All Fall Down (22 page)

“Well then,” says the woman. But she doesn't stop watching me.

I crouch beside Robin, and stroke his arm awkwardly. It's very cold. His face already has the parchment look of dead skin. His black hair is loose and hangs over his forehead. The world seems to swim in and out of focus. My hand shakes, violently, on the bed, and my teeth start to chatter.
I knew
, I think.
I knew this would happen. I knew that nothing could be trusted, that nothing would hold.
But in truth, I didn't know. I thought I was safe. I thought it was over.

Nothing is ever over
, I think, with a sudden certainty, and a sudden sadness. And I know, sitting there by Robin's bed, that after today I will never feel safe again. I will never be able to love simple and sure and sweet without remembering this moment, and being afraid. I stand up, sick of it all, and go back to Richard and the others, to tell them that we can't go home just yet.

 

 

T
here's no church for another three miles. We bury Robin and the body of the dead woman in the pasture at the back of the inn, where the landlord's cows graze and the horses are let loose to flick their tails and pull at the thick, tussocky grass. There's a big oak tree and a hedge of hawthorne and brambles. Cow parsley and thistles grow in the ditches. The pasture slopes down to a beck with a ford and rushing water. It's evening, and the sunlight sends long shadows stretching out across the grass. The sky is peach and pink and pale orange over the hills, the long clouds coloured like the inside of an oyster shell. It's quiet and cool and still.

There's no one at the graveside except for Richard and us, and the landlord's man, who helped dig the graves – the landlord moved the bodies to the cow-byre, he was so desperate to get them out of his house – and the woman's little girl, whose name is Beatrice. Beatrice is seven. She had a father and two brothers, who are dead as well. She and her mother were travelling to Felton, where her uncle lives. Later, I give one of Juliana's golden bracelets to a carter at the inn, to take her with him as far as Felton. Richard looks disapproving – how much land could that bracelet buy? – but I don't care. I think of Juliana, whose little girls were killed. I think about Robin, with nowhere to go, and Alice, with all of those children who weren't hers. I try not to think about what will happen to this child if her uncle is dead.

Beatrice spent most of the morning screaming, but she's quiet now. She sucks on a bit of bread and honeycomb and holds on to Mags's hand.

The men carry the bodies to the grave-mouth on a tabletop from the inn. They're wrapped in winding sheets, so I can't even see Robin's face. I'm glad.

There isn't a priest, and nobody heard Robin's confession, but I don't believe he's going to hell. I refuse to believe it. I don't want anything to do with a God who would send Robin to hell.

The men lower the bodies awkwardly into the grave, one on top of the other. It's clumsy, and the hole is too small, but at least it's not a plague pit.

“Do you want to say something?” says Richard, to me.

Yes
, I think, but my mind won't work, my voice is stuck, my words won't come. What can I say that will make sense of this? I look at Ned and Mag, and they're silent too. Neither of them is crying. Richard shrugs, and begins to shovel the earth back over the bodies.
Wait
, I want to say, but I don't. Wait for what?

Later, when the others are finished, I want to stay here awhile, but Richard looks astonished.

“Who will look after Mag and Ned?” he says. And so I have to go.

 

*

 

The next morning, we leave for Ingleforn. I wonder if I will ever come here again. I wonder how long anyone will remember the two bodies in the cow pasture.

I think about what I would have liked to have said by the graveside, if I'd been brave enough.

I love you.

There was never anyone like you in all the world.

I would have been happy, married to you. We would have made a good family.

I'll never forget you.

But the words sound cheap, and inadequate. All over England, people like Beatrice and I are standing by grave-mouths, saying the same things to those they have lost.

I love you.

I'll never forget you.

There was never anyone like you, in all the world.

 

 

I
t's evening when we come back home. Richard has a lamp on a pole, which sends long shadows swinging over the wattle walls of the houses. Even in the darkness, I know what everything is, where everything is. That's the well. That's Emma Baker's oven. Those are Sir John's beehives, all in a row. That's the forge, and those are the stocks. It even smells the same as it always did: wet grass and pig dung and straw and earth. The air is cleaner here, wetter, richer.

We're home.

I don't care.

We aren't going back home, though. We spend the night in Joan and Richard's little house, which looks just like it always did, except that now there's a crumpled little red-faced person sleeping in a cradle by the hearth. Joan – who Alice always said gave up half her wits when she got married – comes running to the door when we knock and flings her arms around Richard.

“You came back!” she says, and then she sees the rest of us crowding in behind him.

“You found them!” And it's all kisses and caresses, without so much as a “how-was-the-journey?”

And there's the baby by the hearth. A baby girl, a frail little thing, not half as sturdy as Edward was. My eye keeps shifting towards her and then away, as though I'm frightened to look. Edward used to lie just like that – his tiny eyelashes and tinier fingernails and his serious sleeping face. I sit hunched by the fire, my hand on Mag's back for comfort, but she wriggles away to admire the baby. Richard gives me an odd look, as though he expects me to be celebrating. But the village is a place of empty houses and unploughed fields, and the baby scares me, and my heart can't seem to understand that Robin is dead – I keep expecting him to be here, in this room – and I'm going to have to go to the abbey and find out what happened to Geoffrey, and I don't know why, but Joan's neat little one-room house just makes me want to cry.

“You're an auntie now, Isabel,” Joan says, and I clench my lips tight together and don't say a word.

 

We're leaving soon. Joan's sister married a tanner in Kirby Felton, and she's found a house for us to stay in while we're looking for land to buy. Richard's eyes gleam as he talks about pasture land and wheat fields and all the heriot animals, and the beasts with no owners that the new lords are desperate to get rid of. I feel empty.

I thought everything would be all right if we just got home, but maybe nothing will ever be right again.

 

I used to think I'd spend the rest of my life in this village, but now I'm glad to be leaving. Ingleforn is a strange, half-deserted place. The empty houses watch me with empty eyes, and everywhere I go I see reminders of the dead: the empty forge, shut up and unworked, the pigs and chickens wandering half-wild and ownerless through the village, slowly vanishing as villager after villager claims them for the pot, the houses with the shutters closed tight against the wind, the gardens already hazy with uncut grass and weeds. Sir Edmund is dead in his house in London, and a new boy heir is coming, a cousin from Duresme, so the rumours say. Church on Sunday is half-empty, and there's a new priest that I don't know, who's giving the mass to our church and the church at Great Riding. He says the mass without stumbling, unlike poor Simon, and the congregation listen dully and dutifully before wandering away to talk of other things, as always.

After church, Will Thatcher comes over to speak to me. He's gotten taller than ever just in the weeks that I've been gone – he's not a boy any more, he's nearly a man. Maybe I'm a woman.

“I'm glad to see you,” he says, more directly than I remember, and with little of his old shyness. “I thought I'd never see you again.”

I clench my arms tight across my chest. I don't have anything to say to him. I don't have anything to say to anyone.
I don't want to live in this world any more
, I think, very clearly, and I'm so startled by the thought that I blink. Is that true? Really?

“We're not staying,” I tell Will, dully. “Richard's wanting us to move to better land,” and he nods.

“I'll be gone soon too,” he says. “The new lord – he's looking for men to garrison his castle down south. Most of his troops were killed in the pestilence. I'll not stay here.”

I wonder if he remembers that kiss. I wonder if he'll miss me, in his new castle with the new lord, who doesn't look like he's going to stay in Ingleforn any more than Sir Edmund did.

He shifts from one foot to another, the way he used to, then he says, “I'm going to be married too. To Maude Baker.”

“Oh!” I blink at him. Then I say, “I'm glad, Will, really.” Though I'm not. Maude Baker is lumpen and fish-eyed and stupid. She's still scared of rats and spiders and moths, even though she's a great girl of almost twenty.

“I hope – I hope you'll be happy,” I say to Will, and this I do mean. He nods his head up and down a few times and says, “You too, Isabel. You too.”

 

Nobody seems to know what happened at St Mary's. Joan thought all the monks died of the pestilence. Richard thought that a few had survived but they'd packed up all their holy books and taken them to the priory at Felton. The new priest, when I asked, said he thought there were a few monks left, “but they're leaving soon, I think, before the winter comes.”

On the last day before we leave, I go up to the abbey. It's cold. Autumn's here. The abbey sits as it always does in the dip in the road, low and quiet under the white-grey sky. The big wooden doors are closed. I bang on them with my fist, but nobody comes. Weeds are growing out of the cracks between the stones, and in the chapel, one of the beautiful coloured glass windows has been smashed wide open against the rain. It should be sad, and it is, but mixed up with the sadness is the calmness and the sense of peace that always surrounds my abbey, and that old, tugging sense of home that Geoffrey always raises up in me.

There's a tree that I used to climb when I wanted to visit
him and didn't want the monks to know. It's still there up against the orchard wall. It's easier to climb than I remember. I must be getting taller. Little green-and-brown specks of bark and moss come off on my hands and my skirts, but I don't mind. This gown is too short for me anyway. I need a new one. I must remember to ask Joan about Alice's loom. More work for the long winter that's coming.

There's no one in the orchard, but there are noises coming from the gardens, someone whistling, and a thud, like metal on stone. I follow the sounds, noticing all the signs of decay, the dead leaves beginning to fall, dirty and unswept in the earth and the mud, the withered heads of the leeks in the herb garden. I'm filled with a great weariness, a heaviness. I wonder if it will ever really leave me. There's so much that needs to be done, here and everywhere, and I'm so tired.

The monk is in the field behind the graveyard. He's digging a grave. He's knee-deep in the earth, and it's slow going. The earth is stony, and he's forever stopping to dig out the stones with his spade. He looks cheerful enough, though. His hood is down and he's whistling.

He doesn't stop working as I come up to him, though he must have heard me.

“Where are the monks?” I say, a little too loudly.

The monk gives a bark of a laugh.

“Where's everyone?”

It takes me a moment to realize.

“They're dead? All of them?”

“Well, I'm here, aren't I?” The monk digs his spade into the ground and throws the load of earth back over his shoulder. “But yes, there's me – and poor Brother John – and that's the last of us.”

I'm silent. I'd expected this, but somehow I
hadn't
expected it. I feel the way you feel after you lay down a load that was too heavy ever to pick up in the first place – weak and shaky and breathless. The monk glances at me, but he doesn't say anything. He goes back to digging the grave. I'm silent, watching. The day smells of wet grass and wet earth. My hands are stained with bark from the tree, and there's a green smudge all down the front of my gown. My feet are wet. My brother is dead. Shadows from the branches of the tree fall across the monk's face, shadow-brown, then white, then shadow-brown. Water is running in the brook, the last of the apples are ripening in the trees around me, and my brother is dead.

“Were you?” I say bitterly to the monk.

“Was I what?”

“Sleeping with devils. Is that why God killed you all? Was it worth it?” My voice rises. The monk carries on digging.

“If they were, they never invited me along. Pity. My bed got awful cold, those long nights.”

“It's not funny!” I say shrilly. The monk looks up.

“No,” he says, “I don't suppose it is.”

I scuff the toe of my shoe in the mud at the edge of the grave. It's good, thick earth, soft and crumbly and full of worms and the white, wriggly roots of grass.

“I hate God,” I tell the monk. He ignores me. He looks like Alice, lips clenched, getting on with her weaving while Mag has a screaming fit.

“I don't believe in God,” I say instead. I'm not sure this is true – can you have a world without God? – but at least it makes the monk look at me.

“If you don't, you're not the only one. I've had boys from Ingleforn throwing stones at the windows all last week. As if there isn't enough sorrow in this world already.”

“How can you still believe in Him?” I say. “After all this . . .” And I swing my arm around in a gesture that's supposed to include the graves, and the empty abbey, and York with the corpses lying in the street, and Alice and Father and Edward in the grave with the rats, and Thomas swinging from the gibbet in the square.

The monk is quiet. The spade lifts the earth out of the grave and drops it on to the grass with a
splat
. It's strangely comforting, like being out in the fields with my father. My father is dead. My brother is dead.

“You know,” says the monk, “I was a child in the Great Famine. Did you ever hear about that?”

I did. Lots of people in the village remember the famine, when the rains came like they did last harvest and all the crops were ruined. Father lost a grandmother, and a baby cousin, and a little sister smaller than Mag.

“And then their parents cut them up and put them in the pot!” Dirty Nick used to say, his teeth white in his red mouth, his long, grimy face screwed up as his muscles worked under the skin. But Father says no, they didn't eat his little sister, they buried her in the churchyard under the east window. But Will Thatcher says he's heard that people ate each other too.

“People are funny souls,” says the monk. “They chop down the trees above their houses and wonder why the floods come. They eat all their barley and then wonder why their children are starving. They look at the Signs in Europe – the pestilence and the rains of fire and the plagues of frogs – and they say, ‘That won't touch me. That can't come here.'”

“There was a man I knew in York,” I say. “Watt. He said the people in France thought the pestilence was coming for the heathens, until it came to France. And then the people in England through it was coming for the French, until it came to England. And then the Scots rejoiced and thought it was coming for the English . . .”

“And now it's in Scotland,” says the monk, and he spits. I nod. Now it's in Scotland.

“No one thinks disaster is coming to them,” he says. “But it does. And it will. It came to Jesus, and it came to the Israelites and the Egyptians. Four hundred – five hundred – six hundred years from now, men and women will still be chopping down the trees and eating all the barley and hoping Providence will save them. But disasters will come to them too, all the same. And this has been a cruel trouble, I know, more sorrow than we ever thought we'd have to carry. But look! You're still here and so am I, and I've got a new abbey to shape and you've got land to work, I wager.”

“We're going away,” I say. “Before the new lord comes home. My brother Richard says nobody will care if we're villeins or free, so long as we've hands that can plough the fields. We're going to be rich, he says.”

“Aye,” says the monk. He throws up another spadeful of earth. “He mightn't be wrong, either.” He looks up at me. “You should be grateful, my girl!”

I crouch down in the wet grass, ducking my head so I don't have to look at him, there in his grave. I remember the Bible story about the lilies in the field, who need not plough or weave or bake or sow, because of the grace of God who knows and loves them all.

“I'm scared of the baby,” I say, through my hair.

“Scared of the baby!” The monk laughs. “A big girl like you! You can weather the end of the world, but you're scared of a baby!”

He's right. I'm a fool. But the truth is, the end of the world is easy to weather, if you don't expect to survive it. If all you have to do is wrap your mantle tight around yourself and live another day. Anyone can do that, I reckon. After Alice died, I never really thought I'd do anything but die too.