All Fall Down (6 page)

 

 

N
ed and Maggie are finding it hard to take the pestilence seriously. When Father and Alice go over to one of the alewives' houses to argue and whisper about Sir John with the rest of the village, they decide to prepare our house for its coming. I'm working in my garden, but they come and grab my hands and insist on showing me all the things they've done.

“We've got a cross on the door, look—” So they have – a wobbly crucifix drawn with a burnt stick, Jesus with a downturned mouth instead of his usual patient expression.

“He's upset because he's been nailed to a cross,” Maggie explains. “And look—” They've put a bucket half full of piss on the doorstep.

“Don't tread in it!” says Ned.

I step over the bucket. It stinks.

“Why . . .?”

“It's to stop the miasma. You get sick because you smell the pestilence smell, don't you? That's why Alice has all that rosemary and juniper to burn. But
we
thought piss smells much stronger than juniper, so it's double the protection.”

“You have to sniff it,” Mags explains. She bends over the bucket, takes a deep breath and immediately starts coughing. “Eugh!”

“I think I'll avoid that one,” I say. “What else have you got?”

“Old beardy-Bede.”

Alice's little pewter St Bede stands by the loom. Alice bought it on a pilgrimage to Duresme Cathedral. She lights candles by it and prays to it, and once, when Mags took it and dressed it up in a bit of fleece and took it for a walk all round the croft, she was so angry that she boxed Mag's ears and called her an imp of Satan and not worth the breath she'd wasted in prayers for her. St Bede is still standing on his shelf, but he's got an extra candle and he's knee-deep in daisies and dandelions and forget-me-nots. Ned and Mag have added a pile of clumsy little figures as offerings, made from the slimy riverbank clay that Mag likes to play with when Alice and I are washing. “Father, Alice, you, me, Maggie, Edward, Geoffrey and Richard.” Ned points to the clay people in turn. I see that the bulge in one of the figure's arms is supposed to be a baby. Alice often gives St Bede offerings – a clay arm when I sliced mine open on a scythe, a clay eye to cure her father's blindness – but this set looks ominously like a pile of corpses on a battlefield. One of Father's feet has already fallen off.

“More crosses—” They've drawn wonky black crosses on all of the beams, and at the head of Father and Alice's bed. Alice isn't going to be happy. “And this is for you.”

Maggie hands me a bit of cloth – one of the leftover pieces of Alice's dressmaking. It's tied into a bundle with a bit of string.

“Smell!” Ned commands.

I sniff. It smells of dried lavender and woodsmoke, the scent of home.

“It's got lavender in it,” Mag explains. “You're supposed to tie it round your neck.”

“We've thought of everything,” says Ned, and suddenly my eyes fill up with tears. Because foolish though Ned and Mag are, do any of us have anything better?

And then Father comes in at the front door with Alice behind him, and steps straight into the bucket of piss, proving that Ned and Mags haven't thought of everything after all.

 

 

W
hen I thought about the sickness coming here – which I've thought about a lot, this past year – I'd thought of it coming like the styche, or the flux – maybe a child catches it, and then perhaps another child in the family, and then the mother, and then after a few days, it moves to another family in the road, or then to the mother's sister, and so is passed like a rumour or a secret from one house to the next.

When I go down to the well on Monday morning, Amabel Dyer is there. She's got a full bucket of water already, but she's not going anywhere. She waves at me as I come over.

“Did you hear?” she says, in a half-whisper.

“Did I hear what?”

“Radulf and Muriel both have it! Gilbert Reeve went over there yesterday and he found them. And now Gilbert has it too, my sister says.”

“Pssh.” The woman next to Amabel – it's Agnes Harelip, Alice's sister – blows the air out of her mouth with a disgusted noise. “Gilbert Reeve doesn't have anything! I saw him
this morning going off to the market. Your sister's talking nonsense, girl.”

Amabel looks abashed, but only for about half a moment.

“Little Joanie Fisher has it too. Her mother bought some of Muriel's honey from them only last week. She'll get it next, I reckon.”

Joanie Fisher is three years old. Her mother, Sarah, is a friend of Richard's Joan. I feel the ice sliding down my back.

“You can't go near someone who has it,” says Alison Spinner, who's half a year older than me, “or you'll get it. They pass it through the eyes – look in their eyes and you're dead for sure.”

“How can you not go near people? You have to! How can you not go to the well – or to the fields – or to
church
?” I wouldn't mind so much missing church, but I'm trying very hard not to annoy God at the moment. “You'd starve!” I say.

Alison Spinner shrugs. “Then you die,” she says.

I'm quiet. So are Amabel and Alison. This is happening too quickly. What I need is something like the pause after the minstrels have finished playing, the space where everyone breathes in and comes back from whatever place the music has sent them. This is too much.

Alison Spinner passes her pail of water from one hand to the other with a look of unconcern.

“Mother heard,” she says. “They're going to send us a new priest. By the end of the week, Sir Edmund's steward told Gilbert Reeve. They'd better be quick, he said to the messenger. Or we'll be all be dead by the time he gets here.”

“Alison!” Amabel looks shocked, and a little bit like she wants to giggle, like Alison has made a rude joke or something.

“He didn't say anything of the sort,” I say to Alison, cross suddenly: with Alison for not taking this seriously, even – yes,
I admit it – with Muriel and Radulf and little Joanie Fisher for falling sick, and me with nothing I can do about it. I'm like Alice – I like making things better: scolding the children, bandaging the cut, cleaning up the spilt ale. But this? There's nothing you can do about this.

 

We have our first death the next day – little fair-haired Edith, Radulf's niece. One of the monks from the abbey performs the mass, but only her mother and her baby brother come to pray for her soul. And then we hear that the mother is sick too.

“But who's looking after the baby?” I'm on the floor playing with Edward, walking my fingers across his belly, then tickling him until he squirms, and the thought of this other baby – alone, hungry, crying to itself in an house full of the dying – is too horrible to think of.

Alice is chopping leeks at the table. She won't meet my eyes.

“People have their own families to think of, Isabel. They don't want to bring the sickness into their houses. And it's not a baby anyone knows . . .”

Alice, with all her talk of Christian charity! I stare at her, horrified. She fusses with her kerchief, then says, defensively, “It's bound to catch the sickness soon, anyway, Isabel.”

But somehow that baby is the most horrible thing that's happened yet, more horrible than Edith and her mother, who at least nobody could have helped anyway. I can't stop thinking about him – crying and lying in his own filth while his mother lies dying. Something tugs at me – should I go and help him? But what would I do with him, if Alice won't let him here? Would the monks take a baby?

I'm so angry with Alice about it, angry with myself for not going. I rage about it to Amabel as we go down to the archery butts with Robin and Ned, to watch their shooting practice.

“They just left it . . . left it to die. A baby! It's probably there now, with no one looking after it, everyone too scared to go into the house with them all sick.”

“I wouldn't go,” says Amabel. “And I don't think your Alice should either. People have their own children to think of. They can't bring the sickness into their own houses.”

“You don't think that, Robin, do you?” I beg.

“I think it's terrible,” says Robin, and my heart lifts. Dear, kind, Robin, friend to small children and lame puppies. “I'll go there now with you, Isabel, if you want,” he says, seriously. “I'll go and see, if you want me to.”

“Are you mad?” Amabel screeches. “You can't just take someone else's
baby
home! You'll catch the pestilence!”

“I know,” says Robin. His dark eyes watch mine, under his thatch of dark hair. “I'll still go, Isabel, if you want to.”

I hesitate. My heart starts beating faster.

“Would your mother take a baby, if it wasn't sick?” I ask. Robin shrugs.

We're walking past the mill. The waterwheel is turning in the millstream, flecks of bright water splashing us as we pass. Birds are singing in the trees above our heads. We're alive. We might not be soon. Probably that baby is sick already anyway.

“Oh, I don't know,” I say. “I don't know what I want.” And I run forward, before Robin can answer.

Three days later, they ring the passing-bells for Radulf and Muriel, and for Edith's mother. We hear them as we're taking
the oxen out to pasture, and we grit our teeth. There are twelve more cases in the village now, and still no priest has come.

No one mentions a baby.

 

People start behaving differently now that sickness is here. They keep to themselves. If they see someone coming from a house of sickness, they step aside and look away. The Sunday after Sir John leaves the church is full – unusually so – but everyone stands as far away from everyone else as they can get. The brother who's leading the mass has nearly six feet between him and the front of the crowd. At the well, people mutter,
“
God keep you” and keep their eyes down. Everyone is frightened. When Joanie Fisher died, hardly anybody went to her mass. The brothers wouldn't let her body lie in the church, for fear of the miasmas gathering, but they held a funeral procession through the village and a mass at the graveside. Joan went, and she said the only people following the coffin were Sarah, Sarah's sister, the monk who led the service and a beggar she'd never seen before, who asked for 2d just for ringing a hand bell.

“Godspeed they send us a priest soon,” grumbles Alice, standing in the doorway with Edward, who's wailing fit to bring down the thatch. “Isabel and Ned, I told you, we're brewing ale today. How are we going to do that without some water? And Isabel, you come straight back and don't stand there gossiping to Amabel Dyer. I won't have you bringing the sickness here, you hear me?”

 

Ale means a lot of water – two buckets each and a pole across our shoulders to carry them home. Ned scuffs his shoes along in the earth. He's worried, you can tell.

“Isabel?” he says. “If you catch the pestilence – can you get better?”

“No,” I say. “You always die.”

Ned hunches his shoulders. I wonder who he's anxious about – Philip-at-the-brook, who he plays with sometimes on the green, or old John Adamson, or ourselves, when this thing comes to us.

“Ned?” I say, but he pulls away.

“I don't care,” he says. “I don't care about you or Alice or any stupid pestilence.” And he runs off to the well with his buckets swinging.

The women by the well are swapping bad news. Stupid old besoms. As we come down towards them, they stop their talking and look at us over their shoulders. Bad news coming to us. I feel something cold settle in my stomach. The pestilence coming to someone I love. Robin. Richard. Geoffrey. Amabel Dyer. There are so many possibilities.

“Isabel, did you hear?” one of them calls. “The new priest has come. Arrived late last night. Just a boy, Beatrice Reeve says.”

“That's good,” I say, and some of the tangle of fear in my stomach loosens itself. The woman looks as though she's about to say something else, and I tug on Ned's arm before she can work herself up to it.

“Come
on
, Ned. Alice is waiting.”

I drag him over to the well. The women watch. I move restlessly as we wait in the line, stretching the muscles in my arms. The women talk, their wimples nodding, their shoulders moving restlessly. No one says anything to us. It's only as we're done filling our buckets that a woman calls to me.

“Isabel, wait a moment.”

It's Emma Baker.

“Does your father know?”

Ned answers before I can stop him. “Know what? About the priest?”

“Margaret is sick,” says Emma.

Margaret. Robin's mother. My belly tips, as though I'm standing at the edge of a cliff, about to plunge over the edge into nothingness. Robin. My Robin, with his black hair falling in his eyes and his wide mouth open and laughing. The sickness in Robin's house.

“Brother Simon from St Mary's was there this morning. It's the sickness all right. If you know what's good for you, you'll stay away from there, you hear?”

“We've got to go,” I say. “Alice is waiting!” And I'm almost running, fast as I can with the buckets on my shoulders, Ned running after me.

“What did you do that for? Why are we running? Isabel – wait for me!”

“How dare she?” I say. I'm shaking. “How dare she tell me what to do? What's it got to do with her?”

“Are you going to see Margaret?” says Ned. “Isabel?”

“I'm not going to do what those old hags tell me,” I say, and I stamp off back home before he can ask me any more questions I don't have the answers for.

 

Alice is crushing the malt at the table when we come back. Ned is full of the news.

“Margaret at Brook has the pestilence!”

Alice lowers the pestle and stares at him. Her face is red, and a strand of hair has escaped her wimple and is stuck to her cheek.

“Oh, Ned,” she says.

“Can we have Robin here?” I say. “While his mother's sick?”

Maggie, who is rolling Alice's spindle across the floor, looks up.

“Yes!” she says. “Can he? Can he sleep in our bed?”

“I'm sorry, Isabel,” says Alice. She looks tired. She brushes the stray strand of hair off her forehead with the fleshy back of her hand. “I've got Edward and you children to think of. What if he brought the sickness here?”

“Will Thatcher says we oughtn't to speak to anyone who's sick,” Ned pipes up. “He says we ought to stay at home and just lock our doors and—”

I remember all the people who have come down the road from York – the preachers, the carters, the beggars and lepers and holy men and refugees. There is nothing to be done. I remember that baby – what did happen to him? I remember Robin, my kind, anxious Robin. Locked in with the miasma and no one coming.

“I don't care what Will Thatcher says!” I shout, so suddenly that Maggie looks up, startled. “I don't care what anyone says! You can't stop me!”

I push past Ned blindly and run outside. Alice calls after me, “Isabel! You come back here!” but I don't answer.

 

Robin lives across the green from us, the middle house of a row of three with John Baker and the oven at one end and the forge at the other. The two little Smith girls are playing in the garden as I come up to the house – they stop to stare at me over the fence. I ignore them. I'm trying not to listen to the voice – Alice's voice – in my head telling me to walk away and not bring the sickness on our family. The voice that tells me
that these people are in God's hands now, and there's nothing I can do for them.

“Robin,” I call, and I rap on the closed door with the back of my hand. Then, when no one answers, “Robin!”

No one comes. The chickens carry on pecking at the earth around my feet.

There are noises inside the house, scuffles, then the door opens, and Robin appears. He looks smaller than I remember, and paler. He's got a posset of something – herbs, probably – in a little sack pressed up against his nose to protect him from the pestilence scent.