And it was only when he had revived her and brought her to her bed again that she looked at him calmly but sadly and said:
“You must keep the boy away.”
That night she lay alone in the solar while, at her insistence, Gilbert slept in his chair in the hall. Both only slept fitfully, and several times he went to look at her. “You will feel well very soon,” he promised her, and at first light he made her drink some Malmsey wine. Soon afterwards she was sick again.
The buboes began the following evening: three little red rashes, under each armpit and in the groin. Before dark, they had already swollen into boils that made her cry out in pain, and as night fell the word spread through the village:
“The lady of Avonsford has the plague.”
She tried to keep her husband calm, but she did not succeed. He sent for the vicar, but word came back that the gap-toothed priest, terrified by the sight of his own dead sheep, had fled. As he gazed at his lovely wife, with her snow-white hair spread around her head on the pillow like an aureole, and saw with horror the way her body was being torn by the wracking pains, he remembered the haunting words of the poem they had heard two nights before, and they came back to him with a terrible new force:
And torn apart your limbs be all
No one can help you, no one shall;
Tomorrow, lady, we shall call.
He could not bear to think that she could be taken from him.
“God save us all,” he cried, helplessly.
He did what he could. He filled the room with herbs. He prayed himself, night and day; he sent for other priests and at last two were persuaded, for a handsome fee, to come out from Salisbury. But the hideous buboes grew: the one in her armpit was soon the size of an apple, white and hot, as the disease took its inevitable course. By the third day of her illness, he was desperate for any remedy.
It was when he had reached this point of despair, that Margery Dubber asked to apply her cures. She had been brooding for two days in the kitchen, waiting for someone to summon her. Everyone in the village knew that her cures for all ailments were the best, and more than once she had dropped a broad hint to that effect to the knight. He had taken no notice. Now however, seeing his wretched state, she went up and suggested herself boldly.
Godefroi was ready to agree, but Rose would not. Her eyes were sunken now, black with pain, but she found strength to raise her head, stare at the cook and order: “No.”
But the next day she was too weak even for this; and so early in the afternoon, Margery, her two skewed eyes gleaming with satisfaction, was allowed to march into the sick room.
Her cure was simple. She had used it on swellings before, so why should it not work for the plague as well?
“You take a live frog,” she explained to Godefroi. “Press its belly against the boil. That will take the venom away.”
“And then?”
“Hold it there until the frog bursts,” she said. “Then take another.”
Rose was hardly aware of what was happening at first, and when she realised, she only cast her eyes up to heaven and said nothing.
It was not a success. Though she pressed them hard against the growing buboes, the frogs died without bursting, and after a few hours Margery Dubber shook her head.
“She’ll not be cured,” she announced as she left for the village.
That night, alone in the hall, the knight slowly read the tale of Sir Orfeo to himself, and waited.
Nicholas Mason spent one day at Avonsford. During this time, two men fainted in the fields and were carried home.
The next morning he went up to the sheep house; remaining outside the circle of stones, he told them how the plague had come to Avonsford and then, supposing the risk of catching it must be about the same in one place as another, he walked into the city.
The change there was extraordinary. There were few people in the streets now, but they hurried about anxiously with handkerchiefs over their faces. Already, several people had died – no one knew how many – but even as he walked through the market place, he saw a cart carrying two bodies lumber out towards the city gates. There was no organisation; the mayor and aldermen were locked up in their houses like everyone else.
When he passed the Shockley house, he found no crowd by the door. People walked past on the other side of the street, and though no one knew exactly what was going on inside, terrible retching sounds could be heard from time to time from within.
“They’ve all got it,” a neighbour told him, “in the lungs. They say the Wilson boy gave it to them at the farm and William Shockley’s vowed to turn them out for it.” He shrugged. “He’ll not live to do it though.” And as if to confirm this, a fit of coughing started from within and both men hurried away.
A number of people were leaving the city. He saw a small train of covered wagons at the corner of New Street, containing several families including that of Le Portier, the aulnager. He asked the wizened driver of the first cart where he was taking them.
“North,” the fellow grimaced. “They tell me to drive north. Who knows where they’ll end up?” His hard narrow face broke into a grin. “They pay me. I’ll take them all the way to hell if they pay me.”
The close was silent. There was not a soul to be seen. Even the vicars choral, those rowdy junior priests who, only the week before, he had seen exercising their dogs in the cloisters and drinking merrily on the green, seemed to be staying indoors in their lodging houses.
It was as he walked across the empty close towards the cathedral that he was surprised to be hailed by a loud voice.
“Mason!” He knew the voice at once.
Of all the undisciplined young clerics, the vicar choral Adam was the most hopeless case: he was considered a nuisance even by their own lax standards. This was not due to any evildoing on his part – indeed, there was not an ounce of malice in his nature – but because he was such a madcap. He was constantly involved in practical jokes or idiotic fights; never was a young man so obviously unfitted to be a priest. Yet when he was asked why he did not follow some other occupation, he gave the same answer that many another young fellow would have given at that time.
“How else is a poor man to eat and hope for advancement?” For outside the church, there was little scope for a youth who had no money and connection, and who wanted to be anything more than a humble apprentice.
Adam could be recognised half a mile away, not only because of his loud voice, but because instead of a modest habit he wore a tight-fitting tunic, a cotte hardie, and a broad belt embroidered with gold, just as if he were a young man of fashion. Irrepressibly foolish as Adam was, the quiet mason could not help liking this cheerfully outrageous extrovert, with his childlike honesty.
“See, Mason,” he shouted, so that his voice echoed round the precincts, “the world has changed today. Only you and I about and not a priest to be seen.”
It was remarkable. At a time when one in fifty of the population was in some form of holy orders, the cathedral city was teeming with priests. That morning however, it was as if they had melted into the moss on the walls of the buildings. “The silence is wonderful,” Adam called, and his raucous guffaw of laughter seemed to shake the shutters.
“Aren’t you afraid of the plague?” Nicholas asked.
“Me? No. I’ve the cure.” He pointed to two pouches that hung from his magnificent belt. “Six garlic in one. Six onion in the other. The plague won’t come near me.”
Nicholas wondered if this was a joke, though it was no stranger than the other remedies people were trying.
“It’s true,” Adam assured him, and his big, open face broke into a happy smile. “Watch me, Mason, and you’ll see.” And he strode away towards the town.
Nicholas spent the day working in the cathedral. In the evening he returned to Avonsford where he learned that the buboes had appeared on Rose de Godefroi. Two more people in the village, both women this time, had been afflicted, one with the terrible buboes, the other in the lungs.
The next morning he went up to the high ground again. This time he stopped well outside the circle of stones.
“Stay where you are. Do not come down,” he told them. “The plague is everywhere and it is spreading.”
Yet never in his worst nightmares had Nicholas imagined what, in the next ten days, was to follow. The start of the plague had given little hint of it.
At times, he wondered if everyone at Sarum would die. The contagion seemed to swirl and eddy round the city like the waters when the river flooded.
Some were consumed by the plague at once, and died within hours; in others it took the pneumonic form and its victims died coughing blood and mucus; the stronger went down more slowly with the buboes that, in their final stage, spread across the body in a terrible, pestilential swelling that left the body of the dead victim a loathsome and infectious mass of suppurating sores. Of those who caught the plague in its pneumonic form, none lived. Of those who suffered the buboes, about sixty per cent died.
Each day he watched the carts roll through the city picking up the dead. By the end of the first week they were being buried indiscriminately in trenches outside the city gates. One morning he saw the door of the Shockley house open and three pairs of arms unceremoniously drop the bulky form of William Shockley on the ground outside, before slamming the door again. He lay there for two hours before a passing cart decided to pick him up; the next day his wife followed. The day after, two of their children and a servant. But these events were hardly remarked in the general horror. Nor was the news that Rose de Godefroi had died at Avonsford.
The close fared no better than the rest of the town. For two days the gate was closed, in a useless attempt to seal its sacred precincts off from the contagion in the town, but then the porter at the gate succumbed, and it was left open.
Some of the priests emerged to do their duties in ministering to the dying. The friars never hesitated, moving quietly from door to door, apparently undisturbed in their holy work.
But over the whole city a strange fear and lethargy had fallen. The evil spirit of the plague had seeped like a noxious vapour into every nook and cranny of the city. And when the suppurating corpses of the victims were brought into the streets, there was indeed a sickly, terrible stench that turned the stomach. It seemed to Nicholas that men’s souls were filled with terror, and the sense of that, too, was almost palpable.
Only one figure seemed untouched, and this was Adam. Each day he was in the city, Nicholas would see the strange fellow ambling about, in his tight tunic and his broad belt with the pouches of onions and garlics swinging from it. Astoundingly, he still seemed cheerful. People said he was mad.
Nicholas himself remained calm. He reasoned, fatalistically, that if he were a chosen victim, then there was little he could do about it. He was careful all the same. Like most people, he held a cloth over his mouth and nostrils when he walked the streets. He kept himself to himself, ate alone, and avoided any contact with those who were infected. Taking these precautions, he went into the city most days, working quietly in the cathedral and returning periodically to the sheep house on the high ground to give his reports.
The event that caused him to panic took place a week after Shockley’s death. He was carefully crossing the street in the city when, as he stepped over the water channel that ran down its centre, a corpse he had not seen tumbled sideways off a cart in front of him and fell heavily into the stream, splashing him from head to foot. The sudden soaking shocked him. It was as though he had been attacked, and afterwards he felt defiled. The next day, when the family in the cottage next to his at Avonsford came down with the plague, he decided to take further precautions.
“I shall be coming only every two days now,” he told Agnes and the family. “Because I shan’t be in Avonsford any more. I’m going to a safe place until the plague has passed.”
“Where?” John asked him.
And now Nicholas smiled.
“No folk or animals where I’m going,” he replied. “I’ll go to Salisbury tower.”
The cathedral was quiet as dusk fell, and there was nobody to see as he climbed the steps that led to the tower. No one had questioned him when, saying it was for maintenance work, he asked for the keys of the tower doors the day before. Probably it was already forgotten that he had them.
He was carrying a bucket containing bread, two flagons of ale, cheese, salted meat and a quantity of fruit: enough to last several days. Carefully he made sure that the stairs in all four corners of the tower were locked before he made his way up to the parapet. Now nobody could disturb him.
Soon it was dark. The great cathedral below him was silent. It was so warm that he decided to spend the night on the parapet under the stars. He looked up at the soaring spire above him. He knew that, nearly forty years before, his great-grandfather Osmund had climbed to the top the year before he died. Perhaps he would do so too, to celebrate, when the plague had passed.