To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek

and God for his answer shows him the night sky and the stars. Look, you can see it, the dark hue of the sky and the fires of the stars within. And God asks Abraham if he may tell how many stars there are, and Abraham mayn’t; and God tells him his seed will be such on earth, like stars, more than can be told. Do you see what it tokens?’

      The bowmen were still.

      ‘The meaning is that when the Lord would be wreaked on mankind for the wrongs we do, he won’t kill all. He lets enough folk live to seed the world again. Be there eight folk left on one bare ship when all the leave are drenched to death, it were enough, and the children of the eight and their children’s children and all their kin afterwards will be untold as the stars in heaven. So owes it to be with the pestilence. Let the Lord slay folk in their thousands on thousands; be a handful left, or only two, like to Adam and Eve, they might spread mankind again, after the pestilence is spent.’

      Longfreke said God must be more angry than in Noah’s time, for he pined them with pestilence, not flood; and what kind of ship might keep a good man from that evil?

      ‘On the road, each must build a ship out of rue for his own done wrongs,’ said Thomas, ‘which is a better ship than Noah’s, for Noah’s ship fared safe but on this world’s seas, while the ship man makes of the beams hewn of his own heart’s wood bears him safe from this world into the next.’

      The pestilence was a priest’s tale, said Sweetmouth. Even were it true, he said, Thomas’s read was horse-dung. The good of Noah’s ship was that all his kin was in it, and if they overlived the flood, they overlived together, and if they died and their ghosts went to the Lord’s house, their ghosts went together. Let the wayfarer make of his heart the cleanest ship there was, he was alone in it, and his dearest weren’t with him. They might be drenched while he yet float, and he mightn’t know.

      Now Thomas was still, and sorrowful again. He was about to speak when Hayne and Hornstrake came from the church with the infirmarer, a weary monk with glass yolks fastened to his eyes on hide string. Hayne bade the other bowmen go to the infirmary, and hear what the infirmarer would tell them, for he’d speak with Thomas alone.

      SWEETMOUTH’S FACILE DESTRUCTION of my argument humiliated me. It was not my intention to deliver a sermon. I desired to demonstrate to my new companions an incidental mastery of priestly matters, even though I stated to them candidly that I was not a priest; a point I repeated when Hayne and I sat adjacent in the church porch, his gigantic head inclined and mine facing up.

      Among the archers, said Hayne, were obstinate spirits who had not attended confession for many years, yet whose spirits were gravid with crime. The conditions of our itinerary were such, the moment of mortality so unpredictable, that one of our party might perish when we were a considerable distance from a church. It was important to him, he said, that the archers under his command confess before they were exterminated. He made this lamentable prediction with such tranquillity – ‘before we be quelled’ was the English expression he used, a very severe form – that I had to verify he referred to the plague. He did; I apprehend that he considers the archers’ deaths from the pestilence, and mine, to be quite inevitable.

      I reminded him that I lack the clavial power to absolve an individual of crimes. I can only obtain an account of those crimes, to adduce a person’s conscience out into the light, to probe and ameliorate it till it attains a state acceptable to God. Perfect contrition, I explained, was visible to the Deity, but the penitent could not assess his contrition for himself. He required the assistance of another, i.e. the confessor.

      Concerning crime, I said, I had expected him to make some reference to the archers’ captive, de Goincourt, whose presence among them under duress perturbed me. I said I had originally intended to commence my penitentiary work by attending to her confession.

      Hayne advised me that Softly, de Goincourt’s custodian – he referred to her as Softly’s possession – was not convinced of my bona fides, and any attempt to converse with her prematurely would be fatal.

      Would he not protect me? I inquired. He did not respond. This was characteristic, I discovered. Colloquium with Hayne cannot consist of question and response; all one can do is to move into proximity with him and speak. Statements may issue from his lips, or not; when they do, they may appear to be responses, or not.

      In terms of the events of Mantes, two years previously, said Hayne, he had not been in the vicinity of the house from which de Goincourt (the archers refer to her as ‘Cess’) was abducted, and precise details of what occurred might only be obtained from the archers directly responsible. Certainly Softly had been involved, and certainly none had disputed his control over her person since.

      As an account of what occurred, this is evidently unsatisfactory. Yet as frequently as he failed to respond to my interrogation, he anticipated a question I had not articulated. It had been his intention since the company’s foundation, he said, to select such archers as would benefit from maximum liberty to act in accordance with their consciences. Even though matters had not evolved as he desired, he could not now restrict those liberties, or dissolve the company, without assisting their evasion of the just retribution towards which their actions inevitably led.

      ‘And Will Quate?’ I inquired.

      Here Hayne did respond. He turned his eyes to me; and his attention was so much more terrible than being ignored by him that I regretted my question. He said only that he had provided Quate with the necessary terms on which to base his decision to join the company.

      I remain convinced that Quate’s conscription disturbs him.

      Hayne said that responsibility for the company’s actions were ultimately his; yet this did not absolve the archers of culpability for what they did.

      I trembled. In his crude English diction he had enunciated, unconsciously, the precise paradox that led to my rejection by the magisters of Paris after their initial audit of my capabilities. Requested by them to discuss the contradiction between God’s omniscient omnipotence and man’s liberty of action, I was expected to summarise and comment on the perspectives of Augustine, Aquinas and Boethius. In place of this I questioned, and speculated, and advanced my own peurile ideas. Accordingly I was not admitted to the faculty.

      Marc, in privileging you with the occupation of copyist, and you, Judith, with the occupation of domestic servant, I desired not only to alleviate tedious labour, but to create in our common domicile a miniature form of the scholarly paradise, university, from which my mistakes excluded me. I expected you to alternate between labour and academic discourse to my benefit. I have confessed as much to you previously. I am impelled at this hour, however, to confess a novelty, that in attracting you to my service there was a third factor, your affection towards each other. I confess that I envied it. I could not acquire that love for myself, but I desired to contain it, as a bottle may not imbibe wine, but must satisfy itself with preventing its escape, and protecting it from corruption.

      THE SICKHOUSE STOOD east of the church. In the sickhouse yard, twenty feet from the door, stood a wicker stall with a roof of rough cloth. The stall had four openings, one on each side. None might go in the sickhouse, said the infirmarer, but that they go through the stall first, to be undersought for sickness.

      Afterwards they might come out three ways – one door to the sickhouse, if they might be helped; another door to go again whence they’d come, if they were heal; and the third door for those too far gone to be helped by any doctor.

      ‘What owe those unhappy dogs to do?’ asked Longfreke.

      ‘Seek a priest,’ the infirmarer said, ‘or a friend or kin to comfort them, or at worst a lonely stead where they ne have none near to spread the pest further.’

      Longfreke asked how long the stall had stood, and the answer came, a fortnight.

      ‘Have we missed news?’ said Longfreke. ‘Has the pest reached England?’

      ‘It