So the villagers comforted one another and, on the whole, they did it well. There was unusual activity around the church for a week or two but after a time even this began to flag and things went on much as before. The Bishop sent the parson another letter but he had nothing new to say. He wanted them all to pray, of course. Well, that was what Bishops were for and they would do as he said, but they were not going to panic because a lot of foreigners were dying at the other side of the country. They questioned avidly any new arrival at the village but the plague never reached any place of which they had heard.
Then, a week before Christmas, a pedlar stumbled into the village with the eager gloom of one who has bad news to break and means to make the most of it. He had been travelling to Winchester, he said, and had just reached the point where the track to Blakwater met the highway when he saw a group of men and women riding furiously in the other direction. Two or three of them were people of distinction, the rest servants. One of the servants stopped near him to adjust the baggage on his horse and the pedlar asked him what the hurry was. They were fleeing from the plague, was the answer. Hundreds were dying every day in Winchester, the graveyards were overflowing, there was fighting in the streets. He galloped off after his master, leaving the pedlar to look after himself as best he could.
There was no easy comfort now for the villagers. If the plague was in Winchester today then it might be in Blakwater tomorrow. The parson organized all the men of the village into a barefoot procession, carrying crosses and singing psalms. They marched around the village and ended up in the churchyard. But, as the parson privately admitted to Roger, he did it more to keep the people busy than in the hope that it would do much good. If God had decided that his people must be punished he was not likely to be deflected from his purpose at this late hour. ‘If it must come, it must come,’ he concluded gloomily, looking down the track that led to Winchester. Roger looked too; but what he was looking for he did not know: a sick man, perhaps – or the spectre of Death riding on a black horse?
The villagers were in an odd mood all that week. There was a strange, febrile gaiety. Everyone laughed and joked a lot and avoided talking about the dread that was uppermost in their minds. The village was always a friendly place but there was now an unusual sense of comradeship. People spontaneously helped each other; even Mad Meg was treated with unusual respect. The twelve days of Christmas were observed with all the usual jollification: more than usual, indeed, since everyone except the children was behaving as if he was acting a part and, like every amateur actor, was badly over-playing it. There was some suggestion that the steward should cancel the traditional dinner for the tenants on Christmas night; ‘At Christmas we banket, the rich with the poor,’ as Thomas Tusser was later to put it. But the outcry was immediate and the dinner was held with all its usual bawdy fun and the election of a lord of Misrule.
When the plague came in the end it was not by way of Winchester but through the back door from Preston Stautney. It had been a mild, wet winter and Bartholomew Thomasyn was barely recognizable for mud when he staggered up the track that linked the two villages. He had married a girl from Blakwater and so was well known there but the friendly greetings died on the lips of the peasants as he stammered out his news. His wife was dead, he said, and their little daughter with her. At least six other villagers were dead or dying. With nothing left to hold him to his house, he had fled. Soon others would be following his example. The village was doomed and all who stayed there would perish. He had not slept for three days nor eaten for twenty-four hours. His father-in-law led him away to get some rest and the group of peasants that had clustered around broke up with scarcely a word.
That afternoon the reeve walked quietly around the village asking a few of the wiser or senior inhabitants to come to a meeting in the hall of the manor. The steward was away on his travels but the parson was going to be there. Roger, of course, was among those invited. The group duly assembled but, when they were all seated around the table, no one seemed to have any idea what to say or do. The parson should have taken the lead but he looked ill and half-asleep and contributed nothing to the discussion while the reeve muttered some prepared preamble about the need to do something urgently and then looked helplessly around for contributions.
