by Candace Robb
Owen looked down at the bag with doubt. ‘And who holds these to our faces whilst we bury the dead?’
Magda met his argument with a sniff. ‘Cover thy face, thou contentious Welshman. Provident care when thou canst take it is better than none at all.’ Without more ado, the tiny midwife strode across the dusty yard and stepped into the cottage.
Owen lifted the bag to his face and followed, having found it wise in the past to take Magda’s advice. He ducked through the low doorway.
Within, the cot was dark, the only light coming from chinks in the thatch and walls, illuminating the dust that swirled with their every movement and the flies that swarmed round the four bodies, two children lovingly tucked in the wooden-framed bed beside a woman, and a man lying on the floor near the remnants of a fire. Magda crouched down by the bed, lifted the covers with a stick to examine the bodies. Even through the scented bag Owen smelled the putrefaction, gagged, retreated to the yard to catch his breath.
Magda joined him. ‘’Tis the manqualm, Bird-eye.’
Owen crossed himself. ‘Let us find the child. She might tell us where to find a priest.’
Magda, hands on hips, squinted up into Owen’s good eye. ‘Thou thinkst to find a priest will say the proper prayers? Thou wouldst take such time with this?’
‘They died unshriven, I’ve no doubt. And they should be buried in consecrated ground. ’Tis my duty as a Christian man to do what I may to help them to Heaven. I know it is not your way, Magda, but it is mine. And theirs. I must try.’
Magda did not argue, perhaps in thanks for his agreeing to accompany her on this mission. Heading towards the barn, she paused at the cart. ‘Duncan thought to load his family into the cart and bury them? Take them to the priest? Or had he thought to flee it with them?’ Magda grasped the side of the cart, touched her forehead to it, as if suddenly weary. ‘And the worst of it still to come, Bird-eye. Thy Lucie will work from dawn to dusk, as will Magda, and what availeth it?’
‘Come, Magda. Let us find the child.’ Owen walked past the cart, across the rutted yard to the barn. The horse began once more to whinny and stomp. One ear to the door, Owen sought the sound of another living thing within. He heard the rustle of straw. Perhaps the horse, perhaps the child.
The barn door was warped by the river damp. Owen used his strength to lift it and swing it wide. Peering in, he saw an old nag in a stall. He approached it slowly, calming the uneasy creature with murmured reassurances. As Owen reached the nag, he picked up a cloth, rubbed the horse gently until it quieted.
Magda had followed him.
Owen patted the nag. ‘Duncan Ffulford was better off than I had thought, to own a horse.’
‘Aye, and he was proud of her. She carries her years lightly thanks to their tender care. Now, be quiet, Bird-eye.’ Magda stood in the middle of the barn, listening. Her multicoloured gown seemed to flicker in the pied light. ‘She is above.’ Magda motioned for Owen to precede her. ‘Her name is Alisoun.’
As Owen stepped away from the horse, it nipped him gently on the arm, calling him back. Even the beast feared the unnatural quiet of the farm. Owen crept up the ladder to the hayloft, tucking his head down to avoid a pitchfork or knife. In times like this, a child on her own would do well to protect herself. As Owen was about to clear the ladder with his head, he said softly, ‘Peace, Alisoun. I come in peace.’ He held his hands up to show the child he had no weapon. ‘A fisherman told us you needed help.’ He prayed God it was indeed Alisoun up there.
‘Who are you?’ a child’s voice demanded.
Much comforted by the high timbre, Owen said, ‘Owen Archer, captain of the archbishop’s retainers and husband of Mistress Wilton, master apothecary in York.’ He was not sure which might prove more reassuring.
‘Climb up slowly.’
‘May I use my hands on the ladder?’
‘Slowly.’
Owen obeyed, easing his head up, then moving up one rung, two, and stopping there, at eye level with the girl, who stood sideways, skirt hitched up into her girdle, bare, dirty feet planted firmly apart, her upper body expertly poised with a small bow and arrow read to shoot. ‘Turn so I can see the left side of your face.’
Owen turned towards the light coming from a hole in the thatch, giving the girl a full view of his scarred left cheek and eye, the leather patch.
With no relaxation of her stance, the child demanded, ‘Who accompanies you?’
‘Magda Digby, the Riverwoman.’
Alisoun stepped to the edge of the loft, glanced down. ‘What do you want here?’
Owen was about to chide the child for her disrespectful tone, but Magda spoke before he could. ‘Magda comes to bury thy family and take thee back where she will find a home for thee.’
‘This is my home.’
‘Aye, that it is. But thou must have a mother’s care, eh? Thou art but eleven years.’
‘I would not have you for a mother, you old hag.’
‘You should watch your tongue,’ Owen warned.
Magda again did not react to the discourtesy. ‘Thou blamest Magda for thy mother’s poor state after Tom’s birth, aye. Thou needst not worry. Magda does not yearn to play thy mother.’
Alisoun let the bow slacken. She stared down at the straw. ‘My father is dead then?’
‘Aye, God grant him grace,’ Owen said. ‘So we’re needing to take them to consecrated ground and find a priest. Can you show me the way?’
The child shrugged her bony shoulders. ‘The priest wouldn’t come when Father tried to fetch him.’
Owen was not surprised; it was a common tale in times of pestilence. ‘If you take me to him, I will persuade him to do his duty.’
‘I would not have your wife for a mother, either.’
Tempted to give the unpleasant, dun-coloured child a lashing with his tongue, Owen controlled himself. He must do his duty and be done with her. ‘We shall discuss your future once we’ve buried your family. Now take us to the priest.’ He descended the ladder.
After a few minutes, Alisoun followed. At the bottom of the ladder she let down her skirt and shook out the hay and dust, smoothed back her braided hair, then fixed Owen with a steely glare. ‘My future is my own concern.’
A matter to be discussed later. ‘Come, child, we have much work to do.’
Alisoun rolled her eyes and sullenly headed for the door. As Owen watched her depart, he noted how thin she was, realised she might be hungry. ‘Shall we try to feed her first?’ he asked Magda.
‘Do not waste thy time fretting about that child, Bird-eye. She will not hesitate to demand what she wants.’
‘She is always so wayward, then?’
‘Oh aye. Watch thy back with that one.’
Owen made for the nag. ‘I shall hitch her to the cart.’
‘Magda will prepare the bodies.’
When Owen led the nag from the barn, Alisoun stood halfway across the yard, waiting with an impatient look. Owen noted how the child averted her eyes from the abandoned cart and from the house. She had tender feelings, then, though she hid them well. As he worked with the cart, he tried to talk to her. ‘I would wager you not only hold the bow as a trained archer does, but shoot it well, too?’
‘I can fell coneys and squirrels. Why do you want to know?’
Owen decided to echo her lack of courtesy. ‘Who taught you?’
‘I asked you a question.’
‘I choose not to answer.’
Silence. Then, without preamble, Alisoun said, ‘My father taught me.’
‘For protection?’
‘What else?’
‘There had been trouble?’
Hands on hips, Alisoun squinted up at Owen. ‘You’re nosy.’
‘You are rude. We are quite a pair.’
The child ducked her head, turned, sat down in the dirt. Owen found her silence refreshing. He led the nag closer to the house, so he might more easily shift the bodies.
At first Owen thought the stone church
empty, but as he moved to the centre he discovered a prostrate form before the altar. He turned to Alisoun. ‘What is his name?’
‘Father John.’
Owen approached the priest. ‘Father John?’ The figure stirred, but did not rise or respond. Owen knelt beside him, whispered into his fleshy neck, ‘I pray you forgive me for intruding on your prayers, but I’ve come to fetch you to say prayers at the gravesides of four of your parishioners.’
The head turned, an eye peered at Owen, then the priest began to push himself up, but he was lifted to his feet instead. Owen grinned down at the short, corpulent man, filthy and stinking of onions and ale. ‘Gather what you need. We must waste no time.’
Father John glanced at Alisoun. ‘They are dead?’
‘You know they are.’
‘May God have mercy on them.’ Father John crossed himself. ‘How long ago did they perish, my child?’
‘I am not your child.’
‘She says you refused to go to them when her father requested your presence, Father John. Why was that?’ Owen asked.
The fleshy face crinkled round the eyes and mouth as the priest raised his folded hands to his breast and cringed. ‘Whence come you to this place?’
‘York.’
‘Ah. Then surely you noted the portents? The wind that came up from the south. The days the sky was dark, but the rain did not come. And the great multitude of flies. I have felt it my duty to pray. When Duncan Ffulford came, stinking of the pestilence, bringing it into this sacred place, I prayed for his soul and those of his family. But I could not touch them or I might be struck down, unable to pray for the other souls in my care.’
Owen gathered the fabric on the priest’s chest and lifted him off his feet. ‘You have found a convenient way to satisfy your conscience, priest. You do not deserve to wear this gown. But as you are all we have to hand, we must make do.’
Father John’s face was purple. His eyes bulged out. ‘It is a sin to attack a priest,’ he gasped.
Owen let him go.
The priest began to crumple, then caught the pillar beside him and raised himself upright, breathing hard.
‘What you have experienced so far is hardly an attack,’ Owen said. ‘But you might wish to avoid learning the difference. ’Tis a small thing we ask, that you perform your priestly duties.’
Later, as Owen dug, he wondered what had come over him. He was not wont to treat a priest so. Had the child so irritated him? Or was it the madness that came with the pestilence? Might he be infected with it already? He prayed God that if so he died before he carried it to his family. As the priest stepped forward to say his prayers over the graves, Owen found himself praying as much for his own family as for the Ffulfords. Magda stood quietly, eyes closed, one gnarled hand clutching the opposite wrist. She did not pray, so she always said, and yet her stillness suggested a state, if not of devotion, then of concentration. On what?
And what of the child? Owen felt a twinge of guilt about his lack of concern for her. Her obstinacy was no reason to forget she was a child who had just lost her entire family. He glanced over to the foot of the graves where Alisoun had stood. Gone. He looked round, did not see her.
Soon all three were hurrying about, calling the child’s name.
But she had vanished. And the sun was the gold of late afternoon.
‘The river calls,’ Magda said. ‘Has the child any kin nearby?’
Father John frowned down at his feet. ‘There are many Ffulfords in the parish.’
Owen could see no point to another search. The child had expressed her desire to choose her own accommodations. ‘I shall trust you to go among her kin and let them know the child’s situation, Father John.’
The priest frowned at the task, but nodded. ‘It is my duty, of course.’ He glanced at the horse and cart. ‘I can see to them.’
Owen could well imagine. ‘Tell her kin the horse and cart are at the farm, priest.’ He began to move away, turned back for a final warning. ‘I will return to check on the child’s safety. And her horse.’
‘You’ll find naught to anger you, Captain.’
In the boat, Magda seemed to nod in slumber. Owen rowed downriver silently, squinting against the afternoon sun that glinted on the brown water of the Ouse. He was thinking about the Ffulfords. So far most of the half a hundred deaths in York had been among the aged or the very young. But today he had seen a couple struck down who looked his wife’s age. They had been very thin, a result of last summer’s failed harvest, perhaps.
‘Winds from the south. Flies. The priest named them harbingers of the pestilence. But what of the bad harvest?’ Owen wondered aloud. ‘Might hunger so weaken the people that they succumb to the pestilence?’
Magda opened one eye. ‘The girl shows no sign of illness.’ She drew a small bottle from the wallet at her waist, opened it, handed it to Owen, who paused in his rowing long enough to take one drink. Then Magda drank. ‘Was a time thou wouldst accept naught from Magda, Bird-eye.’
And not so long ago at that. Owen grinned. ‘Perhaps I was not so thirsty then.’
The Riverwoman gave one of her barking laughs. ‘Aye. Mayhap.’ She took another drink, put the bottle away. ‘Magda would give much to know what calls back the manqualm from time to time, Bird-eye. A bad harvest?’ She tilted her head, thinking. ‘Each time it has followed one, ’tis a fact. But not every bad harvest summons it. Thy priests say ’tis the scourge of thy god, punishing thee for thy unholy ways. Mayhap ’tis why Magda survives. She is invisible to thy god.’ She grinned, showing her teeth, white against her tanned leather skin.
So ancient and still she had all her teeth but one, and that one she had lost as a child. No one knew how long ago that had been. Magda was not inclined to say. But folk round York spoke of her as having lived on her rock in the mud flats of the Ouse just north of the city since the time of King Canute, hence the Viking ship turned upside-down that served as her roof. Owen knew Magda was too mortal for such a life span, but there was no doubt she was old. And rich with the wisdom of a life spent healing the sick and bringing children into the world. And thinking for herself: though she lived as saintly a life as a good Christian, she was not a Christian and found the Church’s teachings poor, superstitious excuses for common sense. A dangerous opinion, but strongly held. Owen valued in her friendship her clear mind, common sense and a fresh perspective, free of fear.
‘But how do thy priests explain the deaths of infants, Bird-eye?’ Magda no longer smiled.
‘To my mind it is the parents who are punished by such a death, Magda, not the child. I have heard it said that such a child was too good to live; God chooses to take such children directly to Heaven so that the world might not taint their souls.’
A snort. ‘So thy god leaves only the unworthy on earth? Bah!’
Owen felt uneasily like agreeing with Magda. But was that not blasphemy? ‘We cannot always know the Lord’s purpose.’
Magda wagged her head. ‘Thou art not taken in by such nonsense. Thou wast wise to send thy children off to Freythorpe Hadden.’
‘Was I?’ Since the first rumours of pestilence, Owen’s wife, Lucie, had wished to get their children out of the city. Eight years earlier she had lost her first child to the plague – Martin, her only child with Nicholas Wilton, her first husband. So Lucie had conceived a plan to send Hugh and Gwenllian to her father’s manor in the countryside, where his efficient sister Phillippa was also in residence. But there was one problem: Lucie had still nursed their son Hugh, born the past winter, and as master apothecary she could not leave the city at such a time. How was one to find a reliable wet nurse in the midst of pestilence?
And then Magda’s granddaughter Tola had come down from the moors with her infant, Emma, and her two-year-old, Nym, grieving for her husband, who had been savaged by a wild boar. Lucie had befriended the young widow and asked her to be Hugh’s wet nurse.
Owen had not been easily persuaded that Tola should take his only son out
of the city. It was true that when Death stalked a city, people changed, grew wild in their despair, unpredictable in their deeds. Perhaps the children would be safer in all respects in the country. But … ‘The country did not save the Ffulfords,’ he thought aloud.
Magda, who had let her chin drop to her chest again, opened one eye, squinted up at Owen and grunted in sympathy. ‘Tola and her young ones are best away from Magda’s house, where the sick are wont to come. ’Tis not so different at an apothecary.’
‘The sick are not brought to the apothecary.’
‘Nay. But those who care for them … Oft they succumb. Why dost thou yet debate thy decision? ’Tis done.’
It was difficult for any parent, this pestilence that seemed most fatal to children. But for Lucie it was doubly hard because of the loss of her first to the plague. The hope that her family was protected by God’s grace could not buoy her.
How much worse would it ever be for Alisoun Ffulford, having lost both parents and siblings?
‘Are there any more in Alisoun’s family, Magda?’
The Riverwoman jerked awake. ‘Eh?’ She shaded her sleepy eyes with a hand.
Owen repeated the question.
‘Nay. Parents, three children, ’tis all.’ Magda shifted, began to lay her head back down.
‘So what does she guard in the barn?’
Magda grumbled and rubbed her eyes. ‘Herself. Her valuable horse.’
‘Why did she run from us?’
‘Why should she trust strangers, eh? Be patient, Bird-eye. The child will come to Magda or thee in her own time.’
‘How do you know?’
Magda lay down her head, closed her eyes. ‘Some things cannot be otherwise, Bird-eye.’
As Owen rowed towards home, the fly-ridden farmhouse haunted his thoughts.
The boat rocked dangerously as Magda suddenly sat forward, eyes scouring the sky downstream. ‘Fire in the city. Dost thou smell it on the wind, Bird-eye?’