All Fall Down (15 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

He to whom God has given knowledge, And the gift of speaking eloquently, Must not keep silent nor conceal the gift, But he must willingly display it.

 

Marie de France
Twelfth century

 

 

I
t's dark. It's cold. The rain has been falling on and off all day, and though the last fall was a few hours ago now, the sky is still heavy with clouds. The road – the road all those exiles travelled down from York, all that time ago – is swamped with mud and water. My hose and the hem of my gown are splattered and soaked. When I rub my face, water splashes off my hand and down my sleeve. Every time I lift up my foot, my shoe rubs at the broken skin on my heel and my feet squelch. On either side is farmland – beans and oats and barley like Father's strips. It's still harvest, so they should all be full of people, but again and again we pass fields with the yellow barley heavy and abandoned. The harvest is rotting away ungathered. Cows moan in the fields, their udders swollen and unmilked. Sheep with what looks like the murrain lie untended in the grass. In one field, all the cows are dead and the stench is astounding. Foxes and ravens are gorging themselves on the carrion, greedy and fearless and unchecked.

In the doorway of a house, a little boy Maggie's age watches us pass. He's got mud all down his tunic, and his face is red
with crying. I wonder where his parents are, if they're still alive, if there's anyone looking after him at all. But there must be someone, mustn't there? There must be.

My feet hurt. My legs hurt. It's all right for Thomas, he's got a horse. It's the most beautiful horse I've ever seen, a black palfrey with a white diamond on its nose. He has Mag up on the seat in front of him. She's half asleep, lolling back into his arms with one finger and the edge of the blanket stuck half out of her mouth. Ned, stumping along beside me, is close to his limit.

“My
feet
hurt. Aren't we
there
yet?”

I want to shake him, but I'm so tired I can't manage more than a, “Be quiet, can't you?”

Not because I care what Thomas thinks. Not because I don't want Ned to mess up this journey as much as possible. Just because if I hear any more complaining, I think I'll turn round and run back home.

Thomas sits on his horse, pretending he can't hear us. I suppose he thinks he's being polite.

Thomas.

I hate him already.

In the saddlebags on either side of the horse is all we've been allowed to bring. There's not much. Most of our things are useful, not precious. We've got St Bede, and the dice, and the little wooden animals Father made for Ned and Mag. Mag has Alice's coloured beads round her neck and the pewter badge that came from Duresme Cathedral. She wanted to bring Father and Alice's bed, but Thomas laughed and said it wouldn't fit on the horse.

“But it's our bed,” said Maggie. I knew exactly how she felt. I wanted to ask if we could take Alice's red salt-pot, and her
green flagon that came all the way from France, but I didn't want Thomas to think I was a fool.

Thomas is a rich merchant in York.

He probably has whole chambers full of green flagons from France.

I know I ought to be grateful to Thomas. He spent hours helping us dig the narrow grave where Father and Alice are lying now. He and Robin lifted them on to the cart, and off at the other end, so I didn't even have to touch them. I
am
grateful. I am. Now that the bodies are gone, everything is easier, though Thomas said that the grave is too shallow to leave the corpses in safely for long.

“When all this is over,” he said, “your priest will have to sort all this chaos out.”

“Our priest is dead,” I said.

Robin and Thomas and I dug the graves, with Father's spade and another from Simon the priest's house. It took hours. We brought Maggie and Ned down to the churchyard, and I could see Thomas watching them, though he didn't say anything. Robin was looking at Thomas like he was Jesus resurrected and given a broadsword and a chest of gold.

“You know a lot about graves,” he said. “Are you a sexton?” which was a ridiculous thing to say. Anyone could see Thomas wasn't a sexton, with his beaver-fur hat and his mantle lined with moleskin.

Thomas shook his head and said, “No, I work in wine. I have two ships that bring wine from France – though the docks are closed now, of course.” As soon as he said
ships
and
France
, I could see Robin was gone. His eyes never left Thomas, all the time they were digging. It was like there was a little bell-ringer in his head, ringing it out,
France
,
France
,
France
.

France is where the pestilence came from. It's people like Thomas with his wine ships who brought it to England.

Robin didn't care, though. He insisted on taking Thomas back to our barn, insisted on pouring him the last of our ale and cutting him thick slices of our cheese and our ham.

“What are we going to eat when that's gone?” I whispered.

“Isabel!” Robin looked shocked. “He's just dug two graves for us – we can give him some ham!”

I knew we could. I knew I was being ridiculous. We're not short of barley or oats, and the cow and the garden are full of milk and herbs. But I could see what was going to happen. Thomas with his kind eyes looking all round the barn, noticing the straw mattress and the hearth, noticing that we haven't invited him into the house, because I can't think about what that house looks like yet. He was going to be kind and charming, and end up taking charge of everything. And while I was grateful for his help, our other problems were
ours
, not his.

“You're sleeping out here?” he said, casually.

“Just while Father and Alice were sick,” I told him.

“I expect we'll go back inside now,” said Robin. And I could see the thought trailing off as he said it.

“Nice enough out here,” said Thomas. He looked so polite and . . . dignified, sitting there on Maggie's hay-bed, that I found myself liking him a little, before I could stop myself.

Mags was still shy of the stranger, burying her head in my skirts and peering out at him from behind fistfuls of cloth. Ned was like Robin – fascinated.

“Do you live in a manor house?”

“Not quite.” Thomas stretched out his legs – he had soft leather boots with buckles that glistened even through the mud. “I have a house, and a big shop in York.”

“Do you have children?” said Ned. I could hear him wondering what they looked like – if they had leather boots, and horses, and if they sailed on ships to France too. But Thomas's face shut itself up like the big chest in the tithing barn with the seven locks and the seven brass keys.

“Not any more.”

“Did they all die—” Ned began, but Robin kicked him.

Thomas steepled his hands and looked at us over the top of them.

“Do you have someone to go to?” he asked. “Other family?”

“There's my grandmother . . .” said Robin, his voice trailing away. Robin's grandmother is small and blind and gnarled like an old tree. Her hands are twisted with rheumatics, and her back is bent forward like the beams in a roof. She lives with Margaret's brother's wife in a poky little house – Margaret's brother died years and years ago. There might be room there for Robin, but there isn't bread or room for us all.

“We don't have anyone,” Ned said. “Isabel's going to look after us, aren't you, Isabel?” He looked at me, and I felt sick. I ducked my head, pretending to fuss about Mag's long tangle of yellow hair.

“That's right,” I said, trying to sound braver than I felt.

Thomas was quiet. I could feel his eyes watching me, and I looked up, staring straight into his long, sallow face. It looked tired, I realized. There was something about it which reminded me of the monk swaying with sleeplessness on his old farm horse, which reminded me of Simon stumbling over the Latin in the mass with his yellow hair all wild and sleep-tousled. I looked down. I didn't want this well-spoken stranger tangled up with my memories of kindness and bravery. Though I supposed he might have been brave. Burying two victims of the pestilence.

Thomas's fingers were playing with the hilt of his sword. I'd seen Ned eyeing that sword – the sheath was worked with silver and bronze: leaves, with little animals peering out behind them. My mind couldn't focus on Thomas, couldn't give him the attention I knew he deserved. My thoughts were going round and round and round in the same old rabbit-tracks.
Alice is dead. Father is dead. What am I going to do? Alice is dead. Father is dead. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What am I going to do?

“There's space in my house,” said Thomas. I couldn't really understand what he was saying. Who cared how many rooms he had in his house? “It's a big, lonely house now so many people have died,” he said. On the other side of me, Robin sat up, all excited, but I barely noticed. “I'll understand if you want to stay here,” he said. “It's up to you of course, Isabel, and you, Robin. But the offer is there if you want it.”

 

 

I
've never been to York before. I've been to several of the towns around our village – to markets, or fairs. Father went all the way to Scotland when he was a soldier. And Alice went to Duresme, to visit the bones of St Bede. But no one's been to York.

It takes two days' walking to get there, even with Mag up on Thomas's horse. By the end of the first morning Ned is moaning about his feet and his legs and a whole lot of other nonsense. If he can work all day through the harvest, he can't be that tired just from walking.

Ned just doesn't want to go, same as me.

We spend the night in an inn called The Star, which is horrible. The landlord won't let us in at first, in case we carry the pestilence. Thomas has to pay him double. And inside it's dark and smoky, and it stinks – half the servants have run away or are dead, so no one has changed the reeds on the floor or emptied the latrine. Most of the beds in the long bedchamber are empty, but the landlord says we still have to share – Ned and Maggie and me in one, Thomas and Robin in another. I
nearly tell Thomas that Robin and I are married and ought to have a bed to ourselves, but in the end I don't. Outside of the barn, the wedding feels like a game we played a long ago time, when we were still children. I'm shy of telling Thomas about it in case he laughs at us. Not that I think he would – he's been very respectful so far.

But I don't trust him.

It's evening of the second day when we get to the city gates. The road is quiet – like nobody lives there. There's still a watchman on the gate, but he just nods when he sees Thomas and waves him in.

“Isn't there a toll?” says Ned. Father always has to pay a toll when we go to Felton – one to enter the town and another to pitch our stall at the market.

“Shhh,” I say. I'm exhausted by Ned and Maggie and all their questions, all the way here, on and on, like a saw against my skull. “Don't be so stupid. Thomas must be a freeman of the city.”

A freeman of the city. And if he adopts us as his children, we'll be free too.

This is what I've wanted for as long as I can remember. Freedom. Freedom to live my life as I want to, without being pushed hither and thither by Sir Edmund's whims. But I don't feel happy. And I don't feel free. I feel like I've exchanged one master for another, and while Sir Edmund's demands were straightforward and easy to understand, I still don't understand what this master wants from us. From me.

I don't like Thomas. I didn't want to come here. I only came at all because I'm so terrified of our house and the bloody bed where Father and Alice died and that stale, rotten smell that
even the Alice's rosemary and lavender can't mask. Which was a stupid reason to come, because York stinks worse than our churchyard, worse than the pit in Sir John's pasture, worse than anything I've smelt before – a sickly mixture of dung and sickness and death.

“Robin, I don't think we should have come,” I whisper. “What are we going to do in York?”

“He's going to look after us,” Robin whispers back. “He owns ships that sail to France – imagine that, Isabel! Maybe he'll take us to France!”

I'm starting to wonder if Robin is maybe going a little bit mad.

York is unlike any city I've ever been in. Felton on market day is always full of people – selling things, making things, buying things, talking, eating, stealing, dancing, playing. York is empty. What people we see move hurriedly, heads down. Animals forage in the ditches – wild pigs, stray dogs, even a starved-looking horse or two rooting around in the mud. Most of the market stalls are empty or dismantled. And above our heads the church bells are ringing, three or four different bells in three or four different churches across the city, tolling the dead.

Here we go again.

“Isabel,” says Ned. “Look!”

A figure half sits, propped against a church wall. It's a woman in a dark green gown. Her head is slumped against her chest. It's hard to tell from this distance if she's asleep, or drunk, or dead, but Thomas doesn't wait to find out. He pulls the head of his horse around, away from the figure.

“Is she dead?” I say. “What's going to happen to her?”

“The dead-carts will take care of her if she is,” says Thomas.
“They'll be along at sunset. If she's alive, she's in God's hands now.”

He says it so calmly, I'm shocked. For a moment, I'm angry, but then I remember the baby that nobody helped. I remember Father and Alice, who died alone while I was playing weddings in the barn. I never helped them. I never even sent for a priest to hear their confession. I turn away, furious tears stinging at my eyes.

The streets are wet with excrement and other foulness – blood from the butchers' shops, and dye from the dyers'. I clench my nostrils together, but I can't escape the stench. Mag whimpers and buries her nose in my skirt.

 

The city is cramped. The houses bend their heads close together across the alleyways, almost touching in places. They are two- and sometimes three-storeyed buildings, much more imposing than the little one-storey houses in our village. In many of the houses, the shutters are hinged at the lowest edge, so that they can be let down to make a shop window, big enough that you can see the workshop space below, where men hammer iron, or melt gold, or weave, or bake, or make shoes. Many of the windows are shuttered up, but some are still open. One baker catches at my arm as we pass.

“Buy a penny loaf, mistress!”

I pull back. “I don't—”

“She's with me,” says Thomas, and the baker bobs his head and drops his hand.

“Beg your pardon, I'm sure.”

Like in Felton, the houses in York are all built higgledy-piggledy around each other. Big houses peer down on the little
ones that have been built in the cracks between them. Shop-houses are next to merchant halls are next to churches are next to tiny houses even smaller than ours back home. The bells are still ringing, making my head ache, making it hard to think, hard to care.

In one square, there's a figure standing halfway up the wall. I think it's a statue at first, but as we get closer I see it's a man. He's hanging by the neck from a gibbet, and he's obviously been there for some time. Half his face is eaten away by maggots, and as we pass the wind blows the stench in our faces and makes Maggie shriek.

“Who was he?” says Ned, whose face is very white.

“Some criminal,” says Thomas. “A murderer, or a thief. A brigand, maybe. Don't they hang thieves in your village?”

They do – they used to, Alice can remember it – but I've never seen one. If Sir Edmund's steward wants to punish us he mostly just fines us or puts us in the stocks. I saw a man once at the market in Felton whose hand had been cut off for stealing, but I've never seen a man hanging there like that in the square.

Maggie is terrified, much more so than I'd expected. She cries and hides her face in her hands, refusing to move or look out. In the end I pick her up and carry her, and she buries her face against my neck to make certain she can't see anything else. She's heavy, and my arms ache, but it's easier than fighting.

“It's only a dead man,” I say. “He can't hurt you.” I don't understand why she's so upset; she's used to dead things – dead oxen, dead pigs, baby chicks small and unmoving in the straw. She wasn't bothered at all by the huddled woman against the wall. “Where did all these tears come from?” I say. But she just whimpers and won't answer.

When at last Thomas turns into a courtyard, I'm so tired that I don't realize we've arrived.

“Halloo!” Thomas is calling.

His man hurries out of the door to take his horse. He's a servant, but he's wearing high leather boots and a fur mantle, like Sir Edmund's steward back in Ingleforn.

“We didn't expect you,” he's saying. “And so late!” He sees us and glances at Thomas, but he doesn't say anything.

“Very good, Ralph,” says Thomas. He swings himself down from the horse in a practised motion and Ralph gives him a lantern and leads the horse away, saying nothing.

The door opens into a warehouse – or perhaps a shop. Barrels of wine are stacked up against the wall. There's a table with an inkhorn and parchment and quill pens. There are wineskins in a pile. Thomas's lantern casts long shadows and in the yellow light everything seems darker and bigger than it ought to be.

“Stand up straight,” Alice's voice says in my head. “Hold up your head. Show these folk what sort of girl you are.” But what sort of girl I am is nothing. I feel like a corn husk with the corn inside gone. I feel like an eggshell, cracked open and empty and useless.

“None of that,” says Alice fiercely. “You've got to look after your brother and sister now.” But I can't.

“This way,” Thomas is calling.

We're through into the hall. The fire is out and it's cold and dark. The lantern light catches on heavy, embroidered hangings and long wooden tables. And then we're going up the stairway, into the chambers above.

“This is the scriptorium,” says Thomas. “You boys can sleep here.”

There are two low beds against the wall. Ned wraps his arms tighter around his bundle from the saddlebags and looks at me.
I want to sleep in Isabel's bed
. That's what his eyes are saying. Beside Thomas he looks very small and fragile. Tears start behind my eyes again.

“Please—” I say. “Can't the boys come in with us?” But Thomas is shaking his head.

“It wouldn't be proper,” he says, and the tears threaten to rise.

“Come and see,” he says. “You can sleep in Edith and Lucie's chamber.”

He turns away. I mouth at Robin,
Edith and Lucie?
Robin shrugs.

“Edith and Lucie are my daughters,” Thomas says, over his shoulder.

Were
. Edith and Lucie
were
his daughters.

 

Edith and Lucie's bedchamber is about half the size of our whole house. Thomas lights the candle by the bed from his lantern. They're both real beeswax candles, and they cast a yellow glow across the chamber, a brighter, cleaner light than the tallow candles we have at home. It's a fine chamber. There's a wooden floor and windows made of a hard, flat substance, pale yellow, paler than wax. Horn. Horn windows. Thomas really must be rich. There's a big wooden bed, bigger than Father and Alice's, with a wooden chest at its foot. There's a loom with a piece of cloth half-woven, and a desk like the one in the scriptorium in the Ingleforn tithing barn.

“Is it another scriptorium?” says Robin.

“No,” says Thomas. “Those are Lucie and Edith's.”

Mag hangs back, clinging to my hand, but I follow Robin
to the table. There's a cup with quill pens, an inkhorn half full of ink in a hook on the side of the desk and pages of parchment with black letters scratched on to them. Thomas's daughters could write! They could read too, because there are books on the table, two big, thick volumes like they have at the abbey. I touch the top one with my fingertips and close my eyes. This isn't Lucie and Edith's book; it's Geoffrey's and he's trying to get me to listen to something important, some piece of verse or idea that's more urgent than the cheese I'm making or the cloth I'm weaving.

“
The Romance of Lancelot
,” says Thomas, and then, casually, “I could teach you to read it if you like.”

I pull my fingers away from the binding as though scalded.

“I don't need books to read, thank you.”

Thomas gives a little shrug.

“There are clothes in the chest,” he says. “I'd like you to wear them please. You're going to be living here as my daughters, after all.”

I'm not his daughter. I'm Father's daughter, and Mother's, and Alice's, but I'll never be his, no matter how many fancy clothes he makes me wear. When did he decide that he was my father? Was that why he went riding out, alone, to find children to kidnap? Was this planned all along?

I glare at Thomas, but even as I do so there's a part of me that knows I'm being unfair. Whatever else he is, this man isn't evil. He's trying to be kind to us. Even as I try and hate him, I can see that he's trying to be kind. I might even have liked him, if I'd met him at the market, or the fair.

His sallow face looks tired, and sad.

“Maybe it's time for bed,” he says, and suddenly I feel as bereft as Ned. I've been angry with Robin all the way here,
but now I can't bear the thought of sleeping apart from him. I want to lie in his arms like we did in the barn, and forget that we ever left home.

“Robin—” I say, but Thomas's hand is on his back.

“Isabel—” says Robin. I can't tell if he cares or not – does he want to stay with me or is having his own bed part of the reason he's so happy to be living here? “I won't be far away!” he says, but Thomas is leading him out of the room, leaving Maggie and I alone.