Bonus content for The Tolling Year · The Darkling Dispatch, Issue No. 07 A small true history — where the novella's first chapter actually happened.
Everything in The Tolling Year is invented except the worst thing in it, which is true.
The Physician comes down a gangplank at Melcombe in the opening pages, courteous and wrong, and he is mine. The ship he comes down is not. There really was a ship.
In the summer of 1348 — a little before the Feast of St. John the Baptist, which is the 24th of June — a vessel put in at Melcombe Regis, the busy half of what is now Weymouth, on the Dorset coast. The chroniclers cannot quite agree on the details, the way people never can about the beginning of a catastrophe they only understood much later. One says the ship came from Gascony. One says one of two ships, and one of them out of Bristol. One says a single sailor carried it in his body without knowing. What they agree on is the place, and the consequence. A Franciscan friar at King's Lynn wrote it down plainly: through that ship, the men of the town of Melcombe were the first in England to be infected.
The first in England. A whole island's death has to make landfall somewhere, and it made landfall in Dorset, on an ordinary tide, in a working port where men stood on the quay and looked at a ship and did not, at first, go near it.
I have stood on that idea for a long time. The thing that undid half of England did not arrive as an army or a sign in the sky. It arrived the way cargo arrives. It was carried up a gangplank in a body, by something that looked, from a distance, like a man with business ashore. That is the whole horror of how plague actually travels, and it is also, exactly, the shape of the figure I built the novella around. I did not have to invent the Physician's entrance. History had already staged it for me on a quay in 1348, and all I did was give the man on the gangplank a face and a smile and a reason.
From Melcombe it went the way water goes — downhill, along the roads, into every low place that would hold it. Up the Dorset valleys to Dorchester. Inland to the cathedral towns. Within eighteen months it had crossed the whole country, and the most sober modern estimates put the dead at something near half the people then alive in England. Not a tenth. Not a third. Half. There is no year like it in the record before or since.
The detail that broke my heart open, the one that gave the book its title, is what it did to the church. By the start of 1349 priests were dying faster than they could be replaced, and people were dying without the one thing a medieval Christian most needed at the end — confession, absolution, a hand on the dying to send them off shriven. So on the 12th of January, 1349, Ralph of Shrewsbury, Bishop of Bath and Wells — a real man, who appears in the novella's pages as a letter and never as a body — wrote to the clergy of his diocese with an instruction that tells you everything about how bad it had become. If no priest could be got, he wrote, the dying should make their confession to one another. And, if no man were present, then even to a woman.
Even to a woman. You have to understand what that concession cost the institution that made it to feel the size of the dying behind it. The Church was, in that sentence, conceding the floor to the people who had always actually sat up with the dying — the widows, the wise women, the ones who knew the nine breaths it takes a body to go. The official record is built to lose those women. The plague, briefly, wrote them back in.
That is the woman this novella is for. Not the bishop with the seal. The one in the doorway who would not leave.
The bell in the title is the passing bell — the toll rung for a soul leaving, one stroke and then the count, so the parish would know to pray for whoever was going. In a normal year you might hear it a handful of times. In the tolling year it did not stop. People said afterward that the worst thing was not the sight of the carts. It was the bell, going and going, until you could no longer tell whose it was, until it was simply the sound the year made.
I gave my Death a courteous enemy and an old argument and a body she did not want to put down. But under all of it is this: a real ship, a real port, a real bell that would not stop, and a real bishop who, with the country emptying around him, gave a dying man permission to confess to a woman. The fantasy is mine. The grief is theirs. I only sat up with it, so it would not be alone.
— Kate
The sweating sickness that opens The Sweating Year is a different horror entirely — faster, stranger, and it came for a queen instead of a port. But it comes out of the same long English habit of fear, and the same question this novella keeps asking: who sits with the dying, and what does it cost them. Book One of The Hollow Crown is next.