Circle of Pearls

by Rosalind Laker

  Sophie had no such responsibilities, for her staff organized their own pastimes, the housekeeper making sure that there were no idle hands. Drink had become Sophie’s escape. She had always liked cognac, having been given her first sip by her father, but in adult life she had never indulged, restricting herself to the occasional small glass and knowing that it would be all too easy to make it into a daily habit. Now she had to have some outlet from this impossible situation or else she would go mad.

  She passed her time pacing about the house like a caged beast or sitting for hours by her bedchamber window, gazing out with a glass in her hand. Normally she liked to read and there was some half-finished embroidery on a trestle frame that she could have finished, but she was too possessed by hatred for Michael to take an interest in anything. It was entirely his fault that this terrible predicament had occurred. If he had listened to her and dropped the ribbon-selling she would not have had to resort to her trick and be shut up now like a prisoner in the Bastille.

  She put a hand to her aching brow. It was such a long time since she had had one of those devastating headaches that she had begun to hope they were gone for ever, but since the first day of incarceration one had been threatening like thunder in the far distance and giving warning of a storm to come. But it was coming on her now. The signs were all too familiar.

  She had tried to stave it off by lying quietly most of the day on the couch in the salon that had once been her father’s, the nearest she could get to him since Michael had swept away her shrine and she was prevented from going to the graveside. She would have to get upstairs to bed.

  With a groan she sat up slowly. Swords pierced, through her brain. On a sidetable by the couch was a half-full decanter and glass, which she picked up to take with her. At a slow and careful pace she made her way from the room in the direction of the stairs. In the kitchen some of the servants were playing cards. It was an exciting game and the rest were watching, only the housekeeper absent, having a nap in her room. Nobody saw Sophie making her way with painful slowness up the long, curving flight.

  She was swaying on her feet by the time she reached her bedchamber door and felt horribly nauseous. Almost blindly she found the key to her cupboard and with every nerve in her head and neck shrieking with pain she opened its door and took down the bottle of tincture that always gave her relief. At this stage she should have relocked the cupboard and summoned her lady’s maid to administer to her, but she was desperate for the dose and let the drops fall into the glass of cognac that she had poured. She had no idea if the spirit would diminish the tincture’s effect and added extra for good measure since it was harmless. She drank the mixture down in three gulps and then sank thankfully back on her pillows. It was a little while before she felt the first twinge of stomach pain.

  *

  When Sophie was found dead by her lady’s maid it was thought at first she had died of the plague and the servants were panic-stricken. The housekeeper alone kept her head. With the two months nearly up she knew they were all well out of danger as Madame would have been. She had no fear in examining the body and saw for herself there were no plague-blains or signs of swelling. Seeing the decanter she wondered if it was an excess of cognac, but that was for the doctor to decide.

  He sniffed the bottle of tincture and put a taste on his fingertip. Both the lady’s maid and the housekeeper were able to confirm that Madame had had the only key to the cupboard where she kept her tinctures and lotions and nobody knew where she had kept the key. The doctor soon made up his mind as to the cause of death and informed the staff, who were gathered in the hall, that their mistress had poisoned herself.

  ‘But,’ he added when their murmurs of shock had died down, ‘I think there’s every likelihood that she may have taken the dose from the wrong flask in error.’

  At this point one of the young maidservants fainted. The doctor soon brought her round, saying kindly that it was natural that distress for Madame should so affect her.

  When he reported the death to the public coroner, he showed the bottle of poison, pointing out how the label simply said Lotion, and since all the bottles were similar he did not think it was suicide but accidental death.

  ‘Why should she keep poison in the cupboard in the first place?’ he was asked.

  ‘It’s a whitener for the skin and could have caused her demise through constant use had she but known it,’ the doctor explained. ‘She was a beautiful woman and had a range of herbal aids to beauty in her cupboard among medical decoctions for the usual women’s ailments. It’s my belief she had been drinking too much cognac and, feeling unwell, sought some relief and thereby made her fatal mistake.’

  His evidence saved Sophie from a grave in unconsecrated ground. She was buried with her father and her name was added to the ornate headstone that she had chosen for him herself. Jean-Robert was heart-broken. Michael encouraged the boy’s memories of the loving side of Sophie that she had often shown their son and tried to cheer him with the promise of seeing Sotherleigh when it could be arranged. Julia had written that there was an outbreak of the plague in Chichester, and Michael considered it was too near home to expose his son to the risk.

  *

  Winter hit hard at the plague. Frost and flurries of snow brought the numbers of dead down to double figures and hope rose that the end might be in sight. Julia had wondered anxiously about the Webbs as well as Abigail and her husband, who if they had survived would be longing to see their four-month-old son.

  Boy was thriving and living at Sotherleigh where Anne and Mary had him and Katy and Patience under their joint wing. Another boy who was getting along very well was the embroiderer’s brother who had objected to taking his clothes off by the river. He had found work on a local farm and lived with the farmer and his wife, who had lost their two sons at the Battle of Naseby and were fostering him as if he were their own.

  Only with Adam and Julia was the situation becoming gradually more strained. He went no fewer than three times to Oxford during the winter. She would have liked to have gone with him and visited Faith, as well as Susan and her husband at Bletchingdon, while he was at Court seeing ministers about whatever government business had taken him there. But he did not suggest it and she did not dare to ask, not wanting him to suppose her purpose was solely to see Christopher and thus exacerbate the painful relationship between them.

  Christopher had much to keep him busy. The majority of the members of the Royal Society had gravitated to Oxford to escape the plague if they were not already living in the vicinity of the University and the meetings continued. He went often to Cambridge where his chapel was still being built, as was the Sheldonian Theatre, which he visited daily, and if all went well the King would open it in a few months’ time. He also had several interesting commissions, some to be started in the near future, three nearing completion and a number still at the planning stage. A board of councillors wanting a new Town Hall, and seeking prestige for themselves by commissioning the eminent Dr Wren, had rejected his first plans, declaring that the wide stone canopy over the entrance would never bear its own weight and was likely to fall and crush those unfortunate enough to be beneath.

  ‘But I assure you, gentlemen,’ Christopher had replied, ‘that nothing could dislodge that canopy in a thousand years.’ When he proceeded to explain why, crisply and clearly in his tutorial manner, he might as well have been speaking a foreign language for all they understood. The chairman cut him off quickly to save general embarrassment.

  ‘We really wanted a grand portico, Dr Wren.’

  Christopher could have been offended. There was grace and elegance to the canopy as it was, its structure totally in harmony with the rest of the building, and to add anything else would be unnecessary. But even as he reached out to gather up his plans and depart, his sense of humour got the better of him. It was not often that an architect had the chance to play a little joke, but he had done it in the painting of the ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre and he would pla
y another on this pompous assembly.

  ‘Very well, gentlemen.’

  ‘You’ll add the columns?’

  ‘Six should suffice.’

  They all looked pleased and nodded approval. The chairman was most genial. ‘You have satisfied us completely as to the safety of the canopy. Dr Wren.’

  Christopher could not stop chuckling to himself as he returned to his rooms at Wadham College. He planned to order the columns to be an inch shorter than the height they should be. The gap might never be spotted in the councillors’ lifetime, or his own, but the canopy would continue to hang free of any visible support, and in years to come there would be many a laugh when it was seen what he had done.

  He would share the joke with Faith when next he saw her. He liked to see her laugh. Amusement would start in her eves, bring out her dimples and then her laughter, which was like a sweet-toned bell. That reminded him. This evening he must pen his weekly love letter to her.

  Nell Gwyn, passing in a gallant’s coach, saw him and waved, but he failed to notice her, lost in his own thoughts.

  She gazed after him. He was an attractive man, but although he was gracious and smiling towards her, it only came from his natural courtesy. She had met him first in London’s Mermaid Tavern, where members of the Royal Society sometimes gathered for beefsteak and ale after a meeting. It had been the haunt of actors and playwrights since Will Shakespeare and Ben Jonson had roistered there, and it was natural that she and fellow players should have made it their own. Christopher had been holding forth on some discourse and she had listened in fascination, wondering how any man could know so much. Then she had mimicked him very accurately and he had laughed and applauded as much as anyone else. She had liked and respected him for that. Since arriving in Oxford she had seen him several times at a distance.

  ‘What are you thinking about, Nell?’ her escort asked her. He was good-looking, rich, periwigged and fun to be with. She had met him after her arrival with the rest of the players from the King’s Playhouse and the Duke of York’s players when they had fled from the plague, she bringing her mother with her. Mrs Gwyn’s drinking still kept Nell short of money, but she accepted the situation as good-humouredly as she had always done, loving the old woman and taking care of her. Yet she was longing to get back on the stage and start earning again.

  ‘How glad I shall be when we can all go back to London,’ she answered on a cheerful sigh. ‘I was just getting my first good roles when the plague came. At least the King has lifted the ban on dancing rooms and playhouses here in Oxford for Christmas, but there are too many of us players looking for work for me to get a role anywhere. I’m bored with performing in playlets at parties.’ Her eyes danced wickedly at him. ‘As you know, I do vary that by singing for my supper sometimes.’

  He answered her in the same vein with a long and smiling look. ‘You always sing the sweetest of songs, Nell.’

  She laughed and pouted a kiss at him that was full of promise. At sixteen she was as experienced in the ways of the world as any actress twice her age, but he was certain she would keep her girlish, mischievous charm to the end of her days.

  *

  In February the King moved back to Whitehall. The plague still simmered in the slums of Wapping and Stepney, which made many of the Court wary of accompanying him, but he was impatient for life to return to normal. Adam followed the King’s example, as did hundreds of others, and left Julia at Sotherleigh while he went ahead to get their London house aired and fumigated and put to rights before she came.

  Like everyone else who returned at that time he was saddened by the state of London. Every street had many shops and houses boarded up where the occupants had perished. There had been so little traffic that grass had grown amidst the cobbles, giving even main thoroughfares the look of country lanes. It was now estimated that a hundred thousand had died and in places a stench still came from the mass graves that had not been properly covered in the haste with which the dead were buried.

  But London was stirring again. The King’s return revitalized it and people cheered him wherever he went. Coaches and wagons and carts and drays began bringing citizens back again. Many new faces came with them. London had always been a magnet for the young and enterprising, and now there was a flood of eager workmen and craftsmen, freshly out of their apprenticeships, who realized there would be many gaps that they could be filling in among the city’s reviving trades. On all sides windows were thrown wide in houses and tenements as homes were reclaimed and shutters were removed from shops. Bonfires burned in every street and alley as bed linen, clothes and anything else that might still be harbouring infection were burned. Strange aromas filled the air as perfumes, herbs, pitch and brimstone were used to purify premises. Once again at the passengers’ steps up from the river the ferrymen’s cry of ‘Next oars!’ was heard. In the Port of London ships stranded by the plague set out for foreign harbours ready to accept them once more.

  Adam made enquiries on Julia’s behalf and was able to let her know that although Abigail and her husband had both contracted the plague they had been pulled through by Mrs Webb. Boy was then restored to his parents by one of the nine evacuated embroiderers who wanted to return to their London homes without delay. Later Julia heard what a joyous reunion there had been and although Boy was baptized Arthur after his grandfather, who had not survived the pestilence, she was always to think of him by his nickname whenever her thoughts dwelt on those days.

  As for Katy, Michael had legally adopted her by proxy for his mother’s sake, for Anne had no authority to sign such papers. The child’s predicament had been explained to him by letter, there being no relatives that could be traced, and no less important was the fact that Anne had become as devoted to her as to Patience, thinking that Katy was another daughter. Michael understood what it would mean to his mother if for any reason she should be separated from the child. It puzzled Anne at times as to why she could not recall giving birth to Katy. Then Mary would prompt her memory gently to the true facts, which she would remember for five minutes and then forget again.

  The news of Sophie’s death was withheld from Anne. She could get deeply distressed if she believed anything was affecting one of her children, and she would have grieved for Michael’s loss in a way that would be detrimental to her state of mind. Only to his sister had Michael written of the true facts and Julia realized how narrowly he must have come to receiving a fatal dose the first time it had been administered to him. Much as she wanted to see him, she had had to advise him about the flare-up of the plague in Chichester, for it had been fierce and a mass grave had been dug outside the city walls.

  Mary did not care to think what her future might be now that Michael no longer had a wife. Men did not always want to marry women they had made their mistresses when at last the chance opened up for them. It was some comfort that he had sent her a very affectionate message in his letter to his sister. At least Julia’s warning of the plague should keep him away long enough to be able to consider everything carefully before he came to Sotherleigh again. There was no reason to imagine he would visit more often than before in any case, for he was the owner of a most prosperous business in France and it would be his son’s after him.

  It was June when Julia returned to London. She had hoped for a new beginning with Adam, but as soon as she arrived at their house she became unsure again. All the rooms that had been despoiled by the looters had been refurbished and anything that might have remotely reminded her of her terrible experience had been removed, but the light-hearted atmosphere that had prevailed before had gone. She supposed the cause lay within Adam and herself, a cloud under which she woke each morning and slept again at night. She thought so often of Katherine, who had seen the folly that lurked in her nature. Many times she wished that her grandmother was still at Sotherleigh with some wise advice to steer her out of her present troubled path.

  Her workshop in Carter Lane was exactly as it had been left. For safety’s sake she felt ob
liged to have the ribbons there and any of the raw materials that might have been handled by the plague victims put to a bonfire.

  Fortunately a large stock had been building up in Briar House and on a date that was set, these were delivered to Carter Lane. That same day all nine of her workers, who had left Sussex earlier than the rest, arrived to start work again. Alice’s old aunt had died not long before and she herself was shortly to be married in Sussex. As a country-bred girl she had no wish to return to the City. By the end of a week Julia had three-quarters of her old work force at their tasks again. She went personally to her previous contacts, who had always bought from her. The shops were open, but in some cases sons or nephews had stepped into the shoes of owners taken by the plague. All knew of her ribbons and were willing to buy, although until commerce recovered the orders had to be moderate. The ban on centres of entertainment was still in force, no fairs allowed, and the Court had not fully regathered. The war with the Dutch had flared up again, but a splendid victory at sea had settled that for the time being.

  By chance Julia had good news of the Webbs. Both had survived the dangerous risks they had taken and he had been given a living at a church in Manchester where they could continue to care for the poor and the sick. In the meantime they were at Wapping, a few cases of the plague still festering there, and they would not leave London until they were no longer needed. Another piece of good news was that the Needhams had also escaped infection despite some at the Heathcock having died. Their sons were now back from the country, the family reunited and the inn open again.