The Outcasts of Time

by Ian Mortimer

  My attention is only snatched away from this thought by the sight of William moving a bench. He stands on it and unhooks a hefty flitch of bacon hanging from a beam. He steps back down and puts it into his travelling sack.

  ‘In God’s name, William, have you no respect?’

  ‘Someone else’ll have it if I don’t,’ he says. ‘Good food is for the living, not thieves or worms.’ He fastens his travelling sack again and places it beside the door. ‘Besides, if you think me disrespectful, what about the pestilence? What respect did God show Elizabeth and her children? Is not God more disrespectful?’

  ‘That’s blasphemy.’

  ‘Cease your pious moaning, John. I’m sick of it. Help me lift her down.’

  From the way he looks at her, I realise that he did not care for her because she was a whore. He cared for her despite that fact.

  I go over and place my arms around her corpse and lift it while William unhitches the noose. It is a sad weight. Her limbs are stiff and her skin unyielding, like cold wax. As William steps down from the bench I lower her to the floor; then we carry her through to the inner chamber, her hair cascading over my arms. We place her on the floor beside her children, and stand side by side at the foot of the mattress, saying our quiet prayers.

  After a while he says, ‘It’ll be dark in less than three hours. There’s another six miles to Exeter.’

  I stare at the corpses, my mind numbed by death.

  ‘John, I’d bury all three of them, if I could. But . . .’

  I know. In Christ’s name, I know.

  I leave the house and stand outside, breathing the air. He comes out after me. I look up at the sky, and speak my mind. ‘We want to do the right thing. But. But. BUT. That short, unfinished expression says everything. Life shall carry on – but. The pure man has nothing to fear – but . . . You shall not steal, but . . . You shall honour your father and mother unless they be dying of plague. You shall bury the dead with honour – but not if they’ve black swellings erupting from their armpits and necks, or be self-drowned or hanged because their children are dead of plague.’

  I feel tears welling up. Angry with myself, I wipe my face with alternate sweeps of my sleeves.

  ‘It is good to let the grief flow out, brother.’

  I take a deep breath, and look away. ‘I met a mariner once. He told me that he’d been on a ship that was swept out to sea in a storm, beyond sight of land. The ship had lost her mast. For three weeks she was drifting. One by one the crew fell away. He told me that what killed them was not starvation or the waves but an idea: the thought that they’d never see land again. It fastened on them, and sank its teeth in, and it gradually sucked the will to live out of them. It loosened their grip on life. That’s how I feel now.’

  William puts his arms around my shoulders and rests his forehead against mine. ‘Do you remember our father, on his deathbed?’

  I nod. I was young at the time, perhaps only twelve, but I can still see him there, coughing and rattling in the chamber of the mill house at Cranbrook, which our older brother now inhabits. His final act, after the priest had administered the last rites, was to push off his bedclothes and declare he was going for a walk. He started laughing, and then fell back, dead.

  ‘Sometimes I find myself saying things as if I be doiled or crazed. Like asking how many corpses we’ll see. We put those things we cannot face into the basket of madness. It’s like his final laughter.’

  I dwell on this, and lay the thought carefully to rest.

  ‘Come,’ he says, picking up his travelling sack again. ‘She does not need us any more.’

  Two hours later, the air turns colder, presaging rain. The light is beginning to fail. But a late gleam is breaking through the clouds too, creating small patches of brightness shifting across the darkening landscape. Momentarily it shines on the stones of a nearby grass-covered earth bank, and highlights two more dead bodies.

  The man lying by the side of the road looks as though he was kneeling until the moment of his death. He is wearing a fur-trimmed black robe and black fur-edged cap. The red tunic beneath his robe is not dyed with plain madder root such as we common folk use but with some type of brighter red. His hosen too are expensive: true black, not dark grey. I wonder why he was on his knees, doing obeisance to every passer-by.

  His young wife’s body is curled against the bank, about ten feet away. Her white tunic with green and gold braid, her blonde hair and her black travelling cloak all strike the eye with their quality and cleanness, contrasting so strongly with the dark swellings and red streaks of blood vessels in her pale skin. In her last moments she must have thrown her head back, offering her neck to the sky and the crows. I marvel that someone so beautiful could be so marked with such hideous disfigurements. Her mouth is open; her eyes have not yet frozen. There is something in the emptiness of her expression that makes me think of a woman in ecstasy. Such is her beauty that I think I should try to remember her, to use her face in my carving. But why did she die at the same place as her husband? Why did she not walk on? Or, if she died first, why did he stay here?

  Not far from her hand is a silver crucifix attached to a necklace of amber rosary beads. There is a small book too, its long leather thread still attached to her belt.

  I am searching for answers when I see her arm move.

  I jump back, repulsed. This woman is as dead as anyone suffused by the plague. I glance at William but he looks at me, not understanding.

  That is when we hear the baby cry.

  Now I understand. The merchant, hunched over his knees, must have known that his dead body would be mute, and that only his final posture would speak for him. So he died kneeling, begging for help from future travellers – not for himself or even for his wife but for his infant. The woman died near to her husband because she had not sought to leave him. Quite the opposite. She too had known she was dying and all she hoped for at the end was that their two forms would draw attention to the child, which I now realise is beneath her arm, kept warm by her dying body.

  I use a stick to pull back the edge of the dead woman’s cloak. The child is dark-haired like its father, about three months old, and strapped to a swaddling board and engulfed in yards of white linen. It is hungry, moving its head, searching at its mother’s clothed breast for milk.

  ‘Leave it!’ shouts William. His face is angry and frightened at once. I have seen him look like this before; it was when the captains lost control of the army and we broke into Caen, in a mad struggle with the frantic citizens. ‘Leave it be.’

  I feel strangely calm, despite the child’s screaming and my brother’s anxiety. ‘It’s innocent, William. It will die if we leave it.’

  ‘Yes, it shall die!’ he shouts. ‘And if you touch it, you too shall die, as surely as its mother and father are dead.’

  I shake my head. ‘William, no.’

  ‘In Christ’s name, John, you saw the pits in Salisbury. Piles of bodies flung into the earth – so many they were uncountable. You’ve smelled the overwhelming stink of decay. These folk will be like that in two days, their bodies rotting like discarded meat. Do you want to resemble them?’

  ‘You would leave it?’ I say, searching my brother’s face. ‘You would let another Christian soul die on the highway? An innocent child. What kind of man are you? How can you stand there and judge the weak?’

  The wind rises in the branches. William says nothing.

  ‘Where is the pikeman who fought with the king in France?’ I ask him. ‘That man – I was proud to call him my brother. But now . . . Look at yourself: what courage do you have, in the face of this disease?’

  As I speak I hear the screams of the child again. ‘In sweet Jesus’s name, William, folk used to care for one another in their darkest hour. Now they run from their fellow mortal souls.’

  William points to the child under its dead mother’s arm. ‘Touch that and I’ll be your brother in name only.’

  ‘Damn your hypocrisy, William.
You and I both handled Elizabeth Tapper’s corpse. You took her flitch. You and I let her down from her hanging place together.’

  ‘She hanged herself. She wasn’t infected.’

  ‘How do you know? She’d nursed her sons – and they were infected. She may have been as sickly as her children when she died. Or maybe she was as clean as you think, and this child is too. All I know is that she saw nothing in the world to live for. But this child has a chance. You and me – we are that chance. If you are cold-hearted now, this child will die – and we will have been his killers.’

  I look back towards the woman’s body. I decide. I step closer and reach out for the crying infant.

  ‘No, John! Leave it!’

  I ignore him. I take hold of the swaddling board with both hands and carefully draw it and the baby away from its mother. Her corpse slumps down on the grass, as if relieved to be freed from the responsibility. Bound against the board, all the child can do is move its head and cry. It is aching for food and warmth and yet, at the same time, it implores kindness. That sound is exactly what I want to offer. This noise, not words, is the true sound of humanity – as native to us as a song is to a bird. I remember the cries of my own children at birth – the two that died young as well as the three who, God willing, are still alive, and I rejoice in the sound of the cry. I look into this child’s deep eyes. It is squinting through its tears at the world. I know that if I put it down now I will be setting aside everything that makes me believe in myself as a father, and as a man.

  Still holding the child, I walk away from the dead mother, giving it as much warmth as I can with my own body.

  ‘You are a curse on me, John,’ says my brother.

  For a short while there is silence. The only sounds are those of the wind and the child’s urgent crying – a regular rasping followed by a choking, and then a more urgent cry, forced out to express his intense hunger and pain.

  ‘In Christ’s name, John. This is madness. But maybe you are mad. Our elder brother inherited our father’s land. I inherited his strength, his sense of humour and his mercery skill. You know me: I never overpay for anything, whether it be a fleece or a mug of ale. But you – what did you inherit? Nothing. You are soft-limbed and soft-witted, peevish, and altogether too trusting in God. These rich dead city folk, they would not have given a farthing for your soul in life; why risk your neck for their child? God made them rich. He did not make you rich. All he gave you was the skill to knock stones into divine shapes with your chisel. Now the pestilence is here, there’ll be no more work on the cathedral. Nor on the church in Salisbury. As for me, no one needs wool-fells now. Or wool. We’ll be nothing but two hungry bodies amid the bones. You are willing to stuff your mouth with contagion and embrace a mortal fever. I cannot risk being near you.’

  The child is still crying, stopping only momentarily to search for milk in the warmth of my chest before opening its soul again. My brother shakes his head and turns away. He takes a few steps along the road before suddenly turning to say something else. But I speak first. ‘Has it not occurred to you how little you’ve done to earn the reward of Heaven? Even now you are preoccupied with money, with what things are worth. Is that your true understanding? For my part, I wonder what you are worth as a man. What good act have you done to gain eternal bliss? I’ve worshipped God through my chisels. I’ve done my best as a husband and as a father, and to be a good brother to you and Simon. But in the Gospels it says that Jesus went among the sick and the dying – not just the healthy. He was not afraid.’

  ‘He was the Son of God.’

  ‘He was a man too, was He not? And He came to set us an example, did He not?’ I gesture back at the dead couple. ‘Imagine this man and woman were Joseph and the Blessed Virgin Mary, on their way to Egypt, and this was their infant. Would you still say that we should leave their child to die?’

  ‘If Joseph and Mary were lying here in front of us, which they are not, still I would say yes. Leave the babe be.’

  ‘You would rather kill Christ, and deny all the hundreds of thousands of innocents a path to Heaven, than risk your own neck? How miserable and cowardly is that! How contemptible in the eyes of the Lord! And yet you’ve the nerve to say to me that I’ve inherited nothing from our father? In God’s name, I know this. I inherited his goodness. When he sired me I got his moral courage and his love of his fellow countrymen. I’d not exchange such virtues for all your business sense, all your fleeces, all your fond widows. And more, if you were holding this child, and not me, I would not shy away from you as you do now from me. I would say, “William, I understand your vocation. I might not be able to hear your calling but I will help you answer it.” And I would help you too, to the ends of the Earth – not because I want you to help me now but because you are my brother. And you will always be my brother.’

  I start to walk. After about twenty steps I hear him call my name. I walk on.

  He calls again. Still I continue on my way.

  He comes after me, still calling.

  Eventually, after several hundred yards, I give in. I turn back and watch him as he strides up to me, with his travelling sack in one hand and something else in the other.

  ‘The child is heir to his father’s money,’ says William. ‘You may as well take it too. The child will need it.’ William hands me the man’s purse, together with the woman’s book and the crucifix and rosary beads. ‘If this plague is the will of God, John, then God bless you. You have worked the stones of God’s house; your prayers have a stronger moral power than mine. But I cannot believe God will spare this child, and I fear for you. It’s not that I don’t love you as my brother.’

  I nod my thanks.

  ‘Maybe one day the child will read it,’ he adds, looking at the book. ‘I could help him.’

  ‘That would be good.’

  ‘And the book is valuable anyway. In Oxford, you would pay five shillings for one like that.’

  Five shillings – sixty pence – that would take me ten days to earn when paid at my very best rate. And statuary work does not come along that often; most of the time it is plain masonry or vaulting, at fourpence a day. I set the babe on the ground, open my travelling bag, and place the purse, the crucifix and the book inside. Then I draw the ties tight and lift it over my shoulder again, and pick up the infant.

  I glance at the darkening grey sky. ‘Where do we find a wetnurse?’ I ask, trying to soothe the child by putting my finger in its mouth. It sucks for a few moments and then starts to wail in its cycle of compulsive sobs.

  ‘Susannah, the daughter of Richard the blacksmith, in the parish of Saint Bartholomew. She lives not far from the priory. But I know not whether she and her son are still alive, after these two months.’

  The cries of the child grow more intense. ‘Will you come with me?’

  ‘It would be foolish.’

  ‘Does God spare the wise? The dead folk we’ve seen today – were they all fools?’

  ‘Who knows?’ William closes his eyes, throws his head back, and shouts, looking at the sky. ‘Christ, be my guide!’

  ‘If you are in doubt, William, and you cannot find the right way in your own mind, you should not ask Christ what you should do, you should do what you believe He would do.’

  He looks at me. And we start walking.

  I marvel at the child’s determination to keep crying, and at how it makes me feel sympathetic, so desperate to find some food. But I can no longer keep referring to ‘it’ in that way. He or she is not an ‘it’. I decide it is a boy, and wonder what name would suit him. Immediately I hear the word Lazarus in my mind, for this child has been lifted out of the arms of death. And today is the eve of the feast of Saint Lazarus. But little Lazarus is still repeating his cycle of forcing his rasping scream into the world, then choking on it and swallowing and forcing through the next scream. How I wish I could soothe him.

  When my eldest son cried desperately, Catherine gave him pieces of bread soaked in warm cow’s milk to
satiate his appetite. Although I have no milk, I decide to try the same. I stop on the side of the road and set the baby down, leaning the board against the trunk of an oak. I take some bread from my travelling bag and break some fragments into the palm of my hand. Carefully I tip ale from my flask into my hand and wet the bread. I then push this into Lazarus’s mouth – but he sucks on air, and does not swallow it, and cries even more desperately when it fails to satisfy him.

  ‘More is coming out than going in,’ observes William, looking over my shoulder.

  ‘Do you have a better plan?’

  ‘No. Between the two of us, you are definitely the more expert in the matter of children.’

  A final attempt to push food into Lazarus’s mouth only makes him scream with greater desperation, and more hoarsely. Even offering more ale does not help. Clearly Lazarus needs milk and there is none here – not without knocking on a stranger’s door, and no stranger will welcome a man with a baby. I lift him up again, set the board back on my hip, and start walking.

  ‘Well, at least you tried,’ says William. ‘I do not know if it is a curse or a blessing but truly you do not recognise your own limitations. What other man would try to feed a screaming baby?’

  The undulating fields stretch away on each side of the road, their different strips and furlongs noticeable by the various shades of the stubble. In a few areas the crops lie unharvested, crumpled and black, but in most places the disease struck after the grain was taken in. Less reassuringly, the fields are empty, devoid of workers. The handful of travellers we see step off the road to avoid us. Nearer to the city, we see a family on the move: the wife aboard a pony-drawn cart with two chests of possessions and a baby. The eldest boy is leading the pony by hand and four other children are walking behind: there is no sign of the father. As we approach, the eldest boy barks a warning at the children and they all cover their faces. The mother sees Lazarus and makes the sign of the cross.