All Fall Down (14 page)

 

 

I
t's late when I wake. Usually, I'm the first one up, but today the light is streaming through the cracks in the doors and the cow at the other side of the barn is making urgent noises, wanting to be milked.

Magsy and Ned are already up and playing campball in the yard. I can hear them calling.

“To me! To me!”

I pull on my clothes and go outside. Something's going to change today. It has to.

Robin's sitting on the edge of the animals' drinking trough, eating a bit of cheese. He holds out his hand to me and I go up and sit beside him.

“The food's still there,” he says, in a low voice. “From last night.”

Every evening, I leave ale and food outside the door of the house. Every morning the food is gone and the flagon is there, empty.

Today, it hasn't been moved.

The house is quiet. There's no smoke coming through the thatch. The shutters are closed.

I feel very tired. I lean my head against Robin's shoulder, and he puts his arm around me. Maggie and Ned are playing with their ball against the wall of the house, but I can't seem to pull my thoughts together enough to worry about them, to tell them to keep away. I ought to go in. I know I ought. But I'm frightened. Not of dying. I'm frightened of what the bodies might look like. I'm frightened of the blood and the pus and the stench, and I'm frightened because these things have no place in our neat little house, in my warm and orderly home.

“What are you going to do?” says Robin.

I bite my lip. Father made me promise not to go into the house, but all today I've been wondering if that was a fair thing to ask me to promise, and if I can live with myself if – when – they die alone and unsanctified.

Watching me, Robin says, as though reading my mind, “Walt never said you couldn't go to the monks.”

That isn't true. Father said again and again – since the pestilence came here – that I wasn't to go to the abbey, that I wasn't to go and see Geoffrey, that he didn't care if I'd suddenly decided I wanted to run away and be a nun, I had to wait until the sickness had passed. It's just that now – since Alice fell sick – all his prohibitions have been about the house. But he wouldn't have wanted Alice to die without a priest. I'm sure he wouldn't. And when – if – Alice dies, he wouldn't want her body left to rot in the house, would he?

 

I don't take the others, because I know the abbey is dangerous. I go through the village alone, with nothing but a handful of lavender from the garden pressed against my nose. It's a heavy, wet day, with a faint mist curling around the edges of the trees.
The village is eerily empty. A few chickens scratch about in the road, and a pig is nosing at the fence by Richard's garden, but that's it. It's like everyone has run away or died and we're the only people left alive, though I know of course that that can't be true.

But there must be monks left. Mustn't there?

The stench of the pestilence is stronger at the abbey as well. I take deep breaths of lavender as I bang on the door with my fist, until I think no one will come, that everyone is already dead. At last, a brother I don't recognize answers the door. His hair is wild and his eyes weary.

“Well?” he says. “What?” He speaks real English, as though he's spoken it every day of his life, rather than learnt it from a book like most of the monks.

“Please,” I say. “My parents—”

The monk sighs. “Half of the brothers are sick,” he says. “And the other half are dead. And now every bastard in the village wants a miracle. All right. Wait there. I'll get my things.” He tugs his hand through his hair.

“Do you have a miracle?” I say. The words tumble out of me like grain from a barrel. “We have St Bede, and rosemary—”

“Rosemary and St Bede!” The monk gives a bark of a laugh. Then he sees my face and seems to collapse. “I'm sorry,” he says. “I've not slept all last night, and I'm not going to sleep tonight either. You can't cure this. You do know that, don't you? Once you've caught it . . .”

He sighs. “Come on,” he says. “I'll give them the rites, at least. I can do that much.”

 

We don't talk much on the long ride back. The monk has a scrawny brown horse, which looks as ragged as he does – it's
got some sort of mould around its eyes, and there are patches of discolouration across its back and head which give it a worried, half-finished look. The monk rides with a concentration which suggests that he hasn't had much practice. Maybe he's a villein's son, like Geoffrey.

I'm glad he doesn't say anything to me. I don't feel much like talking.

Robin is milking the cow when we come back to the yard. He nods to me, but doesn't come over. I can't see the little ones. I don't know where they are.

“Hello! Open up! Open up!”

The monk raps proprietorially on our door with the back of his hand. I stand a few paces back. He isn't like any monk I've ever met before. His thin face is unshaven and his eyes raw with sleeplessness. The shaved pate of his head has a raw, scabby look to it.

“I don't know if—” I say. The monk looks at me.

“Well?” he says.

“We've been sleeping in the barn,” I whisper. “I leave them food, but—”

He gives me a hard look then.

“God almighty,” he says. Then, “How many of you are there?”

“Three,” I say. “Four with Robin. Six with my brothers who aren't home. There were seven, but . . .”

He runs his fingers through his hair so it sticks up again. Then he says gently, “Do you want to come in with me?”

I shake my head, blind, tears starting in my eyes for the first time all day at his kindness. Kindness always makes me cry.

“All right,” he says, and he goes into the house.

I wait outside. He's gone for what seems like hours. I hear
scraping on the floor, as though he's moving the bed. Perhaps they're all right after all.

He comes back to me at the door.

“Don't be frightened,” he says. “Come and see.”

Coming in from outside, the house is dark and stuffy. It smells of lavender drying, and rosemary and juniper, and straw and smoke and pig and cow, but also the sickly, rotten scent of death. The fire is dead, and the candles are out.

The smell is worse in Father and Alice's little bed-space. The monk has arranged them flat on their backs together in the bed, but he couldn't hide the mess – the blood and pus and worse on the blankets. Their skin is marked with bruises, blossoming under the skin, bruises and blood.

They are both quite dead.

 

I feel like I'm falling. I feel like I'm standing on the top of Riding Edge, just about to tip over the face of the cliff, and there's nothing I can do about it. My mind is dull. All I can think about is Ned and Maggie and Robin, and how it's my job to look after them now, and how am I supposed to do it on my own?

“Their confession,” I whisper. “I never heard it. They died unshriven.”

“Here,” says the monk. He makes the sign of the cross over the bed.

“But if no one heard their confession – aren't they going to hell?”

“Perhaps they heard each other's confessions,” says the monk. He puts his arm around my shoulders and leads me gently away from the bed. “Yes. I'm sure that's what must have happened. They knew what the bishop said, didn't they?”

Outside, the sudden brightness makes me blink. Robin has taken the cow to pasture, and Mag and Ned are nowhere in sight. My head is stuffy, as though I haven't properly woken up. I can't think what to do next. Should I tell the others? Find Geoffrey? Run away? What can I do with these ruined people? I'm supposed to bury them, I know, but the thought fills me with terror. I want to run back to the barn and lock the door and never leave it again.

“Your brothers.” The monk is talking to me. “Little girl. Listen to me. Where are your brothers?”

“Geoffrey's at the abbey,” I say. “Richard's in his house – it's not far. He's got a wife who's going to have a baby. Do you know Geoffrey? Is he all right? Can we go back and tell him?”

The abbey rushes into my head, the abbey infirmary where Geoffrey was working, that cool, safe place rich with the smell of dust and sunlight, green leaves and apple blossom, paper and old stone. Maybe we could go there, and the monks could look after us. They wouldn't ask Mag and Ned to work in the infirmary, surely? Maybe there's somewhere safe they could hide us. But even as I'm thinking it, I know I'm dreaming. Nowhere's safe any more.

“Geoffrey,” says the monk, as though he's tasting the name. Then, “No, don't go to him. Better not bring your family to the abbey now. Take the others to Richard – he'll look after them.”

“But I can't!” I cry. “Father told us we weren't to. Why can't I see Geoffrey? What's wrong with him?”

“Little girl,” says the monk. He says it calmly, but very firm. “Listen to what I'm telling you. The abbey can't help you now. You need to go and find your other brother.”

Does that mean Geoffrey is dead, and he doesn't want to
tell me? I bite my lip, hoping to make the blood come, but I don't ask any more.

“All right,” the monk says. “Good girl. Come on.” He leads me away from the house and towards the gate. He hauls himself back on to his horse, rubbing at his bloodshot eyes, yawning hugely. Then he leans over and touches my forehead. “
In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti
,” he murmurs, like I did to Simon, and I stand there at the gate to our house, watching as he rides away and the empty land that is the rest of my life rises up to meet me.

 

Richard.

Richard will help. I know I promised Father not to go to him, but I can't do this on my own. How can Robin and I dig the graves? How can Robin and I bring in the harvest alone? How can I keep Mags and Ned fed? How can I go back to that house, once so warm and safe, with the stench and the blood and the dead people already starting to rot inside it?

When I rap at the door, Joan answers, her belly heavy and swollen, and my hope sinks a little. I'd forgotten quite how pregnant she was. At the same time, it's so wonderful to see someone grown-up and related to me – someone whose problem Ned and Mag and those dead bodies are now – that I grasp at her sleeve.

“Joan! Oh, Joan. It's so good to see you.”

“Isabel! Isabel, whist.” Joan steps awkwardly off the doorsill, shutting the door behind her. “You'll wake Richard.”

Wake Richard? The sun is already halfway through its journey into the heavens. Why would Richard be sleeping?

“Can I talk to him?” Tears are pricking at the back of my eyes again.

Joan hesitates. There's something wrong with her face – it's stretched taut with sleeplessness and her eyes won't meet mine. Who of her people have died – her father? Her sister? I don't want to see whatever sadness is there and I look away, to the church and the faded cloth of the archery butts and the three beehives round and content and all unknowing in a row in Sir John's herb garden.

“Isabel . . .” she says, and something in her voice makes me turn back to her. “It . . .”

“What? It's what? I need to speak to Richard, Joan.”

“I think it's the pestilence . . .” says Joan, and her face crumples suddenly into tears, and she's crying, this grown woman who I'd hoped would solve all my problems is crying in the doorway.

I hate Joan. I hate her and I hate her stupid tears.

I back away. Joan's shoulders are shaking, but I can't help. All I can give her is more grief, and I can't bear to bring my unhappiness here, to another human's shoulders. I'm a coward, I know, and a fool, but I can't help it. She'll hear soon enough. I stumble back up the track, as Joan closes the door behind me, back to my two dead bodies and what is left of my family.

Last week, I had four brothers, two parents, one sister and Robin.

Now I have one brother, one sister and a husband.

And it isn't over yet.

 

 

T
he future stretches before me, bare and terrible. First I have to talk to the others. Then I have to do something about the dead things in the house. Probably then I have to clean up the house and make it into somewhere we can live again, but my mind revolts at the horror of it. Maybe we could just live in the barn for ever, where it's clean and quiet.

Once we've done those things, then I'll worry about what we're going to do next.

Robin is feeding the chickens – so late in the day! – when I come back to the yard. He sees my face and he comes over and puts his arms around me. I don't have to tell him anything. I just rest my head against his shoulder and breathe in his warm leathery earthy scent.

“Richard wouldn't help us?” he says at last, and I rub at my face with my hands.

“He's sick. And Joan has the baby coming. It's just us now.”

I sit Maggie and Ned on the water trough and tell them what's happened. They're quiet, and they look as bewildered
as I feel. Maggie seemed to understand about Edward, but Father and Alice together is too big for her to hold.

“But where are they?” she says. “Where's Alice?”

“Alice is in heaven,” I say. “But her body's in the house. Do you want to see it?” She shakes her head. She knows what a dead thing looks like, from Edward's cold little corpse. She doesn't need to see another.

“What's going to happen to us?” Ned demands. “Who's going to look after us, if Richard isn't?”

“I don't know,” I say wearily. “Me and Robin, I suppose.”

“You can't!” says Ned. “You're not grown-up enough!”

“Fine,” I say. “Feed yourself then,” and he bares his teeth at me. I've only been his mother for an hour, and already I'm a failure.

“Isabel,” says Robin, quietly. “How are we going to bury them?”

How indeed? I think of the people I would have gone to for help in another life – Alice's mother, who died of the ague three years ago, Robin's mother, Emma Baker, Edward Miller, the priest. Emma Baker is the only one left alive, and can I ask her to dig a grave for two grown people? But the sexton is dead, and I hate the gravediggers, I hate the thought of giving one of our animals to them in payment. But what choice do we have?

I start shaking my head from side to side, blindly, like a hurt animal. I don't know how we're going to bury them. I don't know how I'm going to look after Mag and Ned. I don't know what we're going to do.

Robin puts his arms around me again. I rest my head on his shoulder. There's so much that needs to be done. I can't do any of it.

“Come on,” says Robin. “Let's go down to the churchyard and see who's there.”

 

The churchyard is quiet. It got so full these last weeks, they stopped burying people there. They've opened a pit in Sir John's pasture behind the church. The dug-up earth is heaped up in a pile. The pit itself is low and uneven and stinks of lime. Unconsecrated ground.

Adam the sexton was one of the first in the village to die. Dirty Nick, who's mad, and the gravediggers who follow the funeral carts now open the pestilence pit and throw the bodies in, and then they feast off the beasts of payment, or if there isn't anyone left to pay them they go into the houses of the dead and take what they like.

I can't bear it.

I go into the church and call, “Hello? Hello?” but nobody answers.

Nothing stirs in the cottages by the church. A goat chews at the carrots growing in the sexton's garden. Nobody stops him. The door to Nicholas Harold's son's house stands open, but the inside of the cottage is dark. Nicholas's pig is digging up their herb garden unchecked. I don't want to think about what might be inside the cottage.

“Where is everyone?” whispers Robin.

There are people still alive in the village. There are. There's smoke rising from the oven, and from one or two of the cottages by the forge. One of the beggars is wandering over the green, with the aimless, half-crazy motion of one of the sick. Most people are at the harvest, I know. But Robin is right . . . the village has an emptiness to it that isn't usual even in harvest-time. Perhaps it's because the forge has been silent
since Robert the smith died. Perhaps it's because so many animals are dead. Perhaps, perhaps.

I wonder if Noah felt like this, standing on a mountain looking over his flooded world, trying to work out how to remake his life from the beginning.

“There's someone over there—” Robin says, pointing.

In the mist at the edge of the churchyard, there's a low shape, no higher than a child and moving. I draw in my breath. It looks like a devil, a black devil digging up the bodies to take them down to hell. But Robin is moving towards it, and I'm more scared of being left on my own than I am of whatever it is.

“Hello!” Robin calls. “Hello—?” and then, “God, Isabel!”

He turns away, like Maggie when she's frightened, his head ducked down, as though shielding off a blow. I move towards the shape, questioning, and the wind turns so that it's blowing in our direction and I catch a lungful of the pestilence smell, so strong I nearly gag.

“What is it – Robin—?”

It's a pig. One of John Adamson's red-haired pigs, with his snout in the shallow earth. At first I don't understand Robin's horror, then I see that the pig's snout is muddied with blood, and I see what it's been gnawing at, and my stomach rises to my throat and I have to turn away to be sick.

“Isabel,” Robin says, and I can hear the tears in his voice. “God, Isabel—”

His voice sounds small and childish and frightened, and I'm suddenly furious with him. It's
my
mother and father who are dead. It's
me
whose world has tumbled topside up. Why am
I
supposed to look after
him
?

“Shoo!” I shout at John Adamson's pig, stamping my feet
and flapping my arms. “Shoo! Go away, you horrible thing!” I run at it, and the pig lumbers away a few feet, but then stops, looking at me with its little piggy eyes. There's another pig at the other edge of the grave – old Sarah Stranger's fat sow, which just looks at me and then carries on with her dinner.

This must be the plague pit. The mud is so shallow here that you can see low, swollen shapes in the earth where the pigs have been rooting – a mottled arm here, a swollen stomach there. My belly rises in me again, and I swallow to keep it down. My eyes move almost of their own accord, catching on scraps of cloth and hair, trying to tell
which
and
who
these people are, and I turn my face away in horror. My hands find Robin, and I clutch at his tunic. He puts his arms around me, and I bury my face in his chest, feeling the tears rise again. How can I do this? How can I put Alice and Father in here?

“There's Dirty Nick,” Robin says, and I feel the panic rising in me.

“I'm not asking Dirty Nick!” But what choice do we have? A small – no, a large – part of me just wants to put them in the ox-cart and leave them by the churchyard and hope someone comes and buries them for us. But what if no one does?

Robin is looking over my shoulder, into the churchyard.

“There's someone there,” he says.

He's right. There's someone there, where a moment before there was nobody. A man, taller than any of the men I know, standing in the mist by one of the gravestones. He looks like an angel, coming to blow the last trumpet and raise the dead. Or perhaps he
is
one of the dead, rising from the tomb. The Day of Judgement has come at last, and I can lay down all my burdens and put my future in God's hands. I should be frightened, I know, but actually what I feel is relief. It's the
same as the feeling you get at the end of a long task, when an adult comes back and takes over the cooking pot or the loom or the plough, and you know that all that effort is lifted out of your hands, that the meal or the cloth or the field may have been worked well or ill, but whatever happens, it's not your business any more.

I don't have to worry any more, is what I think, very clearly. I'm so sure of it that when the man turns, I walk easily and happily towards him, the way a Michaelmas pig walks easy and happy towards the woman who has fed him all throughout the long summer, unaware that this day her hand holds not the slop-bowl, but the knife.