(August 1351–October 1357)
In his lifetime the Black Death, a sorcerer travelling from China, had shifted the balance of Christendom and killed half the folk in England. But to Ursula’s Jackie it seemed that nothing new ever happened or ever would. The bell rang and the nuns went into quire. The bell rang and the serfs in the great field paused in their labour and crossed themselves, and then scratched themselves, and then went on working. The little bell rang and Christ was made flesh. One day the thought had risen up in him: Suppose I don’t ring my bell – what then? This thought had come on a summer afternoon when the noise of the grasshoppers was everywhere. For an instant the sun had seemed to smite him with a tenfold heat, he felt himself dissolving like wax, and the butts of the mown grass where he lay pricked him like a thousand daggers. What then? The end of the world, perhaps. The bell silent, Christ not made, the world snapped like a bubble. Perhaps. But also a beating. Sitting up he shook the hair out of his eyes and saw a grasshopper and tore it apart and felt better. The sun was no stronger than before and all round him it was a summer afternoon and the grasshoppers were chirping and the dun horse feeding and everything was as usual.
The willows and alders cast their leaves, the clouds gathered, the earth darkened, the autumn rains began. One morning there would be a great bellowing of beasts. It was Martinmas, when the pigs and cattle were driven to the shed and slaughtered for winter meat. After that it seemed to grow dark very quickly, as though darkness steamed out of the great cauldrons where they made the black-puddings. A frosty day coming in December scratched one’s eyes, the sunlight was so suddenly brilliant. Through Christmas and Epiphany there were sweet dishes, pastes of eggs and figs and ground-almonds that encrusted the spoon and the mixing-bowls. A pittance of unmixed wine made the nuns a little tipsy, they walked more swimmingly and were unwontedly polite, and when they spoke their voices were pitched as though they were just about to sing. This amiability made it difficult to tell them apart. But each face resumed its particular expression, and through February and March he was glad to stay in the kitchen, watching the wind ruffle the pool of rainwater that spread from under the woodhouse door, and eating the chips of dried cod that flew from under the mallet. Round and round went the days like a mill-wheel, and because it was Lent when penances are remembered, on Fridays his mother went barefooted to the cloisters to repeat the penitential psalms and be scourged by the prioress. No one much pitied her, neither did he; and hearing Mabel say that the bishop’s sentence had ordained that the scourgings should continue throughout the year and that only the prioress’s laziness restricted them to Lent he felt defrauded, as though his significance as a nun’s child were belittled.
Being a nun’s child distinguished him from the other children about the place, and even when they taunted him he knew he was more interesting than they, and that whatever future awaited him he would not, like them, live tethered to the sour soil of the manor. In spring, when all young animals play together, he played with them and was their ringleader, but when the days grew hot he left them and went to lie among the rushes, hidden, as he liked to lie. And so it would be full summer again, and he would be a year older, and this summer, surely, he would be old enough to go to Waxelby Fair.
But no summer is so long, so wide, as the summer before it. Time, a river, hollows out its bed and every year the river flows in a narrower channel and flows faster. Jackie was old enough to work now, and Jesse Figg the bailiff set him to weave hurdles or spread dung or keep the cows from straying into the young crops, and Mabel added that a cowherd has time on his hands, time enough to gather the tufts of wool that the sheep leave on brambles. Now, too, there was this new woman, this Pernelle. Sometimes she was a pleasure, for her cloth