To Calais, In Ordinary Time

Meek James

Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTIONLONGLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTIONA BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY EXPRESS, SCOTSMAN and SPECTATORThree journeys. One road. England, 1348. A gentlewoman flees an odious arranged marriage, a Scots proctor sets out for Avignon and a young ploughman in search of freedom is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais. Coming in their direction from across the Channel is the Black Death, the plague that will wipe out half of the population of Northern Europe. As the journey unfolds, overshadowed by the archers' past misdeeds and clerical warnings of the imminent end of the world, the wayfarers must confront the nature of their loves and desires. A tremendous feat of language and empathy, it summons a medieval world that is at once uncannily plausible, utterly alien and eerily reflective of our own. James Meek's extraordinary To Calais, In Ordinary Time is a novel about love, class, faith, loss, gender and desire - set against one of the biggest cataclysms of human history.

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 29 août 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786896759
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

James Meek is the author of six novels including The People’s Act of Love which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Scottish Arts Council Award. It has been published in more than thirty countries. Meek has also written two collections of short stories and two books of non-fiction, Private Island , which won the 2015 Orwell Prize and Dreams of Leaving and Remaining . He is a Contributing Editor to the London Review of Books and writes regularly for the Guardian and New York Times . He lives in London. In 2020, To Calais, In Ordinary Time was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
Also by James Meek
Fiction
McFarlane Boils the Sea
Last Orders
Drivetime
The Museum of Doubt
The People s Act of Love
We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
The Heart Broke In
Non-Fiction
Private Island
Dreams of Leaving and Remaining

For Kay and Sophy
The paperback edition published in 2020 by Canongate Books
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2019 by Canongate Books
canongate.co.uk
Copyright James Meek, 2019
The right of James Meek to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 677 3
eISBN 978 1 78689 675 9
God is deaf nowadays
- William Langland, Piers Plowman
Contents
Outen Green
Cut me that
The World
Will went through
The End of the World
Will beat on
The New World
The shipmen wouldn t
Acknowledgements
OUTEN GREEN
C UT ME THAT rose, demanded Berna of the gardeners. She pointed to the most finely formed flower, coloured the most brilliant crimson.
A prize surely intended for your marriage, said her cousin Pogge. Weren t it sufficient provocation to take your papa s book without consent?
Berna embraced the volume she carried. Papa offered me the fulfilment of my desires in the garden, in lieu of my preference for a liberty general. She turned to the younger of the two gardeners. He had default of height, but was formed pleasantly, with puissant shoulders. His freshly razed face had an appearance of attentive tranquillity. Will Quate, cut me the rose.

I T WAS S UNDAY , St Thomas s Day eve, and there wasn t no garden work to be done nor no other work neither. Will Quate wasn t no gardener. He came to help Rufy bear home a heap of rose sticks for his fire. But the lady Bernadine happened to come by and bade them give her the best bloom on the bush, and they mightn t say no, so Will hewed the rose with his knife, plucked five thorns of the stem with his fingers and gave it her. She took it and led her kinswoman through the door in the garden wall to her father s wood.

M Y COMMISSION TO annotate the abbey s property case is complete; I am obliged to transmit it to the advocates in Avignon. Nothing detains me in Malmesbury except the difficulty of leaving. It is not terror of events that obstructs my return to France, but the practicalities. It is impossible to be a solitary traveller in these times. I must find company for the journey, yet the roads to the southern ports, previously dense with viators, lie vacant.
I suspect the prior has more intelligence about the progress of the plague in Avignon than he divulges. I have received no communication from the city since Marc s brief note in March, informing me that the pestilence was general there, and that on the advice of his doctor the Pope now defends himself against the pestilential miasma by habitation at the median of two enormous fires.
Written at Malmesbury Abbey, sixth July anno domini one thousand three hundred and forty-eight, of ordinary time the twenty-seventh, the Sunday preceding the festival of the translation of the relics of my name saint, Thomas martyr, by Thomas Pitkerro, proctor of Avignon .

B ERNA AND P OGGE passed a line of village children who foraged in the husks of last year s beechmast. They followed a path to the foot of a tree, sat on a blanket and placed between them the book and the rose. From a pouch she carried, Berna took a bowl and a bloodletting knife and demanded that Pogge bare her arm.
I prefer not to, said Pogge.
It is simply to demonstrate the method, that you might at some future point apply it yourself.
Pogge lifted her arm, rigidly enclosed in linen. It s sewn in, she said.
I advised you to permit your limbs liberty of movement.
I desired to accustom myself to sewing in, in advance of your marriage ceremony.
It is my opinion that you contrived this excuse. You doubt my ability to bleed.
You know I admire your numerous virtues, but you are a knight s daughter, not a surgeon.
It is notorious in our family that I possess a plethora of blood. Berna rolled up her own left sleeve till it was above the elbow. Regard, she said, demonstrating the faint marks of previous cuts in the crook of her arm, and one more fresh. Are they not finely accomplished? I chanced to see my friend sanguinary, the barber, in Brimpsfield last week. He advised that should the advertisements of the clerks prove true my former comfort would be a form of defence. My chaperone left me unobserved for a moment and the barber supplied me with the knife.
I would have held you too determined in your gentility to have acquaintance with barbers.
I ne strain for gentility, said Berna, raising her voice a fraction. It is courteous amiability towards such classes as barbers that distingues our relations with them from their relations with each other, determined, as they are, by money.
The pique left her, though not the ardour with which she spoke, accompanied by a certain generality of address, as if Pogge were only one of a number of listeners. While my mother lived she conducted me to the barber to be bled once a month. My humours were of so special a nature. She would lie on a couch, supported by a cushion, I would lie against her in the same position, and she would fold me in her arms while the barber opened my veins. The cut would be pursued by silence, apart from the respiration of my mother in my ear and the gutter of the blood in the bowl. I have never known such contentment.

S IR G UY CAME and saw the rose was gone. He chewed the inside of his cheek.
Was my daughter here? he asked the men.
They ne said nothing.
Sir Guy beheld the heaps of rose sticks Will and Rufy had bound in bundles.
A heap of Sabbath-breakers, he said. Would you have the murrain sent us sooner?
Rufy said it wasn t work, he and Will only gathered the sticks for his hearth, as his lord had behest him the boot of the rose tree when he shred it.
Sir Guy cut one of the bundles with his knife and took of it a thick, well-shaped length of rosewood, bent at one end in a handle, as it had grown. He held the handle, let the other end sit on the ground and leaned his weight on the wood.
A kind walking stick, he said.
Rufy said the tree would grow that way, and his mum was lame.
There s sap in your old dam yet, said Sir Guy. I saw her hop about the pole two month ago.
Rufy said her bones were bad, and he ne thought it him no harm to take a good strong stick to help her walk about.
I ll learn you otherwise, said Sir Guy. I ll have bad bones one day. Why would I lack a good stick of my own rose tree to help your shiftless mother? All hold me soft and reckon they might have what s mine without no afterclap. I was robbed of a gown, and now you d rob me of a walking stick.
Will said they mightn t say no to the lady Bernadine when she bade them give her the bloom. He took a handful of little brown spikelets of his belt-bag and, with bowed head, offered them to his lord.
Eh? What s that? said Sir Guy.
Will said he hewed them from the rose branch. They were the thorns, he said, that must also rightly be Sir Guy s.

A COMPANY OF archers pervenes to Malmesbury imminently, on its way to France. It is suggested I go with them.
When travelling towards the pestilence was a theoretical possibility, I had fortitude. Now I may actually go, I am terrified. My mind cannot accommodate my own mortality, yet is capable of engendering an infinite series of images of colleagues and remote acquaintances who have succumbed. I remember Brozzi, the Rota lawyer with the enormous jaw. I have been visited repeatedly by a vision of him recumbent in a pit in his court robes, his face corroded by marauding dogs, the bone of the jaw protruding nude and white, while my baker asperses soil over him with a flour scoop.

B ERNA STROKED HER cousin s cheek and told her how fortunate it was she d come. She d been about to take her own life.
How? demanded Pogge.
Thrown myself into the moat.
Pogge shook her head. Your moat s not profound enough for drownage. You d kill several frogs and break your arm.
They disputed the best way a woman should contrive her death. Pogge favoured poison. Berna preferred a tumble from a high window. Pogge said she couldn t have done it anywise, for suicide was the mortal sin that mightn t never be absolved, and Berna were certain to go direct to hell, to burn till Judgement Day.
The King of Heaven will absolve me, said Berna. He will perceive the purity of my soul and the sincerity of my ardour. He will see that by forcing me to marry an old man in place of my amour, my father left me no alternative method to preserve my honour. I shall be raised to heaven as a martyr to love.
Before Pogge might reply she was arrested by a noise of approaching pigs. The place Berna had chosen was a hollow between two roots that rose higher than their heads, hiding them from most of the forest. They could hear the beasts grunt, step through last year s dry leaves and dig in the ground with their mu