Further Tales of Warren Horesby: An Imperative.
Although I’ve written three books set in the fictitious village of Warren Horesby (but based on a ruined medieval village in East Yorkshire), I’m still drawn to the medieval life and the might-have-been of life there. So…I’m planning to write a story every now and then about characters other than the window makers. ‘An Imperative’ is the first. It concerns the time after the Great Pestilence when survivors had to readjust to a new way of living. My character, a woman, is facing starvation and must do something about it.
A stink of putrefaction lingered. It clung to the wattle and daub walls and the meagre furniture, the few fabrics. It wafted up to her nostrils from her garments as she moved. A nauseating, sweet smell. Until now she’d not had the energy to even wash her filthy hands but today things had taken a turn for the better; the sorrow, though still evident as a hard lump in her chest, was becoming easier to cope with. And while her once voluptuous breasts sagged on her thin chest, they were even now giving reward to the lips that sucked for nourishment. Born just before it all began, it seemed then that the tiny babe didn’t stand a chance of survival once the disease had showed itself in the family. Little Isaac lived but his needs were depleting her own.
With him nestled against her breast, she secured him in her old shawl pulled firmly around her. She pushed open the door and stepped outside. In the dim early light she saw a thin figure in skirts pushing pigs from a hedge, a few geese and ducks squawking noisily as a boy threw them food and on the hill beyond, a man herding scattered sheep. She knew by these few things, the pestilence was over.
Her home was on the East Row of Warren Horesby where the jumble of ramshackle houses, the poorest in the village, rested precariously on the incline of a wind battered hill. From there she was able to see other houses nearer the village centre emerging through the grey morning mist, some with open shutters like hers and puffing smoke from the dark, heather thatch. But many doors and shutters remained hard closed; no smoke rose from them. She had to act fast. She had to face the competition she knew would begin. It would be fierce.
Before she did anything else, she had to feed herself to gain strength. Wearily, she went to the back of the house to seek the last of the vegetables and herbs. Isaac’s satisfied little body did not hamper her movements. Once back inside, she tempted the fire into life with moss and thin twigs. Onto the flames went the herbs and she stood rubbing her back while they caught on. It was windy outside and the smoke from the damp foliage struggled to find its way through the hole in the roof but draughts coming through gaps in the walls swirled the perfume and efficacious properties into the corners exactly as she wanted them to do: they would help remove the miasma left behind. More importantly, they revived her as she breathed them in. She trickled the last of the stale water from a jug into a cauldron, added the meagre vegetables and hung it over the heat.
She needed more water. She must go to the well. Collecting water was the only activity that had continued daily throughout the period but with fewer and fewer women to meet as time went on. On the way, she looked down to the glazier’s house, part-burnt out in someone’s misplaced belief that the family had brought the disease. Looking up and across she saw the ordered row of larger houses on the slope of West Row. The one house she was desperate to see had its shutters open. She had seen the man of the house take bodies to the pestilence pit. There had seemed little point in first calling into the empty church. One body had been her friend Mary. Before all this, she and Mary had chatted at the well, picked herbs together in the wood and talked about children – but their different social station had made it impossible to meet further – she the ragged cotter, Mary the artisan’s wife. She felt the need to hurry. A neighbour was at the well, almost unidentifiable in filthy clothing.
‘At least a third of us ‘as gone,’ the figure said dolefully, looking at her with half-closed eyes and grey cheeks. ‘Appen we’ve been lucky.’
Back home with no-one to greet her, the lump in her chest swelled painfully. Things had been good for a while; the village had been happy. The king had been praised for battles won, the Scots had ceased to raid and the rains had eased. Crops were improving, the summer hot. But… also had come tales of a disease moving up the country. Inexorably. She had pleaded with her husband’s parents to take note of it. But they would not. Hull, York and Beverly had been hit horribly but Warren Horesby, cosseting them in the valley would, they believed, escape. Not even the Passion Week earthquake back in Spring had worried them, even though the monks at nearby Meaux Abbey had believed it to be a warning from God and feared God’s wrath for who knows what misdemeanours? Then Later, they’d learnt that ten out of fifty congregants of the abbey had survived. The pestilence arrived in the village days later. Years of friendship were extinguished in a few days as each family huddled in their homes, avoiding contact with others. A priest and a young physic doctor had tried to offer advice as women sought out old remedies as well as new ones, along with repenting of sins they could not even recall.
The disease was horrifyingly quick and repugnant: a headache; rising body heat; a rash; quickening of the heart; bewilderment; a cough; the buboes - large masses in the neck, the arm pits, the groin; black, dead patches on limbs; a vile, nauseous stench. There had been no-one to help steer her through fear as she learnt to recognise the inevitability of death. And no-one to explain why shehad escaped…and her child. Her failure to heal others haunted her. Her husband’s father had been the first to die in her family, then his mother, his sister and his two young brothers. Her husband had died last, in agonising sorrow. Thank God she herself was an orphan and had no more family to worry about, except the child.
She kissed Isaac’s head and laid him in his crib. She ate the softened vegetables and drank the cooking water, then put more water on to warm. She had to hurry. She took her mother-in-law’s bowl from the top shelf and put it on the floor. It was large enough and shallow enough for a person to stand in. It had a beautiful carved edging – a precious bowl made by a long-gone family member out of oak, now darkened with age. She poured warm water into it and placed a piece of soap, bought at great expense in better times from Meaux Abbey, at the side. She stepped out of her clothing. Stiff patches of dried pus from burst buboes littered her over-garment. The doctor had said if the evil stinking matter of the buboes came out, the person would live…but it was not true. There was also the spatter of blood, like small dropped rose petals on her chest from when her husband had coughed as she held him. From then, she hadn’t tried to keep clean. Why should she bother when she expected that both she and her child would face the same fate? Impulsively, she tossed the garment on the fire. Flames flared and died.
Standing naked in the bowl, she gently soaped her body with a cloth. Over the past few weeks she’d felt trapped in a bubble. Floating. Timeless. Waiting for it to pop her to death. Despite the need to hurry, the warm water and slow, rhythmic wiping movements relaxed her.
Freshened up, she put on her clean Sunday clothing. A spotless cap hid her dull brown hair, save for paler hairline curls which she allowed to prettily peep out. With her mother-in-law’s fine wool shawl cradling Isaac closely to her, she set off.
Only recently had she begun to act boldly like this. It had taken the Great Pestilence to do it, forced as she had been to cope in the circumstances. Even as far as saying prayers for the dead – by the time she had needed the priest, his desperate, shadow-eyed face and weary body had disappeared, so she had said prayers over her family as they died. The Archbishop had decreed that this could be done when no priest was available - but she still feared retribution. Yet, nothing was worse than being unprepared for death. It meant languishing in Purgatory or worse – Hell. And if Hell was worse than the Pestilence… well.
She walked across the valley to West Row. The early slanting sun hit the houses at the south end, showing them to be much larger and neater than where she lived. The people here were their own masters; Artisans, not poor cottars like her husband’s family or with their own dubious beginnings like her. She felt nervous but was convinced, or rather hoped, that after so much upheaval, social niceties would be forgotten for a while. The village must survive and the mixing of social status was the only way to do it. She approached the house and saw Ingram, Mary’s husband, a carpenter, sitting on his haunches by the doorway whittling wood. No-one else seemed to be there. She was nervous. He was handsome and talented with thick black hair only just showing signs of grey – its attractive unkemptness added to his capable demeaner and her heart hammered in her chest. She was lesser than him and her only entitlement to such a bold approach was her friendship with his wife. She had nothing else.
She drew closer. He looked up and between dark strands, his eyes peered at her through swollen lids. A child’s weak cry came from inside the house. His head tipped towards the sound but his eyes stayed on her.
‘Ah, Eunice,’ he said.
She smiled at him. She knew there would be other women without husbands and children still to feed, anxious to attract this man. There would be confrontation, fights, scratching and hair pulling, jealousy. But this was her time. Now. She must claim her friendship with his dead wife as a right to comfort him in his loss. She would fight for him, but held her breath, waiting for him to speak further. Hoping beyond believing.
‘I wondered if you would come. I would have been to see you but the children still grieve and I cannot leave the three of them.’
His cheeks were thin and his smile tremulous, with thin lips showing teeth more obviously than she recalled. He had suffered as she had. She would marry him.