Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [363]
Her next action was stranger still.
Pointing to the crumbling wall she told her two puzzled stepsons:
“Take stones from there and place them round the house.”
And she went to a point fifty yards from the building and paced out a circle round the sheep house, pausing every five paces to make a mark in the ground where she wanted them to put a stone.
“But why?” they asked.
“I will show you,” she promised; and since they were used to obeying her, they did as she had said.
By late afternoon there was a circle of sixty-three stones around the house.
The building itself was adequate: one end was in a good state; the roof was easily repaired; their quarters were spacious and airy. But there was one problem.
“There’s no water here,” they complained.
And now for the first time Agnes smiled in triumph.
“Yes there is.” And taking a wooden pail with her she led them out of the hollow and strode a quarter of a mile across the open high ground. “There,” she said.
It was a dew pond. No sheep had used it for years now, and it was a generation since the bottom had last been re-sealed; but there was still a layer of water, about a foot deep in the centre; and it was clean.
“That is our water,” she declared.
When they returned, she pointed to the ring of stones.
“The stones will protect us,” she explained, “because they are our barrier: nothing – no stranger and no living animal – is to come inside the circle.” And now she told them why she had insisted that they bring with them not only John’s longbow, but also the little bows and slings he had made for the children, with which they often hunted birds.
“If anything comes near we’ll drive it away with stones from the slings; if that doesn’t work, we’ll kill it with the arrows,” she announced.
“How will we know if anything’s coming?”
“We’ll keep watch,” she answered simply. “Night and day.”
John looked at her curiously.
“And what if people come?”
“They must not enter the circle,” she replied, “Or I’ll shoot them.”
As the family stared at her in astonishment, they knew that she meant it.
“It is necessary,” she stated with a fiery determination, and they knew better than to argue.
The truth was that Agnes Mason hardly knew what she was doing herself.
When the knight had spoken of the plague’s approach at Avonsford, and while the villagers had scoffed, she had thought long and hard about the matter. For unlike them, she not only believed the knight, but she saw why the plague was coming, too. And it was this terrible knowledge, which she kept to herself, that made her consider all the more carefully, searching in her mind for clues as to what she should do. The mind of Agnes Mason, though she could not read and write, was stored with a remarkable stock of information. There was the knowledge her mother had carefully handed on to her – not only about the care of her little household but a huge store of folklore and herbal cures; there were the strange if garbled accounts her father had given her about his journeys with old King Edward to Wales and Gascony. All these she remembered perfectly: for ever since childhood, she had had an extraordinary ability to memorise. Her brothers and sisters used to say: “Ask Agnes. She never forgets anything.” But above all, it was her vivid imagination that had been filled almost entirely from a single source: the Bible, as related to her by the vicars of Avonsford in their perfunctory sermons or, more important, the public preachings of the friars when they drew their audiences to them in the market place or by the roadside. The images they evoked coloured all her thoughts. The words they spoke, some terrible, others comforting – these were the mighty truths that echoed in her mind.
She had thought hard.
And certain things she knew. She knew this plague was sent by God, as a punishment for men’s sins; when she was still a child,