The Black and the White Read online

  THE BLACK AND THE WHITE

  Alis Hawkins

  This book is dedicated, with great fondness, to the memory of Peter Ralph — gentleman, charcoal burner and friend.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  EPILOGUE

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  February 1349

  I wake to dimness and silence, blinking bleariness from my eyes. In the dim light, I can just make out the turf dome of our collyers’ hut above me.

  Something is not right but I cannot think what. Cannot think at all. My eyes close and I fall back into sleep.

  Coughing wakes me again. The pain of it is like a blade, its edges chipped and jagged, cleaving my chest, tearing up through my gullet. And the very sound — the hack of it — takes me home. Back to our house in Lysington, back to my sweat-soaked bed and my father’s hand holding a cup of water. The memory rips a greater pain through me, the pain of pestilence, deaths, burials.

  My father’s hand held the cup because my mother is dead. They are all dead. My family. All dead.

  A cold terror raises the flesh on my scalp. I was dead, too.

  Master William leant over me, I remember him doing it — he anointed my head and my hands and my feet with holy oil, prepared me for death.

  Hoc est corpus meum — this is my body.

  The dryness of the host on my hot tongue. The sting of the wine in my throat.

  I closed my eyes and died in our house at Lysington. Is this not our hut, then? Is it a chamber of Purgatory?

  I lie still, my heart skittering in my chest, my fists clenched, barely able to breathe. Do the dead breathe? Do the hearts of the dead beat still? And then the truth sweeps through me like an inrushing tide of relief. I dreamed it all. The devil sent lifelike visions of death and grief into my dreams but I have not moved from the hut, from the forest. I have been here all along. Nobody is dead. They are all still there, waiting for us. My mother might, even now, be birthing the child who kept her from the forest.

  The candle gutters, a low stub in a pool of wax and I realise that this is what troubled me when I first woke — the candle. Why has it been burning while I slept? And no workaday tallow candle, either. It is sturdy wax and, even burned to a nub, I know that I would need both hands to compass it around. A church candle. But how can that be?

  I try to raise myself and something tumbles to the floor. As I lean on one elbow to see what it is, my wits spin in my head. I close my eyes until everything comes to rest. Sitting up has caused my heart to thud heavily in my chest and, with each beat, I repeat a litany of relief. ‘Nobody’s dead. Nobody’s dead. It was a dream. Nobody’s dead.’

  The spinning finally ceases and I lean over a second time to see what has fallen to the floor. There, lying on the strewn bracken, is my father’s little wooden statue: his patron saint — Saint Cynryth — the White Maiden.

  Something cold chills my skin. In my dream, I grasped that same little image in my hands as I sank towards death. The dream-shade of Master William took the saint from my fingers and handed her to my father. Such a dream…

  What is it that makes me glance across at the hut’s other bed, the better, roundwood- framed one that my mother sleeps in when she comes with us? Why am I not content to close my eyes and sleep again, comforted that all is well, that my mother is safe at home? What draws my eyes, I cannot say but, when I look, there he is. My father.

  No, that cannot be right. If I am in the hut, he should be outside. Always, one of us is on the hearth, minding the coaling pit lest the stack shift and turn bonfire. What is he doing in here with me, sleeping the time away?

  I half-rise, half-roll from the pallet and kneel on the floor, weak and trembling. Though something in me wants to turn away, I make myself look at my father. Against his usual tight-curled habit, he is on his back, nose pointing up. His mouth is open a finger-width but no air whistles in and out. I touch trembling fingers to his forehead. He is cold.

  Dead, then.

  I put my hands over my ears, but the demon-voice is inside my head.

  Happy now? Wished him dead often enough, didn’t you?

  No! I shake my head. My wits are muddled. He cannot be dead. No one is dead. It was a dream. If he is cold, it is just the winter air.

  Look, then, the voice goads, look and see if he isn’t dead — quick-like, in his sleep, like you always saw him in your mind.

  ‘No! No, no!’

  No one knows those thoughts. I have always pushed them down. Deep down. How can any demon know them?

  I stare at my father’s face. Is he truly dead?

  My hand unsteady, I reach towards his chin and pull the blanket back.

  ‘Mother of God!’

  Beneath the pale wool, my father has sewn himself into his shroud. Or rather, half-sewn. The needle he used is thrust through the shroud at the point where he stopped. The shroud is a half-sheet’s width, its edges doubled into a fold and closed with clumsy stitches. My eyes trace the lumpy seam he has made from toes to breastbone.

  That half-sheet tells me that I dreamed no dream, that everything I remembered when I woke is true. For I watched him wrap the other half about the bodies of my mother and my newborn sister.

  The pestilence came and killed our village. My mother and her child are dead. My brother and his wife and children are dead. All dead. Along with more than half the people I have ever known.

  I fall back on my pallet and find that there are no tears left in me. When the pestilence came, I knew it would decide things between us. If I was pest-struck, then my fate was death and my father would be proved right. If I watched him die, it would mean that I had not been sinful in defying him.

  After my mother died, I fell into a cough-racked fever and all seemed settled. My father tended me and, when Master William gave me the last rites, I repented of my rebelliousness and made my peace with God.

  But, now, I am alive and my father is dead.

  I push myself to my feet and breathe awhile, hands gripping my trembling thighs. When my breath calms, I steady myself with one hand on the roundwood door-frame and pull aside the wadded sacking that hangs there. The light squints my eyes and I raise a forearm to ward off the glare.

  White. The world is white with snow.

  I turn back for a blanket and my head spins with the sudden movement. How long is it since I ate anything but the sacrament? I was fevered and coughing blood a whole day and a night before Master William came to give me the last eucharist; how long did I lie in that death-like sleep? Long enough for my father to bring me here before he sickened and died. Or did he come, already sick, knowing he would die, wanting to die here?

  Yes, that would be like him.

  In the chill silence that snow always brings, I make my way on shaking shanks across the charcoal hearth, stopping after a few steps to slow the sudde
n galloping of my heart and pull the slipping blanket more closely about me. I hang my head and breathe deep and, as I do so, I see that the russet of my tunic is spattered with a darker brown. I pick at the spots with a fingernail and recall a day of racking coughs, the taste of blood in my mouth, the anointing. Only Master William came to give me the death rites, no white-robed boys, no neighbours with prayers to speed my soul. The pestilence has made strangers of us all.

  I look about me. Nothing stirs. I might be the only living thing in a barren, white world. The trees are still, their branches stiff with snow. Not a solitary bird calls in the frozen air. A shiver of terror goes through me. Never in my life have I been all alone. Not here. Not in the village. Always, there have been folk about me.

  On the other side of the clearing is our cart. The sight of it almost brings me to my knees with relief. I was almost ready to believe that my father and I had come here on the wings of angels or dragged by demons. But no, it seems that my father brought us here in the usual way.

  And, now that he is dead, I may go back to Lysington, back the village, to our manor. My father might have preferred to live and die here, but the forest is not my heart’s home as it was his. He might have preferred to turn his back on our land and make our family’s living here in the King’s Dene Forest, charring wood for coal, but I was always dragged here unwillingly.

  But, if I am to go home, I need our mare for I am in no state to walk so far. I turn and look around the hearth but there is neither hide nor hair of her to be seen, not so much as a hoofprint in the snow. Did my father just unhitch her and let her go after bringing me here? The cart does not look abandoned, the shafts are propped to keep it level and the canvas is tied down. What else did my father think fit to haul into the forest along with his dying son? I shuffle around to the back of the cart and untie the canvas. Then, a corner clasped in both trembling hands, I peel the snowy pelt towards the shafts, until the whole freight is revealed.

  I stand and stare without understanding. Lying beneath the canvas, is every moveable thing from our house in the village. Trestles and board, flour chest, clothes press, our familiar copper pans and earthen pots, my mother’s bread trough, the small indoor water butt, a bench and three stools. A space in the middle shows where the wool-stuffed pallet lay, with me on top.

  What was in my father’s head that he would bring everything here? Were his wits addled by the pestilence? Or does this mean there is no village to go back to — that every soul in Lysington is dead?

  I stand there, trying to master the fear that threatens to overwhelm me.

  No. They cannot all be dead, surely? Elsewhere, the pestilence has always left folk, there are always some who survive. And yet, the silence that surrounds me is empty of life. Even the flat grey sky seems immovable, as if it has been decreed that the sun will never be seen again, nor any blue of the heavens.

  I lean against the cart and grip the wicker-work of its side. Like all charcoal carts it is long and light, built for the sacks of charcoal we haul — four feet high and almost as much in girth but light enough for a woman to lift. The solidity of the whip-weave, its familiar feel, calms me. Something in the world is still as it was.

  As my heart slows, I feel a gnawing in my belly. Without the mare I must walk home, but I cannot do that yet, starved as I am. I must eat.

  Inside the flour chest I find a few bushels of oats, along with bags of beans and peas. Making a pottage is surely not beyond me — I have seen my mother do it often enough. Trembling from weakness and cold, I clear away the snow and lay a fire. I am glad of the candle still flickering at wick-end in the hut, for the ember-basket holds nothing but cold, black coals.

  With a few pulls of dead grass from the hut’s turf-thatch and a frond of dry bracken from the floor, the fire is easily started. While it catches and begins to flame around the kindling, I fetch logs from the stacks of cordwood at the edge of the clearing. My father always had the makings of the next coaling pit to hand and I am grateful for that now. I will not have to go searching for firewood while I recover my strength.

  But I will have to fetch water for my pottage. The water butt on the cart is empty. Will my legs carry me to the well? But if they will not, now, then they may never — I must feed myself. And yet, I do not want to leave the hearth, the hut. Not alone.

  I look about me, open my mouth to shout into the forest, then shut it again. I am alone, with all my worldly goods. Who knows who might come? The pestilence has made some men desperate.

  I cross myself, take the bucket from the cart and set off for the well.

  I shuffle along, bucket in hand, like an old man, keeping to the upside of the path, afraid that, weak as I am, I might miss my footing and slither down the bank to fetch up against a tree.

  My breathing is loud in the stillness and I walk through a cloud of my own misted breath. Droplets form on the edge of my hood and on my eyelashes, making my eyes feel wet. One hand frozen to the bucket’s rope handle, I put the fingers of my other hand in my arm-pit to keep them warm.

  Less than halfway to the well, I stop to catch my breath and still the trembling in my legs. Leaning against a tree, I look up, searching the treetops for the smoke that will tell me another collyer is tending a pit nearby. Sometimes, as we make our way back to the charcoal hearth from Lysington, with the hills of the Dene spread out in front of us, it seems that the whole forest is smouldering — the smoke from a thousand coaling-pits rising above the trees. Coaling is the life of the forest and the smoke of the craft is its out-breath. The King knows that, and so do his ministers. The Dene is the forge for the King’s war. Without our coal there would be no smelting of the forest’s iron, and without iron there would be no armour, no horseshoes, no swords, no arrow-heads for our archers, no cartwheel rims for the long roads of France.

  Carefully, I turn a full circle on the snow-blanketed path but there is not a single wisp of smoke in the clear, cold air above the trees. Are there no pits burning in the forest now — has every collyer gone home or fallen to the pestilence?

  The thought that I might be alone, at the mercy of the Dene’s fairies, sends a cold terror through my veins. My skin crawls and I can almost feel the Fair Folk watching me from their secret hiding places in the trees. How will I defend myself, alone as I am? I do not even possess a bow.

  Suddenly, I realise that I have left my fire untended. It could be put out in a heartbeat with an armful of snow. I switch the bucket from cold hand to warm and set off again, ignoring the pain in my toes from the snow. After the jut of hillside that separates our hearth from the well, the path broadens out and I am in less danger of going arse-over-tip down the hillside. I quicken my pace and lift my eyes from to my feet to the well, wondering whether I will have to break thick ice to fill the bucket.

  But, when I see what is there, my feet stop walking.

  CHAPTER 2

  At the right hand side of the well’s wide cistern, in a broad cleft in the snow-hung rock, stands a woman. She seems almost to be made of snow for she is dressed in a white kirtle and a long, white cloak. A greeting rises to my lips but, as soon as I draw breath, I know better than to give it voice. This woman is not mortal.

  I set the bucket down on the snow and move towards her. If she stood on the ground instead of in the rock-fold, she would scarcely reach above the buckle of my belt; only my plague-befuddled wits could ever have taken her — even for an instant — for a living woman.

  I stop a pace or two in front of her. She is beautiful; far more beautiful than the blue-clad Mother of God who stands in our church. But this carved woman is not serene like the Virgin; she seems more full of passion and one hand reaches out to me as if she is saying, ‘Wait, I’m coming’. Or, perhaps, ‘No, don’t go’.

  And, though she is no more than an image made of wood, I know her. She is far more lovely and more lifelike than the clumsy little figure which lay on my chest as I slept in the hut but, still, this is the same woman. This is my father’s beloved
saint — Cynryth, the White Maiden.

  I move forward until I am no more than an arm’s length away from her. Now, I can see the smallest details of her beauty. Her hair, not quite covered by her head cloth, is the colour of a newly-opened chestnut, her lips cherry-red. The braiding around the neck of her white gown is picked out in yellow, like the little daffodils that grow on the slopes of the Dene in spring, and her eyes are the blue of speedwells.

  Leaning towards the rock, I put my cold hand to her outstretched fingers.

  They are warm to the touch

  My father’s devotion to Saint Cynryth began just after Easter in my ninth year when a peddler, drawn off his customary track by some wandering inclination, found himself at our hearth.

  Like most of his kind, he was a quick judge of men and, offered a stool and a bite of bread and cheese, he was soon telling my father tales of the ancient greenwood of England. And the sweetest, saddest tale of all was of the White Maiden of the well, Saint Cynryth. It was the tale of a headstrong girl who, deceived in love and almost taken to the Otherworld by a wandering fairy, resolved to take no man as a husband but to wed herself to Christ and live a solitary life in the forest.

  As the peddler told his story, I believe the White Maiden stole my father’s heart, right there on our hearth. I know it did not matter a jot to him that our parson, Master William, had no knowledge of a saint called Cynryth.

  ‘Salster is distant from here,’ he would point out whenever the parson tried to dissuade him from his devotion to such an uncertain figure. ‘Even you, Master William, who have studied at Oxford, you have never been to Salster so you have not seen her shrine.’

  According to the peddler, Saint Cynryth’s name amongst the common people — the White Maiden of the Well — had been given to her long after her death.

  ‘In later times,’ he told us, ‘when her name no longer came readily to people’s minds and tongues, a barren woman had a vision at the well the saint had drunk from — a vision of a maiden, all in white, carrying a newborn child. And, that very night, the woman conceived a son.