The Plague Stones

by James Brogden

  Warily, he approached the window again, expecting to find the garden empty.

  She was still there, still staring. However, the ground around her was busy now with small, dark shapes, tumbling about her bare feet as if playing. Rats. The sound of their chittering reached him clearly.

  She raised her arm, and beckoned to him.

  Come down.

  ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘No, this can’t be real.’ Toby crept back to bed, wincing at the creaking of the floorboards, convinced that either that sound or his own shouting would have awoken one of his parents, and that they’d come to ask him what all the fuss was about and why was he wandering around in the middle of the night? There was no way he was going to tell them that he’d seen someone in the back garden. He knew exactly how it would look: more nightmares of the burglary; obviously their son was more traumatised than they’d thought; time to take him to see the men in white coats. That was never going to happen. Besides, there was a passive-IR security light looking over the garden; if there really was anyone there, the light would have come on. It had to have been the after-effects of whatever he’d been dreaming. He reached for his phone, put his headphones on and then slipped himself deeply under the covers, trying to hide in the darkness and his music.

  But still he heard the chittering, like delicate fingers tapping lightly on his window.

  8

  HESTER

  APRIL 1349

  WHEN FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD HESTER ATTLOWE WAS sure that the rest of her family were asleep she crept out of bed, pulled on her woollen dress and a pair of soft leather slippers, and went to see the stranger sleeping in her father’s barn.

  Getting out of the sleeping loft was easy enough; as the only daughter in the family she had the space behind the ladder to herself, nestled like a bird in the comfortable angle formed by the floor and the underside of the steeply sloping thatched roof. Her brother Henry occupied the space in front of the ladder, so there was nobody to disturb as she rolled off her straw-filled mattress and tiptoed towards the hatch. His side of the loft space was thick with the warm and yeasty fug of ale farts.

  She caught her breath and froze as the floorboards creaked, but all that happened was that Henry grunted and flopped over onto his other side, snorting like a wallowing sow. She shouldn’t have worried – he was so drunk that nothing was likely to waken him short of the End of Days. As were her mother and father, asleep and snoring in the room below. There was neither candle nor window, but she knew every inch of her home and proceeded by touch to the top of the ladder without stumbling or knocking anything over.

  The ladder creaked too, and she paused midway down in the pitch-darkness, a few feet above her parents’ heads, listening for any change in their breathing which might indicate that she’d disturbed them. There was none. Theirs was the large wood-framed bed with the panels that her father had paid to have carved with vines and flowers – the finest in the village. Dick Attlowe was neither as rich as Gideon the miller nor as important as Father Cuthbert, and their village was really little more than a hamlet which struggled in the shadow of larger and wealthier neighbours, but he was generous with gifts and that generosity had won him as fine a reputation as any lord’s, at least to Hester’s mind. People would give the shirts off their backs for love of her father, though sometimes it was for fear of his reeve’s staff too. If he caught her sneaking around at night like this she was sure to get a beating.

  Hester eased herself the rest of the way down the ladder and slipped through her parents’ curtain-door into the main room. There was a little light here, a ruddy glow from the embers in the central hearth for which she was grateful. She would never have been able to make it across the room in darkness, since the floor was covered in the sleeping, snoring, drunken lumps of her neighbours.

  Like all the houses in Clegeham her home was cruck-built, the ‘crucks’ being tall A-frames made from entire tree trunks sawn lengthways and propped together, rising to the apex of the roof in one sweep and then braced and reinforced with timbers, walled with wattle and daub, roofed with thatch. The simplest huts had two crucks and the bay between; room for living and working below, sleeping above. Larger cottages had three crucks, and so two bays, like that of Nicholas the smith, whose forge took up one half of his home. The Attlowes’ home had four crucks, which gave them three bays; the only other structures in Clegeham larger than that were the stone-built mill and church. On one end of the house were the bedrooms from which she had just come. The other end was a barn where Dick Attlowe’s plough and two prized oxen were kept at night. In the middle was the main household workspace where Hester did the mending while her mother Cristina cooked the family’s food and brewed their ale – and on festive occasions it was also the closest thing Clegeham had to an alehouse.

  This year St George’s Day had been celebrated with particular fervour. Rumours of the pestilence had been gathering for almost a year like smoke; at first, nothing more than a wisp or two of outbreaks in Weymouth and Bristol – places on the coast that might as well have been on the other side of the ocean, for certainly nobody from Clegeham would ever have travelled so far. Then the pall of it grew throughout Michaelmas as travellers brought tales from London of whole streets full of corpses, their flesh blackened with rot and bulging with tumours that wept pus and blood. At Easter came news of deaths in Worcester to the south and Birmingham to the north – not exactly on their doorstep but close enough for the smoke of fear to thicken about them, saturating their clothes and seeping into the walls of their homes. They breathed it in and exhaled it into the faces of their neighbours, so they prayed for protection. Father Cuthbert shepherded their souls in the ways of righteousness, and however disturbing was the news from places where people’s ways were strange, the villagers of Clegeham slept soundly in the knowledge that their steadfast faith would be rewarded, and that the Lord would keep them from harm.

  St George’s Day was therefore a chance to forget, momentarily – or at least mask the fear with celebration. Spring was a lean time anyway, with food stores running low before harvest, and the last harvest had been particularly wet which only made it worse, but those who could be spared from the fields cut flowering branches of may and blackthorn to decorate the village houses and church. Gideon the miller began baking cakes of white flour rather than the black rye bread which was all the villagers could normally afford. Wives and mothers brewed up in their homes ale enough to fill every jug and tun in the village. Ordinarily they would have travelled on the Monday to celebrate with their neighbours in the larger village of Haleswell, where there was a tavern and dancing on their green, but this year the people of Clegeham stayed close to home. The decision was unspoken, hidden in the smoke of fear.

  Hester started to pick her way across the room, and spotted the sleeping form of Robert, the miller’s son. When she’d been sent to the mill by her mother for a bag of malt she’d tried very hard not to stare at him, but he hadn’t made it easy, shovelling great loads of grain into the hopper with a broad-bladed wooden shovel, the sinews standing out in his forearms and his hair all floppy in his eyes. He’d seen her staring, and grinned.

  ‘Will you dance with me, after, Hester Attlowe?’ he asked.

  She hmphed at him in a bid to regain her composure. ‘I know very well what kind of dance you have in mind, Robert Hicking,’ she retorted, and turned away. Robert the miller’s son had a pretty leg, that was true enough, but he did not have her heart.

  Clegeham had no tavern, and not much of a green, at that – more of an empty space formed by the triangle of the mill, chapel, blacksmith, and haphazard scattering of houses between. At its centre, as if anchoring the buildings, stood a large stone which was whitewashed and decked with garlands of blossom. Father Cuthbert – the young priest who spent more time in his own fields than at the pulpit – blessed it with water from the spring in Haleswell, and they danced around it. In the light of a great bonfire and to the music of wooden flutes and drums they wove in and o
ut of each other in twirling, skipping steps, passing hand-to-hand, ducking under each other’s arms and spinning behind each other’s waists. Hester felt as if the springing turf itself was lifting and propelling her along, her friends and neighbours spinning by in grasp and pull, release and skip, their grins as wide as hers. Dorrie, the girl with the harelip who made beautiful beads; and Timothy, who knew the trick of charming blackbirds; and Janot, who was so strong he once carried a lame calf five miles; and Agnes, whose hair looked like spun gold; and Hugh, the blacksmith’s cousin – and a dozen more, and their fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters. She knew all their names and their lives as they knew hers, and the weaving of their steps was the weaving of her life with theirs and theirs with hers. And yes, she twirled with Robert the miller’s son and let him steal some kisses, and even stole a few for herself. She was fourteen – old enough to be thinking of marriage in a handful of years, allowing that her father should find a man he considered suitable, but while she was yet young enough to be dismissed as a child she saw no harm in dancing with whomever she pleased, be it miller’s son or squire. The Black Death might fall on them tomorrow, but she thanked the Lord for today.

  Daylight faded and the lingering dusk seemed to coil out of the ground like mist to wreathe about their legs while the sky held the last of the fireglow for a luminous moment, until it too was gone. A thin rain set in from the south and the villagers went – shadows staggering on dance-exhausted legs, arms about each other’s shoulders, laughing and gasping – to the Attlowes’ cottage for ale and simnel cake. Those who could not fit inside gathered as a group by the doorway to bask in the beer-rich warmth of crowded bodies that spilled out while Hester and a few of the older daughters of other families went about with earthen ewers and jugs so that no cup was drained empty.

  She was tossing a bowl of slops into the night when she saw the shape of a man in the dripping shadows and shrieked, dropping the bowl.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said, and stepped forward, meagre light from the doorway catching his features. Features she did not know. A stranger. ‘I meant not to startle you. I have travelled long today and am bone-weary. Is this the village of the Holy Well?’

  Hester shook her head. ‘You are short of that by a mile yet.’ His accent was as strange as the fashion of his hat, and he wore a cloak fastened close against the rain with a gleaming brooch. Travellers often passed through Clegeham, but as Hester’s surprise at being startled melted away she found that he was by far the most interesting she had seen in a long while.

  The man’s shoulders slumped and he wiped a hand over his dripping face. ‘Then I have been beguiled. They swore it were no more than a day’s journey. May I shelter in your alehouse for the night?’

  Hester murmured something about going to fetch her father, took up the bowl and ducked back inside, where she found him and young Father Cuthbert laughing together with John Naissh, the bailiff from Haleswell. She did not like Bailiff Naissh. He had lost his wife in childbirth a year gone and Hester could see the way he looked at her – it was an appraising look, the way a farmer might look at a cow and wonder how many calves could be sired on her. The fact that her father answered to him only made it worse.

  ‘Papa,’ she said. ‘And, Father,’ she added, ducking her head before the priest. ‘There is a stranger y-comen, outside, seeking our hospitality.’

  ‘What manner of man?’ asked her father.

  ‘A traveller,’ she shrugged. ‘One who is wet and weary, that is all I know.’

  ‘Just one?’

  ‘For aught that I could tell, but if he had companions they will all be drowned rats alike and we shall see them off with a broom straight enough.’

  He laughed and kissed her brow. ‘I will see this King of Rats.’ But as he put down his mug Hester’s mother arrested him with a slim hand on his wrist.

  ‘Husband,’ she said. Her face was troubled. ‘These are ill times to be welcoming strangers. Is this wise?’

  ‘It is our Christian duty,’ he replied. ‘I’ll not leave a man out in the dark on a night such as this. What do you say, Father?’

  Dick Attlowe could not pronounce the title ‘father’ without even the ghost of a smile, since Cuthbert himself was no more than nineteen years old. He was dark-eyed and dark-haired, and swallowed his ale heartily. Hester moved quickly to refill his cup before any of the other girls could, hoping that she might catch his eye, but he thanked her with a chaste politeness that tore at her heart. ‘As Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Hebrews,’ he declaimed, ‘be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’

  ‘Then shall we be doubly blessed,’ chuckled Bailiff Naissh, looking straight at Hester. ‘For we are already in the presence of one heavenly creature.’ He tipped her a lazy wink, and grinned.

  Dick Attlowe kissed his wife’s fingers and folded them back into her palm. ‘I will see the stranger, and if he is a godly man he will be welcome under my roof.’

  ‘And if he brings the pestilence?’ Hester’s mother pleaded. ‘You will risk our lives and our children’s lives for a stranger?’

  ‘What pestilence shall we fear, obeying the Lord’s gospel? How shall I refuse charity to a stranger at my door when tomorrow I may be the stranger at his? If it be His will that the pestilence comes here then we will suffer it and enter into His grace with clean souls.’

  Cristina Attlowe pulled her hand away. ‘Well, if and until that shall come to be, your guest shall have here the barn and you will attend on him yourself. My child will not. Hester, come.’ Together, mother and daughter gathered up the ale bowl and cups and left the men to their drinking. The revels were not yet done, for those that remained were the hardiest of drinkers (or else the most reluctant to return to their own wives), and so Hester was unable to see the stranger welcomed.

  ‘But, Mother,’ she teased, pausing halfway up the ladder to the sleeping loft. ‘What if it really is an angel that sleeps under our roof?’

  Her mother hmphed, unappreciative of her attempt at humour. ‘He’ll be angel enough if he simply pays for his board, though with your father welcoming him I would not be surprised if he left with even more gifts. Probably one of our oxen.’ She looked up at Hester, who was surprised by the glittering depths of dark anxiety in her mother’s eyes. ‘You’re not to greet him, or talk to him, or linger in his company, do you hear?’

  ‘But, Mother…’

  ‘No! I know you, my girl. You are too curious for your own good. When he’s on the road away from here with his back to us you can look to see if he has any wings then.’

  Hester stomped up the ladder to the sleeping loft. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I will not.’

  In the safety and secrecy of her bed, she reached into the straw stuffing and felt for her one true treasure: a pewter pilgrim badge given her by Cuthbert on his return from Canterbury. It was small, the size of a baby’s palm, and exquisitely detailed in the shape of a sailing ship, but even in the dark she could tell its shape with her fingertips, and feel the shine of it when she brought it up to her lips. She could never look at it in daylight, however – she could not risk other people seeing it. She cared nothing for her own reputation, but whether she liked it or not Cuthbert was now their village priest, and she loved him too much to risk the shame to him.

  The stranger had worn something like it pinning his cloak, and Hester was seized with a burning curiosity to see whether it was of the same fashion. Her mother would find ways of keeping her busy and out of the way come morning, and besides, she was only going to have a quick look and then come straight back to bed.

  She pretended to sleep while first her brother Henry retired, then her father, listening to the murmured argument of her parents. Her mother was from Hereford, close enough to Wales, it was said, to have some of that folk’s wildness in her, because although she’d acquiesced to her husband’s will readily enough in front of the other men, in the privacy of their bedroom it was another matter.
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  ‘I am the reeve,’ Hester heard her father protest. ‘It is my duty to set an example for the others.’

  ‘You are one of Naissh’s many reeves,’ her mother pointed out. ‘It is true, you were elected by your neighbours because you are an honest man and fair to all. That is one of the reasons why I love you. But if they want moral instruction then they should look to Cuthbert. Let him worry about their souls, and you worry about their work.’

  After her parents’ voices had become snores, Hester listened to the sounds of the household diminishing as those guests too drunk to make their way home slept in the straw of the family room, laughing and chatting and finally settling into silence.

  She stood before them now in the shifting red ember light, and for a sickening moment she was certain that the people lying before her weren’t just asleep, but actually dead – victims of the pestilence – and that if she were to step over them she would see blackened fingertips clawed in their final death agonies as if reaching out to grasp her ankle as she passed, to pull her down amongst them where she would stare into their glassy eyes and smell the pus weeping from the swollen buboes in their armpits and throats, corrupting their voices as they mocked her with rot-clotted laughter…

  Hester whimpered, and nearly ran for the ladder back to her safe nest in the roof.

  No. She would see the ‘angel’.

  Steeling herself, she stepped around the supine bodies, who she saw now were breathing quite peacefully and very much alive. Thankfully none of them was John Naissh; he had left soon after the arrival of the stranger, wending his drunken way back along the mile of road to Haleswell. The thought of him being here, asleep on her floor, to awaken unexpectedly and see her, and what he might think… She shuddered. In the embers of the fire she kindled a stub of candle, and by its wavering light crossed to the other side of the room and the door to the barn. She held her breath as she lifted up the heavy wooden latch, and winced at the creaking as she eased the door open just wide enough to slip through, convinced that someone in the room behind her would wake up and demand to know what she was doing, but nobody did.