll go to one of the chaplain’s houses and make him find the new priest.
“Yes? Can I help you?”
The man standing on the doorsill is younger than Richard. For a brief, dizzying moment, I think it’s my brother Geoffrey; then as he steps out of the shadow, I see that he’s older than Geoffrey, maybe eighteen or nineteen. He’s tall and gangly, with long, white fingers twisting anxiously around themselves. It’s his hair that made me think it was Geoffrey – a shaggy blond mop – that and the slightly Frenchified English that Geoffrey picked up after a couple of years speaking French with the monks of St Mary’s. This man’s hair is darker than Geoffrey’s, though, and he’s thinner. He looks like a string bean with all of the colour bleached out of it.
“Yes?” he says again. He’s got a high, rather nervous voice.
“Please,” I say. “My friend’s mother – Margaret – she’s dying, I think. I mean, she’s sick. So could you come and – and—”
“Oh.” The priest jumps. “Wait there.” He disappears into his house. I wait on the path. There’s a clunk from inside, and the sound of something falling.
“Are you all right?” I ask, peering around the open door.
Sir John’s house is small, cluttered and dark. It’s bigger than ours, but there’s no solar. There’s only one candle burning beside the little hearth-fire, which is sputtering in the wind from the door. Several bags sit open on the earth floor, clothes and books and other interesting-looking objects spilling out of them. The boy-priest is tumbled on to the floor, under Sir John’s ale barrel, which is spilling ale out on to the floor and over his hose.
“Benedicte!” he says, then he sees me there in the doorway. “I mean—”
“It’s all right,” I tell him. “I don’t mind you swearing. Here—” And I go and help him heave the ale barrel up and off him. He’s a man nearly grown, but I’m stronger than he is.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I only arrived last night, and there’s so much to do. There are so many people who need visiting. And I don’t know where anything is. I’m still studying, really, but so many priests are dying. I mean—” He stops and looks confused.
“It’s fine,” I tell him. “I know there aren’t many priests left. And I wouldn’t bring the oil and candles if I were you; I’d save them for people who are actually dying.” He looks at me so gratefully that I stand up a little straighter. “I’m Isabel,” I tell him. “And don’t worry. I’ll look after you.”
“Thank you,” he says, very seriously, though I can see a smile puckering at his lips. “I’m Simon de Marcham. And I’d be very grateful if you’d show me where your friend’s mother lives.”
*
Robin’s little house sits closed like a treasure chest between the baker’s and the forge. Next door, Robert Smith is leading a horse around the forge-yard, trying to calm it down. The horse snorts and tosses its head, perhaps sensing the disquiet around it.
The young priest – Simon – fumbles with the catch of the gate. I lean over and open it for him.
“You can go home now,” he says. “Don’t stay.”
“All right,” I say, but I wait at the gate as he goes up to the house. The door opens a crack, but I’m too far away to see anything but darkness inside. Simon the priest goes into the house, and the door shuts behind him.
15. Kisses Against the Night
Four more people fell sick yesterday, and eight today. One of John Dyer’s oxen fell down dead on the green, and no one would go near it to bury it. One of Agnes’s chickens was stolen in the night by one of the exiles from York, or some other village in the south. The bell rang out twice for the dead this morning, and once this evening. I don’t even know who the last bell was for.
It’s worse at the abbey. Amabel Dyer says she heard ten monks died. Emma Baker says eighteen, and thirteen of the exiles. Agnes says, if God is punishing those monks, they must have done something terribly wicked.
“I heard they were sleeping with devils,” she whispers, at the well, and I clench my fists to stop myself from answering. Father says she’s talking nonsense.
“All those sick folk in the infirmary, no wonder they’re dying.”
I worry that Geoffrey is dead. I want to go up to the abbey and see, but Father won’t let me.
“Not while the sickness is there,” he says. “I’m serious, Isabel! There’s time enough to worry about Geoffrey when this is over.”
I don’t understand how he can bear not to know, but I know he means it.
We don’t hear anything more from Robin. I go and leave food and water on his doorstep every day. The second evening, Alice catches me with the bread under my arm.
“So it’s you who’s taking it! I didn’t think it was Ned. Where’s it going, then?”
“Robin’s house.” I brace myself for anger, for Alice to tell me how stupid I’m being. But she just st
ands there, biting her lip.
Then she says, “They’ll need ale as well—” And she goes and fills me up her favourite green flagon. “There,” she says, and, seeing my surprised look, “You’re a good girl, Isabel. But don’t tell your father now.”
I never see Margaret or Robin, but the food always goes from the doorsill, and after the second evening the green flagon is always left just behind the gate, so someone must be alive in there. After the first day, I don’t knock again, although I always want to. I look over the fence to see if I can catch sight of Robin – perhaps he’ll be bringing in firewood or cleaning out the pig or something – but I never see him. I don’t even know if he’s ill, though I guess not, as someone is fetching the food each day.
Three people buried today. Two yesterday. There are more bells from St Paul’s Church in Great Riding – they have the sickness there too, worse than we do, I think, from the ringing.
Simon gives his first service to a church that is already emptier than usual. I’m not sure who is dead, who has family sick, who’s left the village and who is simply frightened of coming. The service is received in near-silence, which is stranger than almost anything else. Simon trips and stumbles over the Latin, but as far as I can tell he doesn’t get anything wrong.
Afterwards, he tells us that bodies will no longer be allowed to lie in state in the church, and that instead of a funeral mass, the dead must be satisfied with a placebo read at the mouth of their grave. There’s some muttering at this – if no one prays for your soul, how will God know to send it up to heaven? – but no one argues. Everyone looks too tired and cowed to protest. Afterwards, only Gilbert and Emma Baker stay to talk to Simon. The rest of us hurry back home.
There’s another procession through the village. Alice goes, but she leaves Edward behind, and Father won’t let any of us go with her. We hear them chanting and ringing hand bells as they walk past our door, but we don’t look out.
And every day this sickness lasts the more trapped I feel. I want to kick a hole in the wall of the house, or fight somebody, or run and run and never come back.