There are more and more empty houses in the village. Twice now, I’ve seen sick people wandering through the village half-naked, their wits gone. Sometimes, they don’t discover that someone is dead until their neighbours scent it out from the stench of the rotting corpse. Muriel-at-Brook was dead for a week before they found her. Her little daughter was still sleeping in the same bed, half-starved and stinking and covered in blood and shit. Her aunt took her, but not all children have found a home. Edward Miller had two chickens stolen by a couple of filthy ragamuffin boys from York. Sarah Fisher had leeks pulled up from her garden by a family who’d fled the pestilence from the south, and now had nowhere to go. These folk don’t stay for the harvest. They won’t stop in a pestilence village, but they need to eat, same as the rest of us.
Father doesn’t seem to notice the bells ringing, or the empty spaces in the church. He’s eaten up with worry over his fields. You’d think, watching him, that he cares more about his rows of barley than he does for Robin’s mother and Radulf and Muriel and little Joanie Fisher and Geoffrey at the abbey, about whom we’ve still had no news.
There’s far too much barley to bring in on our own. Father’s been trying to get other folk to work on our strips. He offered Stephen Dyer 2d a day to work our strips of field instead of his father’s. Stephen was tempted – you could see it in the way he bit his lip and glanced from side to side, but his sister Matilda heard and started shrilling at Father, calling him cruel and heartless, to be making money out of others’ troubles.
“You’re as bad as those gravediggers, you are!” she said, spitting into the dust.
The new gravediggers charge more and more for their services. Since Adam the sexton died, they’ve asked as much as a whole pig for burying a body – that’s what Sir John used to want for saying the mass! Even the beggars who follow the dead-cart only ask for pennies. And then the gravediggers swagger around the village, living off salt-bacon and throwing their farthings away on ale and white bread. There’s an uglier rumour too – that they climb down into the graves and steal rings from the fingers and beads from the necks of the dead. I don’t know if this is true or not.
“I don’t know why you’re so worried,” Alice grumbles at Father. “It’s not like anyone is going to starve this year.” And she’s right. This year there’ll be more than plenty, even if we leave half the barley to rot in the fields.
“Why waste your strength bringing in food that no one will eat?” says Alice, jiggling Edward up and down on her lap. “They’re big sillies, aren’t they, my love?”
Alice doesn’t understand. Neither does Robin.
“More work,” he groans, stretching his long arms over his head. “We’ll be the richest dead people in England!”
Robin isn’t used to working as hard as Father makes him. Margaret’s land was all rented out, and though Robin worked in their herb garden and did his labouring on Sir Edmund’s land and helped with the haymaking and the harvest, most of Margaret’s money came from her weaving and her ale. Father takes Robin out into the fields every morning with Richard, to chase away the birds and weed the rows and do the work of the labourers we aren’t able to buy. When he comes home he collapses by the hearth with his hood over his face and his long limbs splayed out before him. Father thinks the work is good for him, and maybe he’s right. He certainly looks healthier than he did when he first came here. He’s got muscles where before he only had bone. Father never takes Robin’s complaints seriously.
“Coming to hew some wood with me?” he says, and Robin groans. “You’ll need to work much harder than this when you have your own farm, you know.”
“The joy!” says Robin. “The excitement!”
Father tries to look stern, but his mouth twitches.
“Leave the poor boy be,” says Alice, as Robin and Father both know she will. “Have a mug of ale, lad, and don’t listen to him.”
It is very strange living in the same house as Robin, and sharing a bed. I’ve never felt shy about dressing and undressing for bed before, but now, suddenly, I’m awkward about him seeing me in my slip, and even more awkward about seeing him in his breeches. If Robin is shy too, he doesn’t say anything, but I’ve noticed that he pulls the blanket up almost to his chin when he gets into bed, even though the nights are growing shorter and hotter and closer.
I’m shy around him in other ways too, ways I never was before. I’m very aware of when he’s in the room, or when he speaks. I catch myself watching him when I hope he’s not looking. I notice things about him – when he’s weary, or angry, or sad. He hasn’t got used to living with Ned and Maggie yet, the way they tug at you like a pair of puppies; Maggie begging for attention: “Look what I’ve got, Isabel!” “Look what I can do, Robin!” Ned pushing and pushing until in the end you yell at him, or wallop him, and he retreats into wounded righteousness. Robin doesn’t understand about little brothers and sisters. He takes it all too seriously, and minds too much when it all goes wrong.
He likes Father and Alice, I think. Alice, at least. And Father is kind enough to him, though most of his heart is busy worrying over the fields and the sickness. Alice is just worried, about us all.
Richard and I are the only ones who understand Father and his worries.
“All that barley rotting in the fields,” Richard says, and I nod.
“What a mess,” says Richard, and he shakes his head. “What a god-forsaken mess.”
20. Death and the Devil
Mid-July, we have two weeks of real summer weather – hot, dry days full of sweat and flies and thirst. All through the village, you can hear people thinking the same thing. Hot weather is when sickness comes. Even a plague sent from God will surely be influenced by the summer, won’t it? The days that follow are so dreadful, I think I must be dreaming. Or perhaps the happy memories – Midsummer Day, the day Will kissed me, the mummers at Easter last year, and Christmas, and the day Edward was born and decided to stay – perhaps they’re the dream and this is the only thing that’s real. I can’t unmuddle it all in my mind. I feel dazed, like I did the time Richard dropped a sack of oats on my head once by mistake, and everything was dazed and blurry, and nothing made sense.
At first, when bad news came – when Joanie Fisher or Margaret died – it was horrible, so horrible and unexpected that we struggled to believe it. But now everything is dull. Every day brings news of more dead, and every day all I feel is resignation. I turn my face away from the people at church, or at the well, so I don’t have to hear the bad news. I feel like I’ve been turned into one of Maggie’s clay people, and the real Isabel is sitting on the shelf above Alice’s loom, biding her time, waiting for the pestilence to pass.
The next Monday, the harvest starts. It’s the long slog now, five days’ work a week for Sir Edmund, then your own land to work in the evenings after your time on Sir Edmund’s fields is done. If there’s sickness in your family, one person can stay to tend the sick, but the others have to work. Some don’t come. They hide when Gilbert Reeve comes to their houses, and pretend to have left or to think themselves forgotten.
“Better a day in the stocks than a bed under the earth,” Amabel’s uncle told Father.
“Don’t look them in the eye!” I whisper to Robin, but he doesn’t smile. Every day, more people are dying. On the Saturday after the harvest starts, nine people die all in one day. At mass on Sunday, tears run down Simon’s face as he tries to speak to us. And he’s not the only one.
“Today is a hard day,” he says. “Harder than any day we ever thought we’d have to face. But it’s not over yet.”
All around us, people are crying. I know what they want. They want to understand this. Sir John told us that the pestilence punished the wicked – the French and the heathens and the wicked folk in London. But what reason could God have for punishing little Joanie Fisher, or Edward Miller’s baby boy? Why does He strike down the monks and leave the grasping gravediggers, who go into the houses of the dead and take what they pleas
e? The only reason I can think of is that He’s wiping everything out and starting again, that the end of the world is coming, if not today, then soon; next month, perhaps. Nothing else makes any sense at all.
Nine people dying in one day is horrible. But two days later, ten people die. And three days after that, twenty-one.
If we didn’t have the monks from the abbey, I don’t know what we would have done. How would Simon have given all the sacraments alone? Sometimes I see him about the village, swaying with sleeplessness on his old brown mare. Two of his chaplains have died already, and the monk who came down from the abbey to live is sick too. People have stopped complaining about how young Simon is and how he’s started skipping over the difficult bits of the mass. He may not know the services, but he knows how to be a priest. He comes to any house that asks for him, even in the middle of the night, even to families that live right at the other side of the village. He sits by the dying and reads them the sacraments, asks them to confess their sins, even if they are so far gone that it is clear that they will never be able to speak again.
We’re running short of oil and candles. I know the abbey sent to Felton for more, but none could be found. Simon has a bottle of oil that he wears on a chain around his neck. He anoints the sick with a tiny speck on their forehead, and whispers the sacraments to them as they lie dying.
He gave the sacraments to a beggar who wandered half-mad and half-naked through the village. Everyone else cowered away and wouldn’t speak to him, but Simon set him on his horse and took him to the infirmary at the abbey. He sat by his bed and gave him the rites. I saw him afterwards, coming home with blood down the front of his robes and his hair stiff with sweat.
The bell in the church tower goes from ringing a few times every day to ringing almost continuously; one long, sorry peal of grief for the dead. It becomes a background to our lives – another person dead. People die so quickly you lose track.
“I shared a bottle of ale with Will Thatcher and Amabel Dyer once,” I tell Robin, one day. “It seems so long ago now.”
“I know,” says Robin. “Poor Amabel. I’m sorry, Isabel.”
“Amabel’s dead?”
She’d died two days ago, and been buried in a trench in her croft with her father and sister. I hadn’t even known. And when Robin tells me, I don’t feel anything. One more dead means nothing.
This time last year, the whole village would have mourned Amabel Dyer. But now nobody except her family even notices.
The day after twenty-one people die, the bell stops ringing. The space it leaves is incredible. My ears ring with the silence. But the silence is worse than the bell, somehow. Ingleforn has never been silent, but now – suddenly – you notice all the other noises that are gone. The children, who aren’t allowed to play out of their gardens any more for fear of straying into the bad air. The babble of voices around the well and the river – vanished. Many people don’t have time for washing, what with caring for the sick and doing the farm work of all those who have died. We still do, because of Edward, and because Maggie is still small enough to spill ale down her front and mud up her skirts at least twice a day. But washing now is a rushed and furtive business. Alice starts washing in the evenings, after dinner, because then the banks of the river are empty.
And she stops taking Edward with her.
Other noises are missing too. The forge is quiet since Robert Smith died. The stocks are empty too. And the archery butts behind the church stand forgotten, fading in the long sunlit evenings. This is illegal – it’s the law that every man and boy has to practise his shooting every day – but nobody is punished. Why bother fining someone or putting him in the stocks when he might be dead tomorrow?
“There’ll be a pretty mess to sort out here after this is over,” Father says, standing in the doorway looking out at the village, the gardens growing over with weeds.
“If there’s anything left when this is over,” says Alice. And I realize that she doesn’t mean if the world ends but simply, if the village is still here. What happens if so many people die that there aren’t enough of us left to keep up the village?
“I’ll still be here,” says Richard grimly.
“So will I be,” I say. And I will. I hope.
One part of the village that’s noisier than ever is the taverns. We don’t have an inn in Ingleforn – the alewives simply put a sign up outside their door when they’ve brewed a new keg of ale and everyone goes there. Robin’s mother’s was always the main drinking house, but since she died the other alewives’ houses have been full every night, even with the risk of catching the sickness. In the evenings, now that the bells have stopped ringing, you can hear the singing and cheering from Margery Goodenough’s back door until long after dark. Alice sniffs.
“What have they got to be celebrating, I’d like to know?”
But I know. They’re celebrating because they’re alive, and because tomorrow they might not be. They’re celebrating because if you don’t, you’ll go insane.
“Oh yes?” says Alice. “And your father and I, we’re lunatics now, are we?”
“You were always mad, Alice,” I tell her. “Nothing’s changed there.”
Alice still prays every night for the Lord to save us, but I don’t know if she still believes the words she says. I still pray every day too, but only because I’m frightened of what might happen if I don’t. I don’t believe God can be punishing the wicked any more. Not if the people He thinks are evil are the good monks and Robin’s mother and babies like Joanie Fisher. I refuse to believe it – even if it sends me to hell. But then what does He think He’s doing?
More than half the monks are dead, Simon says. And many more are sick.
“The Lord is punishing those monks, sister,” Agnes Harelip says, glancing at Father. She knows all about Geoffrey. “They say in the village they were sleeping with devils and writing Satan’s words in those big books of theirs.”
“Those who think that don’t have to have the monks visit their sick, do they?” Alice says. “Or bury their dead? If I were you, I’d keep your nose where it belongs – in your own house and not in others’ business.”
Agnes’s face twists, the prissy way it does when anyone disagrees with her, which is pretty much any time she comes to visit Alice.
“God won’t spare any of those devil-worshippers,” she hisses. “You’ll see! You’ll see!”
21. My Brother Geoffrey
My brother Geoffrey lives in that abbey. It’s only three miles’ walk away, but it’s a long time since any of us have been there to see him. I wanted to go when the pestilence came, but Father said no.
“Wait until this is over, Isabel. There’s a lot of sickness at the abbey now.”
When people first started getting sick, there used to be a lot more monks around in the village, and I used to stop and ask them about Geoffrey – if he was still at the abbey, if he was all right. I always used to send him my love, tell him we were thinking about him. I haven’t spoken to anyone from St Mary’s in nearly two weeks, though. As the pestilence has tightened its hold on our village, the monks have seemed to slip away. I know there have been a lot of deaths at the abbey. Maybe that’s why.
People don’t talk about Geoffrey any more. Mag can’t really remember him, and even Ned is forgetting, and he’s not Alice’s son, of course, so why should she care?
Father’s the one with the least excuse. He didn’t want Geoffrey to go. When Sir John came and asked if Geoffrey could enter the abbey, Father said no straight off. He said he needed Geoffrey to work in our fields, and what sort of father did Sir John think he was anyway, to send his son away like that?
Lords and ladies send their children away all the time, when they’re younger than Ned. Father said it was a barbaric practice, and Geoffrey’s place was here, with his family.
But Geoffrey wanted and wanted to go. He was always different, Geoffrey. He was one of the best choristers in the church choir – he learnt the hymns about twice
as fast as the other little boys, and he could say all the Latin in the mass, better than Simon can. Geoffrey loved words. He was always running after Sir John, asking him what this word meant, and this one, until they could say things back and forth in Latin like it was a real language or something.
Geoffrey knows ever so much Latin now, of course, and French, and letters and numbers and herbs and planets and whatever else they teach them up at that abbey.
That’s why Sir John wanted to send him away. He said Geoffrey ought to be trained as a priest, that he was too clever to work Sir Edmund’s fields for the rest of his life. Ned and I giggled when he said that. Geoffrey was eleven at the time, skinny and yellow-haired, with bright blue eyes and hands which were always moving and ideas bubbling up inside of him. We couldn’t imagine him as a priest.
But he wanted to go.
“Just think!” he told me, when Father was stamping around the fields with a face like ice, and Sir John was praying special prayers to God for Geoffrey and Alice was making sideways comments like, “Are you sure you want to be a priest, Geoffrey? Wouldn’t you like to have a family one day?” As if Geoffrey ever cared about babies!
“Just think,” Geoffrey said. “They have a whole library full of books. Think of all the words there are in Sir John’s Bible and then think how many there are in a whole library!”
I grunted. Nobody ever learnt anything useful from a book, except if you were an astrologer maybe you learnt astrology, or if you were an infirmarer you learnt herb-lore. But Geoffrey wasn’t planning on being an astrologer or an infirmarer he just used to suck up knowledge like a little pig sucking milk. Latin never taught anyone anything useful, as far as I could see. Not useful like how to milk a cow, or plough a field, or weave a blanket, or sail a ship to Aragon. Why learn all those letters and languages just so you could read the name of a plant, which you could find out much simpler just by asking?
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