All Fall Down

by Sally Nicholls

  Thomas’s horse is just as beautiful this morning as it was yesterday. I stroke its nose.

  “You’re the only person I like here,” I tell it.

  “Don’t you like Thomas?” says Robin.

  “No,” I say. “What’s he doing taking us here? Why couldn’t he just leave us where we were?”

  “He offered!” says Robin. “And we said yes.”

  “Yeh,” I say. “Well, I wish we hadn’t! What sort of person takes someone else’s children home with them anyway?”

  “I think . . .” says Robin. “I think he was just . . . just riding, you know? Being sad. And then . . . he wanted to help us. Why not?”

  “Maybe he’s mad,” I say. “Or dangerous! Did you think of that?”

  But I don’t really believe it. I don’t like Thomas, but I do trust him, oddly enough. I don’t think he’s going to hurt us.

  Nobody seems to expect us to do any housework, so after we’ve looked into every room in the house we seem to be allowed just to go out in the city and wander around – without even an errand to do, like fetching water or buying bread! Probably this is a very stupid thing to do. Probably coming here at all was a very stupid thing to do. If the miasma is anywhere, it’s certainly here, in these city walls. The whole of York reeks with the stench of it. Maggie huddles up close to me, gripping on to my hand.

  “Where are we going?”

  “We aren’t going anywhere,” I say, as patiently as I can. “We’re just walking. Look at the houses, Mag. Look at that one – who do you think lives there?”

  Mag barely glances at the house.

  “Why’s that man lying there?”

  The man is slumped up against the side of the houses, foul and bloated with death. A pair of wild pigs are snuffling bloody-nosed at the corpse. I feel my stomach rise inside me.

  “He’s sleeping, Mag, don’t look at him.”

  I pull her over to the other side of the road. Ned studies the man with a practised air.

  “He’s been dead for days, I reckon. Look how swollen he is.”

  “Ned, don’t!”

  I can hear the shrillness in my voice. I sound like Agnes Harelip. Even the rub of Maggie’s skin against mine irritates me. I pull my hand out of hers. She wails, and I stamp off down the street away from her.

  What’s happened to me? What’s happened to that other Isabel, the funny one, who liked mummer’s songs and bread with honeycomb, the one Robin blew kisses at and said was the cleverest girl in the village? Am I going to spend the rest of my life crying over kind words and little sisters with high voices?

  I feel a sudden flash of sympathy for Agnes, always grumbling and fussing about everything. Maybe she used to be a bonny little girl too. Maybe she’s as confused by the angry old woman she turned into as I am.

  No! I’m not going to turn into Agnes! Not if the pestilence kills Robin and everyone I love, I still won’t.

  Robin is at my elbow.

  “Hey,” he says. “Hey. Isabel.”

  I bury my face blindly into his new wool cote, and he puts his arms around me.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell the grey wool. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Hey. It’s fine.”

  “What’s wrong with Isabel?” says Mag. She’s standing a respectful distance from me, as though I’m about to explode on her.

  “She’s just sad,” says Robin. He pulls back and looks at me, his old ploughboy face under his mop of brown hair. “What do you want to do?”

  I jam the heel of my hand into my eyes, rubbing furiously at them. I never was the sort of girl who cried over nothing. Since Edward died I don’t seem to do anything else.

  “Let’s go to the minster,” I say, instead.

  The minster dominates the city, huge and unimaginably solid. The only thing that’s nearly as big is the castle, which stands apart from the rest of the city: four towers and four walls of stone. There’s a prison there, Father told me once, and a mint where King Edward’s money is pressed. Ned wants to go and look, but I tell him to whist. I want to see the minster.

  The steeple is so tall, it’s hard to lose our way, though we take a windy route, through dark, narrow streets. The smell is worse here – blood and death and excrement and animals. Animals are everywhere – wild chickens pecking at the dirt, even a dead horse lying on its side crawling with flies and rats. I think there must be more animals here than humans, because the city itself is eerily silent. Now and then I see a shadowy face at a window, and in one of the squares we come across a beggar mumbling to himself, but mostly there’s nobody.

  “Is everyone dead?” Maggie whispers.

  “No,” says Robin. “They all left – remember them all coming past Ingleforn?” I think about the poor folk, the servants and beggars and shopkeepers, with nowhere to run to. And I think about the rich folk too, finding the villages closed to them and perhaps the pestilence coming upon them on the open road and their friends leaving them there to die.

  I’m in a mind to hate everything in York, but I can’t hate the minster. Nobody could. It must have taken many, many craftsmen’s lives to finish – the first builders’ great-great-grandchildren must still have been toiling away at it long after their fathers were dead.

  There are wooden scaffolds built up around one side of the entrance, but no sign of any workmen. The big wooden doors open easily enough, though, and we creep inside. Once upon a couple of months ago, I would have thought that nothing could hurt us in here, but now I’m not so sure. I’m starting to wonder how powerful God really is. Unless the sickness really does come from Him, and he wants all this suffering to happen. If so, if he wants us dead, then even these thick abbey walls won’t protect us.

  You don’t really understand the size of the minster until you’re inside it. From the outside, it just looks like a fell, or a small hill, but inside it’s bigger than any building I’ve ever seen. Sir Edmund’s manor house could fit inside it four or five times over and still have room to wriggle. I have never, ever seen anything as wonderful as this.

  The walls and the roof are made of pale stone, with great columns rising up and into the roof. The windows are made of stained glass, like the windows in our church at home, but much bigger and grander. It’s like the inside of a king’s palace, or an angel’s house. It’s like the inside of God.

  It’s grander than the hills back home, grander than the manor house, bigger than a wedding feast, or a sunset, or a new baby. Sunsets and fells are supposed to be grand; they’re God reminding you how powerful He is. This is something else. Because it wasn’t made by God. It was made by us. Men and women, believing in God, believing in their children and grandchildren, trusting that God’s will would somehow be done after they were gone.

  How could they do it? How could they even imagine it was possible?

  It’s so big we have to crane our heads back to see the roof, so big that the walls just stretch on up and up and up above us. I’m close to tears again. It’s like the underbelly of a mountain. It’s like heaven.

  “Did people make this?” says Maggie.

  “People just like you, Mag,” says Robin.

  People just like us. I understand what people mean now about churches being sanctuary. I never want to leave here. I pull away from the others and walk down the centre of the cathedral, tipping my head back to look up at the roof. Behind me, Mag and Ned are looking at the windows, trying to work out what the story is. Robin is looking for St William’s shrine, but I’m not interested in dead saints. I get to the altar and bow my head. I want to remember this – this feeling like my soul is getting bigger, growing inside me until its almost too big to contain.

  God, I pray silently, inside my head. Maybe you do want to destroy everything in the world. Maybe this is the end of everything. But oh, please God, if it isn’t, let me survive it. Let Robin and Ned and Margaret survive it too. Because if men can build a place like this, with only faith and bare hands, then I can do anything. I can get my fa
rmland back. I can farm it myself, with Robin, as a free man and woman. I can live in this strange city, in a dead girl’s clothes. I can build a new world out of the old.

  Compared to this big minster, these are tiny things.

  Compared to this big minster, these are easy.

  33. The Other Family

  I’m in the kitchen watching Watt – the cook – gut a hare. Watt has a beard as coarse and black as horse’s hair and a narrow, clever face like a scribe or a bailiff. His knife cuts through the dead skin as quickly and skilfully as Alice’s would back home. Some things are the same the world over.

  Watt is telling me about the pestilence in York.

  “When it first came,” he says, slicing the knife along the belly of the hare, “so many people left the city! Lines and lines of carts, all along all the roads out, people with animals and furniture and children piled up on top of each other. It got so you couldn’t hire a cart for less than 1d a day, sometimes more.”

  “I know,” I say. “We saw them come past our village. We didn’t let them in.”

  “Aye,” says Watt. “Well, that’s what Thomas said. ‘The villagers won’t thank us for bringing the sickness to their children,’ he said. ‘And I’d rather die in my own bed than a stranger’s.’ And Juliana – that’s the mistress – she said the same. They did talk about sending the children out of the city but somehow it kept getting put off, and then it was too late.”

  “How many children were there?” I say, though I know what the answer is. There were three.

  “Three,” says Watt, drawing the knife along the inside of the hare’s skin. “William – he’s the one that Robin takes after. I knew as soon as I saw him why the master wanted you. And Lucie: they were twins, about Robin’s age. Then Edith. She was in her ninth year, ever such a bonny little thing.”

  Watt sucks his teeth at the sadness of a bonny little thing like Edith dying in the pestilence, then starts to whistle as he turns the hare out of its skin. That’s interesting, about Robin. It explains why Thomas is so much more interested in him than he is in the rest of us. I thought it was just because he was a boy, or perhaps because the little ones are so small, and I’m so unfriendly.

  “Didn’t you want to leave too?” I ask, but Watt laughs.

  “Me!” he says. “What would I do riding north with a cart? How would I eat? I’m only grateful my master didn’t turn us all away. The poor can’t run, and if they can’t work, they can’t eat.”

  I know all about this too. All the servants with no work because their masters left – all the men with no work because no one wants houses built or roofs thatched or rats killed or bread baked – all the hat-makers and tailors and furriers and cordwainers – because who wants shoes and hats and gowns now?

  “What do they do?” I say, leaning forward on to my elbows. Watt plunges his hands into the water bucket, rinsing the blood and the gore from his skin.

  “Well,” he says, “they drive the dead-carts, don’t they? And they dig the graves. They nurse the sick. They pray for their souls.”

  For the first time in my life, I have nothing to do.

  Thomas sees no one, except for the people he meets through work. I don’t see how he can have much work since the ships have stopped coming in with his wine, but Thomas is like Father; he makes work even when there isn’t any. The taverns are the only business that don’t seem to have suffered from the pestilence – like in Ingleforn, the people here are making merry while they can. Thomas has a whole string of taverns which order his wine, and Ralph goes out every morning in his ox-cart taking the barrels of wine around the city. I think Thomas has stolen some of the trade of those merchants who have fled or died. And he’s teaching Robin how to write, and how to tally the numbers of barrels sold and money made in his big account books. Robin is better at sums than he is at writing, though he still pulls terrible faces over his work.

  Thomas often takes Robin on his errands, though whether it’s because he’s training Robin to take over as his apprentice or his son, which is what Robin thinks, or because he’s lonely and if he doesn’t think too hard he can pretend Robin is his dead son, or because he’s a kind man who wants us to be happy, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s all three.

  “He’d take you too, if you asked,” says Robin, in this not-because-he-wants-you-but-because-he-feels-sorry-for-you voice. I don’t want him to take me. I don’t want to start liking him, and I don’t care whether he likes me or not. I don’t want to stand around listening to boring old men talking about wine barrels and taxes and wine and death, death, death, death, death.

  There’s nothing for me to do. I’m not allowed to help in the kitchen or to help with the pig or the horses or the chickens. I’m not even supposed to sweep my own chamber. Probably when the world isn’t ending, there would have been other people to see – other girls my age to talk to – probably Thomas’s wife, Juliana, would have known what I was supposed to be doing and made sure that I was. But now nobody goes out and nobody sees each other and there’s nothing. I don’t even have a maid to talk to. Ralph’s wife, Johanna, comes and ties me into my gowns in the mornings and helps me undress at night, but she doesn’t stay during the day. She’s a washerwoman – she does all the washing for the house as well. She’s not interested in talking to me, and she slapped Mag once for babbling. I nearly slapped her back, but Mag was clinging to my skirts and wailing, and by the time I’d stopped her crying, Johanna had gone.

  Lucie and Edith’s chamber is full of fine things that sneer at me. There are their books I can’t read. The parchment and quill pen for the letters they wrote to their father when he was away. Lucie’s fine embroidery that I could never, ever finish. The threads are made of real silk. When I’m feeling particularly sad, I take the embroidery down and stroke it, feeling the softness of it, the realness of the violets and lilies and roses sewn into the cloth. It will never be finished now.

  In the parlour, there’s a loom like Alice’s, but bigger, and finer. It belonged to Juliana. Sometimes – when Robin and Thomas are out – I go and pull the shuttle through the warp. Weaving is at least something I can do. But I always give up after a row or two. What’s the point? Who is this cloth being made for, anyway?

  Other times, I wander through the house, touching things, opening drawers, peering into coffers. Why not? This is our house, isn’t it? Once, I found a chest in Thomas’s room with seven locks and seven keys like the chest in the tithing barn. The keys were hidden in a cubbyhole in Thomas’s writing desk, and when I opened the chest, it was full of jewellery: silver bangles and golden lockets and jewelled pendants. I could have taken any of them out, and I bet Thomas wouldn’t have noticed. I didn’t, though. I put them all back.

  Often, I just lie on my bed in Lucie and Edith’s chamber and don’t move for hours. I watch the dust falling and the light dimming around me, and I listen to the church bells ringing in the hours. I watch the way my pale hair falls over my arm, and I think about Alice and Richard and Father and Edward, and Geoffrey, in his cloister or his coffin. I wonder if he’s still alive. Does he wonder about us too, or does he count us among the dead? Perhaps he’s looking for us in Ingleforn, and nobody can tell him where we are. Thomas told Joan where we were going when we took the animals to her house, but perhaps she’s dead too. My mind is pulled back and forth between my duty to Geoffrey and my duty to Maggie and Ned. Probably Geoffrey is dead too.

  My thoughts move so slowly, like dust motes falling through sunlight. Sometimes, I close my eyes for a moment and when I open them, dusk is here.

  Evenings are the only time I really see Thomas, besides meals. We sit together in the little wood-panelled parlour, shutting the door against the horrors happening in the streets and houses around us.

  Thomas and Robin play chess. The chess pieces are made of carved ivory. They’re much finer than Robin’s mother’s wooden pieces at home. Thomas plays with Ned sometimes too, taking one of his prime ministers off the board to give Ned a chance. He
also has a backgammon set, which Ned and Robin like to play, all sprawled out across the floor. Ned has his dice from home as well, and he and Mag play raffle and hazard. And Mag plays with the dice by herself, throwing them up into the air and scooting them across the floor. My little sister is getting more peculiar by the day. Thomas doesn’t let Mag and Ned play ball in the parlour, but she has a set of little wooden dolls all about the size of my thumb, which used to belong to Edith, and which keep her busy.

  I sit on my chair and spin, because that’s what I would have done at home, and because my old wooden spindle brings a little bit of Alice into this awkward parlour-space. I have Alice’s spindle too upstairs, with the teethmarks in the wood where Edward used to chew it. It’s mine; I won’t let Maggie touch it.

  Thomas mostly likes to read in the evenings, which means we have to listen to whatever he’s reading. Most of his books are in French, or Latin, or Greek, so he translates as he goes along. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. He reads us the beginning of The Iliad, which mostly seems to be people killing each other, or arguing, or sulking. Ned likes it because of all the blood. Robin pretends to like it because Thomas does, and Maggie doesn’t really understand it. I can feel the poetry straining behind his stumbling translation, which quickens me and twists up my frustration into a hard little knot at the same time. I hate it when he’s reading it, but when he finishes I’m sorry almost at once.

  “Would you like to learn to write?” says Geoffrey – I mean, Thomas. “You could look at Lucie’s books, perhaps. I could teach you if you wanted.”

  “I can write,” I say. I write my name in the air. I S A B A L, the way Geoffrey taught me.

  “Or embroider, perhaps?” says Thomas. “I don’t know – maybe Ralph would know someone—”