To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek

cushion, I would lie against her in the same position, and she would fold me in her arms while the barber opened my veins. The cut would be pursued by silence, apart from the respiration of my mother in my ear and the gutter of the blood in the bowl. I have never known such contentment.’

      SIR GUY CAME and saw the rose was gone. He chewed the inside of his cheek.

      ‘Was my daughter here?’ he asked the men.

      They ne said nothing.

      Sir Guy beheld the heaps of rose sticks Will and Rufy had bound in bundles.

      ‘A heap of Sabbath-breakers,’ he said. ‘Would you have the murrain sent us sooner?’

      Rufy said it wasn’t work, he and Will only gathered the sticks for his hearth, as his lord had behest him the boot of the rose tree when he shred it.

      Sir Guy cut one of the bundles with his knife and took of it a thick, well-shaped length of rosewood, bent at one end in a handle, as it had grown. He held the handle, let the other end sit on the ground and leaned his weight on the wood.

      ‘A kind walking stick,’ he said.

      Rufy said the tree would grow that way, and his mum was lame.

      ‘There’s sap in your old dam yet,’ said Sir Guy. ‘I saw her hop about the pole two month ago.’

      Rufy said her bones were bad, and he ne thought it him no harm to take a good strong stick to help her walk about.

      ‘I’ll learn you otherwise,’ said Sir Guy. ‘I’ll have bad bones one day. Why would I lack a good stick of my own rose tree to help your shiftless mother? All hold me soft and reckon they might have what’s mine without no afterclap. I was robbed of a gown, and now you’d rob me of a walking stick.’

      Will said they mightn’t say no to the lady Bernadine when she bade them give her the bloom. He took a handful of little brown spikelets of his belt-bag and, with bowed head, offered them to his lord.

      ‘Eh? What’s that?’ said Sir Guy.

      Will said he hewed them from the rose branch. They were the thorns, he said, that must also rightly be Sir Guy’s.

      A COMPANY OF archers pervenes to Malmesbury imminently, on its way to France. It is suggested I go with them.

      When travelling towards the pestilence was a theoretical possibility, I had fortitude. Now I may actually go, I am terrified. My mind cannot accommodate my own mortality, yet is capable of engendering an infinite series of images of colleagues and remote acquaintances who have succumbed. I remember Brozzi, the Rota lawyer with the enormous jaw. I have been visited repeatedly by a vision of him recumbent in a pit in his court robes, his face corroded by marauding dogs, the bone of the jaw protruding nude and white, while my baker asperses soil over him with a flour scoop.

      BERNA STROKED HER cousin’s cheek and told her how fortunate it was she’d come. She’d been about to take her own life.

      ‘How?’ demanded Pogge.

      ‘Thrown myself into the moat.’

      Pogge shook her head. ‘Your moat’s not profound enough for drownage. You’d kill several frogs and break your arm.’

      They disputed the best way a woman should contrive her death. Pogge favoured poison. Berna preferred a tumble from a high window. Pogge said she couldn’t have done it anywise, for suicide was the mortal sin that mightn’t never be absolved, and Berna were certain to go direct to hell, to burn till Judgement Day.

      ‘The King of Heaven will absolve me,’ said Berna. ‘He will perceive the purity of my soul and the sincerity of my ardour. He will see that by forcing me to marry an old man in place of my amour, my father left me no alternative method to preserve my honour. I shall be raised to heaven as a martyr to love.’

      Before Pogge might reply she was arrested by a noise of approaching pigs. The place Berna had chosen was a hollow between two roots that rose higher than their heads, hiding them from most of the forest. They could hear the beasts grunt, step through last year’s dry leaves and dig in the ground with their muzzles. They heard the voice of Hab the pigboy. Pogge lifted her head and looked round.

      ‘Please ne regard these villainous animals while I explain the misery and joy that contest for possession of my heart,’ said Berna.

      ‘I have a despite of pigs. They are large and hairy and have a displeasant odour,’ said Pogge. ‘I beg your pardon. I am yours entirely. Let’s consider your state in a manner proper.’

      ‘How well-tempered you are,’ said Berna. ‘How many times at night I’ve wished you were in bed with me that I might wake you and be solaced of your reason.’

      ‘How old is your affianced?’

      ‘Fifty! Fifty years! As old as papa!’

      ‘Have you met him?’

      ‘He has hunted here. I call him Sir Hennery, because his face is like to it was pecked by chickens.’

      ‘But he isn’t otherwise disfigured.’

      ‘No.’

      ‘He’s of fair height, sound in body.’

      ‘It’s a husband, not a horse! He becomes my master, till the end of his days!’

      ‘Of estate substantial.’

      Berna shrugged. ‘Three manors in Somerset-Somewhereset-Nowhereset.’

      ‘You’d be secure.’

      ‘He has hairs growing out of his nose.’

      ‘Encourage him to pluck them.’

      ‘He’s illiterate, hates music, and considers an evening well spent disputing the best hound to catch a hart in grease.’

      ‘England’s unloving husbands and wives may find relief of matrimony,’ said Pogge. ‘There’s a town in France where so many lay in the street they couldn’t neither bury them like Christians nor dig a pit to hold them all, and they burned them there, in front of the houses they were carried from.’

      ‘Who told you this?’

      ‘A Gascon who came to Bristol with merchandise for my father.’

      ‘I very much doubt the French have been burning people. In general we are too phlegmatic as creatures to burn well. Anyway, it ne troubles me. I’d rather the world perish than that I live without my amour.’

      ‘By “amour”, I suppose you refer to Laurence Haket?’

      ‘Ne speak his name,’ said Berna. ‘It’s discomfortable to me. Say “he” and “him”.’

      ‘Ah. Then I suppose you refer to he-and-him.’

      The church bell rang in the village. ‘Oh, for a priest romantic,’ said Berna, ‘who might say, for example, “Death is sent by Love to make us sensible how few hours remain to he who is desirous of the Rose, once the Rose has flowered.”’ She placed the rose on her lap. ‘Pestilence or no pestilence.’

      ‘To imagine Laurence will rescue you from your future husband will make you suffer more. Laurence is departed and won’t return. You live in a manor in Gloucestershire, not in Paris among the poets.’

      Berna laughed and touched the corners of the book. ‘How measurable you are, dear Pogge. Like the Lover in the book you pass too much time listening to Reason. Why not France? Calais is joined to England now, and Laurence is promised tenure of a grand manor outside the city. Why should he and I not voyage there together,