Read Online All Fall Down by Sally Nicholls - Free Book Online

to the next.
    When I go down to the well on Monday morning, Amabel Dyer is there. She’s got a full bucket of water already, but she’s not going anywhere. She waves at me as I come over.
    â€œDid you hear?” she says, in a half-whisper.
    â€œDid I hear what?”
    â€œRadulf and Muriel both have it! Gilbert Reeve went over there yesterday and he found them. And now Gilbert has it too, my sister says.”
    â€œPssh.” The woman next to Amabel – it’s Agnes Harelip, Alice’s sister – blows the air out of her mouth with a disgusted noise. “Gilbert Reeve doesn’t have anything! I saw him
this morning going off to the market. Your sister’s talking nonsense, girl.”
    Amabel looks abashed, but only for about half a moment.
    â€œLittle Joanie Fisher has it too. Her mother bought some of Muriel’s honey from them only last week. She’ll get it next, I reckon.”
    Joanie Fisher is three years old. Her mother, Sarah, is a friend of Richard’s Joan. I feel the ice sliding down my back.
    â€œYou can’t go near someone who has it,” says Alison Spinner, who’s half a year older than me, “or you’ll get it. They pass it through the eyes – look in their eyes and you’re dead for sure.”
    â€œHow can you not go near people? You have to! How can you not go to the well – or to the fields – or to church ?” I wouldn’t mind so much missing church, but I’m trying very hard not to annoy God at the moment. “You’d starve!” I say.
    Alison Spinner shrugs. “Then you die,” she says.
    I’m quiet. So are Amabel and Alison. This is happening too quickly. What I need is something like the pause after the minstrels have finished playing, the space where everyone breathes in and comes back from whatever place the music has sent them. This is too much.
    Alison Spinner passes her pail of water from one hand to the other with a look of unconcern.
    â€œMother heard,” she says. “They’re going to send us a new priest. By the end of the week, Sir Edmund’s steward told Gilbert Reeve. They’d better be quick, he said to the messenger. Or we’ll be all be dead by the time he gets here.”
    â€œAlison!” Amabel looks shocked, and a little bit like she wants to giggle, like Alison has made a rude joke or something.
    â€œHe didn’t say anything of the sort,” I say to Alison, cross suddenly: with Alison for not taking this seriously, even – yes,
I admit it – with Muriel and Radulf and little Joanie Fisher for falling sick, and me with nothing I can do about it. I’m like Alice – I like making things better: scolding the children, bandaging the cut, cleaning up the spilt ale. But this? There’s nothing you can do about this.
    Â 
    We have our first death the next day – little fair-haired Edith, Radulf’s niece. One of the monks from the abbey performs the mass, but only her mother and her baby brother come to pray for her soul. And then we hear that the mother is sick too.
    â€œBut who’s looking after the baby?” I’m on the floor playing with Edward, walking my fingers across his belly, then tickling him until he squirms, and the thought of this other baby – alone, hungry, crying to itself in an house full of the dying – is too horrible to think of.
    Alice is chopping leeks at the table. She won’t meet my eyes.
    â€œPeople have their own families to think of, Isabel. They don’t want to bring the sickness into their houses. And it’s not a baby anyone knows . . .”
    Alice, with all her talk of Christian charity! I stare at her, horrified. She fusses with her kerchief, then says, defensively, “It’s bound to catch the sickness soon, anyway, Isabel.”
    But somehow that baby is the most horrible thing that’s happened yet, more horrible than Edith and her mother,