All Fall Down (10 page)

 

 

M
id-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 please? 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!”

 

 

M
y 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?

Geoffrey was obsessed by Latin, though. He used to wander round the house muttering it to himself. I'm sure it was his way of riling Father. There was a whole long, weary month and a half where he would use all the Latin words he knew for everything, calling Father
Pater
and Alice
Mater
instead of Father and Mother, and asking for
panem
instead of bread. Father used to whack him, and Alice used to worry and fidget, but he wouldn't stop. He's stubborn, is Geoffrey.

In the end, Sir John said he would pay the money to Sir Edmund for Geoffrey leaving the village, and Father stamped and shouted and said he could afford to pay his own fines, no matter what some people thought, and finally, finally, Geoffrey was allowed to go.

I hate it when people leave. People are always leaving me – Richard marrying Joan, and Geoffrey going to the abbey, and that horrible half year after Mother died. When Geoffrey
went, Father got sadder and angrier, and things got a lot less interesting. I used to find myself muttering Latin when I was pulling up leeks or milking the cow, just because it reminded me of Geoffrey. I used to run away to visit him all the time. When he first left us, we used to go up to the abbey every year for the Feast of the Nativity of Mary with all of the other monks' families, and to take part in the Vigil. Father and I went last year, but Richard said he had too much work to do, and Alice was big with Edward and couldn't get away.

I haven't been for months now.

 

All these long, warm days of summer I can't stop worrying about him. Last night, I couldn't sleep for hours, thinking about him. I wondered what it felt like, stuck there surrounded by the dead and the dying. I wondered if he wished he'd stayed here with us. I wondered if he wanted to come home.

Tonight, it's so hot, I wouldn't be able to sleep even if nothing was amiss in the world. Robin is awake too, shifting and rolling beside me. Ned and Mag sleep through his twistings and squirmings, but he always wakes me. Once or twice I think I've heard him crying. Robin never cries during the day. I wonder if he dreams about his mother, and what he thinks when he wakes and finds that she's gone.

This time, when I roll over, the day is feeling her way in through the chinks in the walls. Robin is lying on his side, watching me.

“Isabel,” he whispers.

I reach out my hand, and he squeezes it, very gently.

“Do you think Geoffrey is still alive?” I say.

“Are you still worrying about that?” Robin whispers. “Don't worry. They'd have told us if he wasn't.”

“They might not have known who we were . . . the abbot died, did you know? They have so much work to do . . .”

Robin squeezes my fingers again. “Shall we go and see?”

And I feel something give up inside me. There's nothing I want more than to see Geoffrey, to hold him, to breathe in his inky, herby scent. To know that he's still here walking amongst the living, that the pestilence hasn't taken him from me yet.

“All right,” I whisper back.