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1349. The little girl’s wild sobs and hiccups filled the room even though she had hidden her face in Elenor’s lap to muffle them in the thick woollen fabric of her skirts. She had run back into the manor house from the village, tears already streaming down her face, and flown straight into Elenor’s arms in the solar.
Elenor stroked the girl’s hair and shoulders, as she had done many times in the past, sorrowful months. Elenor, Elenor’s granddaughter. Nora. “Ellie is a baby’s name,” Nora had declared, only a few weeks before the plague had reached the village. Just as Elenor had decided for herself as she and Thomas departed from Paris so many years ago, she recalled, with a stab of her heart and a prickling in her eyes. Poor Nora. Aside from Elenor herself, Nora was the last of their family, the only one to be spared by the plague. One day Nora would carry the lines of Ramsay and Thornham forward into the future alone, as Elenor had done. A heavy burden for Elenor’s namesake, just as it had been for Elenor.
But Nora’s tears, Elenor guessed as she waited for the girl to quiet, were not the same tears they had shared in the past few months. Nora’s mother and father, Elenor’s daughter and son-in-law, and Nora’s brother and small sister, along with so many villagers of Ramsay and Thornham, and men, women, and children all over Christendom, had sickened suddenly the previous autumn, and died coughing blood, and been hastily buried. Matilda, John, and their children lay next to Thomas under graven slabs in the church of Ramsay, the villagers unnamed in a long trench, but surely, no matter their manner of burial, they were all equally beloved to God.
“Nana?” Nora sat up slowly and scrubbed at her eyes and nose. “I heard a story in the village,” she said, taking hold of Elenor’s overskirt and twisting the fabric in her hands. “At the church.”
Elenor’s heart clenched at the pinched look on Nora’s face. She drew Nora close beside her on the bed and grasped Nora’s hands where they were worrying her skirt. “Tell me,” she said.
Nora drew a long breath. “Three knights are hunting in a forest. They are brave and strong and handsome, dressed in mail and bright surcoats and hose. They come around a corner, and in their path they see three dead men.” Nora faltered and shuddered. “Their flesh is dripping from their bones, and their naked teeth are grinning, and there are worms coming out of their eyes.”
“The knights stop in horror. They dismount their horses and approach the dead men. ‘I am afraid,’ the first knight says. ‘Oh, what do I see,’ says the second. ‘I think these are three devils,’ says the third. And the dead men reply: ‘I was a king,’ says the first. ‘I was a fair lady,’ says the second, ‘And I a bishop,’ says the third. ‘Look upon us, and by God’s love repent, for so you will also be’.” Nora’s eyes swam with tears once again.
“Was that all?” Elenor prompted, holding Nora even closer with a flicker of protective anger. “Who told you the story?”
“It was Father Matthew.” Nora’s chin quivered and her tears spilled over. “He said that the dead men and the dead lady came from purgatory, and that we all go to purgatory in chains when we die, unless we pray and fast and repent.”
Doomsdayers. Elenor thought suddenly of her childhood name for Brother Paul and his followers. The acts of penance that had so terrified her as a girl seemed mild and harmless now. Rumours had reached Ramsay weeks ago of the flagellants in France and the Rhineland, who struck themselves with whips studded with jagged pieces of metal and pulled the shards from their flesh, seeking to appease God and lift the plague through blood and pain. It seemed that some also still preached God’s wrath closer to home.
“Are there worms coming out of Mama and Father and Robert and Guillemette’s eyes?” Tears streamed down Nora’s face again as she named her parents and brother and sister. “I don’t want,” she hiccuped, “I don’t want to see them again, not like that.” She shrank into Elenor’s lap, shuddering.
Elenor fought back her own tears. “I know the story,” she said, clearing her throat. “The Three Living and the Three Dead. It is an old story, meant to terrify you into repentance.”
“What if I see Mama and Father in the forest?” Nora said into Elenor’s skirts. “What if I haven’t repented enough?”
Elenor searched for the right words to calm Nora’s fears. “The story isn’t true, Nora. God would not allow anyone to return from purgatory to haunt you. Father Matthew believes that God is wrathful and vengeful. But not everyone believes as he does. Let me tell you a different story, a true story about love and mercy.”
Elenor stood on legs that were a little stiffer and less certain with each passing year, and crossed the solar to the big chest that had been there as long as she could remember. The heavy lid creaked as Nora helped her lift it, and the sharp, musty smell of the interior enveloped them both. Tucked away under the dresses and bedclothes were two little books, which Elenor drew out. Then she shifted the clothing and reached down further to find the coarse brown robes and heavy cloaks that were folded at the bottom.
Elenor had told the story of her pilgrimage with Thomas many times over the years, in whole or in part, to many people, but she tried to make it new somehow every time she told it. How to tell it now to comfort Nora, and perhaps find some comfort for herself, too? She opened one of the books. It was not the book of the works of Bernard of Cluny that Nora had bought for Thomas in Chartres, but a book of hours they had chosen together in London on their return journey. It had also been a plain book, but in the years that followed Elenor had decorated it, filling its initials and rubrics with snatches of life in Ramsay and her memories of what she had seen on the road to Santiago.
Elenor smoothed the pages of the frontispiece, where she had drawn herself and Thomas surrounded by their companions on the journey: Brother Ambrose and Etienne; Marthe with Pipeau slung on her back, holding Guillemette close; Martin and Fra Pietro, and the brigata in a river with their skirts hiked up around their knees. Thomas had watched her draw, sharpening her quills and charcoal when she needed, and carefully brushing in washes of colour where she directed, his big hands shaking in concentration. She took a moment to hope that the prayers copied into the book, and recited aloud from it so many times, had blessed their friends.
Elenor laid the book across Nora’s lap and began. “Long ago, in the years after the Saracens took Acre, and when many people feared that the world was ending just as they do today because of the plague, the priest of Ramsay, not Father Matthew, or Father James, but Father Gregory, who held the parish long before you were born, sent two young people, Elenor, who was only a few years older than you are now, and Thomas, her betrothed, on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.”
The words flowed out as Elenor told Nora about the fear and sadness that had gripped Ramsay even after Thomas and his men returned from France and the Holy Land, and Father Gregory’s moment of inspiration. She shook out the heavy pilgrim robes and cloaks for Nora to touch and examine, and showed her the scallop shells Thomas had bought them at the market stalls in Santiago as she and the sins of Ramsay were carried through the church in the crowd. She told Nora about Master Roger and Brother Ambrose and Etienne and the sisters of Misericordia and the many works they dedicated to God; about the courage of Marthe and her children, and the fear and repentance of Melinda. She spoke of Fra Pietro and his quiet death, and Thomas leading his troop of pilgrims not into battle but safely into Spain.
“And so,” Elenor concluded, “just as there were many roads for pilgrims to follow to Santiago, Elenor and Thomas learned that there are many good men and women in the world, and just as many roads to God. Some Christians hope to avoid the torments of hell through penance on earth, and they take comfort in pain. Some, like Etienne, seek knowledge and question the Church in order to better understand God’s creation, and some, like Pierre Maury, believe that animals have souls. Even Saracens like Hassan pray to God, and although they worship him differently, your grandfather Thomas believed that even they will be saved.”
“What do you believe, Nana?” asked Nora, running her hand over the rough fabric of Elenor’s pilgrim cloak.
“That God is merciful,” Elenor said, thinking of Master Roger and the Sisters of Misericordia, and of Pierre and his sheep and his belief that God would take away even the pain of a heretic burning at the stake. “That God is merciful, and His creation is still unfolding, and we can be part of it with our works.”
“Then we shouldn’t repent?” Nora asked, calmed by Elenor’s story, but now scrunching her face in puzzlement.
“Not in the way Brother Matthew intends.” Retelling her story had calmed Elenor, too, and reminded her of the joy and care that the journey had taught her and Thomas to take in their works. “I think we need to do what we have always done: remember the dead in our prayers and love and help the living as best we can.”
“How can we help?” Nora yawned.
Elenor stood up stiffly from the bed and beckoned Nora to help her open the lid of the chest once more. “All of Ramsay and Thornham will be yours one day,” she explained. “When you marry, your work will be to help guide your husband to rule your manors and villages justly and well, and that is part of how you can help. But this chest, and everything in it, will be yours, just as it belonged to your mother, and to me, and to my mother before me.”
Elenor reached into the chest again, breathing in its familiar scent as she lifted out a heavy velvet gown. “This dress belonged to my mother. I wore it after she died, when I was almost tall enough and had to pin up the hem, and your mother wore it in her turn. She hoped to see you wear it one day.” A deep blue woollen dress brought a wave of sadness: “your mother intended your sister to have this dress one day, but it belongs to you now.” Guillemette had died of the plague only a few days after it had claimed her mother.
Nora reached out solemnly to touch the fabric in the fading afternoon light. “How does that help?”
Elenor smoothed the velvet of her mother’s dress and considered how to answer. She had restitched the seams and let down the hems to fit Matilda when she was old enough to wear it. It was beginning to look old-fashioned, but perhaps she could make it over again for Nora, so that it would be fit to clothe another generation of Ramsay women. The dress was valuable, but it would stay with Nora.
She lifted the heavy pilgrim’s clothing laid out on the bed, an idea forming. She turned to Nora. “The cloth of these robes is still sound, and the cloaks are very warm.” Often too warm, she remembered, fingering the thick wool. “You could give them in alms to keep a poor villager warm next winter.”
“But they were yours,” Nora protested. “Yours and Grandfather’s, and you kept them for all this time.”
Elenor took Nora by the hands. “Then we will both give them, in memory of our dead, in the hope that we will see them again, whole and resurrected.”