9 The Reeve's Tale Page 10

  Frevisse understood immediately and started a prayer. It was a moment longer before Mary, understanding at last, cried out shrilly and flung her hands over her face as Anne and the other women closed on her and Tom Hulcote drew hurriedly back with the look on his face of most men confronted by a crying woman and almost everyone else looked merely uncertain what to do, except the horses, who were reaching soft-lipped for the children’s offerings of fresh grasses, mouthing them carefully out of one small hand after another while the children stared at their parents and everyone else behaving suddenly so strangely. Father Edmund made the sign of the cross in the air toward what was earthly left of Matthew Woderove as he and Father Henry both began to pray aloud for the man’s soul. Sister Thomasine bent her head, joining Frevisse in the Office of the Dead: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine. Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Give eternal rest to them, Lord. And perpetual light shine on them… A porte inferi Erue, Domine, animas eorum. From the gate of hell Rescue, Lord, their souls. But Frevisse was also watching Mary sobbing in Anne’s arms, and Tom Hulcote caught awkwardly apart, alone, looking uneasily from Mary to the wooden box with her husband’s bones to Mary again; and at Gilbey and Elena Dunn even more apart from everyone than Tom Hulcote but close to each other.

  Four ambitious people, Frevisse thought. All with hope for gain because of Matthew Woderove’s death.

  And there was Matthew Woderove, dead.

  She pushed the thought away. It was prayers for the man’s soul that were needed—Delicta juventutis meae et ignorantias meas ne memineris, Domine. The offenses of my youth and my weaknesses do not think on, Lord…

  Still on Old Bet and looking faintly embarrassed by all he had unleashed, Otes said pleadingly to Father Edmund, “What should I be doing with him, eh?”

  The priest ended a prayer and crossed himself, the gesture echoed by everyone, even the children, before he said, “Take him to his house, I suppose. That’s where the wake…”

  Mary cried out and jerked back from Anne. “No!” She flailed a hand toward the box. “No! I won’t have it in my house! It can stay in the church! I don’t want it near me! Leave it here.”

  ‘Mary, dear,“ Anne protested, trying to cover scandal with pity. ”It’s Matthew. You have to…“

  ‘It isn’t Matthew!“ Mary cried at her, shoving Anne and another woman’s hands away from her. ”Whatever is in there, it isn’t Matthew and I don’t want it in my house!“

  ‘Mary,“ Perryn said with plain disgust and no pity at all. ”Don’t be more of a fool than you are. It’s in his own house Matthew should be tonight.“

  ‘Matthew is dead, and it’s my house until you throw me out of it and I don’t want that… that…“ Driven past words with passion, Mary gestured again at the box.

  Her brother began again, “Mary,” but she cried out at him, flung away from Anne and the other women and everyone else into Tom Hulcote’s arms, sobbing shrilly through wild tears, “Don’t let him make me, Tom! Don’t let him make me!”

  Tom caught her, held her, his arms as tightly around her, saying down to the top of her head, “No, sweeting, no. I won’t let him, no.” Kissing the top of her head, then glaring over her at Perryn, all his anger came back, the more fierce for being for Mary’s sake instead of his own. “You let her be, Simon Perryn. You’ve done enough to break her heart. You let her be with this.”

  Equally angry, Perryn returned, “Look you here, Tom Hulcote, it’s Matthew whose heart was broken and by her, and he went off to his death because of it. Now he’ll have his last right, to lie in his own house the last night his body is on earth instead of under it, and she’s going to have to live with that.”

  ‘I’ll not!“ Mary wrenched around in Tom’s arms to face her brother, her rage equal to either man’s. ”He cheated me every way while he was alive. He’s not going to cheat me out of a little peace now he’s dead! That box isn’t coming into my house except over my own dead bones!“

  ‘It’s not your house, Mary Woderove!“ Perryn returned. ”It’s forfeit to the lord and you’re there on sufferance and my sufferance has near to worn out. If Matthew doesn’t lie there tonight, neither will you, ever again!“

  He meant it, and as reeve, he could make it happen. Even Mary in her extremity of anger saw he would if she pushed him farther and froze halfway to another shout at him, her angry blood draining out of her face to leave her pale. Her breast heaved twice with great breaths as she struggled to hold herself back. Then she turned in the circle of Tom’s arms, pulled back against his hold for room enough between them to grab his tunic’s front, and cried up at him, “They hate us, Tom! He hates us! He hates vow! He’d rather we both died in a ditch than marry! Leave here or it’ll be too late and they’ll kill you, too!”

  People were drawing back from her, even Anne. Only Father Edmund came forward, to put one hand on Tom’s shoulder, the other on hers, saying gently, as if comforting a miserable child, “Mary. Mary. Stop this before you make yourself sick and your brother more angry. Mary, heed me.”

  With her face huddled down to hide its weeping ruin, she shook her head, denying his comfort; but after a look at Tom to ask permission that Tom gave with a small nod back at him, the priest took Mary by both shoulders and gently turned her toward him, saying, “All’s in God’s hands, whatever comes, Mary. Believe me. It’s going to be well, one way or another.”

  Mary gave a hiccuping sob and crumpled into the priest’s arms with the simple brokenheartedness of a small child wanting comfort. Holding her carefully while she cried against his shoulder, he patted her back, saying things into her ear, and from relief or because the best of the show seemed over, depending on how they saw it, people began to turn away, find somewhere else to look, something else to do. Father Henry went to talk to Otes still waiting outside the gate, and so did Perryn, but Anne came away toward Frevisse and Sister Thomasine, bringing her younger son with her and calling her other boy and Dickon down from the wall for the sake of asserting herself over something.

  Sister Thomasine had returned to looking at the ground in front of her, so it was to Frevisse that Anne made a rueful shake of the head and said, “I don’t know if Mary has ever understood the world isn’t here simply to make her happy, or if she knows it and the problem is that she blackly resents it.” She glanced back at her sister-in-law, now standing a little back from Father Edmund, gulping on the last of her sobs, her head hanging. “If only her bad temper was as little as she is, we’d all live the happier. And so would she. Colyn, stop that.” Colyn had been scratching under his hair where it grew raggedly toward his tunic neck. Anne pulled his hand away. “Leave be, bad boy. You’ve been around John Upham’s dogs again, and caught their fleas, haven’t you?” She pushed his head forward so that she could part his hair to see his neck. “A good rubbing down with tansy when we get home is what you’re going to…”

  She broke off, staring at the back of his neck with something in the way she stood there that made Frevisse lean to see, too, but Colyn fidgeted, protesting, “Maaammm,” and Anne let go his head to clamp her hands down on his shoulders, not with anger, Frevisse saw by her face, but in something near to… was it fear?

  ‘What is it?“ Frevisse asked sharply.

  ‘I…“ Anne was looking rapidly through the crowd for someone, not her husband, still in plain sight with Otes, but, ”Mistress Margery!“

  Her urgency drew people to look toward her and some began to come her way but a bone-thin woman in a faded green gown moved more quickly and with more purpose than the rest, to her before anyone else, Anne saying before she could ask anything, “Look,” pushing Colyn’s head forward again and his hair up from his neck. The boy squirmed but only from his hips down, knowing better than to make more protest while Mistress Margery bent to see. Frevisse shifted enough to see, too, and so did Sister Thomasine on the other side, come out of her withdrawal into curiosity.

  ‘A rash,“ Mistress Margery said and pulled the boy’s tunic away from his neck to
see down inside. ”It goes down his back, too.“

  ‘It itches,“ Colyn complained, squirming harder. Mistress Margery loosed him and he scratched at his chest. ”Here, too.“

  ‘You look,“ Mistress Margery said over him to Sister Thomasine, and without hesitating Sister Thomasine did, putting his hand aside and opening his tunic’s front at the neck. She worked more often than any of the other nuns with Dame Claire in the infirmary, and now Frevisse realized why Mistress Margery seemed familiar to her. She was the village’s herbwife, who came sometimes to the priory to exchange the herbs she gathered from the fields and hedgerows and woods for ones Dame Claire grew in the priory’s gardens, and that would be how she and Sister Thomasine were confident of one other.

  ‘He has a rash here, too,“ Sister Thomasine said.

  From among the little crowd gathering around them a woman with a small girl beside her said, her voice scaling up, “What kind of rash? Plague rash?” She was drawing back even as she asked, shoving the little girl behind her as she went. Nor was she alone. Everyone else was pulling away, too. Only Anne, Mistress Margery, Sister Thomasine and Frevisse stayed where they were around Colyn— Frevisse by plain force of will, not denying to herself her sudden terror—and only Perryn, with his other son and Dickon behind him, started toward them, but Anne cried out, “Stay away, Simon! Don’t come near! There’s Adam and Lucy will need you!” Because if it was plague, then likely it was too late for Colyn or her, but if their father lived, Adam and Lucy would still have someone. If they lived.

  Perryn broke stride, struggling between coming on and staying where he was, but managed finally to catch himself back, taking firm hold not only on his feelings but on both boys, to keep them where they were beside him.

  Mistress Margery, seeming untouched by the fear around her, said, “Take your tunic off, Colyn.”

  Colyn did and stood, naked to his breeks and staring blindly at nothing in front of him, eyes huge with terror, while the herbwife and Sister Thomasine looked at the bright pink-to-red rash now easily seen all over his back and chest and disappearing into the hair behind his ears. There had been no outbreak of the Great Death in this part of Oxfordshire for longer than Colyn had been alive, but all save the very youngest children had heard the thing talked of enough to know what its coming meant. Not simply death—death came often enough to any village to be familiar and accepted—but an ugly death that sometimes took so many in a village there were too few left alive to bury the dead.

  Uncertainly Sister Thomasine said, “It doesn’t look like what I’ve heard of the pestilence.”

  ‘Nay,“ Mistress Margery agreed, loudly enough to be heard across the churchyard. ”This isn’t plague rash.“

  Anne sobbed once, softly. Colyn’s shoulders sagged. A shuddering sigh passed across the churchyard and hands moved in the sign of the cross with desperate thankfulness.

  ‘See,“ Mistress Margery went on, still in a carrying voice. ”It doesn’t have the rosey rings. It isn’t the plague.“

  ‘But then what is it?“ Anne asked, after all only a little less desperate because whatever it was, her son had it.

  Mistress Margery laid hand on Colyn’s forehead. “He’s hot.” She meant by more than already came with the day. “Fevered hot. Feel.”

  Using the simplest, surest way to know if there was fever, Anne pressed her lips to Colyn’s forehead in a kiss and drew back with a trembling nod of agreement. “He’s dry-hot. He’s fevered.”

  ‘Morbilli,“ Sister Thomasine said. Meaning the ”little plague,“ rather than the great one.

  ‘We call it mesels hereabouts,“ Mistress Margery said, ”but aye, that’s what it is, I think.“

  Anne caught Colyn tightly to her, as if that would be enough to keep him safe. Colyn, knowing as well as she did that it would not, began to cry.

  Chapter 8

  Early as it was, the sunrise light still slanted honey-thick and golden across the goat-cropped grass of the village green, the morning was already heavy with heat, weighing down—along with the village’s unnatural quiet at his back—on Simon as he trudged heavy-legged along his foreyard garden’s path from the gateway to his housedoor. Wearily certain that going farther, even simply into the house, was too much trouble, he slumped down on the bench there with bowed head, hands hanging between his knees, listening to the quiet—no sounds from inside the house, no shifting of cows in the byre, no chickens busy around his feet—and told himself, wearily, not to mind it, that no one was dead, there was no need for mourning.

  Yet.

  That had been the worst of these four days since manor court—the waiting to see who would die.

  Not if but who.

  And how many.

  Simon forced himself to straighten, dragging his back and then his head up against the tiredness that came from more than having been up all the night keeping watch by Colyn and Lucy and Adam in the church. There were eighteen children sick so far. One child or more from every family with small children in the village. No, twenty—he was forgetting Gilbey’s two boys because they were being kept at home, not with the rest. Gilbey had even ridden to Banbury on Saturday and brought back a doctor to see his, at a fee Simon didn’t care to think about. Sometimes Gilbey looked to have more money than sense, Simon thought bitterly. But then, with all Gilbey had, he could afford to take leave of his senses once in a while.

  And sitting thinking about Gilbey was getting nothing done, Simon reminded himself, and there were things that desperately needed doing. Though for his very life Simon couldn’t seem to think of any of them just now and scrubbed at his face with his hands, trying to be more awake, his stubble unfamiliarly harsh. There had been no Saturday bath and shaving this week. He had made do with a swim on Sunday, the stream warm enough for it, when he’d gone round the fields to see how things did, but shaving was too much trouble.

  Or maybe it wasn’t, he thought, finding he was scratching where the hairs prickled under his jawline.

  Was it only Tuesday?

  In those first terrible moments in the churchyard four days ago, mothers had begun to look to their children, harsh with fear as they felt foreheads and searched bodies for the telltale sign of rash. There had been the pink beginnings of it on only Adam and three others there, but Mistress Margery had warned, “Spots are the surest sign but it can first show with no more than a running nose or a cough there’s no reason for, or just in an ill temper because they don’t feel well and don’t yet know why.”

  Anne had whispered, “Lucy,” left home with Cisily because she was fretful, and Simon had gone tight-throated with the same fear stark in his wife’s eyes. The last time there had been mesels in the village, Adam had been newborn and not taken them—the very youngest babies never seemed to, Mistress Margery had said, nor those who had had it before—but their Jon, their firstborn, just turned three years old, had sickened, had burned up with fever and died, and Anne had nearly lost her milk with worry and then with grief, and almost they had lost her and Adam, too, and it had taken Mistress Margery more days to bring her back to health than Jon had taken to die.

  ‘And it’s going to spread,“ Mistress Margery had said in the churchyard. ”Be sure of it. When it reaches one, it’s like to reach all, it spreads so easy and fast, if they’ve been near each other at all of late,“ which they likely had been, always at play together at most days’ ends when their work was done.

  In the silence then, with the only sound the whimpering of Emma Millwarde’s baby against her neck, everyone had stood staring at nothing or at their children, facing what was come on them with probably the same thought: How many children would it be this time who didn’t live? Last time it had been three, all well on one day, all dead before a week was gone.

  Into that stricken quiet, Sister Thomasine had said, “If so many are going to be ill and badly fevered, might it be well to keep them all together and in the church here in this hot weather?”

  The few who heard her—Simon and Anne
, Mistress Margery and Dame Frevisse—had momentarily stared blankly at her. Then understanding had bloomed in Mistress Margery’s face and she’d said, “Yes! There’ll be no place stay cooler than the church these hot days.” With its stone walls and thickly thatched roof. “And if they’re kept together, I can see to them far better, all at once, instead of running from village end to village end.” And maybe coming too late, the way it had been during the throat-sickness three winters back, when Mistress Margery had been saving Martin Fisher’s daughter, clearing her throat of the slime that was like to choke her, when word had come that John Gregory’s boy was in like case at the village’s other end but by the time she’d run the length of the village green to reach him, she was too late and he was dead, no fault of hers, just the way it was. She had saved others enough in her time for folk to know she knew her herbs and that there was power in her spells. She had even killed a man once with a spell, but only that once and only to save her own life, nor was she like some healers who only valued their skill for the money it brought them and cared naught about what they did or who they did it to. So folk had listened to her there in the churchyard while she told them why she wanted the sick children kept in the church, and the two nuns and Father Henry had explained to Father Edmund, to have his permission for it.

  He’d given it readily, saying, “Where better for them to be than in here where we can best pray for them while we tend them?” and his willingness had helped talk around to it such as might have not seen the point, though even then Gilbey and his wife would have none of it. But there was none as missed them anyway and the nave was fair cramped as it was, with straw-stuffed mattresses brought from homes laid out in rows along both its sides for the children and barely space between for those who tended them to move and sit and sometimes lie down themselves.