“But where are they?” she says. “Where’s Alice?”
“Alice is in heaven,” I say. “But her body’s in the house. Do you want to see it?” She shakes her head. She knows what a dead thing looks like, from Edward’s cold little corpse. She doesn’t need to see another.
“What’s going to happen to us?” Ned demands. “Who’s going to look after us, if Richard isn’t?”
“I don’t know,” I say wearily. “Me and Robin, I suppose.”
“You can’t!” says Ned. “You’re not grown-up enough!”
“Fine,” I say. “Feed yourself then,” and he bares his teeth at me. I’ve only been his mother for an hour, and already I’m a failure.
“Isabel,” says Robin, quietly. “How are we going to bury them?”
How indeed? I think of the people I would have gone to for help in another life – Alice’s mother, who died of the ague three years ago, Robin’s mother, Emma Baker, Edward Miller, the priest. Emma Baker is the only one left alive, and can I ask her to dig a grave for two grown people? But the sexton is dead, and I hate the gravediggers, I hate the thought of giving one of our animals to them in payment. But what choice do we have?
I start shaking my head from side to side, blindly, like a hurt animal. I don’t know how we’re going to bury them. I don’t know how I’m going to look after Mag and Ned. I don’t know what we’re going to do.
Robin puts his arms around me again. I rest my head on his shoulder. There’s so much that needs to be done. I can’t do any of it.
“Come on,” says Robin. “Let’s go down to the churchyard and see who’s there.”
The churchyard is quiet. It got so full these last weeks, they stopped burying people there. They’ve opened a pit in Sir John’s pasture behind the church. The dug-up earth is heaped up in a pile. The pit itself is low and uneven and stinks of lime. Unconsecrated ground.
Adam the sexton was one of the first in the village to die. Dirty Nick, who’s mad, and the gravediggers who follow the funeral carts now open the pestilence pit and throw the bodies in, and then they feast off the beasts of payment, or if there isn’t anyone left to pay them they go into the houses of the dead and take what they like.
I can’t bear it.
I go into the church and call, “Hello? Hello?” but nobody answers.
Nothing stirs in the cottages by the church. A goat chews at the carrots growing in the sexton’s garden. Nobody stops him. The door to Nicholas Harold’s son’s house stands open, but the inside of the cottage is dark. Nicholas’s pig is digging up their herb garden unchecked. I don’t want to think about what might be inside the cottage.
“Where is everyone?” whispers Robin.
There are people still alive in the village. There are. There’s smoke rising from the oven, and from one or two of the cottages by the forge. One of the beggars is wandering over the green, with the aimless, half-crazy motion of one of the sick. Most people are at the harvest, I know. But Robin is right . . . the village has an emptiness to it that isn’t usual even in harvest-time. Perhaps it’s because the forge has been silent since Robert the smith died. Perhaps it’s because so many animals are dead. Perhaps, perhaps.
I wonder if Noah felt like this, standing on a mountain looking over his flooded world, trying to work out how to remake his life from the beginning.
“There’s someone over there—” Robin says, pointing.
In the mist at the edge of the churchyard, there’s a low shape, no higher than a child and moving. I draw in my breath. It looks like a devil, a black devil digging up the bodies to take them down to hell. But Robin is moving towards it, and I’m more scared of being left on my own than I am of whatever it is.
“Hello!” Robin calls. “Hello—?” and then, “God, Isabel!”
He turns away, like Maggie when she’s frightened, his head ducked down, as though shielding off a blow. I move towards the shape, questioning, and the wind turns so that it’s blowing in our direction and I catch a lungful of the pestilence smell, so strong I nearly gag.
“What is it – Robin—?”
It’s a pig. One of John Adamson’s red-haired pigs, with his snout in the shallow earth. At first I don’t understand Robin’s horror, then I see that the pig’s snout is muddied with blood, and I see what it’s been gnawing at, and my stomach rises to my throat and I have to turn away to be sick.
“Isabel,” Robin says, and I can hear the tears in his voice. “God, Isabel—”
His voice sounds small and childish and frightened, and I’m suddenly furious with him. It’s my mother and father who are dead. It’s me whose world has tumbled topside up. Why am I supposed to look after him?
“Shoo!” I shout at John Adamson’s pig, stamping my feet and flapping my arms. “Shoo! Go away, you horrible thing!” I run at it, and the pig lumbers away a few feet, but then stops, looking at me with its little piggy eyes. There’s another pig at the other edge of the grave – old Sarah Stranger’s fat sow, which just looks at me and then carries on with her dinner.
This must be the plague pit. The mud is so shallow here that you can see low, swollen shapes in the earth where the pigs have been rooting – a mottled arm here, a swollen stomach there. My belly rises in me again, and I swallow to keep it down. My eyes move almost of their own accord, catching on scraps of cloth and hair, trying to tell which and who these people are, and I turn my face away in horror. My hands find Robin, and I clutch at his tunic. He puts his arms around me, and I bury my face in his chest, feeling the tears rise again. How can I do this? How can I put Alice and Father in here?
“There’s Dirty Nick,” Robin says, and I feel the panic rising in me.
“I’m not asking Dirty Nick!” But what choice do we have? A small – no, a large – part of me just wants to put them in the ox-cart and leave them by the churchyard and hope someone comes and buries them for us. But what if no one does?
Robin is looking over my shoulder, into the churchyard.
“There’s someone there,” he says.
He’s right. There’s someone there, where a moment before there was nobody. A man, taller than any of the men I know, standing in the mist by one of the gravestones. He looks like an angel, coming to blow the last trumpet and raise the dead. Or perhaps he is one of the dead, rising from the tomb. The Day of Judgement has come at last, and I can lay down all my burdens and put my future in God’s hands. I should be frightened, I know, but actually what I feel is relief. It’s the same as the feeling you get at the end of a long task, when an adult comes back and takes over the cooking pot or the loom or the plough, and you know that all that effort is lifted out of your hands, that the meal or the cloth or the field may have been worked well or ill, but whatever happens, it’s not your business any more.
I don’t have to worry any more, is what I think, very clearly. I’m so sure of it that when the man turns, I walk easily and happily towards him, the way a Michaelmas pig walks easy and happy towards the woman who has fed him all throughout the long summer, unaware that this day her hand holds not the slop-bowl, but the knife.
He to whom God has given knowledge, And the gift of speaking eloquently, Must not keep silent nor conceal the gift, But he must willingly display it.
Marie de France
Twelfth century
30. Thomas
It’s dark. It’s cold. The rain has been falling on and off all day, and though the last fall was a few hours ago now, the sky is still heavy with clouds. The road – the road all those exiles travelled down from York, all that time ago – is swamped with mud and water. My hose and the hem of my gown are splattered and soaked. When I rub my face, water splashes off my hand and down my sleeve. Every time I lift up my foot, my shoe rubs at the broken skin on my heel and my feet squelch. On either side is farmland – beans and oats and barley like Father’s strips. It’s still harvest, so they should all be full of people, but again and again we pass fields with the yellow barley heavy and abandoned. The harvest is
rotting away ungathered. Cows moan in the fields, their udders swollen and unmilked. Sheep with what looks like the murrain lie untended in the grass. In one field, all the cows are dead and the stench is astounding. Foxes and ravens are gorging themselves on the carrion, greedy and fearless and unchecked.
In the doorway of a house, a little boy Maggie’s age watches us pass. He’s got mud all down his tunic, and his face is red with crying. I wonder where his parents are, if they’re still alive, if there’s anyone looking after him at all. But there must be someone, mustn’t there? There must be.
My feet hurt. My legs hurt. It’s all right for Thomas, he’s got a horse. It’s the most beautiful horse I’ve ever seen, a black palfrey with a white diamond on its nose. He has Mag up on the seat in front of him. She’s half asleep, lolling back into his arms with one finger and the edge of the blanket stuck half out of her mouth. Ned, stumping along beside me, is close to his limit.
“My feet hurt. Aren’t we there yet?”
I want to shake him, but I’m so tired I can’t manage more than a, “Be quiet, can’t you?”
Not because I care what Thomas thinks. Not because I don’t want Ned to mess up this journey as much as possible. Just because if I hear any more complaining, I think I’ll turn round and run back home.
Thomas sits on his horse, pretending he can’t hear us. I suppose he thinks he’s being polite.
Thomas.
I hate him already.
In the saddlebags on either side of the horse is all we’ve been allowed to bring. There’s not much. Most of our things are useful, not precious. We’ve got St Bede, and the dice, and the little wooden animals Father made for Ned and Mag. Mag has Alice’s coloured beads round her neck and the pewter badge that came from Duresme Cathedral. She wanted to bring Father and Alice’s bed, but Thomas laughed and said it wouldn’t fit on the horse.
“But it’s our bed,” said Maggie. I knew exactly how she felt. I wanted to ask if we could take Alice’s red salt-pot, and her green flagon that came all the way from France, but I didn’t want Thomas to think I was a fool.
Thomas is a rich merchant in York.
He probably has whole chambers full of green flagons from France.
I know I ought to be grateful to Thomas. He spent hours helping us dig the narrow grave where Father and Alice are lying now. He and Robin lifted them on to the cart, and off at the other end, so I didn’t even have to touch them. I am grateful. I am. Now that the bodies are gone, everything is easier, though Thomas said that the grave is too shallow to leave the corpses in safely for long.
“When all this is over,” he said, “your priest will have to sort all this chaos out.”
“Our priest is dead,” I said.
Robin and Thomas and I dug the graves, with Father’s spade and another from Simon the priest’s house. It took hours. We brought Maggie and Ned down to the churchyard, and I could see Thomas watching them, though he didn’t say anything. Robin was looking at Thomas like he was Jesus resurrected and given a broadsword and a chest of gold.
“You know a lot about graves,” he said. “Are you a sexton?” which was a ridiculous thing to say. Anyone could see Thomas wasn’t a sexton, with his beaver-fur hat and his mantle lined with moleskin.
Thomas shook his head and said, “No, I work in wine. I have two ships that bring wine from France – though the docks are closed now, of course.” As soon as he said ships and France, I could see Robin was gone. His eyes never left Thomas, all the time they were digging. It was like there was a little bell-ringer in his head, ringing it out, France, France, France.
France is where the pestilence came from. It’s people like Thomas with his wine ships who brought it to England.
Robin didn’t care, though. He insisted on taking Thomas back to our barn, insisted on pouring him the last of our ale and cutting him thick slices of our cheese and our ham.
“What are we going to eat when that’s gone?” I whispered.
“Isabel!” Robin looked shocked. “He’s just dug two graves for us – we can give him some ham!”
I knew we could. I knew I was being ridiculous. We’re not short of barley or oats, and the cow and the garden are full of milk and herbs. But I could see what was going to happen. Thomas with his kind eyes looking all round the barn, noticing the straw mattress and the hearth, noticing that we haven’t invited him into the house, because I can’t think about what that house looks like yet. He was going to be kind and charming, and end up taking charge of everything. And while I was grateful for his help, our other problems were ours, not his.
“You’re sleeping out here?” he said, casually.
“Just while Father and Alice were sick,” I told him.
“I expect we’ll go back inside now,” said Robin. And I could see the thought trailing off as he said it.
“Nice enough out here,” said Thomas. He looked so polite and . . . dignified, sitting there on Maggie’s hay-bed, that I found myself liking him a little, before I could stop myself.
Mags was still shy of the stranger, burying her head in my skirts and peering out at him from behind fistfuls of cloth. Ned was like Robin – fascinated.
“Do you live in a manor house?”
“Not quite.” Thomas stretched out his legs – he had soft leather boots with buckles that glistened even through the mud. “I have a house, and a big shop in York.”
“Do you have children?” said Ned. I could hear him wondering what they looked like – if they had leather boots, and horses, and if they sailed on ships to France too. But Thomas’s face shut itself up like the big chest in the tithing barn with the seven locks and the seven brass keys.
“Not any more.”
“Did they all die—” Ned began, but Robin kicked him.
Thomas steepled his hands and looked at us over the top of them.
“Do you have someone to go to?” he asked. “Other family?”
“There’s my grandmother . . .” said Robin, his voice trailing away. Robin’s grandmother is small and blind and gnarled like an old tree. Her hands are twisted with rheumatics, and her back is bent forward like the beams in a roof. She lives with Margaret’s brother’s wife in a poky little house – Margaret’s brother died years and years ago. There might be room there for Robin, but there isn’t bread or room for us all.
“We don’t have anyone,” Ned said. “Isabel’s going to look after us, aren’t you, Isabel?” He looked at me, and I felt sick. I ducked my head, pretending to fuss about Mag’s long tangle of yellow hair.
“That’s right,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt.
Thomas was quiet. I could feel his eyes watching me, and I looked up, staring straight into his long, sallow face. It looked tired, I realized. There was something about it which reminded me of the monk swaying with sleeplessness on his old farm horse, which reminded me of Simon stumbling over the Latin in the mass with his yellow hair all wild and sleep-tousled. I looked down. I didn’t want this well-spoken stranger tangled up with my memories of kindness and bravery. Though I supposed he might have been brave. Burying two victims of the pestilence.
Thomas’s fingers were playing with the hilt of his sword. I’d seen Ned eyeing that sword – the sheath was worked with silver and bronze: leaves, with little animals peering out behind them. My mind couldn’t focus on Thomas, couldn’t give him the attention I knew he deserved. My thoughts were going round and round and round in the same old rabbit-tracks. Alice is dead. Father is dead. What am I going to do? Alice is dead. Father is dead. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What am I going to do?
“There’s space in my house,” said Thomas. I couldn’t really understand what he was saying. Who cared how many rooms he had in his house? “It’s a big, lonely house now so many people have died,” he said. On the other side of me, Robin sat up, all excited, but I barely noticed. “I’ll understand if you want to stay here,” he said. “It’s up to you of course, Isabel, and you, Robin. But the offer
is there if you want it.”
31. York
I’ve never been to York before. I’ve been to several of the towns around our village – to markets, or fairs. Father went all the way to Scotland when he was a soldier. And Alice went to Duresme, to visit the bones of St Bede. But no one’s been to York.
It takes two days’ walking to get there, even with Mag up on Thomas’s horse. By the end of the first morning Ned is moaning about his feet and his legs and a whole lot of other nonsense. If he can work all day through the harvest, he can’t be that tired just from walking.
Ned just doesn’t want to go, same as me.
We spend the night in an inn called The Star, which is horrible. The landlord won’t let us in at first, in case we carry the pestilence. Thomas has to pay him double. And inside it’s dark and smoky, and it stinks – half the servants have run away or are dead, so no one has changed the reeds on the floor or emptied the latrine. Most of the beds in the long bedchamber are empty, but the landlord says we still have to share – Ned and Maggie and me in one, Thomas and Robin in another. I nearly tell Thomas that Robin and I are married and ought to have a bed to ourselves, but in the end I don’t. Outside of the barn, the wedding feels like a game we played a long ago time, when we were still children. I’m shy of telling Thomas about it in case he laughs at us. Not that I think he would – he’s been very respectful so far.
But I don’t trust him.
It’s evening of the second day when we get to the city gates. The road is quiet – like nobody lives there. There’s still a watchman on the gate, but he just nods when he sees Thomas and waves him in.
“Isn’t there a toll?” says Ned. Father always has to pay a toll when we go to Felton – one to enter the town and another to pitch our stall at the market.
“Shhh,” I say. I’m exhausted by Ned and Maggie and all their questions, all the way here, on and on, like a saw against my skull. “Don’t be so stupid. Thomas must be a freeman of the city.”
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