All Fall Down

  Geoffrey was obsessed by Latin, though. He used to wander round the house muttering it to himself. I’m sure it was his way of riling Father. There was a whole long, weary month and a half where he would use all the Latin words he knew for everything, calling Father Pater and Alice Mater instead of Father and Mother, and asking for panem instead of bread. Father used to whack him, and Alice used to worry and fidget, but he wouldn’t stop. He’s stubborn, is Geoffrey.

  In the end, Sir John said he would pay the money to Sir Edmund for Geoffrey leaving the village, and Father stamped and shouted and said he could afford to pay his own fines, no matter what some people thought, and finally, finally, Geoffrey was allowed to go.

  I hate it when people leave. People are always leaving me – Richard marrying Joan, and Geoffrey going to the abbey, and that horrible half year after Mother died. When Geoffrey went, Father got sadder and angrier, and things got a lot less interesting. I used to find myself muttering Latin when I was pulling up leeks or milking the cow, just because it reminded me of Geoffrey. I used to run away to visit him all the time. When he first left us, we used to go up to the abbey every year for the Feast of the Nativity of Mary with all of the other monks’ families, and to take part in the Vigil. Father and I went last year, but Richard said he had too much work to do, and Alice was big with Edward and couldn’t get away.

  I haven’t been for months now.

  All these long, warm days of summer I can’t stop worrying about him. Last night, I couldn’t sleep for hours, thinking about him. I wondered what it felt like, stuck there surrounded by the dead and the dying. I wondered if he wished he’d stayed here with us. I wondered if he wanted to come home.

  Tonight, it’s so hot, I wouldn’t be able to sleep even if nothing was amiss in the world. Robin is awake too, shifting and rolling beside me. Ned and Mag sleep through his twistings and squirmings, but he always wakes me. Once or twice I think I’ve heard him crying. Robin never cries during the day. I wonder if he dreams about his mother, and what he thinks when he wakes and finds that she’s gone.

  This time, when I roll over, the day is feeling her way in through the chinks in the walls. Robin is lying on his side, watching me.

  “Isabel,” he whispers.

  I reach out my hand, and he squeezes it, very gently.

  “Do you think Geoffrey is still alive?” I say.

  “Are you still worrying about that?” Robin whispers. “Don’t worry. They’d have told us if he wasn’t.”

  “They might not have known who we were . . . the abbot died, did you know? They have so much work to do . . .”

  Robin squeezes my fingers again. “Shall we go and see?”

  And I feel something give up inside me. There’s nothing I want more than to see Geoffrey, to hold him, to breathe in his inky, herby scent. To know that he’s still here walking amongst the living, that the pestilence hasn’t taken him from me yet.

  “All right,” I whisper back.

  22. A High-Day, A Holiday

  We take our clothes down the ladder and dress in the dark, shhing each other and trying not to giggle. Nobody stirs. As soon as we’re out of the house – dressed, but not washed, as we can’t light the fire without waking the others – we’re filled with a festival feeling.

  “No work!” says Robin. He tips his head back and breathes in deep, happy breaths. He looks more like himself than I’ve seen him since he came to live with us. “Your father will probably whip me, but I don’t care – I don’t have to be in your fields today!”

  “Do you really hate it that much?”

  Robin steadies himself and thinks about it.

  “I hate the every-day-the-same-ness of it,” he says, slowly. “The way you know in the morning exactly what you have to do that day, and then you do it, and you come home so tired you can’t stand up, but you know you’re going to have to get up the next day and do exactly the same thing again. And again. For the rest of your life.”

  “But it’s not the same!” I’m indignant. “You don’t know – you’ll see. There’s planting – and weeding – and haymaking – and harvest – and spreading the muck – and—”

  “And all of it standing arse-upwards in a field,” says Robin. “It’s different for you, Isabel. You care what happens to seeds and roots. I don’t, and I don’t think I ever will. No, don’t argue! Look! We’re the only two souls in the whole world.”

  I know what Robin means. We’re on the path between the two village fields, Three Oaks and Hilltop – still in our village, but away from the cluster of houses. It’s very quiet. The sky above us is still that pale, almost-wakeful pre-dawn grey. We really could be the last two people left alive.

  “Come on—” says Robin. He grabs my hand and we run across the dry earth, barley-heads slapping at our legs, till at last we stop, doubled over with breathlessness and laughter.

  “What would you be?” I gasp. “If you didn’t farm?” I think of all the jobs there are – miller, baker, carter, thatcher, tanner, smithy, pigman, reeve. Most of them you need apprenticing for, and the ones you don’t, you either need a licence from Sir Edmund or they earn barely enough to buy a poor handful of rye. That’s why Robin’s mother had so many jobs – she was an alewife and a weaver and a landlady and she let travellers sleep in the solar, and the soldiers that Sir Edmund billeted on her – not that she had much choice about that.

  Robin’s brown face is flushed with running. His ears stick out under his dark thatch.

  “I’d like to be a sailor,” he says.

  “A sailor!”

  “Or a merchant. Or a soldier, maybe. I’d like to travel. I’d like to go to France and see where the Pope lives, and where the wine comes from, and Canterbury to see Thomas Beckett’s bones, or Jerusalem on pilgrimage, like Matilda Tanner did. My mother never went further than twenty miles from Ingleforn, can you believe it? I don’t want to spend all my life planting beans, Isabel. I can’t.”

  “But what about me?” I can’t be any of those things, not without leaving my land, and I don’t want to be any of them either. And Robin and I belong to each other. We’ve always meant to be together – Robin’s land and a little house and my father there to help if we need him. What am I supposed to do if Robin is fighting or sailing or visiting the spot where Noah had his ark or drinking in the tavern where Jesus turned water into wine?

  “I know,” says Robin. “But that’s what I want. I’d come back for you,” he says. But I’m not sure it’s enough.

  The abbey sits in the sheltered place between two hills. Almost until you’re at the end of the road, you can’t see it and you can’t see it, then suddenly you turn the corner and there it is, low and solid and comfortable as always, nestled in the warmest place in the valley, the coloured glass from the monk’s little chapel sparkling in the early morning sunshine. The abbey makes me feel safer than almost anywhere else. I don’t know what it is; the monks, or Geoffrey, or the way no one is ever hungry or desperate here, or just the knowing that it’s rested in this comfortable space with its forty-two monks for nearly three hundred years, and everything has always been well. I’d like to work on an abbey farm, I think. Just so long as no one made me speak French.

  I know the monk who answers the door slightly. He frowns at me and says, in a thick Norman accent, “Yes?” Then, “Isabel? You are all right?”

  “We’re fine,” I say. I reach over for Robin’s hand, and he squeezes it in his long fingers. “Is Geoffrey here?”

  “He is sleeping, I think,” says the monk, and some of the tightness that is clenched up inside of me melts, and I’m not sure whether I want to laugh or cry. I grip on to Robin’s hand, and he gives me an odd, distant smile. My brother is alive. My body is bewildered between happiness and that clenching fear that won’t let go of me. My brother is alive, but how can I stop worrying, even for a moment? My brothers, my sister, my parents, myself. How can I ever relax?

  “He works in the infirmary all night,” says the monk. All of
the monks here speak some English, but most of them grew up in Norman houses where everyone speaks French, like the king and queen.

  “I go and find him for you,” says the monk.

  We wait. The sun is warm against our backs. It’s going to be a hot day.

  And then Geoffrey is there, standing in the doorway rubbing one foot against the back of his leg. He’s grown even since I saw him last, but he’s just as skinny and earnest-looking, and his hair is the same, thick and yellow, with the bald, shaven circle at the top to let God in.

  “Isabel—”

  And suddenly I’m in his arms and I’m crying, and he’s holding me and not saying anything, just holding me, and I’m filled with that sense of safeness that I only get around Geoffrey, a feeling of family which is completely different from the warm, busy, noisy familiness of our home. At home, family is about doing things. With Geoffrey, family is about me and him.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” says Geoffrey, and I say, “Aren’t you supposed to be working – or praying—?”

  And Geoffrey says, “Aren’t you supposed to be working too?”

  And Robin says, “Quick, before she remembers the harvest.”

  And he and Geoffrey grab my hands and pull me along, and we’re off, running down the road that leads to the abbey, and away.

  It’s heady, the freedom – the freedom, and seeing Geoffrey again. Robin is practically dancing.

  “It’s a holiday – a saint’s day – a feast day—”

  “A feast!” I laugh. “We don’t even have anything to eat!”

  “I don’t care,” says Robin. “Where shall we go?”

  “Let’s go to the river,” says Geoffrey.

  It’s cool and quiet by the river. Everyone from the village is out in the fields, or home with the sick. We don’t go to the washing-place by the bridge, but further down, just inside the village boundaries. It’s getting hot already. The sky above is blue and cloudless, and the air heavy with the heat. The earth is dusty and cracked, even here by the river, and the grass is turning yellow. Robin sees the water and gives a whoop.

  “A swim!” he calls. “Come on, Isabel!” And he starts tugging at his shoe. “You too, Geoffrey, or aren’t priests allowed any fun?”

  The water is cold at first, so cold it makes me gasp, but once you start swimming, it’s warm enough. Robin and Geoffrey look smaller naked, their hair plastered to their foreheads, their faces streaming with water. I keep my shift on, but I still see Robin looking at me. We splash each other and the boys swim underwater, grabbing at my legs and pulling me under so my mouth is filled with water and I shriek. In the end, Geoffrey and I scramble out, wet and bedraggled, and sit in the dead grass, little stones and dust sticking to our wet feet and the bottom of my shift.

  I tell Geoffrey the news – which these days is mostly a list of the dead. John Baker. Margaret. Little Joanie Fisher. He listens, but I can’t tell who he remembers and who he doesn’t. Margaret he says he knows. Joanie Fisher he’s never heard of. John Baker . . .

  “Was he the big man with the red face? Who used to wallop us for stealing from the bread oven?”

  “His face is red all right,” I say. “But he’s not that big.”

  Geoffrey smiles.

  “He was big to me.”

  I ask him about all the people from York, and about working in the infirmary. He’s silent, picking at the stones.

  “All the infirmary monks died,” he says, in the end. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  He nods his yellow head.

  “That’s why I’m there now . . .” His voice trails off. He pokes at the dusty earth with his twig. “Did you know,” he says, “in the library, at the abbey? They have an astrolabe that tells you the position of all the stars and all the planets?”

  I don’t even know what an astrolabe is, but I don’t say so.

  “Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter,” says Geoffrey. “The earth, the moon, the sun. If you could tell their exact positions – if you could know how they influence each other, what they tell each other in the sky—”

  “Yes?” I say. “What?”

  Geoffrey turns his head.

  “You’d know everything,” he says. “All the future . . . all the past. All the grains in God’s hourglass. That’s astrology. The science of heaven.”

  The river runs below us, blue and clear, rushing and chuckling and swirling around the stones. Robin floats on his back with his brown face out of the water and his chin pointed up at the clouds. The birds trill in the trees and the sunlight sets the whole water dancing.

  “I read something that made me think of you,” Geoffrey says suddenly.

  “Mm.” Geoffrey is always telling me things out of books, and usually they either don’t make sense or they don’t mean anything.

  “Yes,” he says. “Listen—

  He to whom God has given knowledge,

  And the gift of speaking eloquently,

  Must not keep silent nor conceal the gift,

  But he must willingly display it.”

  He looks at me expectantly. I wriggle my shoulders.

  “He,” I say. “It’s always he. What about she? What if she wants to speak el – el—”

  “Eloquently.”

  “Eloquently. I bet he didn’t think of that, did he?”

  “But he did. I mean, she did.”

  “She?”

  Geoffrey nods. “That’s why I thought of you. That poem was written by a woman. Marie de France. She was an abbess. She wrote poetry – about King Arthur, and Tristan and Iseult, and – oh, Isabel, all sorts of beautiful things. But don’t you see what it means?”

  I stare at him stupidly. All I can think is that a woman wrote poetry. A nun – so not exactly a woman like me – but still. A woman.

  “It means,” says Geoffrey, “anything. It means anything. If you have a skill – or a talent – then that’s a gift from God and you have a duty – an obligation to use it. So, if you want to be a farmer – and that’s what you want, isn’t it? To farm your own land, rather than let poor old Robin do it? – Well, if that’s what you want and God has given you that skill, then you have to do it. Otherwise it’s like throwing away his gift – like the men burying the talents, do you remember?”

  Vaguely I remember the story from one of Sir John’s rare sermons. If God gives you one talent you’re supposed to turn it into twenty, you’re not supposed to bury it in the ground and leave it there. Except if your talent is for growing seeds; you’re probably allowed to bury them in the ground. I remember what I’d forgotten about Geoffrey – his ability to give shape to the problem or the desire that you hadn’t even realized you had. Being a farmer. Growing things like Father does. I hadn’t known it until Geoffrey told me, but that is what I want. More than almost anything.

  “Give it to me again,” I say, and Geoffrey says the piece of poetry to me, and I recite it back to him until I have it by heart. “I’ll look at it when I’ve got the space,” I say carefully, and Geoffrey smiles.

  “Same old Isabel.”

  Then Robin comes running up out of the river, kicking water before him and on to our feet. We squeal.

  “Brotherly love,” he says. “How sweet. I’m hungry.”

  “We don’t have any food.”

  “Don’t we?” And he scrambles over to his pile of clothes and pulls out a loaf and some cheese and Alice’s salt ham. Geoffrey sits up, the solemn mood broken.

  “You thief!” he laughs. “I should sentence you to five Ave Marias and two Pater Nosters.”

  “You’d better not eat it then,” says Robin, and Geoffrey shrugs.

  “The sin’s been committed already; I can’t let good meat go to waste.”

  The food is warm but good. We eat half-dressed, sticky with sweat and dust. When we finish, Geoffrey stands up, brushing the crumbs from his robe.

  “Come on,” he says. “We’d better be home. Our thief forgot t
o bring us some ale.”

  I haven’t drunk all day, and I’m thirsty, so thirsty that I could drink the river water, muddy and full of disease as it is. We kick our way slowly back to the abbey and drink a flagon of good abbey ale in a row against the kitchen wall. The monks don’t seem to mind that Geoffrey’s been away nearly all the day. How strange to live such a come-and-go-easy life as this.

  As we drain the last of the flagon, Geoffrey stands.

  “Well,” he says. He looks tired. I remember he was working all night.

  I look across at Robin. Neither of us wants to go.

  “Can’t you come home with us?” I say, but even as the words are out of my mouth, I know he can’t. You can’t eat someone’s beef and venison and read their books for four years, then run away as soon as things get hard.

  “I want to stay,” says Geoffrey, but he doesn’t meet my eyes.

  He embraces me, and nods at Robin. “Be careful,” he says, and we nod.

  “Don’t look them in the eye,” says Robin. He stretches out his hand and grips my fingers in his. Geoffrey laughs.

  “Well,” he says. “Good luck.”

  Robin and I walk slowly back down the path, scuffing up dust. The sky is a clear, pale blue above us and the gnats are out, buzzing around the little beck at the edge of Hilltop. The heat and the weariness of the afternoon hang around my shoulders and my sunburnt cheeks.

  “We’re all right, aren’t we, Isabel?” Robin says. “You and me? I know it’s strange, with everything, but . . .”

  “Of course,” I say, but my thoughts are far away.

  “It was a good holiday, wasn’t it? Even if your father beats us for it?”

  “It was a good holiday,” I say. I take his hand and squeeze it, and he gives me a sweet, grateful, weary smile.