To Calais, In Ordinary Time Page 36

  He stood by the frozen pond. Whichday Wat lay under the ice with his eyes shut. Will would break the ice and free him but Ness put her hand on his arm and held him back. ‘Ne wake him,’ she said. ‘He dreams of you.’

  Will went to his house to find his mother. Inside the house had grown to the muchness of the lord’s hall and all the town sat at board. Half the folk were blithe and red-cheeked and mirthy and half were not but bones. The live folk ne heeded the still eyeless fleshlessness of their neighbours, and feasted on rich fare Will hadn’t never seen in his house: piglet, pike, pigeon, baked deer. His mother was at the head of the board with her new husband, Anto the reeve.

  In the shadows at the side of the hall stood Sir Guy, who called that Anto behest him gold for his deer, but Anto ne heard him.

  Will sat at board. Athwart him were the bones of a girl whose name he thought him he should know, but he ne minded. Her jaw opened and words came from between her teeth.

  ‘Buy me a foot of red band at Brimpsfield fair,’ she said.

  ‘I must hedge tomorrow,’ said Will.

  ‘I have work too,’ said the girl. ‘I owe to throw myself on the bonefire. They bade me fetch my weight in bones but all I found were my own.’

  Will lifted a gobbet of pigflesh to his mouth. The girl’s fingers fastened white on his wrist.

  ‘You ne bade farewell,’ she said. She led him outside and showed him the top of the hill, the shortest way to the Rodmarton road. Will saw folk walk away southward there, outlined against the sky, yellow after the sunset. The evening star shone. The folk were far but Will knew them: Madlen, Hab, Enker, the lady Bernadine, Cecile, Thomas and his own self, Will Quate.

  ‘I would go with them,’ he said.

  ‘Your other self is there already,’ said the girl. ‘You may bide here for ever. You’re needed for the harvest.’

  ‘I would go,’ said Will.

  He woke and opened his eyes. Beyond the shade of the cerecloth the light was blindingly bright. The ship rolled. He was wet with sweat. A great sail hung of the mast, and Hayne’s bow, many-hued in bars, was nailed up there. He lifted himself on his elbows. In the middle of the ship he saw three folk: Cecile, and a fair young knave in high-born gear who was Hab, and Bernadine in Laurence Haket’s clothes who was bent over the ship’s side.

  Bernadine-Laurence straightened, wiped her mouth and yelled at Hab, like to she’d already wrathed at him and had only broken off to spew. Cecile put her hand round Bernadine’s waist and helped her back to the side, where she spewed again. At their feet the wicker basket for the castellan’s dove stood empty.

  Hab saw Will was awake. He ran to him, kneeled beside him and gave him water.

  ‘What ails the lady Bernadine?’ asked Will.

  ‘You mean Laurence Haket?’ said Hab. ‘We ne call her Bernadine no more. Seasickness ails her, and the lack of Madlen. I hope it ne vexes you that Madlen’s gone.’

  ‘You were my friend longer than she,’ said Will. ‘I told you I would see you again.’

  ‘Loveman,’ said Hab. He looked behind him, and with his back to the ship quickly kissed Will on the lips.

  ‘Ne catch it,’ said Will.

  ‘Aren’t you better?’

  ‘I feel other.’

  ‘But you’re better?’ Hab frowned.

  ‘Death ne needed me,’ said Will, ‘and now I ne know who I am.’

  Acknowledgements

  I’D LIKE TO thank Francis Bickmore, Leila Cruickshank, Natasha Fairweather, Sophy Geering, Caroline Gillet, Duncan McLean, Matthew Marland, Kay Meek, Daniel Orrells, Adle Smith, Eugenie Todd, and everyone at Canongate.

  Much of this book was written in libraries and cafés, and some in library cafés. I’m grateful in particular to Espresso and Bread Source in Norwich, to the Zealand, Pavilion and Recharge in Bethnal Green, and to UEA and Tower Hamlets libraries.

  Parts of Thomas’s exegesis of the Malmesbury carvings are taken from the Wycliffe Bible. The chant of the Outen Green villagers on their way to the bonefire is from E. J. Dobson and F. Ll. Harrison’s Medieval English Songs. The song ‘When The Nightingale Sings’ is from the Harley lyrics in the British Library. Holiday’s spell against the plague is from Eamon Duffy’s incomparable masterpiece, The Stripping of the Altars, which was both source and inspiration. I drew on the translation of The Romance of the Rose by Frances Horgan, who was kind enough to respond to a question of mine.

  Three quite different books, all called The Black Death, by John Hatcher, Rosemary Horrox, and Ole Benedictow, provided priceless background on the plague. Caroline Dunn’s Stolen Women in Medieval England was invaluable, as was H. J. Hewitt’s The Organisation of War Under Edward III. Mad’s description of the battle of Crécy is based on various sources but I found the account given by Richard Barber in Edward III and the Triumph of England persuasive. I particularly appreciated Barber’s appendix in that book where he listed the royal tournaments of Edward III, showing that the king’s last pre-plague tournament was in Canterbury on 14 July 1348.

  I must acknowledge the work, now spanning three centuries, of that great scholarly enterprise, the Oxford English Dictionary. Without its online version it is difficult to see how this book could have been written.

  London, 2019