‘He has a rash here, too,“ Sister Thomasine said.
From among the little crowd gathering around them a woman with a small girl beside her said, her voice scaling up, “What kind of rash? Plague rash?” She was drawing back even as she asked, shoving the little girl behind her as she went. Nor was she alone. Everyone else was pulling away, too. Only Anne, Mistress Margery, Sister Thomasine and Frevisse stayed where they were around Colyn- Frevisse by plain force of will, not denying to herself her sudden terror-and only Perryn, with his other son and Dickon behind him, started toward them, but Anne cried out, “Stay away, Simon! Don’t come near! There’s Adam and Lucy will need you!” Because if it was plague, then likely it was too late for Colyn or her, but if their father lived, Adam and Lucy would still have someone. If they lived.
Perryn broke stride, struggling between coming on and staying where he was, but managed finally to catch himself back, taking firm hold not only on his feelings but on both boys, to keep them where they were beside him.
Mistress Margery, seeming untouched by the fear around her, said, “Take your tunic off, Colyn.”
Colyn did and stood, naked to his breeks and staring blindly at nothing in front of him, eyes huge with terror, while the herbwife and Sister Thomasine looked at the bright pink-to-red rash now easily seen all over his back and chest and disappearing into the hair behind his ears. There had been no outbreak of the Great Death in this part of Oxfordshire for longer than Colyn had been alive, but all save the very youngest children had heard the thing talked of enough to know what its coming meant. Not simply death-death came often enough to any village to be familiar and accepted-but an ugly death that sometimes took so many in a village there were too few left alive to bury the dead.
Uncertainly Sister Thomasine said, “It doesn’t look like what I’ve heard of the pestilence.”
‘Nay,“ Mistress Margery agreed, loudly enough to be heard across the churchyard. ”This isn’t plague rash.“
Anne sobbed once, softly. Colyn’s shoulders sagged. A shuddering sigh passed across the churchyard and hands moved in the sign of the cross with desperate thankfulness.
‘See,“ Mistress Margery went on, still in a carrying voice. ”It doesn’t have the rosey rings. It isn’t the plague.“
‘But then what is it?“ Anne asked, after all only a little less desperate because whatever it was, her son had it.
Mistress Margery laid hand on Colyn’s forehead. “He’s hot.” She meant by more than already came with the day. “Fevered hot. Feel.”
Using the simplest, surest way to know if there was fever, Anne pressed her lips to Colyn’s forehead in a kiss and drew back with a trembling nod of agreement. “He’s dry-hot. He’s fevered.”
‘Morbilli,“ Sister Thomasine said. Meaning the ”little plague,“ rather than the great one.
‘We call it mesels hereabouts,“ Mistress Margery said, ”but aye, that’s what it is, I think.“
Anne caught Colyn tightly to her, as if that would be enough to keep him safe. Colyn, knowing as well as she did that it would not, began to cry.
Chapter 8
Early as it was, the sunrise light still slanted honey-thick and golden across the goat-cropped grass of the village green, the morning was already heavy with heat, weighing down-along with the village’s unnatural quiet at his back-on Simon as he trudged heavy-legged along his foreyard garden’s path from the gateway to his housedoor. Wearily certain that going farther, even simply into the house, was too much trouble, he slumped down on the bench there with bowed head, hands hanging between his knees, listening to the quiet-no sounds from inside the house, no shifting of cows in the byre, no chickens busy around his feet-and told himself, wearily, not to mind it, that no one was dead, there was no need for mourning.
Yet.
That had been the worst of these four days since manor court-the waiting to see who would die.
Not if but who.
And how many.
Simon forced himself to straighten, dragging his back and then his head up against the tiredness that came from more than having been up all the night keeping watch by Colyn and Lucy and Adam in the church. There were eighteen children sick so far. One child or more from every family with small children in the village. No, twenty-he was forgetting Gilbey’s two boys because they were being kept at home, not with the rest. Gilbey had even ridden to Banbury on Saturday and brought back a doctor to see his, at a fee Simon didn’t care to think about. Sometimes Gilbey looked to have more money than sense, Simon thought bitterly. But then, with all Gilbey had, he could afford to take leave of his senses once in a while.
And sitting thinking about Gilbey was getting nothing done, Simon reminded himself, and there were things that desperately needed doing. Though for his very life Simon couldn’t seem to think of any of them just now and scrubbed at his face with his hands, trying to be more awake, his stubble unfamiliarly harsh. There had been no Saturday bath and shaving this week. He had made do with a swim on Sunday, the stream warm enough for it, when he’d gone round the fields to see how things did, but shaving was too much trouble.
Or maybe it wasn’t, he thought, finding he was scratching where the hairs prickled under his jawline.
Was it only Tuesday?
In those first terrible moments in the churchyard four days ago, mothers had begun to look to their children, harsh with fear as they felt foreheads and searched bodies for the telltale sign of rash. There had been the pink beginnings of it on only Adam and three others there, but Mistress Margery had warned, “Spots are the surest sign but it can first show with no more than a running nose or a cough there’s no reason for, or just in an ill temper because they don’t feel well and don’t yet know why.”
Anne had whispered, “Lucy,” left home with Cisily because she was fretful, and Simon had gone tight-throated with the same fear stark in his wife’s eyes. The last time there had been mesels in the village, Adam had been newborn and not taken them-the very youngest babies never seemed to, Mistress Margery had said, nor those who had had it before-but their Jon, their firstborn, just turned three years old, had sickened, had burned up with fever and died, and Anne had nearly lost her milk with worry and then with grief, and almost they had lost her and Adam, too, and it had taken Mistress Margery more days to bring her back to health than Jon had taken to die.
‘And it’s going to spread,“ Mistress Margery had said in the churchyard. ”Be sure of it. When it reaches one, it’s like to reach all, it spreads so easy and fast, if they’ve been near each other at all of late,“ which they likely had been, always at play together at most days’ ends when their work was done.
In the silence then, with the only sound the whimpering of Emma Millwarde’s baby against her neck, everyone had stood staring at nothing or at their children, facing what was come on them with probably the same thought: How many children would it be this time who didn’t live? Last time it had been three, all well on one day, all dead before a week was gone.
Into that stricken quiet, Sister Thomasine had said, “If so many are going to be ill and badly fevered, might it be well to keep them all together and in the church here in this hot weather?”
The few who heard her-Simon and Anne, Mistress Margery and Dame Frevisse-had momentarily stared blankly at her. Then understanding had bloomed in Mistress Margery’s face and she’d said, “Yes! There’ll be no place stay cooler than the church these hot days.” With its stone walls and thickly thatched roof. “And if they’re kept together, I can see to them far better, all at once, instead of running from village end to village end.” And maybe coming too late, the way it had been during the throat-sickness three winters back, when Mistress Margery had been saving Martin Fisher’s daughter, clearing her throat of the slime that was like to choke her, when word had come that John Gregory’s boy was in like case at the village’s other end but by the time she’d run the length of the village green to reach him, she was too late and he was dead, no fault of hers, just the way it was. She had saved others enough in her time for folk to know she knew her herbs and that there was power in her spells. She had even killed a man once with a spell, but only that once and only to save her own life, nor was she like some healers who only valued their skill for the money it brought them and cared naught about what they did or who they did it to. So folk had listened to her there in the churchyard while she told them why she wanted the sick children kept in the church, and the two nuns and Father Henry had explained to Father Edmund, to have his permission for it.