The People’s Queen. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ voice. Faintly, she said, ‘Your Tom?’

      ‘Cousin,’ the woman offered. Nothing more. She glanced behind Kate, behind the cottage, behind the open-sided barn where the tiles were drying, to the kiln. A knowing sort of look. In her flat quick voice, she added, ‘You must have heard of us. My dad’s the one used to take the tiles from the kiln there to market. Way back, we’re talking now. Must be twenty years ago.’ She nodded again. Her story was taking shape. She was gaining fluency. ‘Married a London girl, my dad, didn’t he? My mum, that was. Stayed on with her family. Liked the hustle and bustle of town life. Always talked about home though. Brought me here once, when I was a kid. Your Tom and me, thick as thieves we were, back then. Climbing trees, swimming in the river’ – she gestured at the landscape – ‘smoking out bees for honey. Nicking the broken bits of tiles for skimming stones. A proper little terror he was in those days. Oh, the things he taught me.’ She went back to shaking her head, with that tough smile pinned on her face and her bright little eyes fixed very hard on Kate’s.

      Part of Kate knew there was something wrong. The more she thought about it, the more seemed wrong. Tom had never mentioned having blood in London that Kate remembered. And they’d surely never been kids at the same time, these two. Tom must have been a good ten years younger. Mustn’t he? Plus which, most importantly, it wasn’t ever Tom’s dad, who’d died years ago, who’d worked out what you could do with the clay. The tiles were her dad’s business. So there must be a mistake. The woman must be mixing her up with someone else. Some other Essex village. Some other tilery. Some other Tom. But if she pointed that out the woman might go. And the baby was coming, and Kate’s back was aching. She told herself: He wasn’t a talker, Tom. Perhaps he just never had 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. СКАЧАТЬ