To Calais, In Ordinary Time

by James Meek

  ALAN TURNED TO Matilda. She laid her hand on Robert’s forehead. ‘The fever’s not so high,’ she said, and asked the knave how he fared.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Robert.

  Laurence gave him a shive of mutton and he ate it quickly.

  ‘He’s not as bad as yesterday,’ said Master Alan. ‘Two nights ago he burned like to he was on fire. He wouldn’t eat, but drank as if there wasn’t no bottom to him. He had two botches between his legs more than his bollocks, and now they’re less.’

  ‘You’ve ground for hope,’ said Matilda. ‘In our town some that overlived the first high fever are already on their feet.’

  ‘What do those that overlive have in mean?’ asked Master Alan.

  ‘Not goodness,’ said Matilda. ‘There’s a fellow, Stucken, who bears the bodies and buries them, who was known as a wicked churl. He was one of the first to sicken, and now he’s heal again. We mayn’t know what drives the Almighty to choose. All should go to mass and bid their beads, light candles, keep dry and cool, drink right worts, spread holy water on their threshold, keep out of the south wind, but at the last, it comes to God’s send.’

  ‘And the worth of your friends,’ said one of the townfolk who’d come with Matilda.

  ‘That’s right, and kin,’ said another.

  ‘Where’s the need to speak of that to guests?’ said Matilda. ‘What use is it now?’ She turned to Thomas, then to Alan. ‘Some folk think them fewer would have died had their nearest been more kindly.’

  ‘Abby Fisher died of thirst after her husband ran away and left her,’ said one of the town women. ‘I know he’s a beater and a swiker and an idler, for they’re my neighbours, but if he’d said he meant to go I’d have fetched her ale, were she ever so sick. Poor thing, she lay there behind a shut door and none knew.’

  ‘There are folk in two rooms with the sick in one and the heal in the other too feared to go in and help their own and too ashamed to tell a neighbour,’ said another.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Matilda. ‘Get out, the lot of you, you’ve work for three times as many. Remember your lord’s nephew in your beads.’

  The townfolk left, and when the thud of their boots was gone, a sound was left like to a man who fought for breath. It was Master Alan, who’d sunk to the floor and sat there with his legs spread out, his back against the table, his body shaken by sobs. A whine rose of the deep of his chest and he began to howl of sorrow.

  Laurence Haket kneeled beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Master Alan, your son will surely recover of this.’

  Master Alan ne let of weeping. Young Robert rolled over on his side and looked down of the edge of the board at his father and told him he felt better. The boy let his hand down and Alan groped for it, held it tight and sobbed the more.

  Matilda leaned towards Berna and whispered that the boy’s mother, Master Alan’s wife, had died that morning.

  LATER, BERNA AND Laurence were solitary in the hall again. Thomas had returned to the chamber he would share with Laurence. Matilda had departed. The rain had intensified, the fire was extinguished, the basin of spice infusion and the mutton cold. Berna kneeled, hands clasped, and said a prayer Thomas had given her. She signed the cross over her chest, prostrated herself and repeated the process while Laurence paced up and down.

  ‘Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae,’ said Berna again. She went down on the flagstones.

  ‘I hate this place,’ said Laurence. ‘It reminds me of Berkeley in autumn, sitting in solitude in the grand hall, attending a place at some event I was unsure I’d been invited to.’

  ‘I ne comprehend what you mean by solitude. I’m here.’

  ‘You won’t even permit me to kiss you,’ said Laurence. He came to where Berna kneeled on the floor and seized her hands. She stood but ne attempted to release herself.

  ‘I’m defenceless,’ said Berna. ‘I can’t prevent you were you to treat me as the archers treated Cess.’

  Laurence threw down her hands, took several paces away and struck the basin with his fist. The force of the blow pulverised the vessel against the wall.

  ‘It appears there’s no injury to my honour you consider too severe,’ he said.

  ‘I ne apprehend it no cruelty on my part to demand restraint on your possession corporeal of my person. With a little patience we may be married properly and have it entered in the rolls.’

  Madlen came into the hall and silently commenced collection of the pieces of basin. Laurence observed her labour meditatively. He turned to Berna and said: ‘You’re unreasonable. You’re aggrieved I ne ravished you previously, yet now I’ve made it impossible for you to return to your family by the very act of ravishment, you are aggrieved by that too. Yes, I see it ne pleases you to hear that I have comprehended you, for if there’s one thing more injurious than not to be comprehended by your amour, it’s to be comprehended too well.’

  ‘I never insisted too fiercely on my reasonableness,’ said Berna.

  ‘I only demand that you consider my position. You have a family whose fate inquiets you. I have none except my brother, who possesses my family property and won’t part with a penny; and he has sons. I have no place to return to save the humid chamber in my lord Berkeley’s house I share with three other younger sons, as poor as I. All that’s promised me I gained in war. All my fortune, all my family, is in the future.’

  ‘I’m here now,’ said Berna.

  ‘Not in no sense complete,’ said Laurence. ‘Regard.’ He searched inside his shirt, took out a wallet and displayed for Berna the grant of fief of the manor near Calais and the tally stick for the boat. ‘These are real,’ he said. ‘Our property, our inheritance.’

  ‘We mayn’t be sure we’ll see this property,’ said Berna.

  ‘To the very point,’ said Laurence, approaching close to her without touching. ‘Master Alan is deprived of his spouse, and he can’t be sure he’ll survive either, but their son has endured the pestilence and emerges. Remember the Romance. Nature demands with urgency that we engender a family.’

  ‘It is marvellous that you and I should have been present at the same scene and remember it so differently,’ said Berna. ‘What appeared most noticeable to me wasn’t the survival of the boy, though that is very touching, but the abandonment of the woman who perished of thirst. I would that were you and I in solitude, without no servants and affected by this pestilence, we demonstrate our love by carrying water to each other rather than succumbing to a second fever to populate a vacant universe.’

  A bell sounded of the church tower and ne let of ringing.

  ‘It’s the appeal to attend our marriage,’ said Laurence. They roused Thomas, who said he would go at his own pace. Madlen pleaded that she might be present, but Laurence gave her money and ordered her to search the village for wine and pastries, and to ensure Berna’s chamber was in a proper condition.

  The rain had ceased, and the marriage couple departed on their horses. Berna’s gown appeared to radiate whiteness in comparison to the ordure of the street. Accompanying the sound of the bell and of the horses’ hooves was the drip of water of the town roofs and of the cloths hung impregnated of the windows.

  WHEN THE BOWMEN came first to Heytesbury, late on Sunday morning, it seemed to them the town was gripped by madness, as if it weren’t the qualm that astoned the townsfolk with its grim speed, but that folk had lost their wits early and made the sickness worse than it owed to be by their giddiness. As evening nighed, the bowmen’s mood shifted. When they saw for themselves how cruel the pest was, it ne seemed no more the townsfolk were mad; it seemed they weren’t mad enough. The bowmen ne understood how the living of Heytesbury kept themselves in wield when so many of their near and dear had laid their eyes together in so short a time. They felt it was they, the bowmen, who must lose their minds, while the townsfolk seemed wonder even. It was like to you spoke to your child, and turned away, and turned again a stound later, and th
e child was gone.

  The priest had barely aneled Hornstrake, and fed Christ’s body in his mouth crumb by crumb – with Will holding the priest’s wrists that he ne shake and spill a speck of the flesh of the Lord of Life – when he, too, fell. He ne woke no more, and within an hour both Hornstrake and the priest stinted to breathe.

  Otherwhiles, Longfreke had sickened, with a high fever, dulled eyes and dry mouth. He shat blood. They laid him on a bed in the house they’d taken near the church and the bowmen took shifts to bring him water and ale. He wouldn’t eat, though there was much to eat. They laid baked chicken and lamb’s liver under his nose and he turned away.

  Stucken rang the church bell for the deaths. It was long before any of the townfolk came. The first to come were Laurence Haket and the lady Bernadine, clothed for their wedding, and it was grim to see their nebs fall when they heard the priest was dead, and Hornstrake, and Longfreke sick.

  ‘How could he weaken so fast?’ said Laurence Haket.

  ‘It goes other with other folk,’ said the deacon. ‘Some speedy, some slow.’

  Longfreke lay in a room in the house he’d hired of a widow who’d lost her husband and eldest daughter. The widow had gone to bide with her kin on the other side of town. She brought the bowmen food and ale and water and linen, but wouldn’t go near Longfreke, and it fell to Will to clean him and handle his piss-pot. The bowmen bought candles in church, lit them and set them around Hayne’s rood on a shelf in the nook where the widow had kept her hallow-likenesses. There wasn’t no lavender nor roses to sweeten the air so they seethed a handful of gillyflowers and seeds of heaven in water and dight it in a can on the floor near Longfreke’s head. Holiday would have him drink a treacle, but Longfreke said it hadn’t done Hornstrake no good, and bade the bowmen work a burial and dig a grave for their friend, for no man of Hayne Attenoke’s score wasn’t going to be laid in no pit.

  ‘Dig another for me,’ he said. ‘I’m about to hit the mark.’

  His steven came to them as if from behind a thick wall. He bade them all go, out-take Will, and to send him a priest if they found one, and lacking a priest, to send Thomas.

  ‘My eyes are like to red-hot needles were pitched in them,’ said Longfreke when he and Will were alone.

  ‘You’ll be heal again,’ said Will.

  ‘This arrow sees its mark, son. The Almighty ne lifted his bow too high when he shot me, nor struck the string too hard.’

  ‘I’m sorry I played Venus to the high-borns.’

  ‘Hush, son. I was weak to let you cleave to the score. I owed to have seen you bide at home with your burd and your plough.’

  ‘I’m glad you took me.’

  ‘For God’s sake, shut your mouth. Hayne said: “Let him come if he hears what Noster tells him. Let it be of his own free will, if he knows who we are, and what we’ve done, and where we’re going.” I would I hadn’t listened. You hadn’t wit enough to understand the stake. I ne knew myself what Hayne meant for us. Maybe all of us are to be deemed guilty, that we ne fought harder to set Cess free. And now Hayne has left us, and I’m near to gone, and Softly’s heal. He wins.’

  ‘When I met you on the road near my home, I thought me the qualm was a tale,’ said Will. ‘I ne thought me the world would end in summer, under the sun in a clear sky, with the leaves new and the birds in song and loving-Andrew in the hedgerow.’

  ‘Who calls it a tale?’

  ‘Sweetmouth, for one.’

  ‘Sweetmouth likes to speak of fair maids.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Tell me, which maid’s fairer, Hope or Truth?’

  Will lowered his eyes.

  ‘Ne pine yourself, son,’ said Longfreke. ‘You fare to fight, and now to follow your sweetheart too.’

  ‘Madlen is my friend.’

  ‘You understand that when I’m gone, Softly will be master of such of the score as is left?’

  ‘I would it were another,’ said Will.

  ‘Softly’s the oldest, and has the right, and he’s nimble, be the Devil ever so deep in him,’ said Longfreke. ‘You have the captain to lean on. Maybe he will hold Softly back. But it ne likes the captain to look too nearly at what goes on between bowmen. He ne cares much for our sins before God as long as we do as he and his masters bid. All I ask is that do you reach France you help Cess go to her own folk again.’

  ‘I swear on my life,’ said Will.

  Longfreke’s neb furrowed on either side of its great wem. He hid his eyes with his hand. ‘Only this morning I nad no need of shameful help,’ he said, and turned on his side. Will helped him squirt shit into the pot, cleaned him with straw, pulled up his breech again and took the filth away to the dung-heap.

  HEYTESBURY SHOULD HAVE been rich in priests. As the deacon informed Laurence, the grand church of Peter and Paul was a church collegiate, and the rector the dean of Salisbury Cathedral. But the rector hadn’t never visited Heytesbury, nor Salisbury. He was an Italian who had his principal habitation somewhere between Rome and Avignon, and the dimes of Heytesbury’s peasants and drapers journeyed to him as silver via the deanery. Usually spiritual care was furnished by one of two vicars and two chaplains, but since the arrivage of the pest, there was a grave mortality among the clerics, and each parish pleaded with its neighbours for aid ecclesiastical. And ne simply pleaded; money was offered. One of their vicars had gone to Warminster to assist, and hadn’t returned. One chaplain had journeyed to Swallowcliffe, a village in Heytesbury’s care, and hadn’t returned. The other chaplain had travelled to Salisbury in search of a replacement, and hadn’t returned. It was possible the chaplains had succumbed to the malady, but equally possible they’d succumbed to the temptation to take up residence elsewhere for double the pay and the promise of a benefice. So in Heytesbury a single priest remained, Father Simon, and now he was departed to the life eternal, they ne comprehended how they might continue.

  Laurence stood with the deacon by a column in the centre of the nave. ‘Aren’t you fit to shrive and absolve?’ he demanded.

  The deacon crossed himself and shook his head. ‘I mightn’t shrive Father Simon himself just now,’ he said. ‘He died unshriven.’

  ‘What, you refused to hear confession of your master in his final hour?’

  The deacon looked miserable. He appeared on the verge of tears.

  ‘I haven’t the power,’ he murmured. ‘Father Simon did such good these days, and wasn’t never without Christ’s body near to hand, and said so many masses, and drank so much of the Almighty’s blood, I hope he may go swiftly to God’s house without shrift nor aneling. I ne ceased to pray for him.’

  ‘Well, you mayn’t receive confession, but you may marry me to my lady Bernadine.’

  ‘Marry you?’ said the deacon, his face changing.

  ‘Yes. It’s a lesser sacrament, I believe.’

  ‘How can you think of a wedding at a time like this? Have you lost your wits?’

  ‘On the contrary, I feel it is I alone whose mind is unspoiled by the madness of these events. Who will rule and defend the common people in future if we nobles ne procreate? Producing the next generation is a matter hardly less urgent than attending to the spirits of the departing.’

  The deacon respired. ‘Your tongue’s got the sleight of French, sir, which I ne understand well, but they learned me some Latin. Produco, producis, producit; generatio, generationis. I think me you’re about this.’ He circled the thumb and forefinger of one hand and moved the forefinger rapidly in and out.

  ‘You impudent harlot,’ said Laurence.

  The deacon shrugged and pointed to where the churchwardens and other common people of the village were preparing space close to the altar for the priest to be placed for a vigil. ‘I mayn’t wed you to your burd,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been given such powers. I’ve too much else to do while so many are sick and dying. I go to work. Do as you will without my help. Go forth and produce the next generation.’

  ALL THE HEAL bowmen, Softly, Holiday,
Sweetmouth, Mad and Will, crowded into Longfreke’s room, together with Thomas, who wasn’t his even self. None had seen him write a word all day, his skin was ashen, his lips pale, and it seemed to like him to keep his eyes shut when he could. He wouldn’t stand in for a priest again, he told them, in a thin dry steven like to when a ploughman frots an ear of corn between his hands to know its ripeness. But the bowmen told him he must, for such was his bond to them, and he was the nearest to a priest they had, and if he’d have a penny of each of them for his work, that wasn’t no woe.

  So Thomas sat on a milking stool by Longfreke’s bed and held the bowman’s thick wrist in his bony hand. Laurence Haket came and said his farewell, and said Longfreke was a good bold soldier, and behest to buy a pound’s weight of candles for him, and to have his chaplain-to-be say beads for him when he was in his manor in Calais. And he left to be with his lady.

  ‘You all owe to go,’ said Longfreke. His steven was so small it mightn’t be heard out-take that all were still. ‘The air in here is rotten.’

  ‘We aren’t women like the men of Wiltshire,’ said Softly. ‘We’re western men and soldiers. We ne fright so lightly.’

  ‘I say yet it’s not no qualm nor pest nor plague nor whatever outcome shit likes you,’ said Holiday. ‘I know towns near Bristol where the ague slew half the folk. It happens somewhere every year.’

  ‘Thomas,’ whispered Longfreke, ‘I’m near to done.’

  Thomas nodded to the rood in the hallow nook. Mad took it down and handed it to Will, who held it up at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Open your eyes,’ said Thomas, ‘and look on your redeemer.’

  Longfreke opened his eyes and looked on the body of Christ. There was a stir at the door and Cess shoff her way through. Softly looked at her astoned. His mouth gaped before he got himself in wield and said in his soft steven: ‘Go to the cart again. I ne gave you leave to come here.’