To Calais, In Ordinary Time

by James Meek

  ‘And punished again for taking your father’s book,’ said Pogge.

  ‘He knows I read it.’

  Pogge knelt down close to her cousin. ‘The Lover is a man,’ she whispered. ‘It’s a book to guide men. If the Lover is a man, what are you?’

  ‘So you’ve read it,’ said Berna. ‘And you’ll know the response.’

  ‘I suppose you are Beauty and Simplicity and all the other arrows that have pierced him.’

  ‘It’s Love, not I, who shot those arrows.’

  ‘This was his sole desire,’ said Pogge. She took the rose and held it in her palm. ‘You refused it him, and he departed.’

  Berna’s face turned crimson and she stood. She picked up the book and the blanket with impatient gestures, seized the rose from Pogge’s hand and threw it away. She began to walk towards the village, and Pogge hurried after her.

  ON THE LEAVINGS of housewives’ stockpots the children laid owl pans and rotten crow, rib of vole and otter, a deal of brock rigbone, some small-fowl carrion and the shells of things that crawl in mould. All it ne gladdened us the pans of nightingales webbed with rat leg and snake rib in one mound of bone, Nack the hayward said a bonefire cleansed the air like no other, and held the saints their noses, their ears were open yet to beads, their gold eyes open to our candles’ light.

  RELATIONS BETWEEN THE abbot and the prior having degenerated so severely (the abbot now completely separated from administrative matters), the prior has assumed responsibility for the emergency. He is content to have me here as a distraction, until he remembers I have no capacity for music, and is dissatisfied. He suspects horror of the plague, rather than, as I insist, practical obstacles, postpones my exit.

  ‘I RECOGNISE YOU from the book,’ said Berna. ‘You’re she who imprisons Warm Welcome and the Rose together in a high tower that the Lover ne approach.’

  ‘Jealousy?’ said Pogge. ‘I’m not Jealousy. If I’m in the book it’s as you say, as Reason.’

  She looked over her shoulder at the pigboy Hab, who hadn’t moved away with the swine, but remained sufficiently close to the tree roots to hear what the cousins said. He caught her eye, laughed, winked, clapped his hands together, dropped his head back and let a squeal. The swine trotted to him.

  ‘Reason,’ said Berna, ‘is merely Jealousy in disguise.’

  Pogge pleaded that she not be angry and took her by the hand.

  They passed the foragers and Berna demanded of the children their purpose. The oldest girl, who carried a baby asleep on her back, said they gathered bones for the Thomas’s Day bonefire.

  ‘You made that stinking smoke once this year already, on John Baptist’s,’ said Berna. ‘There aren’t but small bones here.’

  The girl said they’d burned their best bones the first time, and Nack the hayward told them they must have a second fire, for Death bode for a fair wind from France, and must be met with bone smoke. They gathered what they could find. She took from her apron a bird’s skull of an apricot’s bigness. It was small, she said, but they’d been bidden not to come home till they’d got bones to the weight of her baby brother.

  The demoiselles continued on their way. ‘Concerning the stories of the clerks,’ said Pogge, ‘is there any doubt of the verity of what they say? In Bristol we’re sure. It’s inevitable. Everyone’s afraid.’

  ‘Here most people believe it’s a ruse to enrich priests,’ said Berna. ‘And deny such a malady could cross the sea to England. But it pleases Cotswold peasants to pretend obedience. And some do believe. Our hayward, for example, and he has power here. Hence the bonefire.’

  THE OLD PIGSTER Dor farrowed Hab, and none knew the sire. Dor spent her death pennies on Hab’s christening, so when God called her forth she hadn’t aught left for the fare, and Hab was left alone in the world, without no gear nor silver. He kept our swine and we kept him. As we to the high and proud, so Hab to us. He was knave to any churl. In winter he bode in Enker’s cot, in summer a wattle shelter in the woods, and was deemed true enough that twice he’d driven swine to a buyer in Melksham, and come again with the silver. He danced naked in the bourne, dark as any eel, and sang and rolled in the mud with the grice.

  QUERY: HAVE I been honest? Response: No. In perscribing this commentary I create a substitute for my faith in the continued existence of home.

  Today I went to the feretory. Six pilgrims had risen from the pavement to press their noses to the crystal aperture protecting the nail with which the Romans fixed Christ to the cross. I imagine they who buried him cared more for his corpse than for the ferrous fragments perforating it, or for the spiny crown with which his executioners derided him, a part of which is also supposed to be in the abbey’s possession. These are false relics, I suppose; yet I do not doubt that Christ was crucified. So do I not doubt that my villa outside Avignon is securely insulated from plague, even as I create these textual ephemera. The pilgrims would connect with Christ de facto did they remain at home in a state of piety and virtue, in patient expectation of his resurrection and their transmission into paradise. Yet they doubt paradise is their destination, they suspect damnation, and so prefer to frequent sanctuaries, to touch with their hands the luxurious fallacies of the cult of sacred objects.

  So it is with me. It is my creed that, as I perscribe this in Malmesbury, the chanting of the fraternity perpetually audible, Judith and Marc move around the villa in Avignon in the chanting of the cicadas, picking basil and lavender, lighting the lamps, setting out wine and a volume of Ovid for my return. This is the paradise I expect. But instead of proceeding there with maximum velocity I retard myself here, perscribing. In the mode of the pilgrims, my horror of damnation intervenes with false objects. My creed is the paradise of home, but the pestilence that has not yet infected England has afflicted Avignon, and my terror is to arrive there to an absolute post-mortal silence, pure nullity, except the accumulation of cadavers, the putrefaction of familiar faces. The terror is not of my own mortality, but the mortality of those I care for, that they might perish before me, and I would be in solitude, like Adam without Eve. Best is to be certain they have not perished. But to be uncertain is better than to be certain that they have.

  THE COUSINS AMBLED towards the church. ‘There’ll be free and villain, no gentry, just us,’ said Berna. ‘A place is kept for us, although my father attends mass elsewhere. It’s a mean church, with an indigent curate.’

  The church was so full it would have been difficult for the demoiselles to push through the entrance had the villagers not pressed themselves against the walls to let them pass. Some of the better-arrayed free women tried to meet their eyes; the rest acted as if they mightn’t see them, or oughtn’t, save that they stepped aside to open a way through to a bench close to the jube. There wasn’t enough incense lit to cover the scents of sweat and newly laundered cloth. All talked.

  In front of the jube stood a group of young men with bowstaves against their shoulders. Among them was Will Quate, who sensed the demoiselles’ regard and turned his face towards them. On perceiving them he lowered his eyes and turned away.

  ‘His is the second face out of a painture I have seen among your common people,’ said Pogge, ‘although the pigboy’s reminds me of Lust among the sins, whereas Will Quate looks simple and honest. There is some assurance there that all men aren’t inevitably beasts, even among that sort.’

  Berna regarded her cousin uncomprehendingly, and laughed. ‘You favour him? He’s no gentleman.’

  ‘My father says a family that ne breeds in a peasant every third generation grows away from its proper nature.’

  ‘Pogge, as you see, I converse with one as low as a pigboy, even cherish the boar he guards, but I wouldn’t marry it. Quate ploughs and weeds for a penny a day and lives with his mother. She’s villain-born, and the father free-born, so by his father’s blood he should be free. But his father went to be an archer and died at Sluys, so as far as my papa is concerned, the Quate boy is unfree again.’

  ‘And
does Quate think he is free?’

  ‘He would be free. My father prefers him to be unsure. He tells him he’s at liberty, then offers him villain land to farm.’

  ‘Is that a bow he carries?’

  ‘After Crécy, they all practise archery after mass.’

  ‘He follows his father.’

  ‘Papa is supposed to send an archer for the Calais garrison, but Quate is to marry the village beauty, Ness. She lost a child in March, probably his, so he’s not such an angel. Anyway, Quate mayn’t go to France, so that beefy person next to Quate, the miller’s son, he’s going.’

  Pogge whispered in Berna’s ear: ‘You should go. You desire to go to France so fiercely, and have already pierced the heart of a man with five arrows.’

  ‘Par amour, par amour,’ whispered Berna. ‘It was Love that shot those arrows; all I may do is make him apprehend the value of the pain.’

  HAB CAME OF the wood at noon and made Enker, by his craft, bide at the lichgate. He came in the churchyard and went to the outer door of the church, which stood open, the inner door wedged wide by us that thrang there. Hab listened a handwhile to the priest through the open doors. The qualm would come to Gloucestershire, the priest said, to pine lewd folk for their sins.

  Hab came away from the church door to where the Fishcombe women had left their gear ready to sell their wares after mass. He put the market boards on their trestles under a tree and sang

  To whom should I, the wolf said,

  Tell of my sins ere I am dead?

  Here ne is nothing alive

  That me could here now shrive.

  The women came out of church with baskets of cheese and orchard stuff. Hab said he’d set their boards under the tree so they’d be in shade and they gave him a garlicle, a thick long stalk with fat red cloves below. He took it to the bowman’s field and sat on his haunches to bide till the bowmen came.

  IT WAS THE first Sunday since the field was mown, the best time for bowmen, when the weather was good but they wouldn’t lose time looking for untrue arrows in the long grass. Four came from church to shoot, and chid each other as they went.

  Those days, with Calais won for England, high folk lacked Lord Berkeley that he ne met his due of fresh bowmen to man the walls of the town so the French ne take it again. As the high folk stirred Berkeley, so he stirred his under-lords, and so Sir Guy stirred us for a bowman to join Hayne Attenoke’s Gloucestershire score when it went by Outen Green, Calais-bound.

  Will Quate was our best with bow, but he was to wed Ness Muchbrook. Some gnof had got her with child, and she went to Santiago de Compostela with her mother, and came back a fortnight after, not great no more, with a likeness of St Margaret stamped on a littlewhat of tin. We ne knew how long it took to wend to Spain and back, but we believed it to be further. Maybe, the godsibs said, she ne fared to Spain. Maybe she went to see a woman in Bristol who knew how to make the unborn never-born.

  Some of us reckoned Will Quate the sire of the get, as we’d seen them hop together at other folk’s weddings, but most of us reckoned it was Laurence Haket, Sir Guy’s kinsman, who was his guest when the get was gotten.

  Anywise, Will and Ness were betrothed, and besides, the greater deal of us ne deemed Will a free man, so us thought Cockle, the miller’s son, was the man for Calais. He was free and full barst to go, to wear the iron cap and drink wine and know the French maids. When he told his father he was going, his father called him a dote and smote him on the ear. But now Cockle’d shifted his mood. He’d met a pedder of Bath who told him the qualm was right fell in France, and all the French were in hell anywise, without his help. So he wouldn’t go. And when he told his father, his father called him a canker and smote his other ear.

  Sim, the master-bowman, who lost an eye to one of Despenser’s churls when we weren’t mostly born, said Cockle was a wantwit.

  ‘I’m a free man,’ said Cockle. ‘I’ll live as it likes me.’

  ‘It needs find a bowman by Michaelmas, and I’m too old,’ said Sim.

  ‘I’d go,’ said Whichday Wat, ‘only my wife’s got great, and the youngest is sick, and the ox is lame.’

  They looked at Will.

  ‘He mayn’t go,’ said Cockle. ‘He’s not free. He’s bound to the manor.’

  They heard a stir in the middle of town, over by the green. The priest flew out of the church in his mass-gear and ran toward the hooting, followed by his altar boys. The bowmen went to see, out-take Will, who bode in the field and shet an arrow at the mark.

  THE MARK WAS a gin of straw and wattle meant to be in the likeness of a French knight, and the arrowhead blunt. But when the arrow struck the mark a keen cry of sore seemed to come of it, and a long, low moan. Will looked round and saw Hab on his haunches in the shade of the yew tree. Hab dropped his hand off his mouth and laughed. ‘Mind when I made Bob Woodyer think his cow could speak, and the cow told him she was the angel Gabriel, and God had hidden a golden crock in her arse?’ he said.

  ‘And Bob went about all week beshitten to the armpit,’ said Will.

  Hab held the garlicle out, the stalk thick and right and the cloves red and full.

  Will unstrung his bow, set it against the tree and sat by Hab. He took the garlicle, ran a thumbnail down the garlic sack and slote the rind. He bade Hab put out his hand and pushed the cloves into it. He told seven, white and clean. Hab did six in his bag and one in his mouth. He chewed and said: ‘I lack sweet meat to clean my breath.’

  ‘There’s none,’ said Will.

  ‘There is, would you give it me. A kiss.’

  Will laughed and shook his head.

  ‘I showed you where the white owl nested,’ said Hab. ‘You helped me when they’d tie me to a post and throw sticks at me like to a Shrovetide cock.’

  ‘We aren’t little knaves no more,’ said Will. ‘Find a maid to kiss. She’ll share your bed and cook for you.’

  ‘If we’re all to die ere Martinmas, as the priest says, those as have sins to sin must sin them soon.’

  ‘The priest will say aught to sell candles.’

  ‘Am I not dear to you?’

  ‘You aren’t so dear to me as you’d like, not nearly.’

  Hab narrowed his eyes. ‘I saw you kiss Whichday,’ he said.

  ‘I kissed him on the cheek when he’d been to Tewkesbury. I hadn’t seen him a week.’

  ‘So then you may.’

  ‘When I meet a friend I lack.’

  ‘My old friend!’ said Hab. ‘I haven’t seen you for so long. Kiss me!’ He dabbed at Will’s mouth with his. Will laughed, curled up like a hedgehog and trendled himself away.

  Hab thrust out his underlip. ‘I wouldn’t that you leave our town, and I left alone,’ he said. ‘I’d swim with you again, and dry in the sun with you, my head on your chest.’

  ‘That’s gone.’

  Hab mirthed again. ‘It needs do better than Ness,’ he said. ‘Her eyes aren’t in a right line, and her neb’s whirled like to the full moon. Would you not take me, take my sister.’

  ‘You haven’t no sister.’

  ‘I have a sister, and the sight of you gladdens her. Her name is Madlen, and she’d leave town with you and not come again, even to France.’

  ‘You haven’t no sister,’ said Will again. ‘You haven’t no kin. You bide alone with Enker in the wood.’

  ‘Madlen’s fair like May morning, and you’ll meet her, and she’ll prove your bowmanship.’

  Will said he wouldn’t talk to Hab no more. He left him in the churchyard and went to the green.

  THE STIR WAS made by two friars of Gloucester. One drove a cart and the other banged a drum. The priest came to fight them, for none but he had the right to shrive the folk of Outen Green, and he’d rather die than see Christ’s love sold cheap, or for a halfpenny less than he sold it, anywise.

  But the friars, unwashed and deep yet bright of eye, came to sell other than forgiveness. Their cart was heaped with wood and tin likenesses of our Clean Mother. They showed
us how to fill a likeness with holy water that the water seep from holes in her eyes, and she weep two days on our threshold till spent, and how, were a candle put in the hole in her womb, the tears would shine as jewels to shield us of night-death, and how it was our last hope to get a likeness, for the friars wouldn’t come again. They’d sworn to bide in a hermitry in the Malverns, eating not but dry bread while they prayed to God to forgive mankind. The fee was a bare sixpence, eleven pence for two, and any that took three likenesses, the friars said, might pay but a penny for the third.

  Most folk, out-take Nack, reckoned the qualm was a tale the priests wrought up to wring out our silver. We ne thought us Christ so stern as to slay us by sickness when he took so many in the great hunger thirty winter before. But we wouldn’t that the priest weened we unworthed him, so we bought likenesses.

  The friars said they had an errand from Hayne Attenoke in Gloucester. Hayne bade them tell town and manor his score of bowmen would fare by Outen Green early on Tuesday, the day after next, and they looked to meet their new man on the Miserden road that same afternoon.

  THE MANOR SENT Anto the reeve to Will. Anto found him in the high half of the top meadow, shooting mark arrows at rags dropped by little knaves. When Will hit a rag at one hundred yard the knaves walloped out over the stubble, yall as them thought French knights would shout with an arrow in their gullet, and threw themselves on the ground, merrily slain.

  Anto said their lord must send a bowman to Calais, and none might go but Will.

  ‘I’d go gladly,’ said Will, ‘but I mayn’t. I’m needed at harvest, I’m to wed Ness Muchbrook, and Sir Guy ne deems me a free man.’

  ‘They’ll crop the fields without you,’ said Anto. ‘You’ll wed Ness next summer, when you come again from France, laden with silver.’