Tasters 14

'In God's name,' he whispered hoarsely into the darkness. 'Who are you? What do you want? Tell me and reparation will be made.'

Nothing but an owl answered his question. Philip was about to close the shutters when he heard another sound: the clink of harness, the whisper of voices and those words again. 'Spectamus te, semper spectamus te. We are watching you. We are always watching you.'

Philip hurried down the stairs and fumbled with the key in the lock. He threw open the front door and ran out but there was nothing there. Only the rustle of the leaves though the light from the church had grown brighter. He had the keys in his wallet so he strode across, this time going in through the main door. The light glowed in the snactuary behind rood screen. Philip, summoning up all his courage, strode down.

'In God's name!'

Philip stopped. Waldis' corpse lay in the parish coffin before the high altar. Funeral candles glowed all around whilst the figure kneeling beside it was clearly Priscilla. She didn't even turn round but, resting back on her heels, she seemed absorbed by the red sanctuary lamp.

'Priscilla!'

She opened her eyes and glanced up at him.

Her face, Josse noticed as he turned her over onto her back, was badly bruised.

'She must have banged her face on the ice,' Sheriff Pelham observed, leaning over Josse's shoulder and breathing open-mouthed into his ear.

'Think again,' Josse said. 'If she fell when the pond was iced over, she wouldn't have been down there beneath the surface, frozen into it.'

Momentarily, the Sheriff was silenced.

Rapidly Josse inspected the rest of the corpse. As well as the bruised face the nose had taken a direct hit, and, as he gently probed inside the mouth, he saw what looked like a recently-broken tooth she had damage to both hands.

Josse held the dead hands in his.

Pity surging through him, he realised that someone had deliberately broken two fingers on each of the dead woman's hands.

He laid her head down again and, on the sloping bank, she rolled over until she was lying face-down.

And Josse saw, on the back of the carefully-laundered white cap, a clear boot print.

Someone had savagely beaten her, then dragged her to the pond and held her head under the water with a foot until she died.

When I first read A Distant Mirror describing a fourteenth century plunged into gloom by war, bigotry, superstition and above all by the Black Death, I kept reminding myself that this was also the age of Geoffrey Chaucer, the sunniest of poets. [...] England was not cut off from the rest of Europe during the fourteenth century. It suffered the Black Death as badly as anywhere on the continent; a Peasants' Revolt in which London was sacked and the Archbishop of Canterbury murdered; wars in Scotland and Ireland; and Wyclif's challenge to the Church of Rome. So why did England and its first great poet not succumb to the gloom in this 'calamitous fourteenth century'?

[...]

My own view is that epidemics such as the Black Death have little lasting effect on the great majority of survivors. I would argue this from a study of two later epidemics, the Great Plague of 1665 and the 'Spanish Influenza' of 1918.

In his Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe relates how 100,000 or so died by the end of the year. Yet in spite of the Journal's sombre tone, one gets the impression that London life continued much as normal during the Great Plague, as it had done during the Black Death. The impression is reinforced by the diaries of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, who carried on working and wenching respectively.

[...]

The Spanish Influenza took a far greater toll of human beings but soon it too was almost completely forgotten. The American Professor Alfred W. Crosby ends his fascinating book on the epidemic [America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge 1998)] with an Afterword called'An inquiry into the peculiarities of human memory', which goes far to answering the question of the Black Death and Chaucer. "The important and almost incomprehensible fact about Spanish influenza is that it killed millions upon millions of people in a year or less. Nothing else no infection, no war, no famine has ever killed so many in as short a period. And yet it has never inspired awe, not in 1918 and not since, not among the citizens of any particular land and not among the citizens of the United States. This inaptitude for wonder and fear acnnot be attributed to a lack of information." [...]

Most significantly, though, there is no mention of Spanish Influenza in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, which purports to examine how plague affected the fourteenth-

century world. Barbara Tuchman seems to be unaware that she herself, as a child, survived such an epidemic. Nor did Chaucer, as a mature man, have cause to reflect on the plague which had terrified London during his childhood.