All Fall Down (20 page)

“Isabel—” says Robin.

“It's all right,” says Thomas. He puts his hand on Robin's shoulder. “I thought . . .” he says. “I wanted . . . I don't know what I wanted. To make right some of my wrongs. To make something good out of all this mess. To . . .”

To bring back my children
, I think. Because surely that's what this is all about, isn't it?

“You have to do something!” I say. “Ned's going to
die
– and it's all your fault – you have to make them stop!”

“Isabel!” says Robin, again. “This isn't Thomas's fault! It's ours – for not looking after Ned and Mag properly – for—”

Our fault
, he says, but he means mine. Ned and Mag were never his responsibility.

I can't seem to breathe properly, or to make the world come into focus. Everything is very bright and slightly unreal.

“It's all right, Robin,” says Thomas. “Don't be angry.” He stands up. “I will make this right,” he says to me. “I promise.”

And for the first time since we came here, I believe him.

 

We light all the candles in the house and sit together in the cold little parlour. Summer is nearly over. Autumn's coming.

“It's a crying shame,” says Watt, but nobody answers, so he shakes his head again and goes upstairs with Stephen.

It's nearly midnight when Ned comes home. There's a cut across his forehead and dirt in his hair and the streaky marks of tears across his cheeks.

Thomas isn't there.

“He went right into the castle,” says Ned wonderingly. “He told that man that he'd made me steal those things. That he'd made me join that gang. They took him away and locked him up in the bottom of the deepest, darkest dungeon, and they let me go.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flee from the throng and dwell with truth,
Let your own things suffice, though
they be small. . .
Savour no more than what behoves you.
Rule yourself well, that others may
learn from you,
And do not doubt it, the truth shall set you free.

 

Geoffrey Chaucer
Fourteenth Century

 

 

N
ed sold the ivory chess set to the tinker with the stall by the church. Robin took the coins to the baker and the cheesemaker and the alewife to buy the bread and the hard, yellow cheese and the flagon of ale. Watt used to make all of our cheeses and brew all our ale, but he's gone now, working with his brother in a manor in the south. He offered to take us with him – “Half the manor died, Isabel, they're desperate for hands” – but we wouldn't go. Not until the assizes were over.

I don't know where Ralph went. We woke up one morning and he was gone. So were the best cooking pots and the silver plate and the horses and the gowns from Juliana's wardrobe.

“He just stole Thomas's things!” says Robin, but I find myself unable to care. What does it matter if Ralph has Thomas's cooking pots? We have more important things to worry about now.

Thomas must have real money – coin – somewhere in the house, but I've never found it and I don't like to ask him where. That's his business. There's enough wine and stuff
from Ned and Maggie's shining horde to feed us until the assizes come round, and if anyone deserves Ned's wealth, it's Thomas.

Maggie and I wrap the food up into a bundle with some clean linen and one of the leather books from Thomas's library. Ned I leave to mind Mag and the fire, and to make sure the animals are fed and the pig doesn't get in the herbs. Ned only came to see Thomas once at the castle. He shrunk himself small into my skirts, and looked at the floor, and wouldn't say anything bigger than “Yeh”. If something more than “Yeh” was needed, he shrugged, and turned his face away. Thomas didn't seem to mind.

“Tell Ned it doesn't matter,” he says. “I'm not angry. Tell him.”

Life is beginning to come back to York. There are children in the house opposite, two little girls in fur-tipped mantles who gaze at Robin and me with interest. At the end of the street, there's a man with a tray of pastries over his shoulder, calling, “Meat pies! Meat pies! Get them while they're hot!” Robin and I buy one each and one for Thomas.

“Did you used to live here before the pestilence?” I ask him, and he nods, turning over our coins with his grubby fingers.

“Took the family to my brother John's when the pestilence came. The Good Lord took John, and his son too, and now my brother Roger says the farm belongs to him, and we're to be off back here where we came from.”

“Is it really over, do you think?” says Robin, and the pie-man shrugs.

“Nothing ever ends,” he says, and he hefts his pie-tray back on to his shoulder, calling, “Meat pies! Meat pies! Lovely meat pies!”

I wrap Thomas's pie in my bundle and we're off down through the streets to the castle. York Castle stands a little apart from the city, its four round towers visible as we come out of the streets. It belongs to King Edward, Father said, but he hasn't been to York for as long as Watt can remember. Now it's a gaol, and a mint, and a garrison-house for his soldiers, and a bed for the night if he ever travels north again.

The pestilence was very bad in the castle, particularly in the gaol, Watt said.

“The Lord's wrath was strong against those sinners.” But I've been in that gaol, where the ordinary prisoners are kept, and the stench is strong enough there even without the pestilence, so it's no wonder so many people died. Plenty of people die there of ordinary sicknesses too, the flux and the styche and who knows what else.

This time last year, there was a garrison of soldiers guarding the prisoners and the mint, which is somewhere in one of the towers. Most of the soldiers are dead now, but there's one on the door who nods at us and opens up the little person-door inside the big cart-door to let us in.

Inside the castle walls there's the courtyard, with a well in the middle, and the stocks, and some chickens, and a pig nosing at the gutters. The courtyard is almost deserted. The whole world is half-empty, like a flood plain after the waters have receded, back to wherever it is floods come from. We pick our way around the bottom of the walls until we come to another door in another tower. The guard here is new and takes a little longer over us, asking us who we are and who we've come to visit. We show him our bundle and he nods and lets us inside.

The ordinary prisoners are kept at the bottom of the tower,
waiting for the assizes when their cases will be tried. The judges are travelling north on that long road from London, stopping in all the cities to try all the poor wretches in the gaols, to set them free or condemn them to death. They were due two months ago, but with the pestilence everything is knocked out of shape, and who knows when they'll get here now. There aren't many prisoners left. Those that didn't die of the pestilence have escaped through the great holes in the wall where the spring river flooded into the gaol and nobody thought to mend it. All that's left now are a couple of cripples and a mad woman who tells furious tales to the stones in the wall. And Thomas.

Thomas has a room of his own in the tower, with a bed and a wooden table and a chair and a little window. He's sitting at the table reading one of his books when the guard lets us in. He smiles when he sees Robin, or perhaps me as well, I'm not sure.

“There you are! I wasn't sure if you were coming today.”

We leave money with the guards, so Thomas is always fed even if we can't come. But Robin comes nearly every day, and usually I do too.

“We brought you a new book,” says Robin. “I couldn't read what it was, though.”

Thomas takes the book from Robin and smiles.

“Come,” he says, holding out his hand to Robin, “how much can you remember from last time?” And Robin pulls out his wax tablets, and the two of them are off again into their world of wax and wood and paper and black ink-spiders.

I go to the window and look out. From here you can see the bright snake of the river, winding through the city and out of the city walls. You can see the thatched roofs of the houses,
and though it's too far away to see the people in the streets, there's an ox-cart full of straw coming into the castle and a man exercising a horse in the courtyard below.

Beyond the city walls, the patchwork of farmland starts, green fields for the animals, brown fields for the ploughing and here and there a yellowish field where the crop has been abandoned. There's a team of oxen pulling a plough over a bare field, and the sight of it tugs at my heart. I wonder what's happening in Ingleforn. They'll have started the ploughing there now. I wonder what's happened to our land, if anyone's ploughing it, or if the crops have been left to rot and sink back into the land. There's value in that too. Next year, the soil will be richer, the yield higher.

The birds are gathering on the battlements of the castle, circling in great flocks over my head. They're itching to leave, to take off to wherever it is birds come from and go back to. I'm itching to leave too. Somewhere along that road, Father's land – my land – is waiting to be ploughed. But we can't go before the assizes, before Thomas's case is tried. We all know that.

I turn back to look at Robin and Thomas. A bed, a chair, a table, a candlestick and a window. It's not much. But Thomas doesn't look unhappy. His head is bent over the book, his long finger marking the words for Robin to follow. Robin's face is earnest, but if his wits are like mine, I can see why the letters don't take. I can't hold a thought in my head for longer than it takes to walk down the stairs to the kitchen. I forget important things – the name of the baker in Ingleforn, how many brothers and sisters Alice had, and how many of them are still alive. I used to worry about it, when we first came here, but now I don't. I don't worry about anything, very much. I
do the things I need to do – make the pottage, brew the ale, wash the clothes, bring the food and water to Thomas here – the rest I let float on by. The pestilence seems to be almost gone, and soon the assizes will be over too. And then we'll be moving on.

Robin has given up on the reading lesson and is trying to persuade Thomas to escape again.

“The ordinary prison has great holes in the wall where the floods came through last year,” he says. “All you'd need to do is stop paying for this room and you could just climb out – nobody would care. There's only one guard left now in the prison anyway – all the rest died in the pestilence. We could get everything ready for you – couldn't we, Isabel? It wouldn't be hard.” His face is pained. I can see how much he hates this. And so do I, sort of – that so many, many people died and we couldn't stop it happening, and that this man just sits and waits for the hangman to come. Because he will be hanged. What else will they do to a man who insists on confessing?

“Enough,” says Thomas. He puts his hand on Robin's arm and smiles at him, that oddly distant smile that seems to have no connection to the rest of the world. “I don't want to make trouble for you and your family,” he says. “And that's an end to it.”

Robin's face is pulled out of shape with his unhappiness. I can see why. They might send some men after Thomas, but it won't be many. There are too few soldiers left and too many important things that need doing now – graves to dig, disputes to be settled, offices and titles to fill. One looter won't cause too much unquiet, with all the thievery that's been going unpunished these last months.

I don't think Thomas wants to run, is the truth. I think he wants to go back to his family, his wife and his children. He
likes Robin – you can see how much he likes him – but I don't think he's enough to keep him here. It's worth fighting to stay alive if you've got brothers and sisters who need you, or a wife and a family. But I can see how dying like this might be sweet, if you're Thomas and you don't have anything left to live for.

Thomas is putting his books away, which means it's time for us to go.

“Isabel—” he says, and there's something in his voice that tugs at my attention.

“What are you going to do with your family?” he says. “After the assizes?”

Robin glances at me. It takes me a moment to catch my wits. I've got used to taking charge of my family since Thomas went, and I don't like the reminder that Thomas is still supposed to be our father. I say, with more force than I'd intended, “We're going back home. We've got land – good land. Someone will want us, if only for our land.”

Thomas nods his head a couple of times.

“Do you need money – for the journey?”

I haven't liked to tell him that Ralph has fled with most of his precious things.

“We'll be all right,” I say, instead, and he nods his head.

“God be with you,” he says, and I feel like a door has been shut, leaving us out in the cold, leaving me alone with the family to care for again.

But this time I'm not frightened. This time, I know we're going to be all right.