Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [364]
“But if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord – cursed shalt thou be in the city and in the field. The Lord shall send upon thee cursing because of the wickedness of thy doings. The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption and a fever, and an inflammation and an extreme burning, and with mildew, and madness and blindness, and with a sore botch that cannot be healed . . .”
The list of terrors had been endless, and the piercing eyes of the old man had seemed to hypnotise her. And now the divine punishment had come. This must be the plague the knight spoke of.
Was there no hope? She knew that the villagers of Avonsford, though not especially wicked, were unlikely to escape God’s wrath. But surely her own sins, and certainly those of her three children, were not so great? Good men in the past, men like Noah, had been shown how to escape these terrible visitations: she cudgelled her brains for some information that might save her children.
At last she thought she had it.
“It’s the animals that spread the plague,” she announced.
There were few, if any, at Sarum who would have agreed with her. From the knight down to the humblest cottager, they believed that sickness passed either by contact with humans who were infected, or by inhaling evil vapours which were carried by the wind and rain. But Agnes alone had decided otherwise. For she remembered another sermon she had heard, twenty years before, from a thin, pale Dominican friar with a cold, hard voice who had preached on the Wilton road. He had warned them:
“Evil is all around you. The world is unclean.” And quoting from the book of Leviticus he had declared: “The coney and the hare, because they chew the cud but divide not the hoof, they are both unclean. Of their flesh shall ye not eat and their carcase shall ye not touch. And the owl and the cuckoo and the bat; also the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the ferret and the lizard, the weasel and the mouse all these shall be abominations unto you. Touch these,” he cried, “and you shall be defiled.”
Few people took much notice, but Agnes remembered. The more she thought about it, the more she believed this might be the means by which God would spread His righteous rage.
And gradually her plan had begun to form.
“We must go away from the village,” she urged. “Away from contact with unclean animals, like the preacher said. We must live apart until this plague has passed.”
“How?” the two brothers had demanded.
And then her inspiration had come, and she had declared:
“I know a place.”
For the rolling, high ground, bare and uninviting, was in some places empty of man and beasts. It’s as bare as the sea, she thought. The more she considered the great chalky wastes, open only to the sky, the more she grew certain that this was the region that God had prepared for them.
“We’ll go up to the high ground to escape the plague,” she said. “We’ll be safe up there.”
At first they had not wanted to go. But she had been persistent. “Think of our children,” she cried – for she always called them ‘our’ children, in the same way that her stepsons referred to her as ‘our’ mother. “Will you leave them to the plague?” And at last, as they always did, John and Nicholas gave in to her determined will.
But now that she had led them on the journey to the high ground, she realised that her problems had only just begun. For having got them to go, how would she keep them there?
She did not know. For years, Agnes had taught herself to be strong. The brothers relied on her and she encouraged this, for if she could not keep her two quiet stepsons at home, how would her children be fed? With her own plain, strong looks