When they reached the sheep house, she sent the two brothers back to the woods, telling them: “Find all the firewood you can and bring it here.” Meanwhile, she inspected their new accommodation. The holes in the roof and the crumbling wall had not interested her; but the earth floor and the ground around the wall did. For half an hour she looked into every cranny on her hands and knees before finally proncouncing: “No rats. Not even a spider.”
Her next action was stranger still.
Pointing to the crumbling wall she told her two puzzled stepsons:
“Take stones from there and place them round the house.”
And she went to a point fifty yards from the building and paced out a circle round the sheep house, pausing every five paces to make a mark in the ground where she wanted them to put a stone.
“But why?” they asked.
“I will show you,” she promised; and since they were used to obeying her, they did as she had said.
By late afternoon there was a circle of sixty-three stones around the house.
The building itself was adequate: one end was in a good state; the roof was easily repaired; their quarters were spacious and airy. But there was one problem.
“There’s no water here,” they complained.
And now for the first time Agnes smiled in triumph.
“Yes there is.” And taking a wooden pail with her she led them out of the hollow and strode a quarter of a mile across the open high ground. “There,” she said.
It was a dew pond. No sheep had used it for years now, and it was a generation since the bottom had last been re-sealed; but there was still a layer of water, about a foot deep in the centre; and it was clean.
“That is our water,” she declared.
When they returned, she pointed to the ring of stones.
“The stones will protect us,” she explained, “because they are our barrier: nothing – no stranger and no living animal – is to come inside the circle.” And now she told them why she had insisted that they bring with them not only John’s longbow, but also the little bows and slings he had made for the children, with which they often hunted birds.
“If anything comes near we’ll drive it away with stones from the slings; if that doesn’t work, we’ll kill it with the arrows,” she announced.
“How will we know if anything’s coming?”
“We’ll keep watch,” she answered simply. “Night and day.”
John looked at her curiously.
“And what if people come?”
“They must not enter the circle,” she replied, “Or I’ll shoot them.”
As the family stared at her in astonishment, they knew that she meant it.
“It is necessary,” she stated with a fiery determination, and they knew better than to argue.
The truth was that Agnes Mason hardly knew what she was doing herself.
When the knight had spoken of the plague’s approach at Avonsford, and while the villagers had scoffed, she had thought long and hard about the matter. For unlike them, she not only believed the knight, but she saw why the plague was coming, too. And it was this terrible knowledge, which she kept to herself, that made her consider all the more carefully, searching in her mind for clues as to what she should do. The mind of Agnes Mason, though she could not read and write, was stored with a remarkable stock of information. There was the knowledge her mother had carefully handed on to her – not only about the care of her little household but a huge store of folklore and herbal cures; there were the strange if garbled accounts her father had given her about his journeys with old King Edward to Wales and Gascony. All these she remembered perfectly: for ever since childhood, she had had an extraordinary ability to memorise. Her brothers and sisters used to say: “Ask Agnes. She never forgets anything.” But above all, it was her vivid imagination that had been filled almost entirely from a single source: the Bible, as related to her by the vicars of Avonsford in their perfunctory sermons or, more important, the public preachings of the friars when they drew their audiences to them in the market place or by the roadside. The images they evoked coloured all her thoughts. The words they spoke, some terrible, others comforting – these were the mighty truths that echoed in her mind.
She had thought hard.
And certain things she knew. She knew this plague was sent by God, as a punishment for men’s sins; when she was still a child, the vicar had told her of the fall of Babylon, the great flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. She had seen them in the windows and carvings in the churches. These things were to be feared – and expected. She remembered the words of Moses from the Book of Deuteronomy, as they had been translated to his audience by the terrifying old Franciscan friar who had preached in Sarum when she was a little girl.
“But if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord – cursed shalt thou be in the city and in the field. The Lord shall send upon thee cursing because of the wickedness of thy doings. The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption and a fever, and an inflammation and an extreme burning, and with mildew, and madness and blindness, and with a sore botch that cannot be healed . . .”
The list of terrors had been endless, and the piercing eyes of the old man had seemed to hypnotise her. And now the divine punishment had come. This must be the plague the knight spoke of.
Was there no hope? She knew that the villagers of Avonsford, though not especially wicked, were unlikely to escape God’s wrath. But surely her own sins, and certainly those of her three children, were not so great? Good men in the past, men like Noah, had been shown how to escape these terrible visitations: she cudgelled her brains for some information that might save her children.
At last she thought she had it.
“It’s the animals that spread the plague,” she announced.
There were few, if any, at Sarum who would have agreed with her. From the knight down to the humblest cottager, they believed that sickness passed either by contact with humans who were infected, or by inhaling evil vapours which were carried by the wind and rain. But Agnes alone had decided otherwise. For she remembered another sermon she had heard, twenty years before, from a thin, pale Dominican friar with a cold, hard voice who had preached on the Wilton road. He had warned them:
“Evil is all around you. The world is unclean.” And quoting from the book of Leviticus he had declared: “The coney and the hare, because they chew the cud but divide not the hoof, they are both unclean. Of their flesh shall ye not eat and their carcase shall ye not touch. And the owl and the cuckoo and the bat; also the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the ferret and the lizard, the weasel and the mouse all these shall be abominations unto you. Touch these,” he cried, “and you shall be defiled.”
Few people took much notice, but Agnes remembered. The more she thought about it, the more she believed this might be the means by which God would spread His righteous rage.
And gradually her plan had begun to form.
“We must go away from the village,” she urged. “Away from contact with unclean animals, like the preacher said. We must live apart until this plague has passed.”
“How?” the two brothers had demanded.
And then her inspiration had come, and she had declared:
“I know a place.”
For the rolling, high ground, bare and uninviting, was in some places empty of man and beasts. It’s as bare as the sea, she thought. The more she considered the great chalky wastes, open only to the sky, the more she grew certain that this was the region that God had prepared for them.
“We’ll go up to the high ground to escape the plague,” she said. “We’ll be safe up there.”
At first they had not wanted to go. But she had been persistent. “Think of our children,” she cried – for she always called them ‘our’ children, in the same way that her stepsons referred to her as ‘our’ mother. “Will you leave them to the plague?” And at last, as they always did, John and Nicholas gave in to her determined will.
But now that she had led them on the journey to the high ground, she realised that her problems had only just begun. For having got them to go, how would she keep them there?
She did not know. For years, Agnes had taught herself to be strong. The brothers relied on her and she encouraged this, for if she could not keep her two quiet stepsons at home, how would her children be fed? With her own plain, strong looks and her three young children, she was unlikely to find another husband to look after them. Some day the two brothers would marry and she would lose her hold on them, but secretly she prayed that day would be delayed as long as possible. And so she had made herself strong, to dominate the brothers and feed her children. So far it had worked.
She had taught herself to be patient; it had not been easy. How they secretly irritated her, these two men who were so necessary to her, with their quiet grey eyes and their slow and quiet ways. Their father, a skilful man who physically resembled them, had had a quick temper and a wicked sense of humour to match her own fiery mind. But his two sons were like slow-moving streams, never even in flood, on which she knew the little boat of her family must sail. How she longed for the company of different men, and how carefully she concealed her frustration, for she sensed that if she ever allowed her temper to flare up, she would lose their loyalty. But she had been patient. She had even come to love them over the years.
And now her authority was to be tested. For if her plan was to work, she must never allow her authority to slip, even for a moment: there must be no sign of weakness.
The first test came that evening.
It was about an hour before dusk, when the family had finished the light meal of wheatcakes she had made, that John quietly rose and began to walk out of the little compound.
An instinct made her follow him.
“Where are you going?”
He grinned cheerfully.
“To the miz-maze. Catch some coneys.”
The miz-maze of the Godefroi knights, only two miles away to the west, had been allowed to fall into disrepair. Although the pattern of the maze could be clearly seen in the turf, it had not been re-cut for years; for Gilbert, probably because it had been such a favourite haunt of his father’s, had never cared for the place and seldom went there. In the circle of yew trees around it, where the soil was soft, a thriving colony of rabbits had now sprung up – a warren which could have been a modest but valuable asset to Gilbert if he had shown any interest in it. It was the one corner of the estate where discreet poaching was never noticed.
But now Agnes shook her head.
“You must not go there. Coneys are unclean.” She reminded him of the warning in Leviticus.
“They sell well enough in the market,” he protested, gazing at her stubbornly.
“They carry plague,” she said.
His grey eyes were unconvinced, and as she faced him, she sensed that this was a crisis. If he went to catch coneys now, her authority would be undermined and she would never hold the little family together in the difficult days ahead.
“The plague is about to strike,” she said with certainty. “It may be in Avonsford already. Think of the children.”
He hesitated.
“We must stay together here,” she pressed on quickly, “and never leave until it has passed. You’ll see what happens to the others.”
John said nothing, but to her relief, he turned back.
Just before he went back with her into the sheep house she put her hand on his arm.
“Promise me, until the plague has passed, that you will obey me,” she asked.
Again, he gazed at her unwillingly, and though she stared back at him with steadfast eyes she was inwardly praying: “Let him obey Your will, dear God.”
Slowly, grudgingly, he nodded and walked inside. It was enough for the moment.
But by the next morning, she had failed.
Of the two brothers, Nicholas was the one she feared less. He was fairer than John and even milder in temper; he was employed as a cathedral mason in the constant repair of the fabric that the great building required, and when John had gone to the French Wars, it was Nicholas who had stayed at Sarum to look after Agnes and the children.
Yet it was Nicholas, just before dawn, who slipped out of the sheep house unnoticed and set off towards the city.
And when she saw what had happened, Agnes pursed her lips and said nothing, but she knew what she must do.
He was glad to get away from Agnes. Sometimes she frightened him. For if she supposed that she concealed her fiery temper from her stepsons, she was mistaken. She might have swallowed her impatience, but the waves of it emanated from within her like heat from a forge, and they disturbed him.
As for her faith in isolation from the plague, Nicholas did not believe in it.
The sun was up as he walked off the high ground into the city below, and the dew was glistening on the cathedral roof.
As he passed the city bar, his mind was already occupied with the work he intended to do in the cathedral that day and it was only when he reached the market place that he noticed that something was strange. Usually by now the place would be bustling, but today for some reason only half a dozen stalls seemed to be opening. He thought nothing of it and followed his usual tour round the eastern end of the market and down the High Street. Shockley’s store, he noticed, was still shut up for the night. No one in the High Street seemed to be stirring except for the black rats who were swimming after a little pile of rubbish that was drifting down the water channel in the middle of the street.