discarded, tidily on the covers I smoothed down the fingers to make them lie at ease on the bed. The arm lay at an unnatural angle. I turned it, but still it looked no better. I stared at it, trying to visualise how an arm at rest should look.
“Come along now,” Merchant Martha urged. “They’re waiting.”
Merchant Martha scurried ahead and I had to trot to keep up with her, but she always walked as if she had eight legs instead of two, so I could tell nothing about the urgency from her speed. She clutched my arm and steered me to the open gate of the beguinage.
The entrance was blocked by a handcart, as if the owner was determined that nothing would precede him through the gates. An old man lay crumpled up inside, his grey head sagging against a lumpy sack. His beard was matted with vomit, his scarlet face beaded with sweat. He panted, mouth open like a dog. A younger man squatted on the ground in the cart’s shelter, sunk into a stupor. His eyes were closed and he seemed content to doze, knowing nothing could get past the cart without disturbing him.
Gate Martha was clucking like an old hen, clearly vexed that she couldn’t get her gate closed. I followed her through the open gate, squeezing past the handcart. Outside, two women crouched, their backs to the wall, hunched up against the bitter wind. Both looked worn out. A small girl lay across the knees of one of them, sweating and fretful. Her mother kept up a regular rhythm of patting the child heavily on the back. It didn’t appear to soothe her, but it was as if the mother had been doing it for so long she had forgotten how to stop.
An older boy rested his head in the second woman’s lap. She couldn’t have carried such a lanky child so far, he was almost as tall as she, but perhaps he had come on the handcart with the old man. Beyond them, alone a little girl lay curled up, whimpering. She’d messed herself and lay in a stinking puddle of liquid shit, the colour of pea broth.
Gate Martha peered around, then looked down at the solitary child. “There was a lad with this one. William, he called himself, said he was her brother, but by the looks of it, he’s run off. I reckon that’s the last we’ll see of him.”
Crouching down opposite the woman with the little girl, I touched the child’s leg. She was burning up.
“How long have the children had this fever?” I asked.
But neither of the women answered or even looked at me and I began to wonder if I had actually spoken aloud. They gazed down unseeing at their own stained clothes, their thoughts so turned in that if Saint Michael himself had appeared with his sword of flame, I doubt they’d have noticed him. Gate Martha nudged the grime-streaked toes of the nearest woman with her shoe. The woman squinted up at her.
“Lass asked what ails the bairn,” Gate Martha said.
The woman protectively pulled her child closer to her, half smothering her. The child wailed and struggled feebly.
“We’ve come for the cure, for the bairns.”
I tried to smile encouragingly. “We’ll take your children to a room near the infirmary. They’ll be comfortable there.”
The two women frowned at me as if they didn’t understand.
“There are good clean beds, dry and warm,” I added eagerly. Anyone would think I was an innkeeper trying to sell the virtues of his lodging to a passing merchant. “We’ll give them what tinctures and herbs we have to help them.”
They continued to stare blankly at me and I sensed that I was not telling them what they wanted to hear.
“We can’t promise to cure them, but we’ll try what remedies we know and if God wills it… We’ll all pray for them.”
The woman struggled to her feet, weighed down by the burden of the child in her arms. She glowered at me as if she thought I was refusing to help.
“We want the cure.” She spoke with the grim determination of a cheated housewife demanding her full measure of flour.
“We can bathe them, give them cordials, bleed them, do whatever we can, but-”
She took a step forward, angry. “We can wash our own bairns and we’ve not brought them here for potions. We’ve come for the cure. Let the bairns touch it, that’s all we want.”
I turned in bewilderment to Merchant Martha. “What does she mean-the cure?”
Gate Martha beckoned Merchant Martha and me aside. “Host that was saved from the fire,” she whispered. “That’s the cure they’ve come for.”
“Andrew’s Host?”
Gate Martha nodded and Merchant Martha looked as grim as I’d ever seen her.
“But why do they think it’ll cure the children?” I asked, bewildered. “There’s been no healing.”
The Host lay in its painted wooden reliquary in the recess near the altar. Everyone said it had protected us from the murrain and even the flood, but no one had claimed it had healed them of any infirmity or sickness. It had not cured Healing Martha.
Gate Martha shrugged, but offered no explanation. The woman came across to where we stood, swinging her child in her arms like a battering ram.
“You’ll not deny the cure to the bairns. We’ve money for candles,” she said defiantly. She jerked her head towards the young man still snoring on the ground under the cart. “He’s got money an’ all, so don’t let him tell you he hasn’t. I saw his wife give it him, though he’d sooner spend it on ale and let the old ’un die. He’s wanted him out of the way for years, says the old pisspot’s a useless mouth to feed.”
The little girl lying by herself gave a convulsive shudder and turned. Even through her coarse shift, I could see her belly was swollen up like a drowned sheep. Her flushed face crumpled in pain. She cried out and another stream of green shit oozed out of her. But she didn’t open her eyes.
Merchant Martha gripped me fiercely by the arm. “If they’re demanding the relic, I’d best fetch Servant Martha. She’ll want to know about this. Meanwhile you take that little girl inside. If her brother has left her here for us to care for, I warrant that child at least will be grateful for a warm room and a dry bed.”
pisspuddle
bLACK, BLACK WATER IS CREEPING towards me. My legs are heavy. They won’t move. I can’t get my arms free. I’m trapped in the stocks and the water’s rising up. It’s running round my feet in a little trickle, like spiders’ feet. It’s crawling up over my belly.
“Mam, Mam, get me out!”
Why doesn’t she come? It’s cold. It’s so cold. My teeth are chattering and I can’t get warm. There are monsters swimming in the water, things with big eyes and beaks, sharp beaks stabbing at me, tearing me. I can’t fight them off. I can’t get my hands free.
“Don’t leave me here, Mam. Where are you?”
Water’s getting deeper. I’m so thirsty I want to drink the water, but the beaks are jumping out of the water at my face. Sharp beaks, hot beaks, hotter than pincers from the furnace. Black Anu’s in the water, she’s biting my belly with her big teeth. She’s eating me.
“It hurts. It hurts so much. Mam, make her stop!”
“Hush, lass, hush. She’s getting worse, Osmanna. I’ve seen bairns taken like it afore. There’s nothing can save them when they get this bad.”
“Keep wiping her with the cold water, Pega. We have to cool her; she’s burning up.”
“Mam?”
“Your mother’s not here, child. It was your brother who brought you here. Try to drink some more of this, please. It’ll make you better.”
“No, Osmanna, leave the bairn be, she only pukes it back up again and it just makes the poor mite more miserable every time. There’s nowt you can do for her now. She’ll not make it through the night. Let her rest.”
“No, Pega, she won’t die. I can’t let her die.”
“Bairns die, that’s the way of it. When they get this bad, there’s nothing can save them.”
“There’s another way… I remember… I saw Healing Martha do it once on a babe that wouldn’t suckle. Turn her onto her belly, Pega. If the medicine won’t go down, perhaps we can get it up.”
saint pega’s day
anchoress and virgin sister of saint guthlac, she lived not far from crowland. when guthlac realised he was dying he invited his sister to the funeral and she sailed down the river welland. following guthlac’s death she went on a pilgrimage to rome, where she died.
aLL EYES WERE FIXED upon the white wafer raised high above their heads, such a tiny fragile thing, yet it was the very presence, the very substance of the omnipotent God who created all Heaven and earth. I held in my hand a drop of water that is an ocean, a flame that is the essence and being of the whole fire.
“Salus, victoria et ressurrectio nostra.”
