Free All Fall Down by Sally Nicholls Page A

mustn’t come here again. Promise me. Behind the fence is fine, but not like this again – not so close that you can smell the miasma. If anything happened to you – if anything happened because of me – I couldn’t bear it. I mean it, Isabel.”
    I nod, the tears rising in my eyes.
    â€œTake care,” I say. “Please, please, Robin, take care.”
    â€œYou too,” says Robin, and he shuts the door, so suddenly that I don’t even get a chance to say goodbye.

14. The Boy-Priest
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    I t begins to rain as I’m coming back home – a greyish drizzle that soaks into my mantle and reminds me of last year, when it rained without ending and all the harvest was ruined. I wonder gloomily if the world really is ending. Sometimes it absolutely feels like it.
    I feel like I’m trapped in a cage, a cage which is closing tighter and tighter around me, until I’ll have nowhere left to turn, and then the black thing, the miasma – in my dreams, the miasma is black, like a cloud, and it seeps under the door and coils up over the fireplace and into our solar – then the miasma will come and find me, and I won’t have anywhere to hide.
    My head is full of . . . what? Rotten corpses, that stench in Radulf’s house, the taste of blood and the thought of Robin alone with . . . all that . . . the pus and the blood and the vomit. What can I do with that? I want to scream, to smash something, to get as far away from this place as I can.
    I like fixing things. Mending things. Most of the things in my life get better if you work at them. This doesn’t. How can I help Robin if I’m not even allowed to visit him?
    It’s only as I’m at the gate that I remember the new priest is supposed to have arrived. Priests visit the sick, even those who are sick with the pestilence – this priest can visit Margaret and Robin even if I can’t. I’m so pleased with this thought that I turn straight around and head back towards Sir John’s house. No priest would leave Robin to look after his mother on his own, would he? Apart from Sir John.
    Nobody comes when I knock on the door. I bang on it with both fists. What will I do if he doesn’t answer?
    I’ll go to the abbey and find a monk is what I’ll do. I don’t care if he’s praying, or in church, or writing in his scriptorium, I’ll make him come to Margaret. I’ll go to one of the chaplain’s houses and make him find the new priest.
    â€œYes? Can I help you?”
    The man standing on the doorsill is younger than Richard. For a brief, dizzying moment, I think it’s my brother Geoffrey; then as he steps out of the shadow, I see that he’s older than Geoffrey, maybe eighteen or nineteen. He’s tall and gangly, with long, white fingers twisting anxiously around themselves. It’s his hair that made me think it was Geoffrey – a shaggy blond mop – that and the slightly Frenchified English that Geoffrey picked up after a couple of years speaking French with the monks of St Mary’s. This man’s hair is darker than Geoffrey’s, though, and he’s thinner. He looks like a string bean with all of the colour bleached out of it.
    â€œYes?” he says again. He’s got a high, rather nervous voice.
    â€œPlease,” I say. “My friend’s mother – Margaret – she’s dying, I think. I mean, she’s sick. So could you come and – and—”
    â€œOh.” The priest jumps. “Wait there.” He disappears into
his house. I wait on the path. There’s a clunk from inside, and the sound of something falling.
    â€œAre you all right?” I ask, peering around the open door.
    Sir John’s house is small, cluttered and dark. It’s bigger than ours, but there’s no solar. There’s only one candle burning beside the little hearth-fire, which is sputtering in the wind from the door.