To Calais, In Ordinary Time. James Meek

all bondmen worthless churls that they ne durst ask for one themselves?

      Will ne looked ever so alone as in church, for Ness ne seemed to mind him, but kept her eyes to the ground and her fingers knit together with a string of beads. The Muchbrooks ne looked at the Quates, and the Quates ne looked at the Muchbrooks, out-take Will, who turned his head her way at the saecula saeculorum.

      After mass the priest led us out of church and downhill. We bore the likenesses of St George, St Andrew and St Michael, and Rob the deacon bore the oaken rood with the likeness of our Maker nailed to it, and Whichday and Cockle and Tom the smith and Bob Woodyer bore the likeness of our Clean Mother in her blue kirtle with her fair white face shined with wax and lambswool and lips hued red. The knaves rattled sheep knuckles in boxwood cans and we sang

       Domine Maria I have in mind

       Whereso I wend

       In well or in woe

       Domine Maria will me defend

       That I ne stand

       For no manner foe

      We came up to the bonefire and the priest bade us kneel and hold up our hands to heaven. The priest stretched his fingers over us and spoke in Latin and then a bead in English asking Christ to ward us of ferly death.

      Then Nack came forward and un-knit the cloth around the horsepanthing and set it on the pole pitched in the middle of the heap of bones. No smith of Outen Green hadn’t made no horsepanthing since the ill crops of the old king’s day, and most of us hadn’t seen one. Tom put a little nail in the horsebone for each soul in Outen Green, edging the eye and nose pits with nail heads as to make it seem the horse were undergirt with iron when it was quick in our fields.

      We tinded clouts soaked in pitch and cast them on the bonefire and it was fired and burned and black smoke ran off the bones. It stank all day and darkened the sky. Evening it dwined to ashes, and though we ne yet knew would Will outgo, the ploughmen set up a board for a bowman-ale in the churchyard, and some of our shepherds came.

      It ne fetched but six shilling for Will’s shrift, and we ne knew would it be spent, for there wasn’t no word of Sir Guy, and none nad seen him. Whichday fetched his pipes and Buck the warrener his gittern and they played Guy Came Out of Warwick, The Maid of Cardiff, Three Strings and a Reed, The Mirthful Sparrow, Green Grow the Rushes, The Fiend and the Gleeman, My Love Yed to Fair Gloucester, The Oak Is Hoar and The Ram Would Have Good Wether. A few maids came by and we hopped with them.

      When the moon was high, Whichday and Will ran and fetched Whichday’s ox and hitched it to a plough and they began to plough the duck pond, saying when they’d ploughed it they’d sow it with duck eggs, and in a fortnight crop baked duck.

      ‘POGGE. POGGE! ARE you asleep?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘I’ll take bread with me, and a veil for my face. And a blanket. It may be necessary to sleep in the forest.’

      ‘You won’t sleep in no forest, for you won’t go nowhere, and on Saturday you’ll be married.’

      ‘Pogge, I have no money. I mayn’t travel without money.’

      ‘All the more reason why I shouldn’t lend you none.’

      ‘One night’s lodging on route, and stabling for Jemsy.’

      ‘Your father’s horse?’

      ‘Two florins should cover it. I’ll repay you double when we’re safe in Calais.’

      ‘The larger part of femininity, if they may not marry him they love, will take the marriage, then try to return to their amour in secret once their social and financial position is secure.’

      ‘Pogge! How can you make such monstrous pronouncements? You evidently consider the larger part of femininity to be a branch of the sorority of prostitutes. A woman who permits a man she ne loves to possess her as a secret route to her real amour? Haven’t sufficient virgins been martyred rather than surrender to such advances?’

      ‘You summon the saints to justify your aversion to marriage, and the poets to justify your passion for the lover who provokes that aversion. You ne permitted me to finish. I spoke of the larger part of femininity. There is another part, whose members will joyfully allow themselves to be stolen from their families by a gallant lover before they may be married to a lubber of their parents’ preference.’

      ‘Yes! That’s I!’

      ‘No, Berna. Laurence hasn’t come to steal you. When he was here I’m sure he played the lover par amour very well. You ne know to whom he played before, nor to whom he plays now.’

      ‘You won’t make me cry, Pogge, although I know you wish it.’

      ‘He hasn’t come to steal you, so you’ve determined to steal yourself, and deliver yourself to him, wherever he is.’

      ‘Wiltshire,’ came Berna’s voice, small and rageous in the darkness.

      ‘I shan’t lend you no florins, but so long as you’re disposed to steal, you may have one of my gold nobles.’

      ‘Where are they?’

      ‘In my purse. Remember, I am measurable.’

      Berna laughed and stretched, holding her arms straight back behind her head and clenching and unclenching her fingers and toes. It was hot and they lay on the bed without covers. ‘I shan’t never let no one measure me,’ she said.

      TODAY I INQUIRED of the prior if he sensed the pestilence were the Deity’s final act with respect to his human creation. Would humanity be extinguished?

      ‘I predict,’ said the prior, ‘that you will perish. So Deuteronomy. And the music will cease, and the candles of the abbey will be extinguished, and its columns ruptured, and the Deity will abolish light, so that were a single member of humanity to survive, he would not possess the means to testify to its ruin.’

      ‘What of the last man?’ I said to the prior. ‘Who will receive his confession?’

      ‘We assume the final human to be male, but man’s was the prime nativity,’ said the prior. ‘Why should man be the last to die? Why should the final human not be female? Why should Adam not perish before Eve, and none remain except Eve for him to confess to? Eve’s was the primal vice, the rapture of the fruit. Were not it just for the last person left on earth, unconfessed, unabsolved, to be female?’

      ‘A terrible solitude for any human,’ I said, ‘to have no society except their conscience.’

      ‘Terrible and anticipated,’ said the prior. ‘Be cognisant that Canterbury determines the situation to demand an exceptional regulation, that in extremis the female may take confession from the male.’

      NB Marc, the Dante by my bed belongs to one Konrad Schadland of Mainz. Do all in your power to return it, with a request that he absolve me.

      IN THE MORNING Will asked his brothers if there’d been word from the manor, and they told him no, he must earn his bread with his back bent like any poor man, for it was a working day.

      He took his weeding bill and stick, went by the back road to the demesne land, whet his bill and set to cropping golds and poppies in Sir Guy’s acres under corn. We saw him there hooded against the sun. He went inch by inch along the rows, set the fork and swung the bill and cropped the weeds one by one, right and steady. Behind him went a heap of small girls who gathered the blossoms that flew of his blade, and two thack-pot knaves to scare the crows. He ne saw nor