“He’ll go up and come down again just like he said,” he said aloud, to reassure himself. And if the old man succeeded, it would be something to tell his grandchildren about. Behind him, the great bells in the belfry sounded the hour. It was ten o’clock.
How silent the air was. The soaring octagon of the spire rose majestically, straight at the blue sky, in its separate region above the world to which it was obviously so serenely indifferent: indifferent to the Shockleys and their mill, to Godefroi in his manor, to the sheep on the high ground that had paid for its very stones; it was indifferent to the market, the close, to even the bishop himself; to drought and flood below, seed time and harvest; the spire was above these things.
Osmund took his time. He rested when he wanted. And at last, a little before the bells sounded the half hour, he came to the dizzy point where he could stretch his little arms right round the spire, as he touched the silent capstone in the sky. He was aware that, far below, people in the close were staring up. There was now a faint, just discernible breeze in his face coming from the west.
He had done it. The cathedral, and all that was in it, was his.
His long-sighted eyes were an advantage. Below, he could see every detail of the houses in the close. He could see the market place. Behind the city, on the ancient hill, he could make out individual figures moving about on the castle walls. On the rolling ridges, everywhere, he could see the tiny dots of the sheep. Eight miles away, directly in line with the old castle hill, he could even make out the broken circle of grey sarsens at Stonehenge. And beyond that, ridge after ridge, extending northwards like a sea.
And as he gazed over Sarum, so high in the sky, even the old mason’s newfound sin of pride dissolved in the air, lost at the wonder of the place.
After a little time, he came down.
THE DEATH
1348
On a warm August morning, a little after dawn, the small ship had passed the low headland and come slowly through the sheltered harbour waters to tie up beside the quay at Christchurch. The ship contained a cargo of wine, from the English province of Gascony in south west France. The sailors, eight bluff, healthy fellows, came briskly down the gangplank and were welcomed by the men on the waterfront. Soon afterwards, they began to unload.
They did not know about their passenger and his small companion.
He arrived alone – except for his companion. His coat was black. He had come in a crate, into which, at the French dock, he had accidentally strayed; now, as soon as it had been deposited on the quay, he left it immediately. For he did not care for the company of men. A small, solitary figure, he moved unnoticed along the edge of the waterfront looking for a convenient place to hide; seeing none, he made his way, pausing from time to time, up the little lane that led past the edge of the priory churchyard and soon afterwards he came to a row of small gabled houses, huddled together. He could tell that they were already occupied, and since strangers in his experience were seldom welcome, he and his small companion moved on, keeping discreetly to the side of the lane so as not to excite attention. Soon he came to a cobbled street.
He could not decide whether he was hungry or not, after the long voyage. There were not many people about, but a cart rumbled by on its way towards the quay and splashed him with mud, which he did not mind. Fifty yards further he saw that there was a stream on his right; and immediately beside it was a hump of ground on which rose the thick, dark walls of the little castle of Twyneham with its stout tower that faced the priory. Amongst its stones, he guessed, there would be passages, litter, scraps of food and sewers leading down to the stream. He could smell the faint tang that always arose from such an area, welcome to a scavenger like himself. Gratefully he made towards it, for he was getting tired.
It was as he reached the castle wall that he discovered his mistake. Three grey-coated guardians of the place, all male, stood facing him, each standing just behind the shoulder of the next. He made a tentative signal that he had come in peace; but first the front one, then the other two, bared their teeth at him. They began to advance, menacingly. He did not hesitate, but scuttled away to the edge of the stream, taking his companion with him. There he turned, saw them still watching him, and despondently went back to the street.
He felt unwell. He had experienced a brief shivering fit just before he had left the boat; now he found that his head was pounding. He made his way along the lane out of the little town, crossing a stone bridge. Through a hole in the side, he could see the river Avon moving below at a steady pace, its long green river weeds swaying from side to side and for some reason this made him giddy.
On the other side of the bridge, fifty yards along the bank, was a small mill; but this was not what he wanted, for he did not care for the company of humans. He cast about for something else, somewhere to rest. He had travelled nearly five hundred yards from the boat and he felt very tired. Then, close by, he saw a pile of rubbish by the water’s edge. He entered it.
An hour later his breath was coming in gasps. When he tried to rise, he had difficulty, but in his confused state he felt the need to do so and forgetting that the rubbish heap was, at least, a shelter, he staggered out onto the river bank. No one noticed him. His companion came with him.
Slowly now, and with pain, he started to drag himself forward, hardly knowing what he was about, but determined: I must find a quiet place, a shelter where I can be alone, he thought. It took him fifteen minutes of spasmodic movement to reach the wooden walls of the flour mill, and although it was bound to be occupied, he did not care: finding a hole, he crawled into a store room. He halted beside a sack of flour.
And now something terrible began to happen to him. As he shook with fever, he was vaguely conscious that he was starting to bleed. He could feel the blood in his mouth: it seemed to be coming from his gums. Strange and terrible sensations came from his body too: his breath came in gurgles. There was fluid of some kind in his lungs; could this, too, be blood?
Half an hour later, he was dead. His companion stayed with him for a little while.
When the house rat came past the corpse of the strange black sewer rat, which had no business to be there, he saw that it was surrounded by a pool of blood. He sniffed the corpse cautiously, uncertain what to make of it: and it was at this point that the flea, the companion which had been living on the body of the black rat for a week, left the corpse and transferred itself to the house rat. Soon afterwards the house rat and the flea moved on to another part of the building.
It was the following morning that the flea made an unusual move. It did so because it was ravenously hungry. For some reason, when it fed on the house rat, its hunger was not satisfied. And so, when a cart containing a man and a ten-year-old boy stopped at the mill and the boy wandered by some sacks of flour where the house rat was scavenging, the flea, which normally did not feed on humans, left the rat to try the boy. It was no good. A few minutes later the flea hopped back to the rat.
The reason for this failure on the part of the flea was that the blood of the black rat which it had been secreting in its stomach had developed a new and hideous life of its own, breeding bacteria that had already sealed off the entrance to the flea’s stomach so that it could not draw in any fresh blood. When the flea tried to ingest blood from the boy, it was unable to do so, and it spat the blood, together with bacteria from the entrance to its stomach, back into the boy’s skin before leaving him.
The boy’s name was Peter Wilson.
It is a tiny life-form, a small collection of cells. Under a powerful microscope, the little bacterium has a shape that resembles nothing so much as a safety pin.
It is asexual: like other bacteria, it replicates itself by splitting in two.
The bacteria form colonies, residing in the bloodstreams of small rodents, from which fact medicine has allotted them the name
yersinia pestis
, and these live for the most part quietly and in peace. They have done so – and still do today – for who knows how many centuries, in obscure regions in places round the globe from the Crimea, to India, and the United States of America.
Normally the
yersinia pestis
bacteria are contained by antibodies and do not overwhelm the other cells in the blood of their hosts and this stable condition, which may last indefinitely, is called the chronic condition of the disease.
Why is it then that at isolated periods, something extraordinary occurs? Why, after remaining in this peaceable state for perhaps a hundred years, should the little cells suddenly spring into hyperactivity, replicating themselves with an urgency that develops into a kind of seething rage, a rage that turns into an explosion? What is the alteration in the environment, the unexpected catalyst that begins the process? Various explanations are offered by science, but no definite answer is known.
Whatever its first cause, once the sudden expansion begins, it is almost unstoppable. Nothing but a barrier of the highest mountains, a polar ice-cap, or an impassable sea, seems to bring their expansion to a halt.
Or almost nothing. Modern science has found preventative treatments which were effectively applied when the disease began to break out in the United States of America in the 1970s so that only a few lives were lost. But the third pandemic of the plague, which killed some ten million in India at the turn of the century, is still continuing, although contained, to this day.
In the 1340s, such an explosion occurred.
It began in central Asia. From there it spread outwards – eastwards to China, southwards to India, and southwest along the old trading routes to Asia Minor and Turkey. By December 1347, probably carried by ship, it simultaneously appeared in Constantinople and the borders of Greece, Genoa in north west Italy and Marseilles in southern France. Then it swept, like a madness, through the whole of western Europe. No one had seen such a thing before.
The Black Death is a single form of bacterium which is transmitted mainly in two ways, called the bubonic and the pneumonic plagues.
The bubonic plague is usually carried from host to host by fleas. No less than seventy-two possible host animals have been identified, from rabbits, hares and squirrels, dogs and cats, to – the best known – rats. The different forms of infected animal population are then grouped into two, so that we speak of two varieties of the disease: the sylvatic form to be found amongst non-domestic rodents like squirrels, less likely to have intimate contact with humans – this is the form found in the United States today – and the murine form, usually transmitted through rats, and therefore likely to reach the human population.
With the pneumonic plague, the same bacteria are transmitted from one infected human to another, by tiny droplets in the breath.
The Black Death travelled round Europe in a huge clockwise curve, from Italy round the west and ending in Scandinavia and the Baltic.
That it struck so particularly virulently and spread so completely may have been due to several causes. The population of Europe in the previous century had greatly increased, to a level it was not to reach again until the eighteenth century. A series of bad harvests may have created famines during the first half of the fourteenth century and lowered the resistance of some of the population. It is also thought that the rat population, especially the black household rat, had increased substantially in the thirteenth century – indeed there may have been few if any rats on the island of Britain before that time. All these circumstances, however, are only suggestions – proof is lacking. Indeed, only one definitive statement about the circumstances favouring the reception of the plague emerges from history. It came from the Medical Faculty of the University of Paris, in the year 1348.
In the year of Our Lord 1345, on March 20, there was a conjunction of the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the House of Aquarius.
The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter portends death and disaster.
The conjunction of Mars and Jupiter portends pestilence in the air.
For Jupiter is warm and humid and draws up evil vapours from earth and water; and Mars is hot and dry, and kindles the evil into an infective fire.
We must therefore expect a terrible calamity.
In the first months of 1348 the plague struck Venice and Pisa. By March it had reached the crowded city of Florence where the people, labelled thirty years earlier by their exiled poet Dante as wolves, died more like flies. Southern France was already in its grip. By June it had reached west to central Spain and taken in almost all France to north of Paris. Some time afterwards it reached the shores of England.
When the flea bit Peter Wilson, and the bacteria entered his blood, they travelled with him up the river Avon. Though they had travelled over seven thousand miles, they were still teeming with fury.
Walter Wilson and his youngest son Peter arrived back at Sarum that night, and went straight to the Shockley farm.