All Fall Down (16 page)

 

Maggie is exhausted. She won't let me take her gown off, and she whines when I try to put her to bed.

“I don't want to go to sleep! I want Alice! Go away!”

“Alice is dead,” I say and I yank her gown over her head and make her cry. “You know that, Maggie!”

“I want Alice!” Mag whines, and she kicks me hard on the shin.

“Go to sleep,” I say, lifting her into our bed. She kicks and cries, but she doesn't get up, she just lies there sobbing in the dark. Eventually, she's quiet, but it's a long time before I climb into the bed and fall asleep beside her.

 

 

W
hen I wake the next morning I lie in the strange bed, under the fine bedlinen, and stare at the bed's canopy above me. From out of the window, a church bell is ringing. Another funeral? No, because another bell starts up across the city, so they must be ringing in the hour.

Soon we'll all be dead
, I think. It can't be long now. How many more people can there be left in the world? Soon God will come down from His heaven, and the dead will wake, and all this will be over.

I climb out of bed and open the shutters. Below me, a shopkeeper is opening up his shop. A carter rattles by in a laden cart. There's the sound of water falling as someone tips a chamber pot out of an open window into the drain below. I can smell the drain even through the horn windows. The whole city stinks of death and human foulness.

Magsy stirs in the bed beside me.

“Alice . . .” she says sleepily.

“Alice isn't here,” I say. “Come and look at our new clothes.”

Lucie and Edith had a lot of clothes. I sort through them.
One girl was a bit taller than me, the other was somewhere between me and Maggie – her clothes would probably fit Ned, but they're enormous on Mags. They're beautiful, though. All of the dresses are beautiful. There's a soft green gown with flowers and birds embroidered round the collar in yellow silks. I pull it on over my head, but I don't have anyone to lace it up for me, so in the end I have to wear my own clothes from Ingleforn. There are no shoes – perhaps the girls were buried in them? – so I keep my own on. Mag is lost in the smaller gowns, but that's not my problem. If Thomas wants her to look ridiculous, so be it. Mag adores them anyway. She insists on trying on all the younger girl's clothes, before settling on a dark red gown. She's much livelier than she was yesterday – dipping her finger in the inkhorn and smearing ink on her skirts, crawling under our bed to check that there's nothing else hidden there, taking all the pens out of the pot and twirling them around, pretending to write.

“Hey—” I say. “Hey, Maggie – leave that. Let's go and find the boys.”

Robin and Ned are up and dressed. There are other men in their room – Thomas's man, whose name is Ralph, and another servant with a thick black beard. Other beds rest against the walls, but these are empty. I wonder if the people who slept in them are dead.

Robin is sitting on the bed talking to Ralph. He's explaining about us.

“We aren't anyone,” he's saying. “We just met Thomas and he helped us bury Walt and Alice and—” He stops when he sees us come in.

“Isabel – look!”

Robin has new clothes too – a dark green hose and a brown tunic, with a soft leather belt and leather shoes that turn up a little at the toe. Thomas's son must have been almost the same age as Robin, because Robin's clothes fit better than Maggie's do. He looks good – handsome, almost, if a little awkward. Ned – like me – is still dressed in his old tunic and hose. There mustn't have been a right-sized son for Ned to step into.

“Look at Mag!” Robin says. “You look like a princess!” Mag smiles at him uncertainly. She's gone shy again.

“Aren't there gowns for you?” Robin asks.

“They all need tying together,” I say.
Like a parcel
, I think, but I don't say it out loud. “Besides, I'd look like a fool in them.”

“No, you wouldn't,” says Robin. He takes my hand. “Come and look what Thomas has!” And he leads me to a mirror built into the wall.

I scowl into it. A white, square-faced girl scowls back. Her hair hangs around her ears, an odd, pale colour somewhere between Ned's copper and Margaret's corn. It hasn't been combed in several days. Robin looks like a merchant's son, and Maggie looks sweet, but this girl looks like a wooden doll. A whole boat of silks from China wouldn't make her look like a lady.

“I look hideous,” I say.

“Hardly.” I jump. Thomas is standing in the doorway with an odd smile on his lips. Odd and a little bit sad. I wonder which daughter I'm supposed to be – Lucie or Edith.

“I can't put any of those gowns on by myself,” I say, defensively. As though I've been caught out doing something wrong. Which I suppose I have. Pretending to be Isabel, instead of pretending to be Lucie or Edith. I wonder what Thomas is going to do. There's no sign of any other women living here, though someone must wash all these men's clothes,
and Lucie and Edith must have had a maid to tie them into their gowns. Perhaps she died too.

“I'll think of something,” says Thomas, but his eyes are already moving away towards Robin. “I've got work I need to do this morning,” he says.

“Do you want me to come?” says Robin, and the blood rises in my cheeks. Thomas can't have Robin. He's ours. But Thomas shakes his head.

“You go and have a look at the city,” he says. “I'll show you what we do here tomorrow.”

 

Thomas's house is big. There are three or four chambers upstairs, for sleeping and working in, a big kitchen where the bearded man, whose name is Watt, cooks Thomas's meals with his son Stephen, the warehouse shop we came through yesterday and a hall, with three big tables and a square hearth in the centre of the floor. There's even a parlour, with high-backed wooden chairs and tapestries on the wall, for the family to sit in. Thomas's wife's loom is in here, and some embroidery that I hope belonged to his wife and not his daughters, because I know I'll never, ever be able to sew anything nearly as fancy as that. There's also a privy built on to the side of the house, so Thomas doesn't even have to leave his chamber to go. It stinks.

“That's disgusting,” says Ned, screwing up his white little face.

“It's very sensible!” says Robin. “And you'll have to get used to it if we're going to live here, if you don't want to piss in your bed!”

Eugh.

The garden is at the back of the house. It's a long, narrow
strip of land, fenced in on both sides to stop other families' animals trampling his herbs. The chickens are here, and a pigsty with two black boars, and stable for his horse and his man's horse – a sturdy grey palfrey. He's got more herbs than we have at home, including a few that I don't recognize, but nobody's thinned out the carrots and they all look dry and in need of watering. I wonder whose job it is to look after them and if I'll be allowed to help now I'm a rich man's daughter.

None of this feels real. Father and Alice, Edward, Thomas. It feels like a game we're playing, like some joke the devils are playing on us. I keep expecting to wake up and find that it's all been a dream.

Thomas's horse is just as beautiful this morning as it was yesterday. I stroke its nose.

“You're the only person I like here,” I tell it.

“Don't you like Thomas?” says Robin.

“No,” I say. “What's he doing taking us here? Why couldn't he just leave us where we were?”

“He offered!” says Robin. “And we said yes.”

“Yeh,” I say. “Well, I wish we hadn't! What sort of person takes someone else's children home with them anyway?”

“I think . . .” says Robin. “I think he was just . . . just riding, you know? Being sad. And then . . . he wanted to help us. Why not?”

“Maybe he's mad,” I say. “Or dangerous! Did you think of that?”

But I don't really believe it. I don't like Thomas, but I do trust him, oddly enough. I don't think he's going to hurt us.

 

Nobody seems to expect us to do any housework, so after we've looked into every room in the house we seem to be allowed
just to go out in the city and wander around – without even an errand to do, like fetching water or buying bread! Probably this is a very stupid thing to do. Probably coming here at all was a very stupid thing to do. If the miasma is anywhere, it's certainly here, in these city walls. The whole of York reeks with the stench of it. Maggie huddles up close to me, gripping on to my hand.

“Where are we going?”

“We aren't going anywhere,” I say, as patiently as I can. “We're just walking. Look at the houses, Mag. Look at that one – who do you think lives there?”

Mag barely glances at the house.

“Why's that man lying there?”

The man is slumped up against the side of the houses, foul and bloated with death. A pair of wild pigs are snuffling bloody-nosed at the corpse. I feel my stomach rise inside me.

“He's sleeping, Mag, don't look at him.”

I pull her over to the other side of the road. Ned studies the man with a practised air.

“He's been dead for days, I reckon. Look how swollen he is.”

“Ned, don't!”

I can hear the shrillness in my voice. I sound like Agnes Harelip. Even the rub of Maggie's skin against mine irritates me. I pull my hand out of hers. She wails, and I stamp off down the street away from her.

What's happened to me? What's happened to that other Isabel, the funny one, who liked mummer's songs and bread with honeycomb, the one Robin blew kisses at and said was the cleverest girl in the village? Am I going to spend the rest
of my life crying over kind words and little sisters with high voices?

I feel a sudden flash of sympathy for Agnes, always grumbling and fussing about everything. Maybe she used to be a bonny little girl too. Maybe she's as confused by the angry old woman she turned into as I am.

No! I'm not going to turn into Agnes! Not if the pestilence kills Robin and everyone I love, I still won't.

Robin is at my elbow.

“Hey,” he says. “Hey. Isabel.”

I bury my face blindly into his new wool cote, and he puts his arms around me.

“I'm sorry,” I tell the grey wool. “I'm sorry.”

“It's all right. Hey. It's fine.”

“What's wrong with Isabel?” says Mag. She's standing a respectful distance from me, as though I'm about to explode on her.

“She's just sad,” says Robin. He pulls back and looks at me, his old ploughboy face under his mop of brown hair. “What do you want to do?”

I jam the heel of my hand into my eyes, rubbing furiously at them. I never was the sort of girl who cried over nothing. Since Edward died I don't seem to do anything else.

“Let's go to the minster,” I say, instead.

 

The minster dominates the city, huge and unimaginably solid. The only thing that's nearly as big is the castle, which stands apart from the rest of the city: four towers and four walls of stone. There's a prison there, Father told me once, and a mint where King Edward's money is pressed. Ned wants to go and look, but I tell him to whist. I want to see the minster.

The steeple is so tall, it's hard to lose our way, though we take a windy route, through dark, narrow streets. The smell is worse here – blood and death and excrement and animals. Animals are everywhere – wild chickens pecking at the dirt, even a dead horse lying on its side crawling with flies and rats. I think there must be more animals here than humans, because the city itself is eerily silent. Now and then I see a shadowy face at a window, and in one of the squares we come across a beggar mumbling to himself, but mostly there's nobody.

“Is everyone dead?” Maggie whispers.

“No,” says Robin. “They all left – remember them all coming past Ingleforn?” I think about the poor folk, the servants and beggars and shopkeepers, with nowhere to run to. And I think about the rich folk too, finding the villages closed to them and perhaps the pestilence coming upon them on the open road and their friends leaving them there to die.

I'm in a mind to hate everything in York, but I can't hate the minster. Nobody could. It must have taken many, many craftsmen's lives to finish – the first builders' great-great-grandchildren must still have been toiling away at it long after their fathers were dead.

There are wooden scaffolds built up around one side of the entrance, but no sign of any workmen. The big wooden doors open easily enough, though, and we creep inside. Once upon a couple of months ago, I would have thought that nothing could hurt us in here, but now I'm not so sure. I'm starting to wonder how powerful God really is. Unless the sickness really does come from Him, and he wants all this suffering to happen. If so, if he wants us dead, then even these thick abbey walls won't protect us.

You don't really understand the size of the minster until
you're inside it. From the outside, it just looks like a fell, or a small hill, but inside it's bigger than any building I've ever seen. Sir Edmund's manor house could fit inside it four or five times over and still have room to wriggle. I have never, ever seen anything as wonderful as this.

The walls and the roof are made of pale stone, with great columns rising up and into the roof. The windows are made of stained glass, like the windows in our church at home, but much bigger and grander. It's like the inside of a king's palace, or an angel's house. It's like the inside of God.