All Fall Down Read online

  “They steal animals too, these people,” one of the church chaplains says, which is pretty impressive knowledge, given as how we only saw them for the first time yesterday.

  “Whatever happened to Christian hospitality?” says Robin. He glances at Alice, but her back is stiff and she doesn’t answer. “Those people will die if nobody takes them in.”

  Alice’s arms tighten around baby Edward, who tugs at her veil again with a fat fist. Alice is the most religious person in my family, apart from Geoffrey, but this time she won’t meet Robin’s eyes.

  “Most of those people will die anyway,” she says, and I realize that she’s afraid.

  6. Processional

  The abbot leads the procession. He carries a flask of smoking incense which he sways before him as he walks, sending the Latin of the psalms ahead to frighten away the demons and call up the good spirits of the earth. Or the angels. Probably the angels.

  The other monks walk behind him in closed ranks, heads bent. I can count thirty-one warty bald heads, which is right because eight of the monks are too old to walk, and the infirmarer and his assistant will stay at the abbey. My brother Geoffrey walks right at the back, neither part of the monks’ ranks nor part of the villagers. Poor Geoffrey, not-one-nor-t’other. He’s shot up this last year, like a beanstalk, and he has something of the quality of a weed that grows in a dark place, searching for the sun. His thatch of yellow hair spills awkwardly over his ears, the round tonsure in the centre red with sunburn from the hot days last week. Geoffrey isn’t a monk. He’s too young, for one thing – he’s only a year and a half older than I am. He just lives at St Mary’s so he can learn Latin and French and Bible stories and all the other things he needs to know to be a priest.

  It’s a cold day, one of those bleak, windy days which come unexpectedly in the middle of summer, and halfway through the abbot’s fourteenth Bible reading, it starts to rain. Mag starts to whine.

  “I’m cold. Can’t I put my shoes on?”

  I shiver and wrap my mantle tighter around myself.

  We’re praying to God to take the pestilence away. To spare us. We’re asking His forgiveness for whatever crimes we might have committed against Him, we’re abasing ourselves before Him, barefooted and repentant, and asking Him, please, to keep His sickness away from our doors. And from the doors of those we love. Just leave us all alone, really, please. Send Your wrath to the really wicked people, in York, and London, and over the seas.

  This worked in foreign lands, in Cornwall and Devon. Some villages the pestilence passed right by, like the Plagues of Egypt passed over the houses of the Israelites. But Geoffrey says that the Pope himself led the processions in Avignon, and it didn’t save any of his people.

  Afterwards, my feet wear heavy boots of black mud, which is probably the only thing which stops them dropping off, they’re so cold. Geoffrey and Robin and I go down to the river to wash them clean. Robin doesn’t have many friends amongst the village boys – mostly he just has me, and Amabel, and Alison Spinner. But he and Geoffrey were always friendly, right from when we were small.

  I’m a little shy of Geoffrey, the way I always am when I see him again after a time apart. I notice all the things I’d forgotten about him. How tall he is! The Norman accent he picked up from five years living with monks. The way his yellow hair falls into his face, and how he keeps shaking his forehead to keep his eyes free.

  “Are you well?” I ask, a little nervously. “Are you coming to the Midsummer celebrations? Did you really give a bed to all those people from York?”

  Geoffrey’s face twists as I ask the last question. “As many as we could. The rest we let sleep in the barn. Don’t worry about them, Isabel. Tell me how you are – and Father – and Ned and Maggie—”

  “We’re well,” I say. “Edward has three teeth now! And he can roll over – and clap, and—”

  “Clever boy,” says Geoffrey, but he doesn’t really know Edward, or care much about him. How strange to have a brother that you neither know nor love! I can’t really imagine it, any more than I can imagine Alice coming into our family and not loving us, or we not loving her.

  “I don’t think they’ll let me come to the Midsummer Fire,” he says. “It’s so busy at the abbey, with all those people! I’ve been working with Galen. Trying to find out if he’s ever come across anything like this pestilence.”

  “Galen?” I say. “Is he the infirmarer?”

  Geoffrey laughs. “He’s one of the fathers of medicine!” he says. He must see the confusion still in my face. “He lived hundreds of years ago, Isabel.”

  “Oh.” Geoffrey always knows more than I do, about everything. “Are you going to be an infirmarer, then?”

  Geoffrey’s head is bent over his boot buckle. He says, not looking up, “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Of course,” I say. Robin nods.

  “It’s not decided yet – don’t tell Father – but there’s a chance I might be ordained early.”

  “Early? But why?”

  “Why do you think?” says Geoffrey, whose mind always leaps ahead to the answer while mine is still trying to understand the question. Because so many priests have died is why, down south in those places where the pestilence has already reached. Because priests are the ones they send into the houses where pestilence is, to breathe in the foul air and give absolution to the dying. Because now they want to send Geoffrey to some strange parish where the priest is dead and everyone in the village is sick, to do the same.

  “Will you do it?” says Robin. “If they ask you?”

  “I want to,” says Geoffrey, but he still doesn’t look up. I don’t believe he does want to. Geoffrey went to the monastery for the books and for the words and to learn the names of rocks and stars and saints and bones. He didn’t go to sit with the dying. I want to tell him not to do it, not to go. But if you die without a priest to give you absolution and hear your confession, you go to hell. So many people – good people: monks, nuns, Christian folk – so many good people are burning in hell now because their priest died and no new parson came in time. If they ask Geoffrey to serve as a priest, I can’t tell him not to go. And I know my brother. If they ask him, he’ll say yes.

  “And anyway,” he says, answering the question I didn’t dare ask him, “it’s no more dangerous than staying at St Mary’s.”

  There’s something in his voice that makes me think he wants us to ask him what he means. I don’t want to know what’s hidden behind his words, but Robin says, “Why? You don’t have the pestilence there, do you?”

  Geoffrey’s fingers play around the brass buckle on his boot. He doesn’t answer.

  “You don’t, do you?” says Robin. “Geoffrey! You don’t!”

  Geoffrey’s face is white. “You’re not to tell anyone!” he says. “The abbot doesn’t want anyone in the village to panic. And if Father knew . . .”

  I don’t care about Father. I don’t really care about the abbot. My heart starts racing, and my head is dull and heavy and full of fear. The pestilence is at St Mary’s. The pestilence is three miles away. The pestilence is in the infirmary where my brother Geoffrey works.

  “Isabel?” says Geoffrey, and I turn to see his pinched, funny, worried-looking face blinking at me. “Isabel—”

  I crawl over to him, smearing mud all over my skirts, and put my arms around his neck. He holds me, and I breathe in his ink-and-incense scent, all muddled up with mud and straw and the wet air of the river.

  “Don’t go back,” I say. “Please, don’t. Come back home with us and be safe.”

  Geoffrey’s long, bony arms are tight about me. I think of all the things the Bible says, about steadfastness, and faith, and duty, and how I don’t care about any of them if they mean my brother has to go back to a place where the sickness is. But all Geoffrey says is, “Isabel, it’s coming here too,” and I know that even the small protection I can offer him is worth nothing at all.

  7. Pestilence

  So what is it,
exactly, the pestilence? Some say it’s a plague, sent by God to destroy the wicked or perhaps the whole world, and that that’s why there’s no cure. A preacher who came to the village last year said that in the Bible it’s written that a third of humanity will be destroyed by plague before the end of the world comes. Which means that God is taking more than His share of death this time around, if the stories we’ve heard are true.

  Some say the pestilence is a disease like any other, caused by bad air, poisoned air, blown on the winds across Europe. That’s why it creeps north and north and north, why you can’t outrun it, why it never stops. But where did that bad air come from? And what happens to it? If the earth is a ball, like Geoffrey says, will the pestilence roll over the top of the world and come back round to greet us again? Or will it kill us all and go roving over the empty world, forever?

  All this last year, travellers from the south have told stories about the sickness. Some call it the morte bleu, the blue death, but most say the pestilence or just the sickness. Some talk of spitting blood, of hard, black buboes the size of pigeon eggs growing under the armpit or in the groin, of God’s tokens – red marks, like blood, below the skin. It stinks – everyone who talks about the pestilence talks about the stink.

  “Like the devil himself,” says one soldier, crossing himself.

  “You’d know,” says his companion, but nobody laughs.

  More sinister are those who talk of a sickness that strikes like an adder, without warning.

  “My cousin’s child – he took ill in the evening and was dead an hour later.”

  “My father’s pig took a rag that had been used to wipe the blood from a man with the sickness. The pig ate the rag, and fell down dead in the road.”

  Other folk say that the pestilence brings madness. That folk will leap from their windows, run naked through the streets, babble and cry and fight as though all the king’s men are after them.

  “Maybe if won’t be so bad then,” the men say, grinning sideways one to another. “If the young women start taking their clothes off.”

  How do you keep yourself safe? That’s the next question, the one everyone wants an answer to. Surely there are medicaments and spells; surely someone, somewhere has found a way? The preachers hiss.

  “By loving God and begging His forgiveness. By turning from the devil and all his works.”

  “This bone,” a wandering preacher told us. “It belonged to St William. Wear it next to your skin and it will save you from harm.”

  “Chicken bones and glue,” Alice muttered. “Either that or he’s a grave robber, or a cathedral robber – or worse!”

  “Don’t look them in the eyes,” said the pardoner who came after Christmas selling forgivenesses for any sin you might ever want to commit and a few you never would. “That’s how it’s passed – through the eyes!”

  “I walked through the city of London,” said the young man at the Easter Fair, the young man with the weeping sore in the corner of his mouth and the restless eyes that wouldn’t settle on any of us. “I walked through the houses of the dying, stepping over the corpses of the dead in the street. I passed through the stinking air of the sickness, and I walked out the other side unharmed. And all I had was this!” And he shook a silken pouch stuffed with rosemary and lavender. “Worn by the skin,” he said. “Closer than a lover, and surer on a winter’s night.”

  The silence that followed this was so thick you could lift it with a spoon.

  “And you survived?” said Emma Baker.

  “And I survived.”

  The most important question is the one we ask every traveller.

  “Once you have it – once you’ve caught it – can it be cured?”

  And the answer is always the same.

  “Nothing cures it. Once you have it, you die.”

  And now it’s here, in the house where my brother lives.

  And the monks are coming from that house to walk barefoot through Ingleforn, leading us all to pray for the sickness to pass us by. They look so calm and holy, but the sickness clings to their hands and to their eyes and to the underside of their robes. Every time they come, they bring death closer.

  And I’ve promised Geoffrey not to tell.

  8. Bone Fire

  On St John’s Eve, we have the bone fire on the green and the Midsummer revels as usual. All the village gathers around the bone fire and we walk around it in solemn procession, holding hands and chanting the Midsummer rhyme.

  “Green is gold.

  Fire is wet.

  Fortune’s told.

  Dragon’s met.”

  The rhyme is a riddle that can only be answered at St John’s Eve, when the first green leaves are still curled in golden buds, when the water is alight with little wishing-candle-boats, when fortunes are told and St George does battle with the dragon. The answer is Midsummer Eve, of course!

  After the chant, the revels begin. At Great Riding, they have a different mummer’s play each year, but in Ingleforn we always do St George and the Dragon. Will Thatcher is St George, on Gilbert Reeve’s black horse, and Edward Miller stands behind the stocks and is the voice of the Red Dragon.

  “I am the Dragon. Here are my claws! I am the Dragon. Here are my jaws!” he calls, and all the children shiver and stare. The Red Dragon itself is the same glorious red and gold kite as it always is, flown by Robin and another boy from the village. Last year my brother Richard’s wife, Joan, was the Princess, but this year she’s too heavy with the baby that’s coming, so Alice’s little sister Maude plays her instead.

  Will Thatcher is shy as St George – he stutters his lines and blushes when he has to rescue Maude from the Dragon. But when he draws his sword to fight the Dragon, he looks like a real knight from a stained-glass picture window. The Dragon-kite swoops from side to side in the sky, until St George subdues it by waving his sword around and ties a bit of silk around the kite string, to show that the Dragon is now defeated. He and Maude lead the kite by its leash, like a dog, while the audience cheers. But then the silk slips, and the Dragon escapes, and Robin and the other boy roar and bellow and swoop the Dragon-kite up and down to show the Dragon’s anger. Two little girls run across the stage trailing a length of red silk to show the Dragon’s flames. Will Thatcher collapses in a heap with something like relief, but Maude rolls about and moans most convincingly.

  When everyone is dead, Gilbert Reeve saunters in as the Doctor.

  “I am the Doctor, and I cure all ills.

  Just gulp my potions and swallow my pills.

  I can cure the itch, the stitch,

  The pox, the palsy, and the gout.

  All pains within, all pains without.”

  He gives a pill to St George and the Princess, who jump back up on to their feet. He gives another pill to the Dragon-kite, which swoops and wails about the sky before plunging down to the earth, dead.

  Everyone cheers and claps, and John and Emma Baker come round with St John’s dragon-wing biscuits, coloured red with rose petals. Then Gilbert Reeve nods at the musicians and the music starts and the dancing begins.

  I love Midsummer Eve. It’s the day when you thank God for the old year and look forward to the next. Later, we’ll be lighting the candles and setting them afloat on the mill pond with our wishes in them. Now, though, it’s time for fortune-telling.

  Father gives us some farthings to buy a St John’s bread pod each. St John’s bread isn’t bread at all, but flat, soft brown seed pods coloured like dates and curved like a bow. For St John’s bread, you do the how-many, or the humney, as in, “Humney children will I have?” or, “Humney years will it be until I’m married?”

  Then you bite into the St John’s bread and eat it, counting the seeds as you do. The number of seeds is the answer to your question.

  I wonder how many people’s humneys this year are about the pestilence? I think of asking how many days it would be until it reached the village, but decide that since it’s coming no matter what I do, it doesn’t mak
e much difference when.

  How many people that I love will die? I ask, instead, but when I open the seed pod and see the seeds, I decide I don’t want to count. Any more than none is too many.

  I don’t believe in fortune-telling, anyway.

  Destiny cakes are the other sort of fortune-telling for Midsummer’s Eve. John Baker moves amongst the crowd with a tray of cakes covered with a cloth.

  “Destiny cakes! Destiny cakes!” he calls. We buy a cake each and put our hands under the cloth to choose our destiny.

  Most of the pleasure of destiny cakes comes in trying to work out what they might mean. Robin gets a long, twisted cake like a snake. I tell him it’s a hangman’s rope and he’s going to hang for laziness. He says it’s a wave and means he’s going to travel over the seas.

  “It’s a ploughed field, more like,” Father says, making a waving motion with his hand. “All that good land you’ve got to plough!” Robin pulls a face. He’s not much interested in ploughing.

  Maggie gets a round cake, which Ned says is an egg – “You’re going to lay an egg, Mag!” – but Alice says is a nugget of gold, and means she’s going to be rich. Alice’s is twisted into a shape nobody can work out. Ned says it’s a heap of something: “Gold, maybe?”

  “Washing, more like,” says Alice. “Isn’t it, baby Edward? All your washing?”

  Mine is square.

  “It’s a house,” says Ned. “A new house.”

  “Or a book, maybe?” says Alice. “Maybe you’re going to be a learned woman, like your brother.”

  “Maybe,” I say, but all I can think is how much that square destiny cake looks like a coffin.

  After the destiny cakes, there’s dancing. I dance one dance with Father – as usual – where he treads on my toes – as usual – and one with Alice, who really can dance for a woman who’s over thirty. Then I dance one with Robin, whose hands are sweaty and who keeps apologizing when he bumps into me.