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

who at least nobody could have helped anyway. I can’t stop thinking about him – crying and lying in his own filth while his mother lies dying. Something tugs at me – should I go and help him? But what would I do with him, if Alice won’t let him here? Would the monks take a baby?
    I’m so angry with Alice about it, angry with myself for not going. I rage about it to Amabel as we go down to the archery butts with Robin and Ned, to watch their shooting practice.
    â€œThey just left it . . . left it to die. A baby! It’s probably there now, with no one looking after it, everyone too scared to go into the house with them all sick.”
    â€œI wouldn’t go,” says Amabel. “And I don’t think your Alice should either. People have their own children to think of. They can’t bring the sickness into their own houses.”
    â€œYou don’t think that, Robin, do you?” I beg.
    â€œI think it’s terrible,” says Robin, and my heart lifts. Dear, kind, Robin, friend to small children and lame puppies. “I’ll go there now with you, Isabel, if you want,” he says, seriously. “I’ll go and see, if you want me to.”
    â€œAre you mad?” Amabel screeches. “You can’t just take someone else’s baby home! You’ll catch the pestilence!”
    â€œI know,” says Robin. His dark eyes watch mine, under his thatch of dark hair. “I’ll still go, Isabel, if you want to.”
    I hesitate. My heart starts beating faster.
    â€œWould your mother take a baby, if it wasn’t sick?” I ask. Robin shrugs.
    We’re walking past the mill. The waterwheel is turning in the millstream, flecks of bright water splashing us as we pass. Birds are singing in the trees above our heads. We’re alive. We might not be soon. Probably that baby is sick already anyway.
    â€œOh, I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know what I want.” And I run forward, before Robin can answer.
    Three days later, they ring the passing-bells for Radulf and Muriel, and for Edith’s mother. We hear them as we’re taking
the oxen out to pasture, and we grit our teeth. There are twelve more cases in the village now, and still no priest has come.
    No one mentions a baby.
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    People start behaving differently now that sickness is here. They keep to themselves. If they see someone coming from a house of sickness, they step aside and look away. The Sunday after Sir John leaves the church is full – unusually so – but everyone stands as far away from everyone else as they can get. The brother who’s leading the mass has nearly six feet between him and the front of the crowd. At the well, people mutter, “ God keep you” and keep their eyes down. Everyone is frightened. When Joanie Fisher died, hardly anybody went to her mass. The brothers wouldn’t let her body lie in the church, for fear of the miasmas gathering, but they held a funeral procession through the village and a mass at the graveside. Joan went, and she said the only people following the coffin were Sarah, Sarah’s sister, the monk who led the service and a beggar she’d never seen before, who asked for 2d just for ringing a hand bell.
    â€œGodspeed they send us a priest soon,” grumbles Alice, standing in the doorway with Edward, who’s wailing fit to bring down the thatch. “Isabel and Ned, I told you, we’re brewing ale today. How are we going to do that without some water? And Isabel, you come straight back and don’t stand there gossiping to Amabel Dyer. I won’t have you bringing the sickness here, you hear me?”
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    Ale means a lot of water – two buckets each and a pole across our shoulders to carry them home. Ned scuffs his shoes along in the earth. He’s worried, you can tell.
    â€œIsabel?” he says. “If you catch the pestilence – can you get