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Also by James Meek
Fiction
McFarlane Boils the Sea
Last Orders
Drivetime
The Museum of Doubt
The People’s Act of Love
We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
The Heart Broke In
Non-Fiction
Private Island
Dreams of Leaving and Remaining
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
Copyright © James Meek, 2019
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 674 2
EXPORT ISBN 978 1 78689 676 6
eBook ISBN 978 1 78689 675 9
For Kay and Sophy
God is deaf nowadays
– William Langland, Piers Plowman
Contents
‘CUT ME THAT rose,’ demanded Berna of the gardeners. She pointed to the most finely formed flower, coloured the most brilliant crimson.
‘A prize surely intended for your marriage,’ said her cousin Pogge. ‘Weren’t it sufficient provocation to take your papa’s book without consent?’
Berna embraced the volume she carried. ‘Papa offered me the fulfilment of my desires in the garden, in lieu of my preference for a liberty general.’ She turned to the younger of the two gardeners. He had default of height, but was formed pleasantly, with puissant shoulders. His freshly razed face had an appearance of attentive tranquillity. ‘Will Quate, cut me the rose.’
IT WAS SUNDAY, St Thomas’s Day eve, and there wasn’t no garden work to be done nor no other work neither. Will Quate wasn’t no gardener. He came to help Rufy bear home a heap of rose sticks for his fire. But the lady Bernadine happened to come by and bade them give her the best bloom on the bush, and they mightn’t say no, so Will hewed the rose with his knife, plucked five thorns of the stem with his fingers and gave it her. She took it and led her kinswoman through the door in the garden wall to her father’s wood.
MY COMMISSION TO annotate the abbey’s property case is complete; I am obliged to transmit it to the advocates in Avignon. Nothing detains me in Malmesbury except the difficulty of leaving. It is not terror of events that obstructs my return to France, but the practicalities. It is impossible to be a solitary traveller in these times. I must find company for the journey, yet the roads to the southern ports, previously dense with viators, lie vacant.
I suspect the prior has more intelligence about the progress of the plague in Avignon than he divulges. I have received no communication from the city since Marc’s brief note in March, informing me that the pestilence was general there, and that on the advice of his doctor the Pope now defends himself against the pestilential miasma by habitation at the median of two enormous fires.
Written at Malmesbury Abbey, sixth July anno domini one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, of ordinary time the twenty-seventh, the Sunday preceding the festival of the translation of the relics of my name saint, Thomas martyr, by Thomas Pitkerro, proctor of Avignon.
BERNA AND POGGE passed a line of village children who foraged in the husks of last year’s beechmast. They followed a path to the foot of a tree, sat on a blanket and placed between them the book and the rose. From a pouch she carried, Berna took a bowl and a bloodletting knife and demanded that Pogge bare her arm.
‘I prefer not to,’ said Pogge.
‘It is simply to demonstrate the method, that you might at some future point apply it yourself.’
Pogge lifted her arm, rigidly enclosed in linen. ‘It’s sewn in,’ she said.
‘I advised you to permit your limbs liberty of movement.’
‘I desired to accustom myself to sewing in, in advance of your marriage ceremony.’
‘It is my opinion that you contrived this excuse. You doubt my ability to bleed.’
‘You know I admire your numerous virtues, but you are a knight’s daughter, not a surgeon.’
‘It is notorious in our family that I possess a plethora of blood.’ Berna rolled up her own left sleeve till it was above the elbow. ‘Regard,’ she said, demonstrating the faint marks of previous cuts in the crook of her arm, and one more fresh. ‘Are they not finely accomplished? I chanced to see my friend sanguinary, the barber, in Brimpsfield last week. He advised that should the advertisements of the clerks prove true my former comfort would be a form of defence. My chaperone left me unobserved for a moment and the barber supplied me with the knife.’
‘I would have held you too determined in your gentility to have acquaintance with barbers.’
‘I ne strain for gentility,’ said Berna, raising her voice a fraction. ‘It is courteous amiability towards such classes as barbers that distingues our relations with them from their relations with each other, determined, as they are, by money.’
The pique left her, though not the ardour with which she spoke,