Then I remembered Bill was dead. Jaybee had killed him. Bill wouldn’t mention anything to anyone.
“My enemy isn’t here,” I whispered again, blinking rapidly to make the tears drain away, keeping my voice flat and level. “Not in this time. Not in this place. Take me somewhere, good horse, where we may rest.”
We ambled down the road while the sun moved toward noon. The blood caked on my legs, and my trousers stuck to my skin. When the sun was at its height, we reached the place where the Sedgebrook fell into the Welling beside a tumble of stone and the shattered remnant of a great wheel, moss-hung where it stood beneath the sluice. Scattered among the trees were the stalks of old chimneys and a soggy rubbish of thatch. Sawley Minor was no more. There was no one in the place and nothing to show why they had gone.
Grumpkin crouched beside the water, a paw extended to catch whatever might be swimming there. The horse nibbled at the tall grass beside a broken chimney. I took off my clothes and washed myself and my trousers and changed my underwear and put a folded twentieth-century sock between my legs to keep the blood from coming through my clothes. In this time there were no napkins, ready-made in a box. There were no tampons. At my next “flowering” (Aunt Lovage’s word), I would have to go back to rags, worn and washed in cold water, then dried and worn again, as Doll had taught me.
The horse and I drank long at the sluice while I wondered what to do next. Though there was no one at the mill, the road that led beside the ruins was still traveled. There were hoofmarks in the muddy verge, and the grasses at the edges had been bitten back by hungry beasts. It led to the abbey and on to East Sawley, and there would be someone, many someones, at either place. We turned down it, the horse, the cat, and I, moving slowly in the shadow of the leaves.
As we rounded each corner, I found myself looking for the abbey. I had been there a few times, with Papa and Aunt Terror. It had not seemed a lengthy journey, even to a child. When I saw it at last, however, I did not recognize it for what it was.
Empty walls by the lakeside. A few carved pillars, with branching tops, like trees turned to stone. Steps leading upward to a floor littered with blackened, shattered beams and a sooty altar stone. The chapel had been there. The burned beams told of fire and the roof falling in. Around this wreck stood vacant halls where men had once worked and prayed, weedy fields they had once planted. Beyond the chapel floor, in the cemetery of the abbey, lay row on row of crosses, a hundred new ones where once there had been a few dozen old ones.
I slid off Horse’s back and walked between the stones of the tumbled wall. Beyond the fallen rock, roses were blooming. Here the abbot’s garden had stood. Papa and Aunt Terror and I had had wine and cakes on the pillared porch where briars now tangled themselves beside the steps. In the center of the garden was a fishpond where lilies had bloomed, the roots brought home from distant lands by a crusader, so the abbot had told us. The pond was muddy now, sodden from recent rain and rank with vines.
I heard a sound and turned to see a skulking figure dart away behind a pile of stone. “Hey,” I cried. “What happened here?”
There was no answer. I waited where I was, and after a time, an old face peered around a corner. I started toward it and was waved away.
“Stay away,” he cried. “Stay away from me. Bring me no death. Stay away.”
I stopped. “What happened here,” I called again. “Did the place burn down?”
“Dead,” he cackled at me, his eyes squinched almost shut. “Dead, all of them. All but half a dozen. Then the fire. Then the ruin. Then those that were left went away to Wellingford, all but me. I’ll stay, I told them. Stay and guard the abbey.”
“Dead?”
“Where’ve you come from, boy, that you don’t know dead? With the Black Death dancing among us like the vintners upon the grapes until we are squoze, trampling us like the threshers on the straw until we are winnowed. Dead they all were, the abbot among them. Swollen and screaming and dead.” He came out from behind the corner, a thin old monk in a ragged habit, capering like a goat and making a thin, screeching sound of lonely agony.
I knew of the Black Death. Of course. I had read of it, heard of it, repressed the information, somehow never dreamed that it had touched anyone I knew. And it had come here! And where else?
“Are there many dead in the nearby towns as well?” I asked. “In the hamlets and villages?”
“Everywhere,” he cried, jigging up and down in his fear or fury. “Everywhere. And half of all the world is dead of it, too. Stay away from places, boy. Hide you in the forest. Hide you deep where nothing comes on you. Else you’ll join them all.…” Something sounded deep within the trees, and he leapt like a startled deer and darted away. When I turned back from the sound, he had gone, leaving me with my dilemma still.
I had no time to nurse it. What had sounded in the trees was a horn, and what emerged from the trees was a hunting party, two lords, a few huntsmen, and a pack of spotted hounds. The men carried boar spears, so I knew they had been after wild pig, up Trottenham way most likely. I stood aside, humble as salt, and let them come.
He
