Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [374]
He did not try to move from where he was; even if he had wanted to, he did not think he could have made it down the deep spiral stairs. He tried to drink only a little ale at a time, realising that he might need to conserve his supply of liquid.
By the afternoon the agonising pains had spread to his groin as well. He wanted to weep, but his body refused him even that relief.
He spent another night alone, while the plague continued remorselessly to take over his body.
By the following dawn, he knew he would not survive. He remembered the wretched man he had seen in his last extremities, stretched on the tomb below, and the grotesque, rotting corpses he had seen carried through the streets. He had no wish to be reduced to that final, loathsome state.
Painfully he dragged himself to the edge of the parapet. The city was gradually stirring below.
He gazed out, over the sweeping ridges to the north, and as he did so, he was vaguely aware of a tiny stone face, in a niche in the masonry a few feet to his right, gazing in the same direction.
For an hour he remained there. Three times he was forced by the pain to cry out.
Then he saw the figure of Adam in his broad belt walking jauntily through the close. He watched him until he had gone out, past the belfry and on through the gate into the town beyond.
Only when he could see the strange fellow no longer did he drag himself to the parapet and launch himself, with a huge effort, as far out into the air as he could go.
Gilbert de Godefroi forgot entirely about the Mason family and the sheep house. Half of Avonsford had died.
He himself sat, day after day, in the hall of the old manor. Often he would pick up the poem of Sir Orfeo and read it to himself while his eyes filled with tears as he thought of his own vanished wife.
Each day he waited, too, for news of his son.
For two weeks, none came.
Agnes Mason and the family remained on the high ground for a total of six weeks.
For Agnes, the week after Nicholas’s last visit was the worst.
On the second day when he did not appear, all the family knew what it must mean. John said nothing, but she knew what he was thinking – she had been thinking the same thought herself. For each time he appeared, still healthy, after she first turned him away she had known with greater certainty: he was not contagious when I refused to let him in – if he catches the plague now, it will be my fault. Now, day after day, she prayed that he would come again, and each day, John’s sullen silence was worse than a hundred accusations.
There was another problem too. She had chosen the deserted spot so well that no one ever came there, and as the weeks passed it was impossible to know whether it was safe to leave or not.
A month passed. Their food ran low; worse, the weather was so dry that the dew pond became almost empty, with only a small chalky puddle at the centre.
“One more day and we shall have to leave,” John stated, and she could not deny it.
But that night it rained, and the next morning the whole family walked over to the dew pond and found a fresh supply of clear, clean water.
They held out for two more weeks, living off grain and water. A kind of lethargy descended upon them. They walked slowly, like people in a dream. Each day the bare ground around the circle of stones was empty and there was nothing to do but watch the clouds.
It was a morning in mid-September when, at last, Agnes turned to John and stated:
“I can’t go on any more.”
It was her first and only sign of weakness. When she said it, she wanted to break down and cry. But she could not.
An hour later, taking an almost empty cart with them, the bedraggled little party slowly made their way across to the edge of the valley.
And when they came down into Avonsford, they discovered that in their absence, the world had changed.
1382
When Edward Wilson looked back, he could not deny that it was old Walter who had changed the family’s destiny.
How fortune’s wheel had turned: what a tale of triumph it was. And of vengeance.
What a pair