All Fall Down (9 page)

 

 

I
t's very strange having Robin living with us. At first, I'm awkward and a little shy – not sure how to treat someone who's watched his mother die of the pestilence. But in the end I just watch what Alice does; brisk, loving, practical Alice, scolding the little ones when they pester him, softening Father when he asks too much, sending him away – “Go and fetch me some wood, Robin, won't you?” when it's obvious that our crowded little house is too much for him.

He's quiet and withdrawn those first few days, brushing aside my attempts to comfort him – “Not
now
, Isabel” – and going off alone to the archery butts, or the well, or the wood. Mag follows him around like a friendly puppy, curious about this strange, subdued version of her old friend. She brings him things to interest him – “Look, Robin, here's the cheese that I helped Alice make. Look – these are our hens. Father made this hoe – look.” Robin tolerates her, which is more than Alice or I do.

“Send her to me if she bothers you,” says Alice, but Robin shakes his head.

“I don't mind. She's nice, Mag.”

Father manages to sell Margaret's cow to Edward Miller, whose cow and all his sheep died of the pestilence. We keep their chickens, but we put Margaret's cockerel in the pot. No one wants a cockfight every day in their yard.

Mostly, Robin's out all day in the fields with Father and Ned. When he comes back, we don't talk much. We just sit by the fire; me with my spinning, or my weaving, or my mending, him watching my fingers, watching the fireside, resting his head on my knee or my shoulder, quiet.

“Was it awful?” I ask him, one day when he's been living with us for nearly a week, and he gives a sort of shudder.

“Tell me,” I say, but he won't.

All he says is, “They go mad, Isabel. After a while. They don't know who they are, or who you are. They don't care that they're lying there in their own blood and shit. It's better, probably, that they don't . . .”

 

Five hundred and fifty people live in our village, including Sir Edmund's soldiers, and more – like the pedlars and the carters and the man who brands the sheep – who come through, stay a few days, and then leave.

Today, as we stand at the back of the church, Father's eyes look down, but Alice's head is turning, counting the missing and the dead. Twenty-three dead this week. More missing. Edward Miller stands against a pillar with his arms crossed and his eyes closed. He lost his mother and his two children in the last week. The eldest was sitting by the fire, with her spindle. They didn't even know she was sick. Her mother went out to bring in the chickens, and when she came back, she was dead. Amabel's grandmother died just the same way.
This sort of death is the worst of all. Every morning when I wake up, I lie in our solar and wonder,
Who died tonight?
I touch Robin and Mag with the back of my hands, to see if their bodies are still warm. If Father and Robin are late home from the fields, I think,
Perhaps they've fallen down dead
. I feel all the time – every day, every moment – like I'm sitting under an axe, waiting for it to fall. I start at unexpected noises, at the sound of crying. I'm frightened, every minute of every day.

I look around the church like Alice, seeking out bad news. Emma Baker is missing too. She's not sick, but her husband is. The oven's been out since he fell ill. One of his apprentices ran away when the pestilence began and the other's mother is sick in Great Riding and he's needed at home. I can't think what will happen when John Baker dies. How can you have a village without an oven? What will we do without bread?

The two smallest Smith children from the forge are here, but their parents aren't. Their father is dead and their mother is home with the oldest boy, who's sick. Alice turns her head when she sees them, and nudges me.

“Go and tell Alice Smith they can come and eat with us after church. Poor little mites – their mother's got enough to do without putting on a meal.”

I push my way through the people to the back of the church. Alice Smith is about Ned's age, with straight, lank black hair. Her little sister is smaller than Mag.

“Alice says you're to come and eat with us after church,” I tell her. She stares at me.

“We can't. We have to go home and see our brother.”

I shift Edward on my hip and scowl at her.

“Alice says you're poor little mites. She says your mother's got enough to do without feeding you.”

Alice Smith's little sister sticks her fist in her mouth and turns her face from me to her sister. Alice Smith's white face goes pink at the cheeks.

“Our mother can cook better than your Alice can!” she says. The people in front of us turn and make
shh
ing faces. “We don't need food from you!”

Her sister's hair is wild and uncombed, and there's a grubby look to their faces, but I bite my tongue. I make my way back to Alice and Father.

“She says their mother can cook better than you can,” I tell Alice, and she sighs.

“Really, Isabel! I don't know what's got into you lately. What did you say to them?”

What's got into me lately? The end of the world is what's got into me lately! All the empty spaces in the church – all the fresh-dug earth in the churchyard. Alice is a lunatic. If it was the Last Judgement and the dead were rising up from their graves around us, she'd say, “Comb your hair, Isabel, wash your face and don't pick your nose. What will Jesus and St Michael think of you, looking like that?”

 

On Tuesday morning, John the baker dies. There are mutterings about sending to Great Riding for another baker – but what baker would come to a pestilence village? – or for John Baker's brother, who lives in Felton and might remember how to work an oven. By Tuesday evening, though, smoke is rising from the oven again. Alice's head turns.

“Who's got that going?”

“One of the apprentices, maybe?” says Father.

But it isn't. When Mag and I take our flour over that evening, Emma Baker is there, piling the wood into the oven with the apprentice whose mother was sick.

“What are you doing, being a baker?” Mag says, her eyes big and round.

“Someone has to,” says Emma. She looks far too cheerful for someone whose husband has just died. Her round face is red and the sleeves of her gown are rolled up. “Don't just stand there gawping, Watt! If that fire goes out, I'll wallop you so hard you won't be able to stand for a week!”

“Are you going to carry on being a baker when the pestilence stops?” I say.

“Well, I don't see who else is going to,” says Emma. “Watt! Didn't you hear me?”

 

“Emma never did care much for John,” says Alice, when I tell her all this. “It was her father who wanted them to marry – he thought it was a fine living for his daughter, though I wouldn't want that great oven on my croft, myself. And who's going to run their house, then, if Emma's playing at baking?”

“Maude's big enough,” says Father. Alice sniffs.

“Well!” she says. She turns to me. “Don't you get any ideas, young miss. Don't go thinking you'll run this farm if anything happens to your father!”

“I'd do it better than Robin would, anyway,” I say.

 

 

T
ime passes. The days grow lighter and longer. Soon it'll be harvest, and I don't know how we're going to manage to bring in all the barley this year. Harvesting takes every pair of hands going – men at the reaping, women and girls at the binding, old folk and little squirts like Mag at the gleaning, stumbling behind the binders picking up the fallen grains.

Every summer, our barn is full of the harvesters, sleeping in the hay and toasting bread and cheese over the old iron hearth. Harvest time is hard, but it's also wonderful. The harvesters bring pipes and flutes and drums. They light fires on the green and dance and play and tell tales late into the night. Alice always sends me to bed early, while the dancers are still jumping and whirling by the fire, but this year I'd hoped I might be old enough to stay dancing with Robin or Will, into the long evening.

This year is going to be different. Who's going to look for work in a village with the pestilence? A few people have come – beggars, and poor men and women who have already lost everything they have to lose. But there are richer trades
than harvesting now. These are our gravediggers and pall-bearers and nurses of the sick, our walkers behind the coffins and ringers for the dead.

I don't know exactly how many people have died, but it's over three score. I think. Maybe more. The church bell rings every day now, sometimes two or three or four times. I often see Simon hurrying past our house, his little bag with his oil and candles dangling from his arm. He's promised us that as soon as the disaster is over, we'll have the funeral masses. At the moment, he's just getting everyone into the ground.

There are more and more empty houses in the village. Twice now, I've seen sick people wandering through the village half-naked, their wits gone. Sometimes, they don't discover that someone is dead until their neighbours scent it out from the stench of the rotting corpse. Muriel-at-Brook was dead for a week before they found her. Her little daughter was still sleeping in the same bed, half-starved and stinking and covered in blood and shit. Her aunt took her, but not all children have found a home. Edward Miller had two chickens stolen by a couple of filthy ragamuffin boys from York. Sarah Fisher had leeks pulled up from her garden by a family who'd fled the pestilence from the south, and now had nowhere to go. These folk don't stay for the harvest. They won't stop in a pestilence village, but they need to eat, same as the rest of us.

Father doesn't seem to notice the bells ringing, or the empty spaces in the church. He's eaten up with worry over his fields. You'd think, watching him, that he cares more about his rows of barley than he does for Robin's mother and Radulf and Muriel and little Joanie Fisher and Geoffrey at the abbey, about whom we've still had no news.

There's far too much barley to bring in on our own. Father's been trying to get other folk to work on our strips. He offered Stephen Dyer 2d a day to work our strips of field instead of his father's. Stephen was tempted – you could see it in the way he bit his lip and glanced from side to side, but his sister Matilda heard and started shrilling at Father, calling him cruel and heartless, to be making money out of others' troubles.

“You're as bad as those gravediggers, you are!” she said, spitting into the dust.

The new gravediggers charge more and more for their services. Since Adam the sexton died, they've asked as much as a whole pig for burying a body – that's what Sir John used to want for saying the mass! Even the beggars who follow the dead-cart only ask for pennies. And then the gravediggers swagger around the village, living off salt-bacon and throwing their farthings away on ale and white bread. There's an uglier rumour too – that they climb down into the graves and steal rings from the fingers and beads from the necks of the dead. I don't know if this is true or not.

“I don't know why you're so worried,” Alice grumbles at Father. “It's not like anyone is going to starve this year.” And she's right. This year there'll be more than plenty, even if we leave half the barley to rot in the fields.

“Why waste your strength bringing in food that no one will eat?” says Alice, jiggling Edward up and down on her lap. “They're big sillies, aren't they, my love?”

Alice doesn't understand. Neither does Robin.

“
More
work,” he groans, stretching his long arms over his head. “We'll be the richest dead people in England!”

Robin isn't used to working as hard as Father makes him. Margaret's land was all rented out, and though Robin worked
in their herb garden and did his labouring on Sir Edmund's land and helped with the haymaking and the harvest, most of Margaret's money came from her weaving and her ale. Father takes Robin out into the fields every morning with Richard, to chase away the birds and weed the rows and do the work of the labourers we aren't able to buy. When he comes home he collapses by the hearth with his hood over his face and his long limbs splayed out before him. Father thinks the work is good for him, and maybe he's right. He certainly looks healthier than he did when he first came here. He's got muscles where before he only had bone. Father never takes Robin's complaints seriously.

“Coming to hew some wood with me?” he says, and Robin groans. “You'll need to work much harder than this when you have your own farm, you know.”

“The joy!” says Robin. “The excitement!”

Father tries to look stern, but his mouth twitches.

“Leave the poor boy be,” says Alice, as Robin and Father both know she will. “Have a mug of ale, lad, and don't listen to him.”

It is very strange living in the same house as Robin, and sharing a bed. I've never felt shy about dressing and undressing for bed before, but now, suddenly, I'm awkward about him seeing me in my slip, and even more awkward about seeing him in his breeches. If Robin is shy too, he doesn't say anything, but I've noticed that he pulls the blanket up almost to his chin when he gets into bed, even though the nights are growing shorter and hotter and closer.

I'm shy around him in other ways too, ways I never was before. I'm very aware of when he's in the room, or when he speaks. I catch myself watching him when I hope he's not
looking. I notice things about him – when he's weary, or angry, or sad. He hasn't got used to living with Ned and Maggie yet, the way they tug at you like a pair of puppies; Maggie begging for attention: “Look what I've got, Isabel!” “Look what I can do, Robin!” Ned pushing and pushing until in the end you yell at him, or wallop him, and he retreats into wounded righteousness. Robin doesn't understand about little brothers and sisters. He takes it all too seriously, and minds too much when it all goes wrong.

He likes Father and Alice, I think. Alice, at least. And Father is kind enough to him, though most of his heart is busy worrying over the fields and the sickness. Alice is just worried, about us all.

Richard and I are the only ones who understand Father and his worries.

“All that barley rotting in the fields,” Richard says, and I nod.

“What a mess,” says Richard, and he shakes his head. “What a god-forsaken mess.”