“I don’t see what difference staying at home makes,” I say to Alice, when she comes home from the procession. “If the miasma is here, it’s here, isn’t it? It’s in this house – in the air – everywhere. The only way to escape is to run away, and we aren’t even going to do that!”
“It clings to the sick,” says Alice. “Or those who are about to fall ill.” She’s working at her loom, weaving a new bolt of cloth.
“Why are you even bothering with weaving anyway?” I say. “If we’re all going to die!”
“We all have to die some day,” says Alice calmly. “And those who survive the summer will need warm clothes for the winter.”
“The Day of Judgement is coming!” I shout at her. “And you’re sitting there weaving!”
“If the Day of Judgement really is coming,” Father says, “I’d rather wait for it in the warm. Go and fetch me some firewood and stop making a nuisance of yourself in here.”
He doesn’t sound really angry, but there’s an edge to his voice that I don’t want to cut myself on. I pick up the basket and stamp outside. They are idiots. Carrying on as usual, when anyone can see that everything is as far from normal as it’s possible to be.
It’s nice to be outside. We’ve been staying indoors as much as possible since the first case came to the village, and coming outside I feel like my soul is breathing out at last, after all day in our dark and smoky and stuffy little house. Outside, the air is cold and fresh, and there’s this achingly pale sky high above my head. I swing the basket from my arm and take my bad mood down the muddy track towards the woods, where at least it can’t crash into anyone else.
The woods cluster around the back of the church. Tolly Hogg brings the pigs here to root for truffles, and Ned and I pick mushrooms and rosehips and wild garlic here in the summer. It’s dark and safe and rich with the scent of pine needles and old wood.
There are people here already. A little cluster of boys and girls about my own age perched on a fallen tree trunk. Amabel Dyer and Will Thatcher and Roger Duresme and Alison Spinner and a few others. They’ve got a flagon of ale and they’re passing it between themselves. Amabel waves when she sees me.
“Isabel! Over here!”
I come willingly enough. “What are you doing?”
“We’re drinking to the spirit of cheerfulness.” Roger holds up the ale flagon. “Squashed by dull old priests and miserable crones. I don’t know what they’re worried about – they’ll all die soon enough anyway. Drink?”
“Thank you.” I take the flagon from him. His ale is stronger than Alice’s, but not so sweet.
“Is everyone in your house weeping and wailing?” says Amabel. “Mine is terrible. ‘The world is ending! We’re all going to die!’ If we’re all going to die, then why do I have to do the spinning? We might as well have a good time while we can and not worry about it.”
“Mine aren’t moaning,” I pass the flagon up to Will. “They’re just . . . worrying. And then trying to pretend that nothing is wrong.”
“Fools,” says Will. He smiles at me, shyly, and I smile back. He’s got a dimple in his right cheek when he smiles. I’ve never noticed it before.
“Don’t you sometimes want to just run away?” says Amabel. “My sister is a maid to a lady in York. She lives in a big house and eats meat three times a week. That’s what I’m going to do, after all this is over.”
“All right if you’re free,” I say bitterly, but Amabel shrugs.
“When the pestilence is gone, everything will be different. You’ll see.”
We pass the ale around as the sky grows darker. Nobody wants to go home. After a while, Alison Spinner produces a whistle and tries to play some of the songs the jongleurs played at Easter. She muffs the high notes, and the boys cuff her good-naturedly across the head while she shrieks and hides her face in her skirts. Roger and Will dance drunkenly, then Will headbutts Roger and Roger charges back at him, mock-angry, and suddenly they’re wrestling, rolling about on the grass, with Amabel and Alison and me cheering them on. It’s like the wrestling matches they have in the churchyard, only neither Roger nor Will really want to hurt the other. They scuffle half-heartedly, until Will manages to climb on top of Roger and pin his arms down. The girls on the tree trunk all cheer.
“A drink for Will!” says Amabel, passing him the flagon. “If you can’t have a drink when the world is ending, when can you?”
“Can we have whatever we want now then?” says Will, laughing a little.
“Why?” I kick moss down at him from my place on the tree trunk. “What do you want?”
Will stands with his feet apart, looking up at me. He’s more handsome than Robin, and nearly as familiar – I’ve known him for as long as I can remember, though for most of my childhood he was busy with the older boys, and for some of it he was away in France. His eyes are lighter than Robin’s, but Robin’s crooked smile is wider. Usually he’s so shy – he must be a little drunk to speak to me so boldly.
“I want a kiss,” he says.
The girls whoop and cheer. I force myself not to look away. Will is still standing there watching me with that serious look on his face. He means it. I remember my wish-boat, and I feel myself blushing. I didn’t believe a paper boat had the power to grant your wishes, but maybe I should have wished for the lives of the people I love, if my wish-boat could do this.
Perhaps this is God’s punishment for my selfishness. To give me everything I asked for, and to take Robin away.
“Don’t kiss him if you don’t want to!” says Alison. “Why should she kiss you?”
“Because the world is ending,” says Will.
He’s right. And even if the world doesn’t end, I might be dead tomorrow and so might he. And his eyes are very light, and his hair is wavy and thick, and I’ve always liked him, just a little bit. And if God is going to take everything from me, the least He can do is let me kiss a young man on the mouth before I die.
“All right,” I say.
I slide off the tree trunk and come and stand before him. The others applaud.
“Go on, Will!”
“Get on with it!”
“Alison’s turn next!”
Will smiles at me a little awkwardly. I like his eyes. I like the freckles underneath his mouth. I like the scar that he got in France, who knows how. I lean forward and kiss him, dry lips against dry lips, tongue against tongue.
“Woo!”
“Isabel likes Wi-i-ill.”
I surface, bright red, pleased and embarrassed, proud and ashamed. Will looks equally red-faced and confused.
“Now then,” he says, taking the ale from Roger. I climb back onto the tree, trying not to smile.
It’s late when I get back, and the hearth-fire is nearly out. Father is about to be angry, but Alice purses her lips at him to stop.
“What have you been doing all this time?” he says.
“Living,” I say. “Which is more than you have.”
I glare at them, but Alice holds out her hand to me and my anger smacks into the wall of her kindness. I stop, confused. Her lap is full of wool, her spindle between her legs.
“Isabel—” she says, and there’s something in her voice which stays my angry words in my throat.
“What?”
“Robin came while you were gone. His mother died this afternoon.”
16. A Bad Death
I know what a good death looks like. I know from when Mother died. A good death is the priest in his vestments coming to the house, and the village behind him with candles and bells and prayers. A good death is the Seven Interrogations, holy water sprinkled into the corners of the chamber, the anointing with oil, the communion wafer and the wine to keep away the demons who hover around the heads of the dying, waiting to drag them into hell.
Margaret didn’t have the last rites. Robin and my father went for Simon the priest, but nobody answered when they knocked at his door. Father went to St Mary’s, but by then it was too late. I don’t
know if Robin heard her confession, like the priest said he could. I didn’t dare ask. I asked Father and he said, “She wasn’t really in any state to take confession,” which could mean anything.
Mother’s body was pulled through the village on the funeral cart, with mourners walking behind her carrying candles and crosses and singing prayers, while the church bells rang out all around us. She lay in the church for a full day and night with candles at her hands and feet. In the evening, Sir John gave the service of the Office of the Dead, and in the morning a requiem mass was said for her soul. Most of the village came to her mass, and afterwards there was a tea with ale and salt pork and roast chicken, and we gave pennies to the beggars who followed the cart and her name was remembered in the prayers at church for months afterwards. I used to watch out for it at mass. I can still remember the day when they stopped praying for her soul, and how much I minded.
This isn’t the funeral cart. This is Robin’s mother’s cart, with our ox Stumpy. Margaret is wrapped in a sheet and lying on the hay. We’ve got candles, but no crosses – only our little pewter St Bede, which Robin is carrying. And there are so few of us in the funeral procession. There isn’t even a priest – he has another burial to watch. There’s just Robin and Father and Alice and me, one of the church chaplains, Robin’s blind grandmother and a few beggars who I think are foreigners because I don’t recognize their faces, but who demand two pence each for following the coffin. I expect Alice to be angry, but she pays without a word.
The bells in the church are ringing, but I can’t be sure if they’re for Margaret or for someone else. They were ringing last night as well. When Mother died, the bells were solemn and sacred and full of holy sadness, but now Alice twitches her head and says, “Lord, those bells! Will they never stop?”
We follow behind the cart. Robin’s face is pale and stiff, and somehow softer-looking. When Father is unhappy, all his muscles tense and he stiffens – it’s almost frightening – but when Robin is sad, his whole face relaxes and all his features seem to sink into each other. All of the animation, the energy, goes out of them. He cries sometimes too, though he’s not crying now. He’s gripping the pewter St Bede and looking down at the ground.
I wonder what’s going to happen to him. No one’s said. I remember how Alice wouldn’t take that baby for fear it would bring the pestilence into our house. Robin’s as sopped in pestilential miasma as that baby ever was. I think about Maggie and Ned and baby Edward, who Alice wouldn’t let come to the church today. Part of me wishes she hadn’t let me come either. That thing in the cart is thick with the smell of death. I press my posset of herbs to my nose. They seem such a small thing between me and the sickness.
But I don’t know how Robin will live if we don’t help him. He can’t weave like his mother could. He can brew ale, but I wouldn’t pay to drink it. He gets some money from his land, but John Phillip’s son who rents most of it is sick himself, and what will happen when he dies?
There’s a small, scared part of me that almost hopes Alice won’t let him come to us. I try and push it down so God won’t hear it and send the pestilence to punish me, but it won’t go away. There’s only one bed in our house, and our straw mattress in the solar. Would we have to share a bed with him if he caught the sickness?
The dead ox on the green is still there, stinking and mauled by the pigs. It’s disgusting. There’s a dead sheep there too, now. Right in the middle of the village!
When Mother died, people came out of their cottages to join the procession as we passed them. Today, no one comes. Smoke blows out of the thatches of a few of the houses as we pass by them, but no one comes out. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t go to their funeral either.
When we reach the churchyard, Adam Goodenough the sexton and another man I don’t recognize are climbing out of a grave pit. There’s a small gathering around the grave – Simon the priest with Lucy Hogg and her son Nicholas, who’s a year or two younger than Mag. There’s a husband as well, and an older son, Jankin, who’s Ned’s age.
The gravediggers come over to us.
“One more, is it?” says the one I don’t recognize. “It can go in with this one then, if you’ll wait a moment. That’ll save you some time?”
Robin stirs beside me, but he won’t speak, I know. I can feel his unhappiness, but I don’t know if there’s anything we can do about it. The churchyard is lumpy with fresh graves, like a field after a family of moles have been through it, digging up all the smooth grass into messy hills of earth.
“Whose grave is it?” Alice says. She’s friendly with Lucy. Alice is friendly with everyone.
“It’s Jankin,” Adam says. He lowers his voice. “And I wouldn’t get too close to Lucy either – I hear the husband’s sick too.”
Alice sighs, but I realize with a dull shock how little I mind. One more death. I’m just grateful it’s not someone I know better.
I touch Robin’s arm. He’s shaking.
“She doesn’t even get her own grave! They’re just going to throw her in on top of him!”
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.” I can’t see what we can do about it, short of digging our own hole.
Robin turns away.
“One day,” he says, and his voice quavers. I don’t ask him one day what.
As the family moves away and Adam Goodenough starts filling in the grave, Simon comes over to us. He’s wearing Sir John’s robes, which are too big for him and keep slopping off his shoulders. His cheeks are still pocked with spots, like a boy, and there’s a smudge of something – ash maybe – down one cheek.
“God keep you, Isabel,” he says to me, and he smiles at Robin.
“And God keep you, Robin.”
Robin jerks his head.
“This is a sorry sort of parish for a boy like you,” Father says to Simon, and Simon blinks and nods and looks at the earth.
“I – well, I’m still learning, sir, but I’ll do the best I can,” he says. “Really I will.”
“I would expect nothing less,” says Father gravely.
Simon says the placebo clearer than he reads the mass. Perhaps he’s had more practice over the last few days. Father and Adam Goodenough lower Margaret into the grave, all wrapped up in her winding sheets. Simon drops a speck of holy water on her head and feet and blesses her.
“God rest their souls,” he says, and turns away Adam shovels quicklime over the open grave.
Afterwards, we stand outside the church, rubbing our arms and looking at the grass and the sky. It’s a mild day, a light breeze blowing the flower scent from Sir John’s garden over the churchyard wall. If the end of the world really is coming, no one seems to have told the wind or the sky.
Robin shifts his feet.
“I’ll be getting home then,” he says.
“No, you won’t,” says Alice. “You’re coming back with us.”
And that’s that.
17. Loving-Kindness
Father takes Robin back to his house to pick up his things, and to bring back the chickens, and Margaret’s cow. There are all sorts of useful things in Margaret’s house – bags of grain, pots and pans, a fine woven blanket that came from France. But Alice won’t let Robin bring anything except what’s absolutely necessary, for fear that the miasma might cling to it.
When Father brings him back home, Robin has his arms clenched tight around a bundle of things wrapped in a blanket. All of his things. He looks very small, though he’s taller than me. He doesn’t greet us, and he ignores Maggie, who’s watching him round-eyed with her head tipped sideways against her shoulder. He just stands by Father with his eyes big and dark in his white face. I want to go and say something to him, but I’m frightened and weirdly shy. Alice would know what to do – she’s better at loving than anyone I know. But I’m not Alice. I’m just clumsy Isabel and I don’t know anything.
Alice’s sister Agnes is here with her spindle. She’s sitting by the hearth with Alice, who is stirring the pottage with one hand and ro
cking Edward’s cradle with the other. Agnes’s eyes widen when she sees Robin, though she must have known Father was bringing him here.
“You’re letting him keep that child in your house, sister, are you?” she says, her voice all high-pitched and disapproving.
“Of course I am,” says Alice, and her voice tightens. “Robin is welcome here as long as he needs to stay.”
“Well!” says Agnes. “I think you’re making a mistake, sister, I do. Bringing a brat with the pestilence on him into your house! Why, he might kill you all, if you’re not careful.”
Margaret stirs uneasily by the fire. Her blue eyes move from Alice to Robin to me. I shrug. Ned says, “Robin’s coming to live with us, isn’t he, Father?”
“Of course he is,” Father says, just like Alice. He puts his hand on Robin’s shoulder. Robin wriggles and grips his bundle tighter. “Robin was my wife’s godson and his mother was our oldest friend. I’ll not throw Margaret’s son out of doors when I have a home of my own. And if you want to share our hearth, sister, I’ll ask you to remember that.”
Agnes draws herself up.
“Well!” she says. “I won’t stay here to be spoken to like this. I hope the good Lord doesn’t bring His displeasure down on you and on these poor children. But I won’t be coming here until I’m sure He’s spared you.”
My father’s face is set stiff.
But, “You’ll be welcome, sister, when you do come back,” is all he says.
Agnes is gathering up her things, pulling her hood over her head. She kisses Mag’s head and says, “I hope you survive this, little cousin.” Mag just blinks at her. You can tell she doesn’t really understand what’s going on. Agnes draws herself up to go. But she’s got a problem. To get out of the door, she has to get past my father and Robin. She glares at Father, who stares back without speaking. In the end, she draws herself up, stuffs her hood over her nose and marches past them, stretching as far away from Robin as she can get. We all wait tense in the candlelight until the door bangs shut behind her.