At the Sign of the Sugared Plum

by Mary Hooper

  When we asked at the adjoining dwelling, Mrs Groat came to her door with a full pipe of tobacco in her hand which she puffed continually as she spoke. She apologised for doing so. ‘But I have heard that it is the only true prevention against the plague,’ she said, ‘and I am not going to be seen without it all the while people are dropping faster than flies.’

  ‘We came to enquire about the children’s funeral,’ Sarah said, standing back so as not to be enveloped in smoke.

  Mrs Groat shook her head. ‘There will be no funeral,’ she said, ‘for the mayor has issued orders that there must be no gatherings of people.’

  ‘But there must be some small ceremony!’ Sarah said, concerned. ‘At least a minister must stand by their grave and offer up a prayer to send them on their way.’

  ‘I think not,’ the old woman said. She coughed a little herself with the smoke. ‘There have been so many funerals already that now they are saying the dead must be dispatched with as little ceremony as possible. All that will mark their passing will be the tolling of a bell.’

  ‘But there haven’t been that many deaths in this parish, surely?’ I asked.

  Mrs Groat shrugged. ‘Two in Crutched Friars Alley yesterday. Said to be dead of the fever,’ she added meaningfully. ‘Then our poor Williams family, a house at the sign of the Crooked Bear – there are four dead there, two dead in the Shambles, and one dead in a house just newly shut up in Stinking Lane. They say that at St Dominic’s there’s been funerals every day for two weeks.’

  ‘I had no idea,’ Sarah said in a shocked voice, while I tried to take in these numbers. As if to confirm what she was saying, I could hear, from several points across the city, the dull tolling of church bells.

  The woman lowered her voice. ‘It’s said that St Dominic’s and the smaller churchyards will soon be filled to overflowing, so they won’t be able to take more bodies. And what will happen then? My husband says they’ll just be left in the houses to rot!’

  Sarah and I gasped.

  ‘They’re already collecting the bodies in a cart instead of on a pallet,’ she went on. ‘They came last night for the children and took them all of a heap together.’

  Sarah and I looked at each other. ‘Then it’s far, far worse than we thought,’ she said to me in a voice a little above a whisper.

  Mrs Groat nodded. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I fear we’ve all been deceiving ourselves. My husband and I would go out of town if we could – but where would we go? Who is going to take in someone from this city when God knows what airs and humours we’re carrying on us? Besides, we could not afford the certificates.’

  Sarah asked which brand of tobacco Mrs Groat was using and she told us, though I could not imagine me or Sarah smoking a stinking pipe, or even how you managed to smoke and breathe at the same time without choking to death.

  We wished the woman well (though privately wondered if the poor thing had already contracted the plague by being so close to the contagion) and began to walk back to the shop. We had work to do, for we had almost used up our supply of rose water and must make a quantity soon, for it was needed in almost every recipe we used for our sweetmeats.

  We passed a sedan chair carrying someone being taken to a pesthouse, with a man in front holding a white stave and clanging a bell to warn people to keep out of the way. As we stood back to watch it pass Sarah linked her arm with mine and drew me close. ‘I feel so guilty about bringing you here and making you go through all this, Hannah,’ she said. ‘If only you’d received my second letter before you left Chertsey.’

  ‘But if I wasn’t here you’d be all on your own!’ I protested. ‘It wouldn’t be right if you had no one to befriend you. Besides,’ I hesitated a moment, then said, ‘if you fell ill, who would look after you?’

  What I didn’t say – for I was ashamed of even having such a feeling – was that I wanted to be here, that I found it dangerous and exciting to be in London at this hour. Some of this was to do with having met Tom, and some to do with the heightened sense of tension and anxiety that now seemed to surround us. At home in Chertsey, life had been peaceful. The milk turning sour or getting blackfly on our beans had been the only disturbances to our calm existence. Here, though, now, there was a bitter, heart-stopping danger in each day. We were walking on the very edge of a chasm of fire.

  We had been to market that morning but had not gone very early, as we usually did in order to get the freshest blooms, for Sarah had said that to make rose water it hardly mattered what condition the flowers were in. We had gone, then, to find bargains rather than perfection. The blooms we’d bought had been placed in enamel jugs of water outside our back door and when I went to get them in (first checking on Mew, who was safely under the bed) Sarah suggested that before we started making rose water, we should take some of our blooms down to St Dominic’s churchyard.

  ‘No matter if the family are not having a proper funeral,’ she said. ‘We can at least say a prayer over the graves of those children.’

  We took one red rose for Mrs Williams, and three pink roses: one for Kate, one for Jacob and one for Marie, and walked along to the churchyard with them. It was a warm night and not yet dark – the watchman called eight of the clock as we walked – but there was hardly anyone about.

  ‘They are staying indoors,’ Sarah said. ‘And have you seen how people now try to avoid each other in the street?’

  I nodded, for I’d already noticed that during this last week or two, people would step in the kennel ditch muck in the middle of the roadway rather than come face to face, breath to breath, with someone who might be infected with the sickness.

  We talked of our family in Chertsey as we walked, and both fervently hoped and prayed that the plague would not reach them there.

  ‘And even if I got a Certificate of Health, how could I go back home now?’ I asked Sarah. ‘I could be carrying the plague on my clothes.’ I looked down at myself. ‘I could be carrying it from London into our home and give it to our brothers and sisters.’

  Sarah shook her head slowly. ‘No, I can see we are both here for the duration, so we must follow all the rules. We must keep the space in front of our shop swept clean, and take care not to eat anything unwholesome. We must examine our bodies carefully each night to make sure no spots or lumps appear. We will chew a sprig of rosemary when we go abroad, and we will take a cordial and make ourselves an ABRACADABRA talisman, for I hear they are most effective.’

  I nodded. ‘One other thing – when I went to the grocer’s I found I had to put my payment coins into a jar of vinegar.’

  Sarah nodded. ‘Then we shall have our customers do that, too,’ she said. ‘With care, you and I can survive.’

  I smiled back at her and squeezed her hand. I was full of optimism and could not believe I could die, for I had everything to live for.

  The bell was tolling mournfully as we approached our parish church, and over the small lychgate which led into the graveyard a tall wax candle burned. Hearing noises and looking over the wall, we discovered four men digging a large hole. To one side there was a piece of tarpaulin on which – my heart contracted – seven corpses were lain. These were not enclosed in wooden coffins, but wound in rough shrouds with a clumsy knot tied at each end.

  I clutched Sarah’s hand, and nodded towards them, my teeth beginning to chatter with fright. I had seen dead corpses before, but only one at a time, and then each body had been settled, washed and neat, arms crossed at the breast, in a pine coffin. These corpses, though, were just piled carelessly on one side like stale loaves.

  ‘Oh, we should not have come!’ Sarah said in a low and shaky voice. ‘We should have stayed away from this horror.’

  ‘Do you think that is . . . is them?’ I asked, nodding towards the corpses.

  ‘Maybe,’ she whispered. ‘Them and some others.’

  ‘Or maybe our family were buried yesterday,’ I said, looking across the churchyard. ‘Look at all the new mounds!’

  There were man
y piles of freshly-dug earth, but no way of telling if each held more than one body. Some sort of white powder had been strewn across the whole churchyard, and it covered the ground like snow.

  ‘It’s lime,’ Sarah said in answer to my question. ‘Lime to stop the infection and to encourage the bodies to . . . to . . .’ she shuddered and could not finish.

  The men were still digging steadily, throwing the earth to one side and singing a bawdy song as they worked. They did not acknowledge us in any way.

  ‘Shall we . . . shall we ask if the bodies they are burying are those of the Williams family?’ I asked.

  Sarah shook her head. ‘They will have no way of knowing who they bury. And as there seems to be no clergy to ask, I think we may as well go home. We can do no good here, and it fair turns my stomach to see such things.’

  ‘Let us throw in our flowers before we go, then,’ I said.

  Sarah nodded. ‘And say our own prayer.’

  So we leaned over the wall and threw in our roses, and the grave-diggers, on seeing us, fell silent. I said a prayer for the Williams family, and then we went home.

  When the Bills were published, we found out that one thousand people had died from plague during that week.

  ‘One thousand!’ everyone whispered in shocked voices, although it had quickly become common knowledge that this figure was much lower than it should have been. Mr Newbery told us that the bereaved would bribe the searchers of the dead to have a death recorded as spotted fever or the purples, rather than have plague noted against the name and cause the rest of the family to be shut up for forty days. Most of the searchers, he told us, were brutal and common types who would sell their own mothers for a flagon of gin.

  That day was a black one for us, too, for Mew disappeared. I had hardly been in our back room at all as I had spent the morning in the shop making orange-flower water: boiling water on our fire, steeping the orange blossom in it, then straining and re-straining the resulting pale primrose liquid through muslin. At dinner time Sarah bought a pigeon pie from a pieman, and when we went into the back, calling for Mew to come and have a scrap with us, she wasn’t there on the end of her tethering string. Discovering this, Sarah and I stared at each other in horror.

  ‘Was she there this morning?’ she asked me.

  I nodded. ‘I gave her some bread and milk. Her string was tied tightly – I checked it!’ I assured her.

  We looked under the bed and, finding that Mew had wriggled her head through the neck loop, both began to cry.

  ‘One of the catchers has taken her – I know they have!’ I said. I was already imagining her sad fate, for I had seen a creaking old farm cart the day before stacked to the brim with the carcasses of dogs and cats in a carelessly jumbled pile of fur and hair.

  We looked around the room carefully, in case she was hiding herself (although there were precious few secret places). Then Sarah looked out the front door while I went to the back. I searched our yard and privy, and called, ‘Mew!’ across the roofs several times, all the while banging one of our old bowls with a spoon to try and attract her. Our yard stayed empty, though, and I thought sadly that if we’d have done the same thing just two weeks ago, a stable-load of cats and kits would have come to our door to be fed.

  Sitting down, we ate some of our pigeon pie, although found we had little appetite for it.

  Sarah sighed. ‘We must imagine to ourselves that, like Dickon, Mew has gone to a happier home,’ she said. ‘Maybe she’s jumped on a cart and gone out of town, or maybe she’s got herself into a cosy household where meat is on the menu every day.’

  I nodded, my heart heavy. What I was thinking and was scared to say was, what would happen if, after a day or so, Mew came back? We wouldn’t know where she’d been. She might have been scratching for mice in a newly-dug churchyard beside a body rotten with plague, or have lodged a while in a house struck down with it. Maybe her thick grey fur would be harbouring the very sickness that we dreaded so much.

  But Mew did not come back, and it seemed certain that she’d slipped her string to go after a mouse or two and been found by one of the fat-gutted ruffians who were employed on the shameful job of clubbing animals to death. Sarah and I cried ourselves to sleep that night, but after that we did not speak of her again, for it seemed to be tempting fate to mourn the loss of a kitten when all around us people were losing parents, children, brothers and sisters.

  More and more people were departing for the country. One morning I had an errand to run for Sarah which took me along the Tyburn Road, and I saw several coach-and-fours laden with cases and servants, trundling along with their thick brocade curtains closed tight to protect the occupants from the stares of the common people. I knew that the travellers must all be either of the aristocracy, or at least affluent merchants or rich landowners, for apart from the fact of their having a coach and horses of their own, and a place to go in the country, I had not heard of an ordinary person being able to obtain a health certificate.

  I saw, too, a pretty yellow-varnished carriage sway past me pulled by two chestnut horses, their manes and tails tied with green ribbon, and the coachman wearing smart green livery. I glanced inside, for this time the curtains were not closed, and was sure I saw Nelly Gwyn sitting there in a peacock-blue gown, for the girl looked up just at that moment and though her ribboned bonnet partly obscured her face, I could see a flash of unruly red hair.

  Sarah laughed when I told her this and said I had just seen what I wanted to see, but I am sure it was Nelly, for her carriage was heading towards Salisbury, and we had heard that the king and his court were on their way there to be further off still from London. I like to think she was obeying an invitation from His Majesty to come and dance some lively jigs for the gentlemen of the court to console them for being away from the entertainments in the capital.

  That day, walking back from my errand which was to obtain an amount of rose oil from a grocer, I could not help my ears being assailed by the constant tolling of the church bells announcing more deaths, or seeing the red crosses on doors as I passed. Most of these doors were in the poorer parts of the city – although not all, for I saw a substantial house in Blackfriars which had been enclosed, and one big dwelling in Fleet Street also. In this house someone had dislodged a plank over the first-floor window and from this space two small, tear-stained children peered out, scared and bewildered. I could not help but wonder what was happening within. Had their mother and father succumbed to the disease? Who was looking after them? There was no way of telling and no one seemed to care.

  Two more things I noticed. One was the activity in the churchyards, for each contained at least two grave-diggers going about their gruesome business, and some had been dug over so constantly for new burials that they resembled ploughed fields. The other thing which assaulted the eye was the number of posters offering preventatives against the sickness. On almost every tree and shutter they hung, advertising amulets, powders, cordials, charms, pills and enchantments. There were some herbal preventatives that Tom had already told me of, and others made from all manner of strange things: powders made from dried toads, an amount of mercury contained in a walnut shell, or a talisman made from a verse from the Bible written in a certain mystical way. All promised to shield against contagion and prevent malignant humours from affecting the body.

  Which of these would be effective, though?

  With so much at stake, which to choose?

  Seeing all these promises and writings together made me think of Tom, for I had not heard a word from him since our day out. I vowed, therefore, that I would go to Doctor da Silva’s as soon as I could to ask Tom about the cordial he had said he would prepare for me. This was a good enough reason and could be my excuse, but the truth was that in spite of all that was going on around us, he filled my thoughts and I longed to see him again.

  Chapter Eight

  The fourth week of July

  ‘And they tell me that in Westminster there is never a Physician and b
ut one Apothecary, all others being dead.’

  Out of the darkness of Doctor da Silva’s shop a monstrous figure came towards me, causing me to scream aloud. The creature was broad and imposing, its head was that of a great bird of prey, with a tiny shining eye and a great hooked beak, and its breathing as it lumbered towards me was hoarse and rasping.

  ‘Keep away!’ I screamed. I backed away, trembling, feeling behind me for the door through which I’d just entered. I tried to recall some holy words to banish such an evil and unearthly creature, but in my panic could not think of any.

  There was the sound of running feet across the shop and Tom’s voice called, ‘It’s all right, Hannah!’ he said. ‘It’s just Doctor da Silva.’

  I burst into tears of fright and relief and Tom put his arms around me. ‘It’s the doctor in the outfit he uses to visit the stricken.’

  I drew in a shuddering breath, peering through my fingers at the figure. Now that I could see more clearly in the dim light I discerned that it was, indeed, only a man in a strange headdress and covering gown of heavy waxed material, and not a creature from hell at all. ‘Is it truly him?’ I asked, for I felt comforted in Tom’s arms and did not want to stir myself from them.

  ‘Doctor, will you take off your head?’ Tom asked, and the frightening creature lifted his arms and pulled off the leathery headdress of his outfit, beak and all, revealing himself indeed as the doctor.

  ‘Yes, it is I,’ he said, trying to flatten his tangled grey hair. ‘I am dressed to go and treat plague victims.’

  My fright disappearing, I thought I had better let my arms fall from Tom’s shoulders, for I did not wish to appear too forward. ‘And is this what you have to wear?’ I asked breathlessly.

  The doctor nodded. ‘All the apothecaries and the doctors – that is, those who are still in London and have not gone away to the country with their wealthy patrons – have them now.’