To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek

two knaves tied handfuls of wool soaked in vinegar to their mouths and noses, groped under the bowmen’s arms and between their legs, pinched their necks and looked at their tongues. They asked each bowman where he was born, and on what day, and wrote it down in a great book. All deemed heal, the infirmarer led them into the sickhouse. He stood them about a board where lay pots of treacles and sheaves of dried worts and glass flasks of many hues. Behind him in the hall were a score empty bedstraws, each made with good clean linen. In the middle of the hall a knave let fall leaves into a smoking fire. The sickhouse stank sweetly of vinegar and rue.

      The infirmarer coughed, clasped his hands together, made a steeple of his first fingers and lifted them to his lips.

      ‘The qualm, or as it is rightly called the pestilence, pest or plague, is airborne, as a sickly mist, and spreads from stead to stead when the wind blows from the south,’ he said. ‘Once it lights on a town, it spreads between folk like to fire in a dry wood. It may reach England in two ways: in clouds, blown by the south wind over the sea, or in ships, either from bad air caught in the sails or in the bosom of the ship, or in the bodies of the seafarers. Comes it thus, it’ll most likely be through London, or Bristol, or Kent, or one of the southern havens, Southampton or Plymouth. Where d’you ship for Calais?’