All Fall Down (21 page)

 

 

T
he crowd in the square are strangely quiet. They wait at the edges and the walls, whispering and watching the wooden scaffold, which has been built against the window of the tavern. People
are
coming back. Across the square are two ladies in silks, whispering on the church steps while their maids scratch their noses and tug their fingers through their hair. The bodies are going from the streets, and the shutters on the houses are beginning to open. But it's a strange, sad, quiet ghost of a city.

I thought I'd hate the people staring, but this is worse. Like Thomas's death isn't exciting enough even to draw a crowd.

The world isn't helping. It's a miserable day, a pale, washed-out grey sky, the sun sitting low and sullen above the rooftops. The people look small and worn. We're a ruined world, the wasteland Noah saw when the flood waters melted away and left him with a muddy, empty wilderness to forge into a new nation.

When it happens, it happens without ceremony. The executioner leads Thomas up to the scaffold. His hands
are tied. Thomas is standing very straight. The four of us are huddled against the wall, away from the others. Robin stirs and stands forward. I follow. I want him to know that we're here, even if those other children aren't, William and Lucie and Edith. I don't want him to be alone when he dies.

Thomas's eyes are moving around the square. They catch ours and settle. He nods, but doesn't smile.

They put the hood over his head. They put the noose around his neck. Maggie cries out, catching her breath in distress, and buries her head in my mantle. I put my arm around her shoulders and look across at Ned. His face is pale, his eyes vivid in the whiteness. His spiky red hair needs cutting. His eyes are watching Thomas. He's not going to look away. Neither is Robin. Neither am I.

Thomas drops. Ned flinches. Somehow I'd expected it to be dignified – Thomas is so dignified, and he's a martyr, like the holy saints. But there's no dignity in this death. He jerks and dances on the rope like a man in a fit, like a butchered pig. Ned is trembling, his hand up to his mouth. Magsy whimpers into my stomach. The crowd is quiet.

At last he's still.

They cut him down. That seems to be all. No one wants to linger. The people are moving off already. A woman passing us shakes her head.

“Haven't we had enough death already?” she says. “You'd think they'd be tired of it.”

Ned is crying. His lips are shaking.

“I'm sorry . . .” he says. “Sorry . . . I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

I put my around his shoulders.

“I know, Nedkin,” I say. “I'm sorry too.”

Robin's face is soft with sleeplessness and sadness.

“He wanted to die,” he says, and I wonder if he's right.

 

Thomas's house is empty. None of the fires are lit, or the candles. Outside, the rain is falling, rat-a-tap-tapping against the wooden shutters. I light the beeswax candles and we all climb into my bed together, the way we used to in our solar at home. This bed is softer than our old bed, and the mattress is stuffed with feathers, but the feeling is the same, of being together in a warm, cosy heap, like a litter of piglets or a nest of baby chicks.

“What do you think those girls would say if they found me and Robin in here?” says Ned, and he giggles.

“They'd say, ‘Get that smelly villein out of my bed!'” I say.

“We're not smelly!” says Mags.

“We might not even be villeins any more,” I realize.

“Doesn't mean they'd marry you,” Robin says, and Maggie squeals.

“Poor girls,” I say. “We shouldn't laugh.”

“Poor Father and Alice and Richard,” says Ned.

“And baby Edward!” says Mags.

“And Mother and Thomas,” says Robin quietly.

And Geoffrey
, I think, but I don't say it out loud.

I used to be afraid of going home, of knowing, but I'm not any more. Not knowing is worse.

In the dark chamber, we're silent, remembering the ghosts of our dead. I wonder how long they'll travel so close to us. Maybe for ever. That's a sad thought and a happy one, both.

“No one else is going to die, are they?” says Mags, burrowing her forehead into my stomach.

“No,” says Robin. “No one else is going to die.”

 

*

 

In the middle of the night, I get out of bed and go into the hall. We've left the shutters open in the corridor, and the moonlight shines on to the wall, silvery-white and eerie and beautiful. I stand at the window and look out at the town. So many people have died. Why were we left alive? What am I supposed to do with all of this life, this bounty I've been given? What can I do that's better than what Alice or Edward would have done?

There's a noise behind me. It's Robin, his face silvery-quiet in the moonlight.

“Hey, Robin,” I say, and he comes and puts his arms around me.

“I'm your family now,” he says, and he kisses me, the way he did on the night of the hue and cry.

 

The moon is high in the sky. The stars are out. Robin is in my arms, and we're kissing, mouth against mouth, heart against heart. We're kissing with all the life that we have and the dead do not. Because we're alive. Because so many people are dead. Because it's so good to feel something after so long feeling nothing at all.

In the moonlight, here in the hallway, it's hard to tell where my body ends and his begins.

I pull my mouth apart from his, and look at him, there so close to me that I can feel his breath on my cheek. I trace the shape of his face with my finger, the line of his nose, his cheek, his mouth.

“Let's have lots of children,” Robin whispers. “Lots and lots.”

“Let's have a cherry tree and a beehive.”

“Let's get our animals back from Joan.”

“Let's be free.”

“I love you,” I whisper, and I wonder if I mean it.

 

We're woken the next morning by the sound of fists. Hard, urgent fists banging at the door downstairs, hands and feet and fists and fear. A constable's bang, or a sheriff's, authority knocking. We try to ignore it, but whoever is banging won't go away.

“I didn't do anything!” says Ned.

“Don't answer it,” says Robin. But it doesn't work. Whoever it is knows we're here. Maybe it's Thomas's family – maybe he has brothers and sisters, or cousins somewhere, who are coming back to claim what's rightfully theirs.

“Don't worry,” I tell Ned. “I'm not going to let them take anyone else away.”

I take out my knife. Robin takes Thomas's sword. Ned – desperate not to be left out – picks up the broom and Mag follows with the candlestick, bobbing a little on the soles of her feet with excitement. I wonder about telling her to stay upstairs, then change my mind. Whatever we're doing now, we're doing together.

We creep down the stairs. The fists are still banging on the door outside, loud and urgent.

“We're coming!” I call through the door. The banging stops.

I tug at the bolts, cold in the morning air.

“Ready?” I whisper. The others nod.

I open the door.

Richard is standing on the doorsill.

 

 

W
e sit round the table in the kitchen for hours, drinking stale ale from Thomas's wine goblets and eating meat pies from the pie man's stall.

“You're alive,” says Richard. “All of you. Even Robin!”

“You can't kill me,” says Robin, but his smile is quiet. He's not the same laughing boy who trod on my toes at Midsummer Eve. But then, am I the same Isabel?

“They said you were sick,” I say.

“I was,” says Richard. “And then I got better. And I came to find you.”

“I didn't know that could happen,” I say. “I thought you were dead.”

“I didn't know what had happened to you,” says Richard. And we're quiet, thinking of all the things that might have happened to us and didn't, and of all the things that did.

“Do you know what happened to Geoffrey?” I ask, but Richard shakes his head.

“There were a lot of deaths up at the abbey,” he says. “Some people say all the monks died . . . some say there were
a few left who went to a monastery in Felton. I know the abbot died. They shut the place up. I didn't like to go up there, Isabel, I'm sorry. And Geoffrey wouldn't have wanted me, even if he was still alive.” But that isn't true. Geoffrey wouldn't have wanted to come home, but he would have wanted to see us, to know if we were alive. But if he was alive, wouldn't he have come to the village himself?

“You have a niece,” says Richard quickly, seeing my frown. “She's called Sarah. A red-haired niece!”

It's like he doesn't care about Geoffrey at all. He's more interested in Joan's horrible baby.

“A baby!” says Mag. “Another new baby!”

Richard is looking at me expectantly. I'm supposed to be pleased, I know.

“What's going to happen now?” I say, instead.

“You're coming home, of course,” says Richard.

 

 

W
e pack up all of our things on to old Stumpy. We leave Thomas's fine clothes behind – they won't be much use when we have to work for our living again. Ned takes Thomas's chess set and Margaret takes the wooden doll that they stole from some dead child. Robin takes his wax tablets and three of Thomas's big leather books. I take nothing except some bread and cheese and the salt pork from the kitchen. Everything else I need, I can find at home.

When I go up to find Robin, he's standing in Juliana's chamber. Open on the bed is the jewellery chest full of gold and silver – a golden necklace set with green stones, a ring dazzling with diamonds, a bangle set in the shape of a serpent eating its own tail. Robin holds up a necklace made of chains of silver.

“Look what I found.”

I come over and let the necklace fall through my fingers. The jewels here must be worth more than Father's lands and house and everything he owned.

“It was under the bed,” says Robin. “Ralph must have missed
it. Thomas wanted you and Maggie to have them. He told me so, ages ago.” He picks up the serpent bangle and hands it to me. I slip my wrist through it. The serpent's eyes are set with rubies and all the scales are marked along its back. I look across at him and see that there are tears in his eyes. I wonder if this is what Thomas was trying to give us, back in the castle. There's a prince's ransom here. He can't have wanted it to go to the City of York.

“Why did he do it, Robin?” I ask, tears blinding my own eyes. “Did he go out looking for children to bring home?”

Robin shakes his head.

“I'm sure he didn't,” he says. “I don't think he had any plan at all. I think . . . well, I think I reminded him of William – you know” – I nod – “and I think he was lonely, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. I don't think he ever really knew what to do with us, once he had us.”

He touches the serpent with his long finger.

“He was a good man, Isabel,” he says.

“I know,” I say. I put my finger on top of Robin's, and press it into the serpent's scalloped back.

“You should wear it,” he says, but I shake my head.

“We'll buy good land with it. And oxen and bees and a pig and some geese for Maggie to play with. It won't be wasted.”

Robin nods, but the tears roll out of his eyes and down his cheeks. I reach out and touch them with the back of my hand. Robin lost two families in less than two months, and then Thomas came and gave him everything he ever wanted. And now he's gone too.

“You've still got me,” I say. “Robin. I'm still here. We're your family now, remember?” He nods and rubs against my
cheek, but doesn't answer. “I'm not going to leave you,” I say. “I promise. And it's time to go.”

 

It's a dull, grey, misty day. All of the joy and gladness of yesterday has gone. We walk, trying not to notice the dead crops in the fields, the dead animals. Trying not to wonder what we'll find in Ingleforn when we return.

We sleep in the same inn that Thomas brought us to on our way here. It looks the same as last time – the long, smoky room with the tallow candles and the dirty straw on the earth floor. There are more people here than there were last time, although the room is still half-empty.

“People are getting braver,” Richard says. “They're moving around again – leaving their old villages and looking for work.”

The talk at the long table and the fire is all about land and work. Lord Hugh is offering three and a half pence a day to anyone who'll work his land. Lady Christina is offering three and three quarters. Lord Randolph only offers two pence and a farthing, the skinflint.

My father gave his labourers two pence a day and a bed in the barn, and they were grateful. Things are different now, it seems.

“We can ask for what we want,” a big, red-faced man by the fire says. “If they won't give it to us, we'll go elsewhere, and they know it.”

The old man opposite is nodding. “It's our world now,” he says. “If we want it. They need us now.” He turns and glares at Richard. “Make the most of it, lad!” he says. “It won't last. All this good land for sale! And the beasts! They say the gentry have so many heriot beasts, they can't give them away.”

“I'd heard that too,” says Richard. He perches on the end of
one of the benches and leans forward. “I want good land,” he says. “I can pay – plough land first, and pasture afterwards. I'm not afraid to work, but I want to go as a free man – and my brothers and sisters with me.”

“Ahh.” The other men lean forward too. “I heard St Helen's were selling good land – did you hear that, Harry?”

“Everyone is selling land!” snorts the old man. “But you wouldn't want to farm St Helen's – little mucky bits of earth and stone. Lady Christina – that's who you want to go to. She—”

Richard lifts his mug to his lips. To Richard this is the promised land of milk and grain. And I can't complain too much – isn't this what I've always wanted too? But there's something indecent in Richard's eagerness. I know he's lost people too – Father and little Edward and all the other people in Ingleforn that I haven't dared ask about yet. But something inside me rages at the idea that something – anything – good can come out of this. It's too soon. It's not fair.

I can see that Robin feels the same, or something like it. He sits hunched up on his bench, pushing at his pottage with his spoon. Magsy is tugging at his arm.

“Can you tear my bread for me? Robin?
Robin!
My bread's too hard.”

Robin pulls his sleeve away.

“Not
now
, Mag!”

Magsy's face crumples. I can see her making up her mind to start wailing. I lean over the table.

“Here, Mag, whist. Look, there you go. Eat that and be quiet.”

Maggie's lip is still wobbling. “I'm not hungry,” she says, pushing my hand away. I want to tip the bowl over her head,
but I don't. I break the rest of the bread into Mag-sized pieces and drop them into the pottage.

“Dolly's hungry even if you aren't – why don't you give them to her, eh?”

“No, she's not,” says Mag sulkily, but she's not going to cry, and that's all I care about right now.

At least I don't have to worry about Ned eating. He's finished his bowl and half of Robin's bread, and he's eying up Mags's bowl with a calculating expression.

“Are we going back to Ingleforn?” he says. “Or are we going somewhere else?”

“We have to go home to pick up Joan and the baby,” I say. “But then Richard's going to buy some new land somewhere. We're going to be free men and women. We won't have to work the lord's land any more. What do you think of that?”

Ned shrugs, but he looks pleased. “When I grow up,” he announces. “I'm going to be the reeve like Gilbert. I'm going to have the biggest strip in the village – and servants to plough it all for me.”

He looks so determined. Sturdy, wiry little Ned, chewing on Maggie's bread with his red hair spiked up and his face red and white with the cold.

“I believe you,” I say, and I do.

The bar is getting busier as the night begins to draw in. Richard turns away from his friends by the fire and orders us all another mug of ale.

“Is there still pestilence in Ingleforn?” says Ned. He tips the top of his ale mug up slowly so the ale trickles down his throat. All you can see over the rim are his round blue eyes.

“Some . . .” says Richard. “Much less than there was. It's going – I promise.”

But people are still dying. I feel my throat tighten.

“How do you know?” says Robin. He's scowling at the tabletop. “I bet it hasn't gone – not really. That's not how sickness works – it goes, and then it comes back.”

“If that's true, there isn't much we can do about it,” says Richard, far too cheerfully. I want to hit him.

Robin's face darkens. “I'm going to bed,” he says, pushing his end of the bench back, jolting Magsy so that she drops her spoon in her lap with a surprised “Oh!”

Robin doesn't stop. His face is red. He's left most of his pottage in the bowl. I know I ought to go after him – make sure he's all right – but I'm so fed up with all this sadness and anger that I let him go.

A little band has set up in the corner of the room – a fiddle player and a drummer and a horn player. They're good. Ned bats his spoon on the table in time. It's getting dark. The girl who served the ale comes along and lights the rushlights along the walls. Magsy climbs under the table and on to my lap. She's a warm, heavy weight against my stomach. I hold her without moving, listening to the music, watching the shadows on the wall rise and dance as people move across the fire and the rushlights, thinking how fragile all this is. Here one day and gone the next.

 

It's late when we go up to bed. Robin is asleep at one end of the long room, in a bed with a red-faced woman and her child. The only beds left are right at the other end. Richard takes Ned in with him, and Mag and I have to share with a skinny little girl who scratches at her flea bites even in her sleep.

It takes me a long time to fall asleep. The long room is warm and dark and stinks of ale and sweat and stale rushes. Whenever anyone goes to the latrine, you can hear them cursing and stumbling down the aisle between the beds.

When I do sleep, I dream about our little house, with the hearth-fire smoking and the lavender and rosemary drying from the beams, and Stumpy and Gilbert Pig sleeping behind their wattle wall. I dream about Alice, holding Edward and crooning to him as she bends over the cooking pot. I dream about the chickens scratching in the straw, and the rustle from the birds nesting in the thatch, and Ned kicking a ball against the wall, calling, “One, two, I'm with you! Two, three, you're with me!”

I wonder if this dream is going to carry on coming back for the rest of my life. I wonder if I will ever forget them, if one day I'll ever be glad – like Richard is – that they went and left us this bright, empty world for our own.

I wake to the sunlight shining through the narrow windows, and the sound of someone – I think it's a child – screaming hysterically at the other end of the sleeping room. Around me, people are waking up: complaining, grumbling, blinking in the sunlight.

I sit up. A small huddle has gathered around the child, who looks a little older than Mag. One of the women is holding her arms down, but she's struggling to get free, kicking with her bare heels at the woman's shins. Then another woman says, “She's dead!” and it falls in one of the silences between the child drawing her breath and beginning to scream, so that the whole sleeping chamber is suddenly still, even the little girl, who hiccups and shudders in the stranger's arms.

“Is it . . .?” someone says, but of course it must be; what else can kill so silently and so suddenly? You go to bed alive and you wake up dead. I expect panic, folk gathering together their things and fleeing, but no one seems even surprised. You live with death for so long that another body is just that – a dead weight to be disposed of somehow. We've all walked among the dead for too long to be frightened any more. Only to the dead woman and her child, who has begun to scream again, does this matter now.

“We should get going,” says Richard. “We've a long way to go today.”

“I'll tell Robin,” I say.

I pull on my clothes and shoes and make my way down the sleeping chamber towards Robin's bed. All around me, people are muttering in low voices. The group around the little girl whisper to each other, and look across at the child. They're wondering what to do with her, probably. Does she have a father somewhere, or other family? As I get closer, I see that it's the child who was in Robin's bed. The woman is lying flabby and white on the bed like a plucked chicken, the fingers of the big hand hanging down from the bed turning black with the sinking blood. Her mouth is half open, but her eyes are closed. Her skin is white and plucked and faintly horrible.

Robin is lying curled up on his side beside her. He looks asleep. His hands are neatly clasped under his chin and his eyes are closed. I wonder how he has managed to sleep through the screaming and shouting. I touch his arm to wake him, and I know. His skin is cold. He's dead.

One of the women from the huddle is watching me. She comes over to the bed now.

“Was he a friend of yours?”

I nod.

“And the little girl?”

“I don't know her.” I swallow. I want to shake Robin, to try and wake him somehow, but I don't dare with this bright-eyed woman watching me so intently.

“Pity.” The woman doesn't turn away. “Something will have to be done with her.” I don't answer. She shrugs. “And you'll have to do something with him,” she says, nodding to Robin. I nod again. If I open my mouth, I'm either going to cry or hit her.