a chance to tell me about a family in London.
‘What’s your name?’ she said.
The woman only grinned wider. ‘Alice…Alison,’ she said, as if she hadn’t quite decided. ‘You just call me Aunty.’
Then Aunty put a bony arm around Kate’s shoulder and began walking her inside her home. ‘Come on, love,’ she said, strangely tender. ‘Let’s us get a fire going. I’m starving, and you need to feed that baby of yours, don’t you?’
The next morning, after the baby came, they had eggs and a bit of the pound of bread that was already drying and crumbling away and a few dandelion leaves that Aunty picked and some onion slices from the store. The little girl had been washed and wrapped up in the waiting rags, and Kate, also clean, was lying, still weak and aching and not quite sure what was going on, but with radiant happiness mixed up with her exhaustion and lighting up her plump little face. She held the small breathing bundle in her arms, gazing at her with the disbelief of every new mother, even in circumstances less strange than these, seeing Tom’s eyes, and Mum’s snub nose, and her own dark hair.
Aunty had fed the hens and made sure they were secured. (‘Wouldn’t want them to go astray, now, would we?’ she said with gallows humour, as if they were hers as much as Kate’s. ‘Because God only knows where we’d be for food without them eggs.’) Then she sat down on the stool by Kate’s straw bed, in the band of light cast by the propped-open door, and looked proudly at her charges.
Aunty was tired, after the night of blood and buckets and water and yelled instructions to push. She could feel her eyes prickling under their scratchy lids. But it had all gone well in the end. Alive, all of them. And that was something, at least, she thought. Another one in the eye for the forces of darkness.
Then she began to talk, still very calmly, in a quiet, reminiscent, dreamy monotone, twitching her fingers through the rents and mends in her thin robe, about what she’d walked away from in London, and what she’d walked through on her tramp through Essex. Because she could see this poor little scrap didn’t know; didn’t have the least idea.
Death hadn’t just come stealing into this one village like black smoke. Whatever this girl thought, it wasn’t the sins of Kate’s mum, or dad, or Tom, or the no-good priest she kept going on about, that had made an angry God decide to smite them all dead, or whatever nonsense it was the priests kept spouting (till they died too).
There were people dying in their hundreds everywhere, Aunty said gently, trying not to shock the girl too much, while not blanketing her in mumbo-jumbo either. There were bodies in the lanes all over Essex: men, women, entire processions of penitents, lying where they’d dropped. Dead people, dead animals. In London they were piling up corpses in burial pits until the pits overflowed before filling them in, a bit. One pit would fill up with the dead before anyone had time to dig the next. Cadavers were dragged out of homes and left in front of the doors. London was no place to be while there was that going on, Aunty said. The air was too foul. They said husband was abandoning wife, wife husband, parents children, and the young their old folk. If you wanted to live, you had to walk. And she wanted to live.
‘So I thought, come and look up Tom and his family,’ she said, going back into the story from last night, about being some kind of relative.
If the girl was waiting to hear whether Aunty’s own family in London had all died, or if she’d been one of the ones who abandoned their own to save herself, she didn’t ask. Just sat there, round-eyed, open-mouthed, gawping. Aunty couldn’t tell if she was even really taking it in. Even if she was understanding the words, Aunty thought, it was probably too much to absorb their meaning all at once. Even for her, who’d seen it with her own eyes, it was hard enough to believe. So Aunty left the past in the past, and didn’t bother with her own story: the kids she couldn’t bury; the priest who wouldn’t say a Mass over them without money Aunty didn’t have. A shrug is all you can offer Fortune, in the end, when nothing will work out; and a calculation: they’re dead; nothing more you can do for them. You’ve got to look out for yourself. Time to go. Aunty just fiddled with the wiry ginger curls under her mended kerchief and went on with her sing-song account of the horror in the rest of the world.
Aunty said she’d heard people were dying even beyond England – all over Christendom, they said. The Mortality was said to have come from the East. People were dying of it in Italy a year ago. Maybe it had come to the ports of Italy in ships; maybe it was the earthquake in Italy that had let the foul sulphurous fumes out from the inside of the earth, from the hellfire below. And now, Aunty said, she’d heard tell of worse on the way. Strange tempests, with sheets of fire and huge murderous hailstones all mixed up together, so you couldn’t know whether you’d be burned to a crisp or battered to a pulp first. People said the fish in the seas were dying, and corrupting the air. But it didn’t matter whether you blamed the stinking mists and stagnant lakes and poisoned air on the Evil One or the Wrath of God. The important thing was to get away to somewhere clean.
‘But where,’ Aunty said, almost to herself. She looked round at the flat Essex field, the soft blue and green of the darkening sky, and wrinkled her nose. Surely the stink here was as bad as anything in London. ‘There’s the rub.’
Aunty paused, and then said, because talking was strangely comforting now she’d started, that she’d heard there were four hundred a day dying just in Avignon, where the Pope’s palace was. And all the cardinals were dead. Good riddance to them, Aunty added with grim pleasure.
She could see Kate couldn’t imagine four hundred people alive, let alone dead, and wasn’t sure what a cardinal was. So instead, timidly, the girl opened her pink lips at last and asked what must have been on her own mind all this time. ‘We couldn’t find Sir John. Tom, Mum…they didn’t have any last rites,’ she mumbled. ‘We prayed. Just the two of us. But I don’t think it was enough. And Dad. If he’s…gone…too. Do you think that means they’re all…’ Her voice faded.
‘Damned?’ Aunty finished for her, grasping her meaning. ‘Because there was no priest? Nah. That’s been the same everywhere – the priests too scared to minister to the dying. Scared they’re heading for hell themselves, after all their years of wickedness. Keen to keep out of their Maker’s clutches.’ And here, to stop her voice catching, she made it shrill, almost a shout: ‘And too greedy to look after the dead without payment, too, half the time. Trying to take money off people even to say a prayer over the bodies.’ She shrugged. ‘Well, that’s priests for you. It’s not just your kin. We could all go to bloody Hell, and what would they care?’
She sensed, from the stunned quality of the girl’s silence, that she’d gone too far. ‘Priests…Don’t get me started on priests,’ Aunty said, a bit apologetically. ‘What you need to know is, some bishop’s sorted it out so that we don’t all burn for eternity because of their selfishness. He says laymen can make confession to each other if they can’t find a priest. The Apostles did that, didn’t they? And if there isn’t a man around to confess to, it can even be a woman. And if there’s no one around at all, then, they say, faith must suffice. And it does. Suffice. You keep that in your head. Your folks are not in Hell. Your folks are all right.’
The girl nodded, and took her saucer eyes off Aunty and gazed down at the baby. Aunty could see what she was thinking: no baptism, so, also, damned?
‘We’re all here. That’s the main thing. You, and me, and this new little life here,’ Aunty broke determinedly into that thought before the girl’s terror took hold. ‘All alive, all blessed by God, all ready to face tomorrow.’ She made the sign of the Cross over the baby. Then she made a wry sort of face. ‘No priest,’ she said, ‘no problem.’ She wagged her finger at Kate. ‘We don’t need them bastards any more to save ourselves, remember?’ She dipped her finger in the last bucket of water left and made the holy sign again on the baby’s face, and said a made-up blessing. ‘Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae,’ she muttered against the baby’s crying. ‘Live long and well, little one. Be happy. Be a beauty. Make others happy, if they deserve it. Be lucky. And be rich if you can! Amen.’
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