Plague

by C. C. Humphreys

  “It cannot, Sire.”

  “Very well. Mr. Betterton, please give me a few more moments. ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,’ eh?” He smiled. “That’s Shakespeare, ain’t it?”

  “It is, Sire. And well spoken, may I say.”

  The king nodded. “Then I will talk with my good chief minister while you, sirrah,” he turned back to Rochester, “away!”

  The earl, who now appeared quite recovered, shook off the men who had held him and walked between them toward the rear door. Yet he was not halfway to it, when a woman’s cry rang out. “But love, love, what of me?”

  Lucy pushed through men to seize the earl’s hand. He raised hers, kissed it swiftly. “Do not fear for me, sweetheart.” His voice rose. “Be assured, everyone. All will be well.” Then, jerking his hand from hers, he swept from the playhouse.

  Lucy dropped to the floor. Coke and Sarah were at either side of her in a moment, but Lucy had swooned and they had to carry her to a stool. There, they held her while another actress ran for some sal volatile. Over her lolling head, Coke and Sarah looked at each other. “He did not even notice her here,” Coke said, his voice low.

  “I know,” replied Sarah. “We will have to persuade her of his indifference.”

  As Sarah bent to Lucy with the small bottle the player had fetched, Coke stood—and recognized the voice talking low on the other side of the rack of dresses.

  “There can be no doubt, Edward?” asked King Charles.

  “None, Sire. I have brought you the bills of mortality from not just one parish but from five. From Whitechapel across to Westminster. The figures are clear. They have risen tenfold in two weeks.”

  “It is certain, then. The plague is upon us.”

  “It is. May God have mercy on our souls.”

  “What is to be done now?”

  “Proclamations must be issued forthwith. The first must be the closing of all places of gathering. Bear baits, taverns. Theatres.”

  “May we not at least see the rest of the play? There’s some good deaths, I hear.”

  “Death is in this house already, Majesty. If you are willing to allow it a few more for your entertainment, sir, then by all means see the end of the piece.”

  A harsh intake of breath. “No, very well, very well, Edward. I would not have that. But let me speak to Betterton and try to do this calmly. No doubt he can extemporize some speech. Should I send the queen straight to Syon House, think you?”

  Coke did not hear the reply. The men moved away, talking low once again. He turned to Sarah and Lucy, whose eyes were now open. “Listen, both,” he said. “You must put on your own clothes—and swiftly. The plague is come.”

  Pitman, who’d appeared quietly and unnoticed, heard him. “So they are at last to admit what many have known this month and more?”

  Coke nodded. “And you were so enjoying the play, Pitman. I am sorry you will miss the end of it, for they will close the playhouse immediately.”

  The large man shrugged. “Bettina would say it is the just reward of sin. So be it. But what do we do now?”

  His gesture encompassed the other two, but it was the third person there who spoke. “My John is arrested. I must see him. I must!”

  “Child!” Sarah put her arms about Lucy again, restraining her. “You heard why he was arrested, didn’t you, love? You understand?”

  “I do.” Lucy wiped away tears. “He has forsaken me.”

  “He has, dear heart.” Coke knelt. “You must forget him.”

  “Hard to do when a part of him so swells my belly.”

  “Something for which he will still answer to me. But in the meantime—and especially in this time—we must make plans around you, not him.”

  Lucy moaned. “He kicks, the little earl.” Her eyes went wide. “I would go home.”

  “Indeed. Mrs. Chalker, her dress? Let us get her back to Chancery Lane.”

  “You misunderstand me.” She gripped his arm. “Home.”

  Sarah sat, keeping her arms around Lucy. “I think, Captain, she means Cornwall.”

  “I have two sisters, each with a brood apiece. They will know what to do.” Lucy’s large eyes opened wider. “Will you both take me there?”

  “I will. Since my livelihood is to be put aside.” Sarah reached for the captain’s hand. “But have you the leisure toward us?”

  Coke glanced up at the man standing silent above them, the question in his eyes.

  “I believe all business will become personal for a while,” said Pitman. “Maybe even his whom we pursue. Can you return soon?”

  Coke nodded. “Immediately. I vow it.”

  “Events have indeed overtaken us,” Sarah said. “Yet my husband’s ghost still walks and will not sleep till he is avenged.” She turned to Coke. “How long will the journey take?”

  “When this larger news is made general, coaches will be hard to find. I know where I can obtain horses, if I move swiftly.”

  “Never mind the coach.” Lucy sat up straighter. “I was born a-saddle.” Her voice rose above protests. “If we do not go at a full gallop, I warrant I shall do well enough. Pshaw! I am only six months gone. And if he’s a bastard within, at least he’s the bastard of an earl. He may as well learn to ride in the womb.”

  All laughed. Pitman put a hand on Sarah’s and Coke’s shoulders. For a moment, all four were linked.

  “Birth and death,” said Lucy. “Is there a play in it, do you think?”

  “That fellow,” said the man on the stair, looking down, “who clings onto Mrs. Chalker. His name?”

  Aitcheson followed his lordship’s gaze. “Pitman? I have already pointed him out to you, my lord.”

  “Not him. The kneeling cavalier. With the moustache.”

  The usher peered among the heads and shoulders of people forcing their way back to the theatre. Above, a drum beat a solemn rhythm. Mr. Betterton was calling for silence, which even he was not finding easy to command. “I do not know him. Shall I inquire?”

  “Do. Discreetly. And those others—” he waved “—what was the stir about? With the actress and the earl?”

  “Oh sir, ’tis the talk of the theatre. The king’s new favourite impregnating Mistress Absolute.” He leaned closer. “It is said that she has taught him all the carnal vices. She—”

  “The whore!” Garnthorpe snarled. “Mother of harlots and abominations of the earth … filthiness of fornication. She—”

  The attendant was startled enough to interrupt. “But sir, she is an actress.”

  The lord grabbed the man’s shirt front. His voice was much quieter but had lost none of its vehemence. “Do not link the Widow Chalker with a poxed whore. One who corrupts and is corrupted by a foul knight.”

  Aitcheson tried to prise the grip from his collar. “Sir, I did not refer to anyone. Others are watching. My lord, I beseech you.” Others were indeed. Garnthorpe released the man. “Find out what I have asked of you,” he went on more calmly. “As for this earl and his strumpet—” he glanced down again at the group below “—God has them marked in his book already, fast filling with such whores and blasphemers.”

  Before Aitcheson could reply, a powerful voice came from above.

  “Your Majesty! My lords, gentlemen, ladies!” Mr. Betterton called from the stage. “Prithee your attention. Pray you, silence!”

  The hubbub decreased and the actor continued, “Alas, playing is suspended for the night. For the next little while, I fear.” The crowd’s voice increased anew, but the actor’s rose over it. “There are reasons, my lords. Sirs. Ladies. Grave reasons.”

  22

  SMITTEN

  July 10, 1665

  London had never smelled sweeter.

  Pitman inhaled deep through both nostrils, something he would never do on a normal July day. On a normal day the heat would conjure all the city’s worst smells, and this July was hotter than most. The sun would beat on every house’s unemptied cesspit, drawing foul steam from the mounds. Fish hea
ds would roll in the gutters, vegetables rot in piles, heated bodies give off rank odours through clothes rarely washed. Rats would nose among the garbage, cats and dogs piss against walls, hackney horses drop their piles alongside those of the sheep, cattle and pigs driven daily down thoroughfares to the various shambles.

  Yet this July Londoners emptied the cesspits daily; no householder allowed garbage to collect before the door, for fear of fines that were finally enforced; while the gutters were flushed every few hours. And people washed. Themselves, their clothes, their front steps, their houses. The acrid tang of vinegar was everywhere, softened by whatever had been steeped in it, all manner of botanicals: rosemary, rue, sage, lemon balm.

  No meat animal could be herded through the streets. The hackney carriages came infrequently, their best customers having fled the city—and if the carriages were discovered to have carried a sick person, they had to stand idle for a week. All the cats and dogs had been slain. Which made for more rats, thousands more. Pitman had always felt the expression “smell a rat” to be inaccurate. A wet hound stank a hundred times worse!

  Nay, he thought, if you do not die from it, there’s something to be said for the plague.

  He shook his head, breathed deeply again, strode farther into the parish of St. Leonard’s toward his home. There were people dying of it, he understood—the ceaseless tolling of each church’s bell announced yet another parishioner dead. It was just he did not know any who had passed; so far he’d shut up only strangers. Sometimes he’d see a new face at a food stall, a different boy at the apothecary’s, an empty place on the bench before theirs at the meeting house. But many had left the city: if they could get the certificate—and if they could afford the price. He saw fewer rich people around, that was certain. But his fellow poor were still by, still living. Mostly. There were times when he heard the carts rumble in the night, when he’d look out his window to see one pass by, a cloth over a fleshy mound, an arm dangling from beneath it.

  He heard a familiar tap, tap, tapping upon the street stones and stepped under the awning of a saddlery to let the group go by. There were six of them, each clutching a white stick that they struck upon the ground. Their physician walked behind them, distinguished by his red stick, his waxed gown, his self-satisfied smile—and by the bird-beaked mask hanging from his belt. Men and women trailed him and he spoke to them in whispers. The people with white sticks had been cured of plague. His advice was sought, his remedies—he had a large supply of small glass bottles about him—purchased. Pitman wondered about his other patients unable to walk by. Hard to give a testimonial from the grave.

  While the doctor conversed, his patients chanted verses that Pitman knew well:

  “ ‘Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor by the arrow that flieth by day.’ ”

  Psalm 91. He nodded, and as they passed him, he joined in the next verse: “ ‘Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.’ ”

  The psalm was one of his favourites. He took it as a sign and it made him feel even better. For was not all going well? To be a constable in times of plague was to be, for the nonce, regularly paid—the parish could not afford to anger the men who enforced the edicts. Who else would supervise the shutting up of people who needed to be quarantined? He knew there were officers who took bribes, let some escape before their windows and doors were hammered closed, or assigned watchers who were also corrupt and would pass over a share of the exorbitant prices they’d charge the unfortunates for their necessities.

  But I am not one of them, he thought proudly. Only by enforcing all laws would the plague—that monster in the labyrinth of London—be tamed. Only by honesty would he and his be saved—that and by the grace of God, of course.

  “ ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee.’ ”

  It shall not come nigh me, nor mine. Besides, between my salary and the coin Bettina earned from that first batch of her ma’s plague water, we are far better off than most. Money for medicines and meat broth for the new mother and her two healthily squalling babes—strong boys, as she had foretold. And if there was not an abundance for the other things they would like—the two rooms had looked small before the new ones’ arrival—well, perhaps that would be sorted as early as tonight.

  “ ‘Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked.’ ”

  He had been busy with his one business, but that did not mean he had forgotten his other. Nor neglected it entirely. The wicked could not, must not, be allowed any rest. Their reward—the killer’s reward—must be by taking. His own reward would come after the taking, with forty guineas now offered for the Finchley slaughterer, also the slayer of John Chalker, actor, the two crimes linked in the public mind by their skilled savagery.

  Forty guineas! Why, that would buy Bettina a house big enough for the whole brood. His, if the word he’d heard this day was proven true.

  The plague had driven not only the wealthier from the city, but also most of the priests. Pulpits stood empty, the people deprived of God’s word when they needed it the most. Yet men had arisen to fill the void. Or rather, they had returned. For the Act of Uniformity and the Act of Conventicles, banishing dissenters from practising within London’s walls, were being ignored. Not overturned; unenforced. If the Church of England would not minister to the people’s spiritual needs, others would.

  Baptists. Muggletonians. His own Quaker brethren. Every other sect and creed. No longer did they have to hide in the dark. They stood in the light again, drawing crowds into it. Drawing crowds …

  There might be a crowd there tonight, which would make the taking of the murderer more difficult. For people were not only lured by sermons of salvation. The promise of Apocalypse, of which plague was only the first sign, also attracted them. It was seductive, the increasing catastrophe, the deepening darkness leading to the eventual and all-revealing light.

  Aye, Pitman thought, the Fifth Monarchists have a power that cannot be denied.

  All Hallows the Great, on Thames Street, was one of their chapels, one of the few he hadn’t visited. And near all London’s Saints would gather there tonight. Something was afoot, Tobias Sym had told him, a man who’d once been his fellow constable and was now an agent in the government’s pay.

  They’d met by chance, gone to a tavern, and the man had passed on to Pitman a whisper he’d heard at a Saints’ gathering—a whisper of murder. Could even remember who had done the whispering. “He had a sabre scar across his nose—and the coldest eyes above it of any man I’ve ever seen,” Sym had confided. “He turned them on me when he thought I’d heard, so I pretended I hadn’t.” He’d shivered. “Still, if you’re interested, why not sneak in with me tomorrow night and hear their madness? A fellow your size could stand me in good stead if’n I get frightened again.”

  He’d laughed, and Pitman had bought him another beer. “The man with the sabre scar,” Pitman had queried. “Was there anything of the butcher or the surgeon about him?”

  Sym had said he hadn’t noticed if there was.

  They’d agreed on a place and time to meet. Pitman knew his own gifts; the one he sought would give himself away, even in a multitude. There might be too much blood on a shirt cuff. A boning knife in a belt.

  “ ’Ware fire!”

  The shout sounded from around the corner before him. Pitman, along with everyone else nearing it, halted. This was the last corner before the row that contained his dwelling. Yet there was no reason to be afeard. Part of the sweet scent of London was the fragrant smoke of guns and stink-pots frequently discharged on the streets. That was the surest way, the king’s physicians had announced, to disperse the miasma that contained the evil.

  The explosion came; a cloud engulfed him. He sneezed thrice. He had never minded the smell of brimstone. Faith, he had filled his lungs with it on enough battlefields as the musketeers and cannoneers vented their
gunpowder. This smoke he recognized, for his neighbour Brown the Brewer always savoured his pots with pepper, his own hops and lavender.

  It was the smell of home. Wiping his nose on his sleeve, he rounded the corner, speaking another line of the psalm: “ ‘There shall no evil befall thee. Neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.’ ”

  He stopped when he saw the men. They had instruments similar to those he had just used on Paternoster Row: ladders, planks, hammers and nails, a bucket with paint. Red paint. It took him a moment to realize that the house they were attending to was his own.

  Two of his daughters, Grace and Faith, were leaning out of the casement on the first floor, begging the constable with the paintbrush to cease his daubing of their door. Which he did, since there was nothing more to add to the writing above the ragged red cross: “The Lord have mercy upon us.”

  Pitman nearly rushed forward—to plead, pull aside the hands with their hammers, even attack those who would imprison his beloved in the house of death. Not an hour before, he had been just so beseeched, so assaulted, even as he drove the nails in. Instead he lurched back around the corner. Forced himself to breathe deep the traces of sweet smoke that remained.

  Think, Pitman!

  If he ran forward, what would he do? Drive off his fellow constables, gather his family of small children and babes and run? They would be cried in the streets in moments. Or should he be shut up with them? To suffer what they must as a family, to pray as a family to avoid it. It was a temptation.

  Yet he did not yield to it. He knew what could happen to families locked up with the monster. It devoured many of them, the cruelty of the practice much criticized for herding together the ill with the hale, and oft causing both to die. He had seen it in houses he supervised.

  What if he stayed free?

  He pushed himself away from the wall, his first steps weak, his next more assured. If a neighbour should happen upon him there and cry him out, he would have no choice: he would be shut up with the others. It was in so many ways his heart’s desire. He must not give in to it.