by Adam Roberts
The door closed again, and could be secured by a padlock through the two metal hoops - closed, but not locked. ‘We must find the key,’ said Eleanor; but this proved no easy matter. It was Bates’s opinion that the key must have been in the possession of the beard-faced Frenchie officer, for he had evidently been in command. Voicing this opinion was tantamount, it seemed, to volunteering to go and pick this corpse’s pocket; and no quantity of bluster or complaint on Bates’s part shifted this duty from his shoulders. ‘Go,’ said Eleanor. ‘We have no time to waste.’ Then she turned to the Dean, who was grinning like a schoolboy, and commanded him to search the servants’ rooms for another padlock and key.
Bates walked again up the silent stairwell. A ghostly silence: it incommoded his manly self-possession. He found himself glancing over his own shoulder. The whole building creaked like a ship at sea. The sound of the surf could be heard as a mocking thing. And there, on the topmost landing, slouched the body of the Frenchman. Bates tried to steel himself, but it was hard. He hunkered down and gingerly prodded the pockets of the man’s uniform greatcoat. He lifted one side of this, a heavy flap of cloth, and tried to insinuate his finger into the waistcoat pocket. But the stomach was pushing hard against the fabric. His flesh felt taut as a drumskin. Cold drum. In at the corner of his eye Bates was aware of the proximity of his face, the ruined and blistered face, the eyes rolled up as white as cataract. Bates’s gorge rose. He tasted a thin sourness in the throat.
It was no good.
He thudded back down the stairs gasping. It was no good. It was no good. Eleanor would be displeased. She had set him a task and he had failed. But the rotting flesh! The decay! And yet, as he ran, he was aware of a stiffening inside at the top of his breeches. Oh, how he revolted himself!
Eleanor would be displeased.
‘This morning I was awoken by an assassin,’ he said to himself as he jogged down. ‘Death!’ And the remembered terror, the remembered thrill, roiled in his mind with the general sense of agitation. Of arousal.
A half-hour passed before they abandoned the search. ‘We cannot waste the entire day,’ grumbled the Dean. ‘And I have yet to break my fast! I cannot ransack any more of this hotel’s rooms! There are bodies everywhere - it is an uncleanness. We should leave, and get ourselves into the cleaner air of the countryside.’
‘We must think ahead, husband-to-be,’ said Eleanor prissily. ‘Let us be more than mere refugees.’
‘Perhaps you are worried at becoming a pauper?’ scoffed the Dean. ‘Well, and you might. For you have nothing, madam. But I have much - and once you accept my authority as husband . . .’
‘Here is the key,’ exclaimed Bates. It was trodden into the dirt of the stable-yard floor, not three yards from the door. ‘’Twas here all the while!’
He picked it up and pulled a strand of muddied straw from its shaft: a brass key, nothing more. But Eleanor was at his side, and her fingers had closed about the shaft of it. ‘Now,’ she announced. ‘Let us go!’
‘I have yet to break my fast, Ma’am!’
They set out on their journey after one further bickering. Oh, they were like children. ‘If we are to walk,’ Bates said, ‘then I shall leave my valise here.’ And he ported it and tucked it into a cupboard beneath the main staircase, thinking at some later date to return and reclaim it.
‘Good,’ said the Dean, wheezily. ‘Your hands are free to carry my cases instead.’
‘I shall not!’ said Bates. He spoke, perhaps, more sharply than he was wont; but then again, his nerves had been jangled fierce enough by the morning’s events. The Dean opened his mouth very wide, and then closed it. His face was dark.
‘You forget yourself, sir,’ he said. ‘You were brought on this journey as my assistant!’
‘The nature of the journey has changed, sir!’
‘I am Dean of York!’ the Dean bellowed. ‘I’ll not carry my own bags!’
Bates glanced over at Eleanor, but she seemed amused by this altercation.
‘I’ll not carry them either, sir,’ Bates said, emboldened by the expression on Eleanor’s face.
‘You’ll do as I tell you, sir!’
‘I am not your flunkey, sir!’
‘I am Dean of York!’ the Dean screeched. And then, abruptly, tears slid from his eyes and made his pink cheek to shine in the sunlight. ‘I’m Dean of York,’ he repeated, in quite another tone of voice. ‘I’m an old man! Too old and infirm to carry such baggage - it may be that I’ll not endure the walking . . .’
‘Come come,’ said Eleanor, putting her arm about him and drawing his tubby body into an embrace, as a mother might with a mewling child. ‘Come come. You are in the prime of your maturity. Aeneas was your age when he stepped out to leave Troy - if not older.’
‘Older,’ said the Dean, in a small voice.
‘Come, come, my hero.’
Eventually they stowed the Dean’s cases in the same cupboard as Bates’s, and set off carrying nothing but the basket with its ill assortment of food.
There were bodies everywhere, so much so that they quickly became accustomed to the fact of death all about them. They ate as they walked through the town, chewing leathery strips of dried apple from one of two glass jars; but it was unsatisfying food. They grew thirsty, and although the road out of town, up the hill, ran alongside a chuckling stream, none of them felt secure that the water was potable. There were bodies everywhere, and some lay in the stream, and who knew how many more clogged the path of the water further up. ‘We should have found a pump - we should fill a jar from a well,’ grumbled the Dean.
‘We will find clean water in the countryside,’ said Eleanor.
And they walked on.
Soon enough they reached the top of the rise and were able to look down upon the town and the sea. It was perfectly still. Not a single thread of smoke escaped any of the chimneys. The great blue fray-edged blanket of the sea was tucked up close. The Sophrosyne looked like a toy. ‘How peaceful it looks,’ said Bates.
‘It is the peace of death,’ said the Dean.
They walked on for an hour or more, and then sat themselves down in the lee of a stone wall to eat. The Dean plucked twigs from a hedge, like feathers from a goose, and piled them. ‘Let us set a fire,’ he said, ‘and bake some of these potatoes.’
‘Do you have flint?’ asked Bates in, he thought, a mild voice.
‘Hold your tongue!’ retorted the Dean, his face red. ‘Look to yourself sir!’ he barked ‘Must I think of everything? Why have you not a flint, sir? Why not?’ Bates’s nerves were already jangled. ‘Because sir,’ he retorted, with more heat than was customary for him, ‘I do not smoke. Unlike you sir!’
‘I smoke? I? I do not smoke!’
‘Your snuff, sir—’
‘Snuff,’ screamed the Dean, his face scarlet, ‘is not smoking!’
The wind sobbed distantly, but otherwise there was no sound. Eleanor had her face down as she looked through the basket. Bates avoided the Dean’s eye, but when he glanced up he saw the fellow struggling to calm his temper.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Eleanor, softly. ‘I beg of you not to fight.’
‘Quite right, Ma’am,’ said the Dean, at once. ‘Quite right.’
‘If we cannot light the fire then we must eat the potatoes raw.’
‘Quite right.’
They sat in silence. The Dean, who possessed a small folding knife, passed it to Eleanor, who used it to scrape the skin from her potato. The Dean, and then Bates, followed suit. The silence was broken with the melancholy sound of three people crunching their tubers, without great gusto. ‘It sits,’ said the Dean, in a low voice, ‘ill on my stomach.’
‘Perhaps we will chance upon a finer repast,’ said Eleanor.
‘My stomach dislikes it,’ the Dean said. Then he said: ‘Fetch me some of the dried fruit, Eleanor, to sweeten my guts a peck.’
Eleanor, though Bates noticed her flinch, did as she was bid. ‘We must husband this fruit,’ she warn
ed as she opened the jar. But she passed a piece to both men and took one herself. ‘Or it will all be gone.’
Bates stared across the field, with the hedge running in a trembly line away to his left and the ground all overgrown with weeds. The reality of his situation began to bear itself upon his mind. ‘These are terrible times for England,’ he said.
‘Terrible times,’ agreed the Dean.
‘Pestilence and war - God’s displeasure.’
After a pause, Bates said: ‘Yet I wonder why did that Lilliputian assassin attack me this morn? What would it benefit them my death, I mean?’
‘Perhaps they planned to murder us all in our beds,’ said Eleanor.
They walked on for some few hours more. They followed a road, but it seemed to lead to nowhere but to an empty field. Crossing this folded clogs and bulges of mud about their feet and made walking harder. On the far side was a wood, and they stopped here for a while. It took them an unconscionable time to scrape the mud from their shoes, the Dean complaining shrilly all the while.
They passed through the trees and out the far side and at once came upon a large grave-ditch dug into a field. It was a hundred yards long, though no more than six feet across: a trench, too narrow for a Brobdingnagian. But there was no mystery here: for a line of dead bodies - forty or more - lay on the far side of the trench, ready to be given into the soil and covered over. The bodies lay all on their backs, daring with their white-open eyes the open sky to blink. But the burial had been interrupted; the gravediggers dead themselves, perhaps, or scared away by battle.
‘Let us hurry on,’ said Eleanor, distressed at this sight.
They skirted the trench and made their way to a metalled road. There was enough mud on the base of Bates’s shoes to glue the small stones of this thoroughfare to his feet. He crunched on with the rest of them. The sky began to cloud.
As night began to draw itself around them they looked for some place to spend it; but the only building they encountered was a single-room hut, some peasant’s cot; and at the doorway of this place they found themselves repelled by a fierce stench from inside. ‘Death,’ cried the Dean, dashing backwards. ‘Death!’
There were several bodies on the floor. They walked on, and eventually found a barn-a structure as old as Chaucer, probably, made of planks of black wood so brittle and dry with age that they resembled stale bread. Moss had grown across the floor inside, and this, though not wholly dry, was soft enough to lie down upon. They peeled and ate another raw potato each, and then a piece of leathery fruit. The uncooked potato sat very ill in Bates’s stomach. ‘My future wife - my betrothed and I,’ the Dean announced, pompously, ‘shall sleep here. There’s nothing improper in that.’
‘Of course,’ said Bates, a little too hastily.
‘There is a leaning board. You might want to sleep there.’
‘Outside?’
‘Under the board. I saw it, before. That’s a perfectly well-sheltered space.’
‘I shall sleep in here, Dean,’ said Bates, ‘with you.’
‘It is hardly appropriate!’
‘Come come,’ said Bates, trying for a reasonable tone. ‘These are extraordinary times. You’d not deny me shelter. Think of your Christian duty.’
‘My duty?’ barked the Dean.
‘Be quiet, you growling dogs,’ said Eleanor. But there was a smile on her face. It did not help take away the rankle from Bates’s mood.
‘Yes sir,’ he said, more aggressively. ‘Thrust me out of doors? Whilst you are cosy within? What if it rains?’
‘You dare preach to me, sir? Dare tell me my Christian duty, sir?’
‘It is because you are Dean of York, sir, that I would expect you . . .’
‘Do such words come from your mouth, sir?’
‘And why not? I’ll stay under this roof. It’s humble enough, and you’ll not push me out into the storm like King Lear.’
The Dean’s eyes popped, but he held his tongue. Eleanor looked from the one to the other, with sparkling eyes.
‘My stomach,’ said the Dean, looking at neither of them, ‘does not like this food of unboiled potato. It’s a poor sort of supper. It gives me mal de stomach.’
Bates adopted a conciliatory voice. ‘We are all of us finding this enforced vagrancy a trial, sir. I sympathise.’
But this, for some reason, riled the Dean up again. ‘You sir,’ he cried. ‘Be still, be quiet, do not speak. You are a hypocrite! A whited sepulchre! I despise-I despise . . .’ He had gone red.
‘Henry,’ said Eleanor, coming over. ‘I fear for your health when you allow yourself to be so angered.’
‘This sneaking serpent,’ spluttered the Dean, pointing a trembling finger at Bates.
‘You might suffer an apoplexy,’ said Eleanor.
‘I fail to see,’ said Bates, with some pomposity, ‘what harm I have done to merit such calumnious speech.’
‘Do you think I have not observed you, sir? Do you think I have not seen with my eye - you, you.’
‘Me, me? What, sir? Me, me, what?’
‘Matthew chapter five,’ said the Dean.
It took a moment for the point of the Dean’s words to register with Bates. He scoffed, and fluttered his fingers in the air, but even as he did so his heart was studding in his chest. ‘Thou shalt not commit,’ said the Dean, in a towering voice, ‘adultery.’
‘I have done no such thing!’ squealed Bates. ‘How dare you, sir, a man of God, how dare you accuse—’
‘But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart!’
‘I know the scripture, sir—’
‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee.’
‘Henry!’ said Eleanor sharply.
‘You look at her - she is betrothed to—’
‘Henry!’ said Eleanor, a second time.
But the Dean seemed to have worked himself into some sort of frenzy. Spittle was upon his lips. His large head waggled. ‘For I shall not be able to bear my shame, and thou shalt be as one of the fools in Israel: but rather speak to the king, and he will not deny me to thee,’ he gabbled.
‘Henry!’
‘And Absalom her brother said to her: Hath thy brother Amnon lain with thee? but now, sister, hold thy peace, he is thy brother: and afflict not thy heart for this thing. But Absalom spoke not to Amnon neither good nor evil: for Absalom hated Amnon because he had ravished his sister Thamar.’
‘Henry!’
The Dean rolled over onto his side and clutched at his stomach with cries of ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ Bates was panting. Eleanor went over to the Dean and lay down beside him, putting her arms about his shoulder. Bates took the corner further from them, set his face to the wall and tried to sleep. It was a lengthy time before sleep came.
The morning came wearing a pearl-coloured veil. Bates had slept poorly and his limbs ached, his neck and shoulders especially, but it was a sort of relief to rise, to stretch himself and walk about.
Behind the hut was a small copse, and a trickly stream flowing down through it, where Bates was able to end his thirst. Several varieties of mushroom were growing there, but on the subject of mushrooms Bates knew not the poisonous from the edible, so he let them alone. He went round the side of this little wooden hillock and found a secluded spot to empty his bowels. When he returned to the hut the Dean was standing at the door.
‘Good morning, Mr Bates,’ he said.
‘Good morning, Dean.’ And nothing more was said of the previous night.
Soon enough they started on their way again, walking. They walked a path away from the rising sun, hoping to find a larger road, a turnpike, or some other travellers of whom they could ask directions to York.
They saw nobody at all. They were walking through an emptied land. ‘Has everybody died of the plague?’ asked the Dean. ‘Is this the world picked clean?’
‘We survived the fever, we three,’ Eleanor observed.
‘That is true.’
‘If we survived then others have survived.’
‘I have a fear in my breast,’ said Bates. ‘Rather, a suspicion.’ He waited for the others to ask him what it was, but they trudged on in silence. ‘It is,’ he said, eventually, ‘that the Lilliputians have brought this plague with them from the Pacific hemisphere. I fear that they . . .’
‘Humbug,’ snapped the Dean.
They walked on in silence.
The sun rose through the sky. The three travellers saw a farmhouse further along the road, and their stride picked up at the thought either of begging hospitality from it, or, if it happened to be deserted (as well it might be), of breaking in and taking what they found. It was a two-storey house, long, stone-built under a slate roof. Behind it was piled a towering haystack, which suggested if not plenty then at least a well-managed farm. ‘Come! said Eleanor. ‘There must at least be a stove within. To me a baked potato would be as good as a Fortunatus’ feast.’