A raven cawed perched on the church’s rooftop. The sun beat relentlessly down. Beads of sweat ran down Nigell’s face. He handed his shovel to Gil and pulled himself out of the deep hole. Joneta knelt next to it, her head covered by a veil.
I nodded to Gil and grasped the shoulders of Ingelram’s body wrapped in the finest of his mother’s plaids. He took the feet, and we lowered him into the grave.
They looked at me and waited. There was no one else to do it. Father Absalom had died two weeks before. We were the last, so I crossed myself and began the prayers for the dead. “Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine…”
Ingelram had fought to the last to save the fermtoun, even when one of the families fled, stealing two of his sheep to take with them. Even when Raso and his wife died. Even when we went to the cot at the far end of the village and found all six of the family lying dead in their beds. I wondered, though, when Filan followed shortly after, if it had finally been too much. When he caught the plague, he died that same day. I thanked God that his suffering was no longer.
Nigell and Gil took up their shovels and filled in the grave. The raven gave one last caw and took flight.
Joneta stood and briskly brushed the grass from her knees. “Do you think they will take me? They might be afeart that I carry it.”
Her thin face made my heart ache, for it was not from lack of food but from grief. “I doubt they have been spared. They will take you, but I will take you elsewhere if they willnae.” And that made me want to weep. My laughing, mischievous Joneta in a nunnery, but it was her choice. All the deaths had sucked her dry of joy, and she said she longed to pray for all we had lost. So we would take her to the Benedictine nuns at Lincluden Priory, Gil, Nigell, and I. The money in my scrip from our raiding would pay her dowry.
Our packs were piled next to the door of Ingelram’s house. I turned in a circle, shaking my throat tight with grief. Weeds sprouted in the fields where a few sheep still grazed, though most had been taken by scavenging wanderers or wandered away. Some we had eaten ourselves. The gardens were overgrown. Only one ancient crone, scraggly white hair poking out from beneath her veil, her dirty kirtle loose on her thin body, sat in a doorway.
“Get the horses,” I told Gil and went to hunker down beside her. “Are you sure, grandame? We could take you to Roxburgh.”
Her lips thinned. “Nothing for me there. But I still has a hen in my cot. I has a roof to keep the rain off—until I dies too.”
Nigell had fashioned a makeshift cushion fastened behind his saddle so his sister could ride pillion behind him. She had ceased to allow me even to touch her hand. It twisted my heart. But better for her to be alive in a nunnery. The most important of my prayers had been answered. That she lived.