by Ian Mortimer
But what can I do now, in the next seven days, which will earn me the rewards of Heaven? For that surely was no angel on the cathedral screen. It coughed, for Heaven’s sake, and pretended to be me, and said it was my conscience. Angels don’t need to clear their throats. They don’t dissemble.
But then how did it know about my mother’s singing being more beautiful than the priest’s? Did I imagine that?
When the whole world is living through a nightmare, why should not I be faced with my own?
Seven days.
I imagine walking down the hill towards Moreton, looking across the town and its old church and marketplace, with the great moor, Dartmoor, beyond it. To the northwest I will see the hills of Butterdon and the earth ramparts of the old fort on the hill above Cranbrook; near that fort is the mill where Simon, William and I grew up, and where Simon now lives with his two children. To the south of the town lies Wrayment, where Catherine and my sons, William, John and James, will have risen and be setting about the day’s tasks. Catherine and Mary from Storryge might be cleaning the house or beating the clothes clean at the Wraybrook. William, old enough now to make himself useful, might have taken some of the grain in the barn to the mill, and then be going into town to see the baker. John and James will no doubt be playing in the mud, breaking ice puddles with stones.
What good can I do for them – or anyone else – in the next seven days?
I could show the children the rudiments of carving. I could tell them of the dangers of sin. I could take in a poor child, to be a servant. And what good would any of these things do? I could turn around and walk back into Exeter, and embrace the lepers in the Magdalene hospital as saints used to do in the old days, to show they were neither afraid of God’s judgement nor judging of His damnation on our fellow men. But no one would care. Who cares for lepers when the plague is in the city?
Truly, what is a good act in this age? How can one consciously do something worthy of a Heavenly reward?
I think of the stories I used to hear in church of all the saintly people: men and women who gave their lives for their faith, saints who performed miracles. William was right, I am not one of them. This is my lot: to leave my house for weeks on end and go to a cathedral or a church where they need masons, and to chisel, carve, mould, shape and bring forth liveliness from the grain of natural stone. I let faces, hands, arms, crowns and clothes emerge from God’s uncut materials. It pays little. Catherine has to work hard on our four acres. They say that rich men are further from Heaven but I do not believe that is true. Rich men can give up their wealth and thereby earn eternal salvation; poor men cannot. Christ might have been poor but I have never heard a priest speak of Him trying to eke out a few pennies or sweating over His four acres. A man performing his trade for a meagre sum cannot go to Heaven – not if simply avoiding doing wrong is insufficient.
Near the village of Dunsford, the appalling stench of death hits our nostrils. We turn a corner in the hedgerow-bounded lane and see a horse-drawn sledge. It is by an ivy-clad tree, half in the ditch, at an angle. Two bodies remain on it; four others have fallen into the ditch. An open mouth and pair of hollow eye sockets stare into the ditch water. The horse that dragged them to this point has been cut from its harness but the man who led it here lies not far away, where he fell on his side, his face contorted in a grimace.
The dead leading the dead.
‘Jesus have mercy,’ exclaims William. ‘Hell could not seem closer.’
I cover my face as I did leaving Exeter. When we are on the far side of the stink, I take the cloth away.
‘Every city, every town, every village. There’s no end to it.’
The village of Dunsford is empty. It seems frozen: a scattering of low, thatched houses – some built of cob, some of granite – to the south of the church. I look up at the hills beyond, thickly wooded with winter-bare trees. This is where the long climb up on to the great moor begins.
We cross the River Teign at the ford. After the recent rain the water is about thigh-deep and fast-flowing. Dead leaves and sticks have caught in the shallows at the edge. I take extra care with my travelling sack, remembering the book that it contains, whose vellum pages will be ruined if they get wet. I resolve to donate it to the church in Moreton, in memory of Lazarus.
My limbs feel tired when I step on to the solid earth, ahead of William. The weariness slows me down as we follow the path up into the woods. After a mile of trudging, I find myself exhausted and sweating. I look back at William, who is having an even harder time than me. He might be the size of an ox but he is less used to carrying his weight, being a man who normally rides. I wait for him, catching my breath, and slap him on the back when he reaches me.
‘We’re doing well, brother.’
He pants. ‘I forget how steep this hill is. We should have gone by Clifford.’
We press on, with alder, ash, willow and beech on either side. Some twisted oaks remain, like craggy witches from long ago. The willows have been coppiced to create the wattles for houses and fences. The alder and ash too have been coppiced, for roofing and charcoal burning. A mile from the river, I pause again, sweating heavily despite the cold. On the hills above there are traces of snow in areas shaded by rocks. I glance up at the sun, which is weak but welcome. About three hours have passed since we left Exeter.
I turn and look back to William. He is slower even than before. In fact, he is stumbling. He leans against a tree. He wipes a sleeve across his brow. Concerned, I walk back towards him, and I see him vomit – a stream of yellow splatters on the leaves. He looks up as I approach. There is a streak of sick in his beard. ‘Stay away from me,’ he rasps, his face blotched and red. ‘Stay away.’
‘William?’
‘I’m sweating like a hot pig. I’ve a pain under my arm. And I’ve been sick. What do you make of these things?’
In that beat of my heart, I know death is with us.
‘The pestilence has entered me, John. Already it’s corrupting my body.’
I open my mouth to speak but I cannot find a word to say. I know now why I am sweating so much, and why I feel so weak. My limbs ache not with fatigue or lack of hunger but with some insidiousness seeping through them.
‘But I had seven days,’ I say.
‘What?’ says William, still bending over, with his arms against the tree, grimacing. ‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing. I . . .’ I look down at the sticks on the path, and at the rotting leaves. Quietly I search my right armpit with my left hand, and then I search my left. There is a sharp bruise there. I freeze, and the nausea within me rises. I look at my hand, which is shaking. I wipe the sweat from my forehead and look at William, tears in my eyes.
William vomits a second time. He spits and glares at me. ‘What are you looking at?’
‘I did what I believed was right . . .’
‘Damn you, John. You have killed me. You and your bloody piety. In all the years we were together, I never hurt you, despite your tedious moralising. Now you’ve killed me.’
‘I am sorry.’
He wipes his face. ‘I don’t care how sorry you are. Oh Christ, damn you! I hate your damn religion. It doesn’t help things. If God wants to make a man suffer, then being all holy is no shield. God doesn’t care for holiness.’
‘I feel it too. Within me.’
‘What?’
‘The plague.’
He straightens himself up and breathes deeply. Sweat trickles down his face and into his beard. He shakes his head. ‘What a world this is.’
He starts to walk. ‘I despise the thought of being one of the corpses in the road. The last thing I want is for some tatchy merchant to come along here and count me among the nameless dead.’
I say nothing. Between brothers, wordlessness is sometimes more meaningful than conversation.
I think of Catherine. I remember when I first saw her, in the marketplace in Moreton, when she was a child. Her father, Roger of Wrayment, had brought her al
ong with him. She was five years younger than me, turning cartwheels on a patch of grass in the square. When she caught sight of me watching her, she asked, ‘Can you do cartwheels?’ before demonstrating another one. ‘I like your belt,’ she added, and I had looked down with no small pride at the pewter buckle I had fashioned from an old pilgrim badge that I’d found on the highway. The following Sunday she smiled at me coming out of church – and when anyone saw her smile, they could not help but smile too. After that, we would exchange a few words every week, on market day, or after church. Later that year I went to Exeter to learn to carve properly, and then I would only see her occasionally, when I came home. After her mother died, her father kept her at home and would not let her marry, even though several men wanted her, including Walter Parleben, the son of John Parleben, one of the richest men in Moreton. And so the years passed. Then one day, as I was working on the screen of the cathedral, she came into Exeter with a kinsman. The foreman shouted up to where I was fitting a corbel. I came down from the scaffolding. Catherine looked very anxious. Her father was dead, she told me; the cottage and its four acres were now in her hands but the bailiff had told her she had to marry. If she did not choose a husband herself, he had added, he would find one for her. ‘Please,’ she said to me, ‘I’ve no wish to leave my house and you’ve no place of your own – why do you not come to live with me.’ ‘Why me?’ I had asked, astonished. And she had said simply, ‘Because you make me feel happy.’ Two weeks later we married at the church door in Moreton.
I will not be able to speak to her again. Even if she is alive, I cannot go to see her and risk spreading the disease to our children. Better that I should go to the churchyard and dig my own grave now. It is the only way I will lie in consecrated ground.
William does not speak as we make our way up Cossick Hill. Instead he looks up at the rocks, as if he has decided they are to be his place of reckoning with God. I think of my mother’s baked apples in honey; Catherine’s peaceful face as she sleeps; showing my sons how to shear our few sheep. I remember brewing ale for the church, and supping so much of it that I started singing. I remember watching the young of the town carolling in the square on a summer evening, dancing hand in hand to the fiddle and pipe. I look back on the fairs in Moreton, when the whole square was filled with stalls and the borough meadows and the lord’s field were packed with the colourful tents of merchants and traders, and the alehouses bursting with music and laughter.
All these memories are about to become unremembered.
We leave the road at Cossick and stumble along the rough path, over the rocks of Hingston, through the gorse and heather. A few moments of struggling to contain myself prove futile and I am sick on the dead bracken. Weak, shivering with cold and sweating, I slump down on a large stone. The sour taste of vomit in my mouth makes me spit – and I see blood in my spittle where it lands on the grass.
William shivers violently. ‘How long does it take?’ He sits down on a rock.
‘It can be quick. Or it can be days. A few people in Salisbury lingered for three or four, one lived for six.’
‘Jesus.’ He puts his hands over his face and falls silent. When he removes them, he stares to our left, along the ridge, for a long time. ‘You remember Christine of Luwedon?’
‘I do. She had long dark hair and a kind smile – and haunches like a cow.’
‘She was my first,’ he says. ‘Her husband was out hunting one day, up on the moor. She saw me on the road and called out to me to help her, for she was having difficulty with an angry ram. She led me up through the woods above Luwedon, not saying a word, and then – all of a sudden – she turned and put her hands to my cheeks, and held my face, and kissed me. It was such a kiss as I’d not had before and, by Saint Faith, I’ll never forget it. After a minute she pushed me down on the ground and knelt astride me, hoiking up her skirts around her waist. In truth, she took me as surely as ever I took a wench in France. Do you think that that counts as a sin?’
‘There were others, afterwards, weren’t there?’ I wince with the pain.
‘More than I can count.’
‘If you can’t count them, then that is indeed sinful. You should at least have remembered their names.’
‘I wasn’t interested in their names . . .’
We fall silent again.
‘I envy you, John,’ he gasps suddenly, clutching his belly and grimacing. ‘At least you will leave something behind.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Your children. Your sculptures. Who’ll remember William Beard? The priests won’t pray for me. The portreeve will find another man to whom to rent my house. At least you will not disappear without trace.’
‘Folk will still see your face,’ I reply.
‘No. I’ll be as dust on the sea.’
‘They’ll see you in the cathedral. Your face is on the altarpiece in the chapel of Saint Edmund.’
He pauses to think. ‘Did you do that?’
‘Of course. Your face also appears in the chapel of Saint Andrew and Saint Catherine. You are in the west cloister too, though that isn’t such a good likeness.’
‘Why not?’
‘Your ears are too big – the dean took down the scaffolding before I could amend them.’
‘You are a good brother,’ says William, clutching his chest, and rocking to and fro. ‘Even though . . . this. Just before Christmas.’
Christmas. I won’t see my sons’ faces light up any more at the sight of so much beef and mutton. I won’t see our house with ivy around the doorframe and holly and mistletoe in the eaves. I will not see the glow of Catherine’s smile as she watches our boys.
I look across to the moor in the distance. ‘How far is it from here to Scorhill?’
‘Eh?’
‘The stone circle on the moor where we went that day with John Parleben and William Kena and the other tinners. How far is it from here?’
‘About eight or nine miles. Why?’
‘I need to go there. To save my soul.’
‘What? Are you mad?’
‘No, I . . . I need to go there.’
William retches again, and spits. ‘You have the child’s purse. Give the money to the church. The priests will pray for you.’
‘It isn’t mine to give. Not since the poor infant burned.’
‘What’s Scorhill to do with it?’
‘I heard a voice last night. At the cathedral.’
‘You heard a voice?’
‘I did.’
‘You are mad.’
‘Maybe. But the voice told me to go to Scorhill to save my soul. And it would be madness to pretend I didn’t hear it. And think, Jesus went into the wilderness, which must surely have been like the moor. The Church Fathers, they too went into the wilderness – to build the first monasteries. Isaiah prophesied that the messenger of the Lord would be a voice crying aloud in the wilderness. And John the Baptist was that man, baptising the penitent not in a church but in the wilderness, in the pure waters of Creation. The wilderness is God’s Creation unchanged.’
William looks down. ‘You were a lucky man while you were alive. I’d have given much to have a wife like Catherine. But now, here we are, reduced to spitting, vomiting, shaking wrecks. And you’ve lost your mind.’
‘How can a man lose his mind? If his mind is his own, he cannot lose it.’
‘Pigs’ bollocks. You think that crying aloud in the wilderness is a sign of sanity? No, brother. It means only that no one need endure your wailing.’
I look up at the vast grey cloud-filled sky. ‘I’m going there.’
‘In Jesus’s name, John, why?’
‘That voice I heard, it knew things about me, about us growing up. It knew about that day when I told the priest about our mother’s singing. It knows what is happening to me now. If I go to Scorhill, perhaps it will speak to me again.’
‘And this voice, was it that of an angel?’
‘I don’t know. It sounded a bit like me. How
are we to know the true voice of Heaven?’
‘I doubt that the true voice of Heaven sounds anything like you. Are you sure it was not the Devil?’
‘By what token can you tell the difference? A voice by itself does not have cloven feet.’
The breeze cuts cold across our faces. I lurch to one side and retch, my stomach empty except for some bile, and I look down at the string of it still on my lips. Yesterday I spoke of us being brothers until the end of time, blithely assuming that time was our empire. But we were already dying.
‘Perhaps it is only seven miles to Scorhill,’ he says.
‘Will you come?’
He shrugs.
‘You do not think it madness?’
‘Don’t be a cut farthing, John. Of course it’s madness, chasing voices. But the madness would be greater if you were travelling alone. Or returning to your wife and children. You can’t go back home now.’
I look at William. He speaks the truth. Who could I get to take a message to Catherine? William too has the plague. And there’s no one else.
The world seems suddenly an empty place.
Winter has fallen a third time.
The way to Scorhill is an ordeal, a swirling together of pain and blotched glimpses of the world as our senses fail and our limbs weaken. The knowledge that we are dying is the one steady thing in our minds: it sinks into us like a knife slicing deeper through raw meat. William is no longer a wool merchant; he will never attend a fair again with a wagon of fleeces. He won’t slap anyone on the back and stand them a mazer of ale and make small talk or exchange jokes with the others gathering in the marketplace. The very fact I was a carver is now just an echo of something that was once true.
At Easton Cross I look up to the top of the hill. On the far side lies Cranbrook. As children, William and I spent much of our time with our brother Simon in the woods up there, cutting staffs with which we would attack or defend the ramparts of the old fort. I remember, on the day that William and I were told by the constable of the hundred that we would be sent to fight in France, we went searching for a stout staff each to help us on our way. I remember thinking that it was a virtuous thing to fight for King Edward and for England because I was fighting also for these woods and hills, and my homeland. But now, who is the enemy? Whom do I fight? The enemy is inside me, my own blood.
