All Fall Down Read online

  Praise for Sally Nicholls’ novels:

  Season of Secrets

  “Nicholls is a writer of enormous power and strength, using an ancient myth in new and surprising ways. A wonderful, evocative, lively book that will delight and move boys and girls over the age of nine – and adults too”

  Literary Review

  “Yet another extraordinary story that is certain to touch you . . . The idea behind this book is so original . . . Stirring, moving and I could not help but be mesmerised”

  Waterstone’s Books Quarterly

  “A poignant novel exploring the complexities of childhood grief, its many manifestations and its healing”

  Irish Times

  “Sally Nicholls is simply an exceptionally talented writer. Her intelligent, warm fiction is honest and profound, complex yet accessible”

  Lovereading4kids.co.uk

  “Poignant and gripping . . . Sally Nicholls intertwines ancient myths of pagan gods with an emotive and touching love story”

  Bookseller

  “WAYS TO LIVE FOREVER was a confident compelling debut novel. Sally Nicholls’s follow up is no less good . . . The balance the author strikes between metaphor and character-driven plot cannot be faulted”

  Financial Times

  “This is what a children’s book should be like! Absolutely wonderful”

  Bookwitch

  Ways to Live Forever

  WINNER

  Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize

  Glen Dimplex New Writer of the Year

  Concorde Book Award

  North East Book Award

  Hillingdon Secondary School Book of the Year

  Warwickshire Secondary Schools Book Award

  Bolton Children’s Book of the Year

  Calderdale Book of the Year

  Luchs Prize – Best Book of the Year (Germany)

  USBBY List of Outstanding International Books (U.S.A.)

  SHORTLISTED

  Branford Boase Award

  Manchester Book of the Year

  UKLA Children’s Book Awards

  Lancashire Book of the Year

  Brilliant Book Award, Nottingham Libraries

  Grampian Children’s Book Award

  Gateshead Libraries Children’s Book Award

  Mad About Books Stockport Schools’ Book Award

  Le Prix des Incorruptibles (France)

  LONGLISTED

  WHSmith Children’s Book of the Year

  CILIP Carnegie Medal

  “I love this book”

  Jacqueline Wilson

  “Powerful, inspiring and courageous . . . the debut of the year”

  Waterstone’s

  “This is an elegant, intelligent, moving and sometimes even funny book. Young readers (and brave parents, and teachers) will love it”

  Guardian

  “A Jodi Picoult for teens that pulls no punches”

  Simply Books

  “Wonderful. Moving and funny and, yes, sad”

  Eva Ibbotson

  “Heart-wrenching . . . an exceedingly poignant read”

  Bookseller

  “Stunning . . . Nicholls’ greatest achievement is in creating an utterly real, flesh and blood character. On the pages, Sam truly lives . . . a powerful, moving book, not to be missed”

  Irish Independent

  “A deeply affecting and life-affirming read”

  Nikki Gamble, Writeaway!

  “This award-winning novel is brutally honest, sad, touching and funny, often all at the same time. It’s a powerful book”

  The New Books Christmas Guide to Children’s Books

  Sally Nicholls was born in Stockton, just after midnight, in a thunderstorm. Her father died when she was two, and she and her brother were brought up by her mother. She has always loved reading, and spent most of her childhood trying to make real life work like it did in books.

  After school, she worked in Japan for six months and travelled around Australia and New Zealand, then came back and did a degree in Philosophy and Literature at Warwick. In her third year, realizing with some panic that she now had to earn a living, she enrolled in a masters in Writing for Young People at Bath Spa. It was here that she wrote her first novel, Ways to Live Forever, which won the Waterstone’s Children’s Book Prize in 2008, and many other awards, both in the UK and abroad. Sally’s second novel, Season of Secrets, was published in 2009.

  To Zoe Owlett,

  who is, I am assured,

  very cool.

  CONTENTS

  BOOK ONE – INGLEFORN

  1. Morning

  2. The Romance of Father and Alice

  3. Sunday Mass

  4. The Exiles

  5. Boundaries

  6. Processional

  7. Pestilence

  8. Bone Fire

  9. Free Men and Bond Men

  10. Little Edith

  11. Rites and Wrongs

  12. Miracles and Magic

  13. Those We Remember and Those We Forget

  14. The Boy-Priest

  15. Kisses Against the Night

  16. A Bad Death

  17. Loving-Kindness

  18. Emma Baker

  19. Harvest

  20. Death and the Devil

  21. My Brother Geoffrey

  22. A High-Day, A Holiday

  23. Today

  24. My Brother Edward

  25. By Candlelight

  26. Isabel Alone

  27. Breathing Through Smoke

  28. Inside the House

  29. Judgement Day

  BOOK TWO – YORK

  30. Thomas

  31. York

  32. The House That God Built

  33. The Other Family

  34. Matilda Alone

  35. Hue and Cry

  36. Thomas Again

  BOOK THREE – HOME

  37. Robin by Moonlight

  38. Alive

  39. The Star

  40. Goodbyes

  41. From a Grave-Mouth

  Finis

  Historical Note

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  I buried with my own hands

  five of my children in a single grave. . .

  No bells. No tears. This is the end of the world.

  Agnolo di Tura

  1348

  The year I turned thirteen, it rained every day from Midsummer to Christmastide. Sheep, huddled grey and sodden in the fields, caught the murrain and died. What oats and barley and rye we could grow were weak and spindly and covered in strange green mould, which had to be scraped off before the grain could be milled. Everyone was hungry most of the time, and in the villages further up the valley, people died.

  Travellers passing through Ingleforn on the road from York told stories of strange happenings in faraway lands. Earthquakes and volcanoes and a new sickness that swept through the people of the cities, leaving not a soul alive. Mostly, the travellers were quite cheerful about these disasters.

  “Not a good year to be a Frenchie,” they’d say. And, “Paris will be King Edward’s for the taking, if he wants it.”

  Even the wandering holy men, the hermits and friars, the preachers and pardoners, even they seemed to relish all this destruction happening over the seas.

  “God sends His angels to wipe the wicked from the earth!” they cried, and the villagers nodded and sighed and agreed that yes, there were a lot of wicked in Castile and Aragon and France indeed, and wasn’t it terrible?

  But in the summer of the year of grace 1348, the stories changed. The sickness had come to Bristol, some said. At first it was just a rumour; then as more travellers told the same tale, we started to believe it. Then the sickness – the pestilence –
was in London. London!

  Now the preachers and pardoners and hermits and friars told a new story.

  “The end of the world is coming!” they said, eyes blazing with righteousness, hair wild and untamed. “Repent! Repent!” And the villagers muttered together in little huddles, and some of the richer men – the free men, the franklins and the yeomen – talked about selling their land and moving north, to Duresme maybe, or the wild lands beyond, in Scotland, as though they could somehow hide from the wrath of God. Most of them shook their heads and sucked in their teeth. Most of them don’t have the gold to flee. Or we belong to Sir Edmund, and have no choice in the matter anyway.

  We knew then that 1349 would be terrible.

  But nobody could have imagined quite how terrible it was going to be.

  1. Morning

  It’s Sunday morning, early, towards the beginning of June. It’s dark still, the pale grey light before dawn, and below the floor of the solar my baby brother Edward is crying. On the mattress beside me, Ned groans and buries his head in the bolster, but I lie and listen to the creak of the bed as Alice climbs out of it below me. A few moments later, I hear her footsteps on the earth floor. I push myself up on my elbows and lift aside the blanket-curtain, peering down. Alice is wearing nothing but a woollen slip and a nightcap, her yellow hair impossibly rumpled as always in the mornings. She lowers herself on to a stool and opens her slip, revealing her heavy, mottled breast. Edward’s screams are quietened as he suckles. Alice looks up and smiles as she sees me watching.

  “Awake, are you?” she says. “Can you get dressed and get the others up? I’ll need someone to go for water.”

  There are a lot of people in my family. I have four brothers – two older and two younger – and one little sister. The older boys don’t live here any more. Richard lives with his wife Joan in a little house he built himself at the other end of the village. Geoffrey – my favourite brother – comes next. He left when he was eleven. He’s at St Mary’s Abbey, training to be a priest.

  I’m next, then red-haired Ned, who’s nine, and little Margaret, still the baby of the family even now we have Edward. They’re curled up on the mattress beside me. I shake Ned.

  “Nedkin, it’s morning. Wake up!”

  Ned moans and curls up tighter in his warm little ball of elbows-and-knees.

  Margaret is still asleep, a strand of yellow hair falling over her cheek. She wakes easily, blinks her blue eyes and smiles at me.

  “Is it morning?”

  “Morning. Come on. Get your clothes on.”

  Father built our solar, a triangular loft space under the roof of our house. It’s almost exactly the right size for our mattress, which is made of sacking stuffed with hay. In the corners where the roof slopes down to the floor, grain sacks and tallow candles and lengths of rope are packed. No space is wasted.

  “Ned!” I shake my brother again. “Come on.”

  I pull my gown over my head and climb barefoot down the ladder. Maggie follows behind me, carrying her clothes in a bundle. I help her fasten her shoes and tug the comb through her hair. She squeals.

  “You’re hurting!”

  “Here—”

  Alice takes the comb and starts teasing out Maggie’s tangles. I sit on the bottom rung of our ladder and pull on my hose. It’s dark. Alice hasn’t started the hearth-fire, and the shutters are still drawn across the narrow windows. The air is cold enough to make me shiver.

  The hearth sits in the centre of the room. Alice’s pots and flagons and goblets sit round-bellied beside the hams and cheese on the shelves above the table, out of reach of the animals. Other everyday things lean against the walls – buckets and scythes and brooms and sacks of barley and an ale barrel half-full of ale and Alice’s loom with a bolt of cloth half-woven. In the low space beneath our solar, a blanket is nailed to the cross-beam to hide the bed where Father and Alice and Edward sleep.

  At the other end of the room, behind their wattle wall, the animals are waking up. Our cow, Beatrice, snorts at me through her nose. We have two oxen for the plough, a cow, a pig, eight chickens and a fine red cockerel. Father is always talking about building a byre to keep the animals apart, but he never does. I don’t mind. I like the cosiness of all sleeping together, the funny snorts and breathy noises in the night, their warmth in winter. They add a rich, earthy, animal smell to the other scents in the house – woodsmoke and straw and thyme and rosemary.

  My name is Isabel. I am fourteen years old, and I can’t imagine ever living another sort of life to this.

  How wrong I am.

  “Done?” says Alice, as Mag leans back into her knees. “You look like a girl who wants to fetch some water. Ned! Aren’t you up yet? The sun’ll be up before you, and we all know what a lay-a-bed she is. Come on!”

  But the sun is stirring, turning the frowsy wisps of cloud a pale, early-morning pink. Summer will be here soon. I can feel it as I walk to the well, swinging the empty bucket beside me. Soon there’ll be sunshine and harvest and swimming in the river by the church. On a morning like this, the sickness seems very far away.

  Our house sits a little apart from the other houses of the village, on the edge of the green, in the shade of two hornbeam trees. It isn’t far to the well. As I walk across the grass, I pass other village houses, built in odd clumps around the watermill, the green, and the river, the distances between them growing as you move further away from the church, which sits at the very centre of Ingleforn. Here is the forge, and the oven, and the Manor Oak, where Sir Edmund’s steward holds the manor court three times a year. Beyond the churchyard are the archery butts, where every able-bodied man is supposed to work at his archery, though Sir Edmund doesn’t mind too much if sometimes they forget, particularly at harvest time and hay-making.

  The road from York runs along the river for as many miles as I’ve travelled it, crossing into the village at the bridge by the watermill and coming along past the church and the front of our gate. The carters come through nearly every day, and the pilgrims in the spring on their way to St William’s shrine, and the wandering preachers, the merchants, the lepers, the madmen, and the holy fools.

  The two big village fields – Three Oaks and Hilltop – are spread one to the left and one to the right of our door. Father farms nearly a virgate of land divided between the two. Behind the house is a narrow copse of woodland, and behind the woods is Sir Edmund’s manor house – we go for the festivities at Christmastide, but mostly we stay away. Why worry the rich, if you don’t want them to worry you? Sir Edmund has another, larger estate in Devon, and a big house in London where he lives for most of the year, God keep him.

  Behind the manor house is the village of Great Riding, and behind the furthest edge of Great Riding’s fields is the abbey, where my brother Geoffrey lives. Behind the abbey is Riding Edge, and beyond it more farmland – rich, flat ploughland all the way to York, two long days’ walking away, where I’ve never been, but Alice says isn’t worth the journey,

  “Not when you could be here, Isabel. Not when you could be here!”

  There’s a line of women and children already waiting by the well. The others nod in my direction, rumpled and sleepy-eyed. Plump, copper-haired Amabel Dyer, who’s about my age and sort of a friend, smiles at me.

  The women are talking in little huddles.

  “They have it in York!”

  “York!”

  “Fifty dead already, I heard.”

  “I heard a hundred.”

  “My man Nicholas said the road from York is full of families fleeing north. Horses and ox-carts and rich men in fancy litters with servants to carry them about so they don’t ever need to walk.”

  Amabel Dyer catches my eye.

  “Is it true about York?” she whispers. “Does Geoffrey know?”

  My belly tightens.

  “Of course it’s not,” I tell Amabel. “It’s just carters’ tales.” But all the happiness has gone from the bright morning.

  York is less th
an a day’s ride away.

  York is nearly here.

  2. The Romance of Father and Alice

  Alice is my stepmother, and one of my favourite people in the world. It’s like a mummer’s play, how she and Father married. My mother died when Maggie was born, and after that Father didn’t want to marry anyone else. He sent Maggie to Robin’s mother to nurse, and my brother Richard, who was fifteen, had to look after me and Ned and Geoffrey. He wasn’t very good at it, and we got used to living with dirty clothes, and burnt pottage, and stale ale, and a hearth-fire that wouldn’t light because all the wood was wet.

  The women in the village clicked their tongues at this, and brought us to the manor court, where Sir Edmund’s steward ordered Father to remarry within three weeks, or have another wife found for him. But Father wouldn’t. He just nodded his head and carried on like he was. So then Sir Edmund’s steward looked at Ned and Geoffrey and me, with our red eyes and muddy faces and hair all wild, and told Father that he had to marry Agnes Harelip by Midsummer Day.

  Poor Father! And poor us. Agnes Harelip is an old shrew. She works as a spinster, spinning thread for the yeomen’s wives in Ingleforn and Great Riding, and she lives in this neat little cottage where everything is just so. She looked at Richard and Geoffrey and Ned and me with absolute horror. Father pursed up his lips, but he didn’t say anything. The next day, though, he washed his face and hands, and mine too, and combed my hair, and he took me to the house where Agnes’s father lived.

  Father knocked on the door, and Alice answered. I knew her a little, and I liked her even then. Her yellow hair was coiled in a knot at the back of her neck, but these long strands had escaped and were fuzzing up around her ears. Her big hands were covered in malt, but her eyes were laughing and kind.

  “Is your father there?” Father said, and Alice said, “No, but come and take a sup, and bring the child too.”

  Inside, the house was neat and swept, and Agnes and Alice’s little brother and sisters were tumbling about by the hearth. Alice gave us a bowl of pottage, and Father asked about the children, and I sat there eating up my bowl and wishing everything was as nice as this at home.