Knight's Acre

by Norah Lofts

  ‘Where in the village?’

  ‘Martin’s. Leastway it was one of them red-headed lot…’

  She had lost her audience. Sybilla was running towards the common.

  She saw the old priest shuffling towards her, carrying his little lidded basket. When she was near enough, she saw that he was crying, slow gummy tears oozing and dispersing themselves in the many furrows of his face. From the lid of his basket a fold of his stole protruded. He had been to one death-bed and now she must call him to another.

  As soon as he saw and recognised her he stopped and held up one hand. ‘Do not come close, my lady. I am straight from a death-bed. Plague!’

  For all its familiarity a heart-stopping word.

  ‘You are sure?’

  With uncharacteristic testiness he said, ‘Of course I am sure. I’ve lived through it twice—both kinds. And this is the worst. I asked you…’

  ‘I’m safe enough. I have also lived through it, Father.’

  It was so long ago, when she was so young, that she had no real memory of it; only of the nuns saying, jokingly, ‘You’ll die of old age; even the plague couldn’t kill you.’ And everyone knew that you couldn’t have the plague twice.

  Falling into step beside him she said, ‘My old Madge is asking for you…’

  ‘What ails her?’

  ‘A sudden fever. And her breathing…’

  ‘That is the worst.’ He wiped his face on his sleeve and quickened his step a little. ‘With the other kind… carefully nursed… once the buboes break, there is hope. But this is deadly.’

  Attempting to fend off what she did not wish to believe, Sybilla said, ‘But she was quite well this morning.’

  ‘Robin Martin was scything his corn.’ Thus reminded of the swiftness of this enemy, he broke into a shambling trot. But Madge was dead before they reached her bedside.

  Father Ambrose shed a few more of the difficult tears of old age. Sybilla stood dry-eyed, the knot which tears might have melted hard and painful in her throat. The dead woman, he said, in an attempt to comfort himself as well as Sybilla, had been a faithful Christian, a regular attendant at mass; only last Sunday… But in a way that made it all the greater pity that the last rites, the formal phrase that sped the Christian soul on its journey should have been denied her, while Robin Martin…

  However, such matters were best left to God. Man must deal with what he could deal with.

  ‘In such time,’ he said, ‘burial is a problem. I know from the past. Anybody can dig a grave; it is the handling. A man needs to be very drunk…’ That was the terrible thing about plague; only the most devoted family—or the most devout religious—would nurse the stricken, only reeling drunkards carry them to their graves.

  ‘I am sorry,’ Sybilla said, ‘I have nothing…’ The last of the Cressacre wine, the last of Walter’s ale, had been drunk long ago.

  ‘I can manage that,’ Father Ambrose said firmly. ‘I shall use the sacramental wine. It is but wine, until the moment of consecration.’

  He hurried off to plant the red-painted wands at the village entry, a warning that this was an afflicted place.

  Eating heartily of the dumpling, Henry said, ‘I though it was just an expression, running about like a hen with its head off. But it did!’

  ‘Halfway round the yard,’ John said. ‘Very comical.’

  Margaret laughed because the boys laughed. The candlelight shone on their faces, young, lustrous-eyed, healthy looking. The thought of the peril looming over them moved her to an unusual display of emotion; ‘My darlings,’ she said and embraced them all. Henry shrugged free and went into the yard, disapproving, she thought, of being treated like a child.

  When he had been gone long enough for any natural purpose she went to the kitchen door, ravaged by fear. Robin Martin was scything his corn! She was about to call when she heard him retching. He knelt, bowed over, supporting himself by the lower rails of the pig-pen. He said, ‘Go away’ but she went and knelt beside him, her left hand steadying his heaving body. Spasm after spasm. Could it start this way?

  Finally, it was over and he leant against her for a moment, exhausted, grateful for support. Then he braced himself, stood up, essayed a shaky joke. ‘I bolted my supper and it wasn’t hasty pudding!’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Empty. I shall be hungry in a minute.’

  Inside the lighted kitchen she examined covertly; slightly pale, slightly watery-eyed. Not flushed. Could it be that beheading the fowl had been more of a strain than he would admit? John looked up from the simple game which he was—a concession now—playing with Margaret, boring because he invariably won, and asked, ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘I threw up, if you must know. Mother, I am hungry now.’

  She made him a bowl of bread and milk, salted, not sweetened, the way he preferred. Immediately John was hungry, too, and Margaret. She made more bread and milk.

  ‘Two suppers,’ John said gloatingly. ‘I wish you’d throw up every evening, Henry.’

  In their extremely dull lives supper in the kitchen, after the excitement of seeing a cockerel, headless, run about the yard, and then an extra meal, made an occasion. They went noisily to bed and Sybilla did not hush them, as she should perhaps have done with a dead woman in the house.

  She kept a candle burning and hardly slept at all, prowling about as though vigilance could protect. She thought about Madge’s burial. On his way out Father Ambrose had said that in time of plague there was no time for coffins; the dead must be buried quickly—‘And after all, Our Lord had only a shroud.’

  She had a blue dress, her best, once carefully kept for occasions, then even more carefully kept against Godfrey’s return. Useless now. Madge, who had lived in homespun, should go to her last bed wrapped in silk.

  In the morning they were all still well and lively, thank God.

  Two youngish men whom she did not recognise, not direct tenants, both happily drunk, took Madge away and laid her in the ground, not beside Johnny, whoever he was, but by Robin Martin, a real sinner, reclaimed at the last.

  With the corpse removed, Sybilla went through the house with the purifying shovel, heads of lavender smouldering on a few hot embers scooped from the kitchen hearth. It was not a guaranteed guard but it was a ritual.

  Father Ambrose said, ‘Three days, my lady, and no fresh case. It is early for hope, this thing obeys no rules—except that it is always carried. In this case by the herring-seller, God rest her.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because when I went out to plant the wands at the village boundary, she lay dead in the lane.’

  Sybilla thought: I made them eat in the yard because Madge lay ill in the kitchen but what they ate was fish the old woman had handled! That was too piercing a thought, so she said, ‘She was old; she told me that morning that she was feeling her years. And if she carried it, why only to two households? She visited others.’

  ‘It strikes where it will,’ he said. The crisis appeared to have cleared his mind and concentrated it upon the present; now it clouded and slid back again. ‘In the confusion, my lady, I have been forgetful. I forgot to ask you. Any news of Sir Godfrey?’

  ‘He died in Spain, Father.’

  ‘I am very sorry. I will say a mass for his soul.’

  On the fifth day—dare one hope now?—she was kneading bread dough in the kitchen when she heard sounds from the yard and ran out to see Henry and John awkwardly supporting and moving Tom. Henry had drawn Tom’s left arm around his own neck and held it there with his left hand, while his right was as far about the bigger boy’s waist as it would go. John had his shoulder under Tom’s right elbow.

  ‘He fell down,’ Henry gasped. ‘Heat stroke, I thought, and we dragged him into the shade but he got worse.’

  She had a thought of which she was ashamed—Oh, why did he come to work this morning? Then she thought—Where? Not the kitchen in which we cook and eat, nor the hall through which we have to pass.
The solar. She took John’s place on Tom’s right hand and said to the child, ‘Take the cushions from the settle and put them in the solar.’

  Tom, groaning and moaning, was hardly prone before Henry said, ‘Come on John. There’s only us now.’

  It was immediately evident that Tom Robinson would be less easily handled than poor Madge had been. He was younger and stronger and put up more fight against both the discomfort he was suffering and any efforts to relieve it. He seemed lucid. He wanted no brews, he said, repudiating the lime infusion; he’d seen what brews could do.

  Sybilla spoke sternly. ‘Tom, if I am to nurse you, you must do what I tell you. Otherwise I shall send for your family to come and take you away.’

  ‘They wouldn’t come.’ That might be true. He struggled weakly against the blanket that she snatched from her own bed and against the hot brick. ‘I’m roasted enough. I’m on the rack.’

  ‘Just try to lie still. You will be better soon.’

  He threw himself about and moaned. ‘I’m in hell. Satan and all his imps. With red-hot pitchforks.’

  The three cushions from the settle slithered about. He needed a more solid mattress.

  In accordance with custom, she had hauled down and burned the one on which Madge had died with the pillows, the covers and the old woman’s scanty clothing. The one on the bed she had once shared with Godfrey, and now shared with Margaret, was double size, so was the one in the boys’ room. It must be Walter’s…

  Respecting his privacy, she had never entered it during his occupancy and since his death she had avoided it. Probably Madge, industrious and conscientious, had gone in from time to time to wipe off the worst of the dust or to air the room. It was with a definite effort of will that she now opened the door.

  And it was not because the room was scattered with his belongings that he seemed still to be in possession. On the night of the fire he had lost everything except his bow, his arrows and the clothes he was wearing. The bow, unstrung, and the arrows stood propped in a corner. The few fresh clothes with which he had provided himself hung limp from a peg. She remembered Henry saying that he did not know that Walter had a blue tunic—perhaps he had been wearing it for the first time when… This was no time for such a thought…

  There was nothing else in the room that said—Walter! For he had never tried to make this place his own as he had that other room. Yet he still seemed to be here, a just not visible or palpable presence.

  She moved to the bed which Madge must have stripped and made tidy. Madge’s mattress, too hastily disposed of, had been easily handled. Walter’s, though not much larger, was not; it was a trifle thicker and stuffed with horsehair, resilient, bouncy. But she must get it down because—the thought flashed—if Tom’s fever increased and affected his mind and lent his body a spurious, brief strength, he could be dangerous; firmly tied down to this mattress… Where did that thought come from? Or the strength which suddenly enabled her to deal with the recalcitrant thing. Almost as though stronger hands had come to her aid and, at the stairhead, a more resourceful mind. Let it slide… It slid, impelled by its own weight and bounciness to the turn in the stairs which Master Hobson had regretted but which had been unavoidable, and then a mere push landed it into the hall, a few jerks took it into the solar and Tom was installed.

  In the kitchen Margaret, unsupervised during this commotion, had pummelled the bread dough, dropped it on the floor, recovered it in pieces, slightly soiled. On the whole insensible to admonition or rebuke she seemed, on this day, to take Sybilla’s mild, ‘Oh dear!’ seriously, and allowed her head to droop sideways. Contrition?

  Maternal rebuke. ‘Margaret, sit up and eat your dinner.’

  ‘Margaret’s neck hurts.’

  John said, ‘So do my legs…’

  So the nightmare began.

  The one glimmer of hope the old priests’ words about good nursing; the one miracle that Henry, dearest of all, was not stricken. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that maybe being sick saved me.’ And who could argue with that, the whole thing so mysterious, taking such varying forms. Tom Robinson in the solar raving about devils and poisonous brews and toads, which he abhorred, crawling over his bed; upstairs, Margaret wailing, tracking every pain, her head, her neck, her arms, legs, teeth all hurt. John did not complain or demand attention but his torpor was frightening and he was the first to have the difficulty in breathing, once so much so that Sybilla resorted to an action which she had seen performed on a man who had fallen into the moat at Beauclaire and taken out, seemingly dead. She worked John’s skinny little rib cage between her hands, press, release, press…

  Henry said, ‘It would be easier for you if they were all up or down. I doubt if I could manage Tom. The others I can.’ He carried John down and then the bed, fetched Margaret.

  ‘Now we,’ he said, ‘can take turns at sleeping on the settle.’

  ‘That I cannot allow, Henry. Not while you work as you do.’

  For doggedly, single-handed, he was proceeding with his harvesting. ‘I’m sorry, Mother, not to help you more but somebody must get the corn in.’

  Her forbade her to cook. ‘Bread and cheese will do for me.’

  He was there, fortunately, when Tom, having suffered all the torments that the devil could inflict, refused to be strangled by him and, with fever strength, threw himself about the solar howling, trying to dislodge the enemy by dashing him against the wall. Henry hit him, knocked him down and hauled him back on the mattress. He rejected Sybilla’s idea of tying Tom down to the bed. ‘It would just make him more difficult to deal with. I’ll tie his feet and his hands together.’

  The timeless time went on. Father Ambrose called once to tell her that every household in the village was stricken; ‘And those who are not are sitting about, waiting… Nobody works, my lady. I have often thought that for one the plague kills, fear kills four.’ He was justified in this harsh judgement for, unlike Sybilla, he had never suffered the plague, he had merely lived through two outbreaks and now, with less certainty of immunity than she could claim, went fearlessly about, not only administering to the dying but tending the sick. In a village which barely tolerated him. The sick there were in good hands.

  She had, in reserve, a small quantity of a dark, viscid liquid, a specific for toothache. A few drops, slow-dripping as Father Ambrose’s tears, ensured, even for a sufferer from toothache, release from pain and sleep.

  In the short interval that Henry allowed himself from the field at midday—not to eat, one could eat bread and cheese anywhere, but to see that in the house things had not got beyond his mother’s control—he saw her, measuring drops.

  ‘It seems to ease Tom’s delusion. It certainly eases Margaret’s pains.’

  ‘Couldn’t they all have a dose? Tonight? So that you and I could sleep?’

  There was no real reason why he should not sleep but, despite her determination to be in charge on the ground floor, resting her bones on the settle, Henry always seemed to know, to hear when Tom yelled or Margaret said, ‘Mother’, or when she rose to make certain that in the night John was still breathing.

  She said, ‘I have so little of it. It must be kept for pain or waking nightmares.’

  ‘I see,’ Henry said.

  He went out, she thought to the field.

  Momentarily relieved from delusions and from pain, Tom and Margaret seemed to sleep. Sybilla worked on John, again in difficulty with breathing; press, release, press again. He gave a cough and ejected some sticky, grey and yellow-streaked, bloody matter.

  ‘I can breathe now,’ John said, and turned on his side and slept.

  Despite all her care the pest-house stench had crept about. It followed her into the kitchen and mingled unpleasantly with the sweet smell of baking bread.

  She went to the kitchen door for a breath of fresh air and felt the unseasonal heat of the afternoon. She was so weary that she felt ill. She realised now the price that must be paid for independence and pride. In bigger households peop
le fared better at such times; there would be someone not yet stricken, someone who shared Father Ambrose’s immunity, somebody like herself who had survived. Isolated here she was fighting almost single-handed against death and, at the same time, doing ordinary, essential things like cooking, since Henry must be fed.

  Lack of proper sleep, constant anxiety, had reduced her to something near self-pity; though she knew she had only herself to blame for her plight. And she must not stand here wasting time; she must go and hunt for eggs if Henry were to have the supper she planned for him.

  Days were drawing in now and Henry always left the field in order to milk the cow while the light lasted. This evening he was late—then very late. She remembered how Tom had fallen down in the stubble and had to be helped indoors. In panic she ran out, across the yard, through the space between the stable and the burned-out house and across the rough track which served as a side entrance. It was bounded on its further side by a bank, from the top of which she had a view of the field. Nothing moved in the dusky light. The stooks of cut corn, each made of four sheaves stood on end and leaning slightly towards one another, stood in even rows, like small tents. The cut stubble lay in even rows, alternating like velvet stroked this way and that. The still uncut wheat stood straight and tall, stretching away, in this half-light, to an immeasurable distance. Henry could have fallen at its verge, his scythe beside him; or, feeling unwell, sat down against a stook…

  The final blow! She moved to descend the bank on the field side; she must find Henry, bring him in; but her legs failed her, wilted like candles in an over-heated room and she fell, not into the field but back, on to the track.

  ‘Christ in Glory!’ Henry said, ‘I could have killed you… Are you hurt?’ The grey horse stood puffing and blowing within inches of where she lay.

  ‘No. Not hurt. I stumbled… Looking for you…’ She took his outstretched hands and pulled herself up. ‘No, not hurt,’ she said, though pain stabbed at her hip. ‘Where have you been?’