This burn elicited a chorus of good-natured jeers from most of the lads in the class, but Toby didn’t mind. Willis was a legend and never meant anything maliciously.
‘Would it be the Black Death, sir?’ He knew the answer already because he’d just been googling it under the table, but he was angling after something more local that might not be on the Internet and he figured that a history teacher would be the person most likely to know.
Willis put down his pen and regarded him warily. The classroom psy-ops tactic of distracting the teacher by getting them to talk about their pet subject (which in Willis’ case was medieval Europe) was standard and well known to both sides, but he obviously decided to indulge them for a moment. ‘Yersinia pestis,’ he said. ‘Came to Great Britain in the bellies of fleas on the backs of rats in the holds of traders’ ships from Gascony. That’s in France. In three years it killed somewhere between a third and a half of the population.’
‘How does it kill you, sir?’ asked Shereen Patel.
‘It attacks the lymph nodes in your armpits, throat and groin…’ Willis paused to wait for the boys’ sniggering to subside ‘…and your body’s overwhelming immune response causes septic shock and catastrophic loss of blood pressure, leading to internal bleeding, gangrene, hence the ‘black’ in the name, multiple organ failure, and – unless someone gets antibiotics into you – death.’
‘So it’s curable?’
‘Today? Easily. In the fourteenth century, not so much. The people then had literally no idea what germs were, or even that something as basic as washing your hands could help prevent the spread of disease. They thought it was a punishment from God, so everything they did to try to stop it involved finding out what had upset God and making him happy again. The usual minorities were blamed, obviously – Jews, Romany gypsies – and some people called flagellants even took to beating themselves with whips to atone for whatever sins they might have committed. They had some mad ideas about cures, too, such as eating crushed emeralds or ten-year-old treacle.’
‘What’s treacle?’ someone asked.
Willis took a deep breath and carried on. ‘So yes, antibiotics, which means that you don’t have to worry about catching it. What you need to understand is that the whole of society changed as a result of so many people dying. You know all those films about survivors in a post-apocalyptic society? Well, you’re living in one, just a few hundred years after the fact. Because labour was so short, peasants could choose who they worked for and earn a lot more money. More women could find jobs and make themselves wealthy and influential, choose to marry later in life or even not at all. The lower classes became more confident and less inclined to simply do what they were told, which led to protests like the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 in which thousands of poor people tried to rise up against their feudal overlords. Just like?’ He waited for someone to make the connection.
‘Russia in 1905?’ queried Sean Davis.
‘Sweetie for that man,’ said Willis, and tossed him a boiled sweet from the jar on his desk, which was probably against health and safety but nobody cared. ‘And so we come full circle and you’re back to revising Stalin. Damn, I’m good. Get back on with your work.’
After the lesson, Toby caught up with Willis in the corridor outside.
‘Sir, about the Black Death.’
‘Yes? Please don’t tell me that you’re running a fever.’
‘No, sir. I was just wondering if you knew anything about it that was a bit more, well, local.’
‘You mean Haleswell? Not myself personally, but I think I was given something a few months ago by the neighbourhood amateur historical society. Come with me and I’ll see if I can dig it up.’
Toby followed him to the door of the staff room where he waited until Willis reappeared with a small photocopied leaflet. ‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘Fill your boots.’
It was a very ordinary A5 flyer inviting anybody who was interested in learning about the history of the Village Trust to a monthly meeting of the Haleswell Historical Society, so far so boring, but it was the details of the venue and the society’s chief secretary which made him catch his breath:
Stone Cottage.
Stephanie Drummond.
And hadn’t he seen boxes of books stacked in the lockup where all the old lady’s belongings were being stored? She must have known all kinds of secrets about the village, including the dead girl. Grinning, he folded the leaflet and stuffed it into the pocket of his blazer, then went off to lunch.
* * *
The sin of Sodom, Toby read, was not, as traditional conservative interpretations would have it, that of rampant homosexuality. Apart from anything else, consider the simple practicalities: if homosexuality was so prevalent that the entire population of the city was considered to be polluted by it, how could it sustain a population? Where did their children come from? It may be possible to argue that the men of Sodom kept wives for procreation and had homoerotic relationships for recreation, but that is a far cry from a mob threatening to gang-rape the angels that Lot was sheltering in his home. Lot’s decision to offer his daughters to the mob is extremely problematic, obviously, but why would he have thought that the men would be interested if their motivation was homosexual gratification?
A violent mob assault of this kind isn’t about sexual pleasure, or even about control, but about humiliating the outsider, dominating the stranger. Regardless of whatever other sinful, lustful, or idolatrous practices the Sodomites had previously engaged in, it is this violation of their scriptural obligation to offer hospitality to strangers which is the root cause of the Lord’s displeasure, and the cataclysm which followed – a cataclysm which destroyed not only the men in the mob, but every human being in the city, wives and children included. Hospitality is a sacrament, to be profaned at great cost.
Toby closed the book – New Interpretations of the Old Testament – and put it in his school bag with the others. Then he checked the time on his phone and swore; he’d been squirrelled away here amongst the dusty furniture and storage crates containing Stephanie Drummond’s belongings for over two hours, and if he stayed any longer his mum and dad would be pissed. He’d told them that he was going out to the cinema with Krish and Sean, but even so he was cutting it close. They were still very wary of letting him out on his own, except that he’d managed to convince them that he wouldn’t be on his own, would he? He’d be with his mates. Thankfully they were more keen on him settling in than worried about him getting hurt again. Or in trouble. He knew they thought he was getting into fights again.
He looked around at the dim, cavernous space cluttered with boxes and furniture shrouded in dust sheets. Anyone could be hiding in here with him. Anything. He closed the main compartment of his bag and reached into the outside pocket, his fingertips touching the reassuring cool hardness of the knife that had been sitting there since yesterday. It was the small one that his mum used for cutting up vegetables. In the long run he would have to replace it with something that his mum wouldn’t miss, but it would do for the moment.
He didn’t plan on getting into any more fights, but he didn’t plan on having to take it like a pussy, either.
Stealing the key from the cupboard under the stairs had been almost as easy as taking the knife. So, surprisingly, had been finding the information he needed, since Mrs Drummond had bookmarked everything significant she’d found with slips of paper and her own marginal notes, just like the one which had fallen out of the bureau. Most were obscure academic annotations, but one had been a revelation:
She waits outside the stones, it read. Endlessly patient, She circles them like a wolf circling a campfire. If it should burn low…
It meant that the old woman had seen the dead girl too, which meant that She was real and he wasn’t going mental.
He wasn’t sure that this was a good thing.
There were dozens of books on biblical interpretations like this one, plus many more on the supernatural, ghosts, epidemiology, compl
exity theory, UFOs, medieval life and culture, the Black Death in general and the history of Haleswell Parish in particular.
In another book he read: To the people of the fourteenth century, the cause of the Black Death was very simple: God was displeased, and so God had punished humanity just as He had with the Deluge or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. We like to think that we are more rational in this day and age but the media cycle demands a causal, reductionist narrative in which any given disaster can be attributed to a limited number of simplistic ‘faults’, which in turn feeds into the subsequent investigatory process manipulated by politicians so that they are seen to be doing something. According to the Daily Mail, a ‘young boy playing near a colony of infected bats’ was to blame for the Ebola epidemic of 2014. Scapegoating is alive and well and blinds us to the uncomfortable truth that the world is vastly more complex than we can probably ever understand, with the result that some disasters terrify us by appearing to be spontaneous, inevitable, and ultimately inexplicable.
None of it was exactly his ideal choice of reading matter – he didn’t understand most of what he read, for a start – and it had taken him a while to decide on the few that he could carry back to hide in his room.
He pulled down the heavy roller door of the storage unit as quietly as he could, snapped the padlock shut, turned and nearly ran straight into Ms Markes.
‘Hello, Toby,’ she smiled.
Toby gawped.
‘We have CCTV on all our properties,’ she explained, and pointed to the camera that he hadn’t even suspected was there. ‘In case of burglars. I was just making sure.’
‘I was just… er…’
‘You know that if there’s anything you want – anything at all – you only have to ask, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I, that is, I wasn’t…’
‘Give my regards to Trish, won’t you?’
He mumbled something, clutched his school bag tightly and fled.
16
HESTER
MAY 1349
HESTER’S OLDEST BROTHER ALAN CAME TO HIS FATHER on the evening of the bloodletting, and she saw the first real, serious argument between them. Alan had married a girl called Margaret from neighbouring Ulverley; she had brought to the marriage three cows from her own father’s dairy herd, and while Alan worked them she was busy producing her own domestic herd in the form of a son and a daughter, with a third on the way. Hester relished being an aunt and whenever she had time to spare, which was precious little, she enjoyed going to Meg’s house and looking after her niece and nephew. In the fullness of time she looked forward to her own children playing with their older cousins, and seeing the Attlowe family growing ever closer-knit in love as the years passed.
There was not much love evident in the conversation between her brother and her father that evening, however.
‘You cannot allow that man to spend another hour in our village!’ Alan insisted. He was pacing back and forth before their fire, plainly nervous at having to confront his father. ‘You put all of our lives at risk – those and the lives of our children!’
‘Did William Priour send you thus to me?’ demanded Dick Attlowe. ‘Did he think that my son could sway me when he could not?’ He squinted at Alan with disdain. ‘How little you must think of me. Do you not at least respect the wisdom of Father Cuthbert?’
‘Cuthbert is a man of God, and a good man besides, but he is not a father. For pity’s sake, he is barely older than Henry!’ Henry, who had been mending one of the leather ox traces quietly in a corner, turned crimson at his name being dragged into the argument. Hester herself carried on with her sewing, head down, hoping not to be noticed, while Cristina Attlowe glanced anxiously between her husband and her eldest son, reluctant to interfere on either side.
‘Father Cuthbert understands that we have a responsibility to more than just our families in this matter. I had hoped you would understand that. I hoped to have raised you better.’
‘It is not just me. Many of the tenants are worried. Simon Yonge has already left with his family, and three serfs have run away. More will leave if you do not act.’
‘So there is talk behind my back, is there?’
‘God’s nails!’ shouted Alan in exasperation. ‘Is that all you can think of? What is said of you? Yes, there is talk behind your back! It would be to your face had you the wit to listen!’
Their mother tried to come between them then. ‘Alan…’
‘Wife, be still!’ snapped her husband. He stood and folded his arms in front of his broad chest, glaring at his son, red-faced, his own temper on the edge of boiling over. ‘It shames me to hear you speak thus, to blaspheme before your mother and sister. To demonstrate so weak a faith. To talk of fear. It shames me.’
Alan’s voice was low and dangerous as he said, ‘You were not too shamed to undervalue my rent for the manor this year gone and pocket the difference for yourself.’
Dick Attlowe’s rage finally overspilled. ‘Get out!’ he roared, snatching up his reeve’s staff and brandishing it in Alan’s face. ‘Get out of my home before I beat you out!’
Cristina flew to her son, putting her body as a shield before him, pushing towards the cottage door. ‘Go!’ she said. ‘You’ve said enough. Just go now!’
Alan went, cursing into the night, while Dick went into the barn and took his rage out on some piles of straw, and Hester and Henry stared at each other with terrified eyes as their mother sobbed quietly in the open doorway.
* * *
The following day, Haleswell closed its border against them.
The boy that Cuthbert had sent to St Sebastian’s early that morning with a leather bottle to bring back more of the well’s holy water returned with empty hands and a bruise purpling his brow. Wide-eyed and babbling, he ran straight to Hester’s father, who was reckoning the village’s accounts at his table in the house’s main chamber. Hester was sweeping on the other side of the central hearth, but not so busily that she couldn’t eavesdrop on the conversation.
‘They have blocked the road, sir!’ cried the boy. He was a child of one of the villeins, and as such she did not know his name.
‘Who have?’ asked her father. ‘Bandits?’
‘No! The men of Haleswell! They stand in the road in great number, armed with pitchforks and sharpened poles! They demanded that I halt a good half furlong from them or be driven off, on account of the pestilence. They have placed a great stone in the middle of the road, hollowed out like a horse’s trough, and they say that if we desire trade with them, goods and payment should be exchanged in the stone at a safe distance. I said that I had not come to trade but to seek the healing water from the well just as I had yesterday, at Father Cuthbert’s behest, at which they replied there was no water, food or protection in Haleswell for anyone except those from Haleswell, and that I should go back.’
Dick Attlowe frowned in puzzlement. ‘There must have been some misunderstanding. You have not conducted your errand properly. Go to them again, and do not fail lest you earn a whipping.’
‘Not I!’ said the boy. Her father aimed a cuffing blow at his head but he dodged it and ran, wailing.
‘Very well,’ her father grunted. ‘I shall go myself.’
Hester had never seen her father so outraged. Even when as reeve he’d had to beat one of the serfs for stealing or shirking their duties, he’d done it apologetically, as if concerned that the miscreant should know that there was no rancour in the beating; nothing personal. This he seemed to take personally.
He took up the staff that Sir Roger’s bailiff had given him as a symbol of his authority, collected a number of the men, including Henry, and set out that very moment. Her mother tried to stop him, but her efforts were no more use than they had ever been when her father had made up his mind.
It was only a mile to Haleswell, a short journey by foot, but the group did not return until later that afternoon. The reason was obvious the moment Hester saw them appear on the road beyond the mill
: her father was limping severely, dragging his left leg and being supported with an arm across the shoulders of John Hastynge on one side and her brother Henry on the other. Henry carried the broken pieces of his reeve’s staff in his other hand. Their father’s upper tunic was caked in blood, with more of it matting his hair and caking his face, which was swollen with bruises.
Hester and her mother rushed to help carry him into the house. He had lost several teeth, had a four-inch gash in his scalp and his leg seemed to be broken in more than one place; it flopped hideously as they manoeuvred him onto his bed and his screams were like no sound she had ever heard her father make. In response to their tearful enquiries he was sullen, cursing them for every jolt, and even though she told herself it was just the pain speaking, the way he turned his face away from his wife and daughter made her think that something much deeper had been broken too – something in his soul.
‘How could they dare?’ he kept repeating. ‘We are freemen. It is our right to seek the protection of our lord and the Church.’ His voice shook with what Hester at first took to be fury, but quickly realised was a kind of bafflement. This development seemed to shock him more than the coming of the plague; disease was to be expected, a punishment of the Lord to be endured without question or complaint, but this wilful rebellion of man against his neighbour was somehow worse.
She prayed harder than she ever had in her life that night, and cried herself to sleep listening to his whimpers and groans in the bedchamber below her while her mother tried to comfort him in vain.
* * *
Without the healing water from Haleswell it took the stranger three more days to die, by which time Father Cuthbert was stricken with fever himself.
Finding that their priest was sickening, folk began to mutter that the Lord had abandoned Clegeham, and half the freemen quit the village altogether, packing what belongings they could into sacks which they carried, for few of them were wealthy enough to afford a cart. Several of the serfs slunk away in the night, though their fate was more uncertain, since abandoning their plots was a serious crime punishable by flogging. Clegeham was tiny, barely a hundred souls at the best of times, and their desertion was a hard blow. Most of the refugees took the Stratford Road south towards Warwick or east towards Ulverley but a few attempted to skirt Haleswell to the north and thereby come to the larger settlement of Birmingham. Whether or not they succeeded, Hester never heard.
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