All Fall Down (2 page)

 

 

A
lice is my stepmother, and one of my favourite people in the world. It's like a mummer's play, how she and Father married. My mother died when Maggie was born, and after that Father didn't want to marry anyone else. He sent Maggie to Robin's mother to nurse, and my brother Richard, who was fifteen, had to look after me and Ned and Geoffrey. He wasn't very good at it, and we got used to living with dirty clothes, and burnt pottage, and stale ale, and a hearth-fire that wouldn't light because all the wood was wet.

The women in the village clicked their tongues at this, and brought us to the manor court, where Sir Edmund's steward ordered Father to remarry within three weeks, or have another wife found for him. But Father wouldn't. He just nodded his head and carried on like he was. So then Sir Edmund's steward looked at Ned and Geoffrey and me, with our red eyes and muddy faces and hair all wild, and told Father that he had to marry Agnes Harelip by Midsummer Day.

Poor Father! And poor us. Agnes Harelip is an old shrew. She works as a spinster, spinning thread for the yeomen's
wives in Ingleforn and Great Riding, and she lives in this neat little cottage where everything is just so. She looked at Richard and Geoffrey and Ned and me with absolute horror. Father pursed up his lips, but he didn't say anything. The next day, though, he washed his face and hands, and mine too, and combed my hair, and he took me to the house where Agnes's father lived.

Father knocked on the door, and Alice answered. I knew her a little, and I liked her even then. Her yellow hair was coiled in a knot at the back of her neck, but these long strands had escaped and were fuzzing up around her ears. Her big hands were covered in malt, but her eyes were laughing and kind.

“Is your father there?” Father said, and Alice said, “No, but come and take a sup, and bring the child too.”

Inside, the house was neat and swept, and Agnes and Alice's little brother and sisters were tumbling about by the hearth. Alice gave us a bowl of pottage, and Father asked about the children, and I sat there eating up my bowl and wishing everything was as nice as this at home.

After a while, Alice's mother said the washing wouldn't do itself, and we must excuse her, and she went out, with a look at Alice. And Alice and Father sat holding their bowls and looking at the fire.

“You've a big family,” said Father, and Alice said yes, she had three little brothers and sisters, and one older, who was Agnes.

“But that's what I like,” she said. “I'd feel strange in a house that wasn't full of children.”

“We've four in our house,” said Father. “And the baby. It's a lot to ask a woman to come to.”

“I certainly wouldn't ask Agnes!” said Alice, and she laughed. “That fat fool didn't know what he was letting your lot in for, if you ask me.”

“Would you have them?” said Father, and Alice looked at him, not at all surprised.

“I'd want my own as well,” she said, and Father nodded.

“Of course.”

“Well then,” she said, and that was that. They were married after mass at the church door. And it wasn't long before we all loved her, apart from Richard, who I think was jealous, being the oldest. But at least he didn't have to look after us any more.

Alice nearly had a baby three times before Edward. Twice the child came too early. Once she had a little girl who only lived a day. But last year, Edward came and stayed.

“Edward's my name!” said Ned, when the baby was introduced to us. Ned's really an Edward, after his godfather, Edward Miller, who is baby Edward's godfather too. Father hopes he'll apprentice them both at the mill when they're older.

Richard doesn't like Alice much, but he
hates
her baby. The more children Father and Alice have, the less land there is for everyone, and without land we'll all go hungry.

“Maybe Edward will marry a lord's daughter and keep us all instead,” I say to Richard, but he just scowls at the crib, as though he's working out exactly how many acres baby Edward will take from his inheritance.

 

 

T
he church is full for mass today, but no one is listening to Sir John – our priest – as he drones away in Latin. The news about York runs from body to body, crackling in the air like summer lightning. Nobody can talk of anything but the sickness.

“In London, they don't bury the bodies any more, they just leave them lying in the streets. Anyone who can leave has left.”

“What about the ones who can't?” says John Dyer, in a whisper. There's a pause while no one says anything, and then the muttering starts again.

“You can't outrun it. It travels with you. I heard about a man who fled from Lynn. Went to his sister's. He thought he'd escaped . . . didn't have a mark on him. Two weeks later he was dead. So was his sister and all the children.”

“In the south there are dead places where nobody lives any more. All these little villages, all the houses empty . . .”

“York!”

Amabel and I stand with Robin and listen.

“Everyone isn't dead in London, are they?” says Amabel.

“They can't be,” says Robin. “How many of those men have been to London? They're just telling stories.”

“York, though . . .”

 

When I grow up, I'm going to marry Robin. We've been betrothed all our lives. Mother was friends with his mother, and his father, who died of the quinsy when Robin was small. Robin will inherit his land when he's twenty-one.

The tone of the conversations in the church have changed. William-at-the-Wood is talking in his loud voice to Father. He's leaving the village, selling his land to his eldest son.

“I'll not stay around to watch God destroy my children,” he says. “I'm off up north tomorrow.”

“Where?” says Father. “Where will you go?” I close my eyes and picture it, William-at-the-Wood off into the wild north where no one can ever find him again. He'll make his fortune selling ribbons or fool's gold, and his daughters will come back princesses and ladies with ermine cloaks and white skin.

William spits and shakes his head. “Up to Newcastle,” he says. “Then Scotland. It's a wild land, Scotland – we'll be safe there, I reckon. I wouldn't stay here if I were you, Walt. I'd pack up while you still can.”

Now the picture has changed – Robin's family and mine, all our household on the back of our oxen, Stumpy and Gilbert, marching down the wide, grassy roads to the land of the mad Scots. Sleeping in inns, running ahead of the pestilence.

But Father sucks in his teeth.

“Maybe,” he says, and I know we won't be going. We can no more leave our land than Geoffrey can leave his abbey. On the road, we'd be beggars, or hired labourers at best.

“Good luck to ye, then,” says William, and he turns away.

“Can you really believe,” says Amabel, “that the pestilence could come here?”

“No,” I say, and I mean it. Plagues and rains of frogs and thunderbolts and sieges where everyone dies happen, I know they do – I've met people who've seen them with their own eyes. But they happen a long way away, in foreign countries where everyone is a heathen and no one has heard of Jesus Christ. I have tried to imagine such a disaster happening here – in Ingleforn! – but my mind cannot hold it.

At the front of the church, the musicians are playing the opening notes of a hymn. The choir – with them my brother Ned – begin to sing. I close my eyes. I believe God punishes the wicked, just as I believe He speaks to his prophets through burning bushes and cures the lame by laying His hand on them. I believe that.

I just don't believe it could happen here.

 

Afterwards, we stay behind to admire the new painting on the church wall. Sir John hopes that a holy painting might appease God's anger, and we're not about to argue. The young artist has painted Noah, standing in his ark, watching with mild interest as the sinners are swallowed up and drowned. You can't see much of the sinners, just their arms waving about as the waters cover their heads.

“Which is the most pious of God's creatures?” says Sir John.

Emma Baker answers, “The pelican.”

“The pelican,” says Sir John. “Who tears her own flesh from her breast to feed her young ones.

“
Pious Pelican, Lord Jesus,

Cleanse me the impure, in your blood,

Of which one drop can save

The whole world of all sin.
”

Maggie likes this new picture, with the elephant and the chimera poking their heads out of the ark, but Ned prefers the one on the other wall, of the sinners burning in hell and the devils poking them with pitchforks.

“Does the pelican
really
eat its own stomach?” he asks Alice. “
Why?
”

“You do such things for your children,” says Alice. She's holding Edward across her chest, his head bobbing out of the top of his swaddling bands. He opens his mouth and dribbles down her shoulder.

“Would you? For Edward?”

“If I had to.” Alice isn't like Mrs Noah in the mystery play, who wails and screams when they try to get her onto the ark. If her children were in danger, Alice would be out there chopping down trees and sawing up planks, as fast as the rain fell down around her.

“Would you do it for
me
?” says Mag. Alice laughs and ruffles her hair.

“A big girl like you?” she says. “I'd send you off to get us a pelican for the pot. Pelican stew, how's that for a feast?”

 

 

R
obin and I go up to the woods after church to gather wood.

“Imagine William-at-the-Wood in Scotland!” says Robin. “Do you think Robert the Bruce will chop him up? I told Mother we should go too, but she says she'd never be able to get enough for our land, and she doesn't like to run away and leave Grandmother with the fines.”

“You'd leave Ingleforn?” Just the thought makes me dizzy. Ingleforn is all I know – the fells behind us, the wood below the village, the funny little church with the bent spire. I've worked in Father's strips of field since I was smaller than Maggie, stumbling behind the reapers, picking up the fallen stalks of barley. How could Robin think about leaving so lightly?

Robin smiles at me. “You've got your farmer's face on.”

“Farmer's face?”

He purses up his mouth and beetles his forehead. “Why don't you care about the oats, Robin? We've got beans, isn't that exciting? Look, Father's bought another four acres, so we can work twice as hard this year, won't that be wonderful?”

I shove him. “Better than your face.” Actually, Robin has a lovely face, always moving, always laughing, but I do asleep-Robin, head lolling, tongue out, eyes closed.

“Is there – work—? Can't – Isabel – do that—? It's – so-o-o nice here . . .”

“Sounds right to me,” says Robin, but he bends to pick up another branch. My own bag is nearly full. “And yes, I'd leave. I'd rather be poor and alive than here and dead. Did you hear about that convent—”

“Yes, I heard!” The convent story is the worst of all the stories we've heard this year, and it's been a year of horrors, stories of villages empty except for the dead, of corpses lying mouldering in the streets, eaten by ravens and pigs, of children starving surrounded by fields of unharvested grain, of family leaving family to die and no one left to ring the passing-bells or say the mass.

“I don't believe half the things people say,” I tell Robin. “And anyway, you can't leave. You belong to Sir Edmund like me, so unless you want to leave your grandmother to pay for your freedom, we're staying here. So what's the point in worrying?”

I push past Robin and start climbing up the rise, the bag of wood bumping against my back, the sticks digging into my spine like unwelcome questions. Maybe the pestilence won't come to us. It might not.

I come out of the edge of the wood. And stop.

There's a caravan of people coming down the road from York. The road isn't too dangerous, except in bad winters, but you do occasionally get highwaymen and outlaws in the woods, so most people travel in convoy. This convoy is bigger than any I've seen before. There are men and animals; voices calling,
pigs shrieking, children wailing. There are riders with nothing but what they can fit in their saddlebags, packhorses laden with all of a family's possessions, even what looks like a hay cart piled with bedding and furniture, chickens in boxes and geese skittish with walking, people alone and people in gangs, minstrels and holy men, lepers and beggars next to families with servants and even a canopied litter, drawn between two horses, wobbling precariously as the horses stumble in the potholes and the mud.

Robin's feet sound behind me. His breath catches and wheezes in his throat.

“Where are they going?” I say, without turning my eyes away from the road. Robin leans forward, hands on his knees. He draws in a long breath.

“Duresme. Scotland. Here.”

“They can't come here!” They can't. I know how the pestilence is spread. It lives in the houses of the poor and wretched. It's passed by breathing miasmas – bad airs. If you get too close to the miasmas of the sick, you catch it too. That's why if you want to be saved, you have to wear lavender and rosemary and rose petals and other sweet-smelling things, to keep the dead air away.

“They'll bring it here!” I say, and Robin shakes his head.

“They know. Look!”

He points. Two men from our village are talking to the caravan. Even from this distance I can see Gilbert the reeve and Philip de Coverley, the bailiff. They're talking to a little knot of men, pointing down the road.

“They're sending them away,” says Robin, but . . .

“They're sending them to the abbey!”

St Mary's Abbey is nearly three miles east of Ingleforn.
The monks won't turn the travellers away. They give shelter to anyone – soldiers, beggars, even one of King Edward's messengers once. But—

“The abbey's where Geoffrey is!”

Robin looks away, back out towards the road. “I'm sure he'll be all right, Isabel.”

But he's remembering the convent story. And so am I.

The convent story came from a troop of minstrels, who passed through Great Riding in the spring. They were full of the horror of it – a convent in France, where all but one of the nuns caught the pestilence and died.

“They say the nuns were sleeping with devils,” the flautist said, but the drummer shook her head.

“They took in all the sick of the village,” she said. “That was what killed them.”

“All but one died,” said Alice, amazed.

The drummer said, “Just one left to bury the dead, write their names in their big book and drown herself in the river.”

That was the story that made us shift and stir uneasily. Nuns – good women – helping the sick and taking in the strangers, like God asked them to. Nuns, killed for their piety, the last nun drowned in the water, with her long hair floating loose around her like a madwoman and her soul pulled down to hell as a suicide.

That was the worst story of all.