4 A Plague of Angels

by P. F. Chisholm

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Robert Greene.’

  Cheke frowned. ‘Greene? When did he take sick?’

  ‘He was well enough when he was playing primero last night,’ said Dodd. ‘Or he seemed like it. Will ye come look at him, Mr Cheke?’

  The apothecary passed a hand over his face. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will, though I was up all night.’

  ‘I dinna doubt it’s all the booze,’ said Dodd. ‘Ye can rest after.’

  Cheke smiled thinly. ‘I very much doubt it, the way the plague is moving in these parts.’

  ‘Spreading, is it?’

  ‘With the heat, the miasmas are thickening and strengthening at every moment. I was called to three houses last night, and by the time I came to the third, every soul in it had died.’

  ‘Och,’ said Dodd. ‘But it’s plague, man. Why d’ye bother?’

  Red-rimmed eyes held his for a moment and Cheke frowned. ‘Do you know, I’ve no idea. I suppose I come in time to comfort some of them. Once I had some notion of finding the answer, of reading the riddle.’

  ‘What riddle?’

  ‘Why does plague happen? Why is one year a plague year and another year not? When London is full of stenches, why does one kind of miasma kill?’

  ‘Och,’ said Dodd shaking his head at the overweening madness of Londoners. ‘Ye’re wasting yer time, man. It’s the Sword o’ God’s Wrath against the wickedness of London.’

  ‘What?’ snapped Barnabus. ‘What’s so wicked about London? Compared to Carlisle?’

  ‘There isnae comparison,’ said Dodd, quite shocked. ‘London’s a den of iniquity, full of cutpurses and trollops that try and blackmail ye oot o’ yer hard won cash.’

  ‘Carlisle’s full of cattle thieves and blackrenters.’

  ‘That’s different. That’s making a living.’

  ‘So’s cutting purses.’

  ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ said the apothecary, putting on a skullcap. ‘Shall we go?’

  By the time they came back to the cobbler’s shop, Joan Ball was back in the kitchen at the rear of the shop and Carey was leaning on the upstairs windowsill peering out.

  Greene was putting a chased silver flask back under his revolting pillow, shuddering and coughing. He bent over a new piece of paper, still writing frantically. Next to him was the jordan full of something that looked like black soup. The stench was appalling.

  Peter Cheke went in cautiously. Greene surged up in the bed, hands over his belly and started roaring with foam on his lips.

  ‘You!’ he shouted. ‘You dare come in here…’

  ‘Mr Greene, your friends…’

  ‘I’ve got no friends and never you, Jenkins, never you, atheist, alchemist, necromancer…Get out, get out…!’

  A book whizzed through the air and hit Peter Cheke on the head. He turned and walked down the stairs.

  ‘I didna ken that Greene had a feud with ye as well,’ said Dodd, hurrying after him. ‘Why did ye not say, I wouldnae have wasted yer time.’

  ‘If I had known, I would have mentioned it,’ said Cheke. ‘But we have never quarrelled before. It is clearly not plague that ails him, but nor does it seem to me a flux. For how long has he been purging blood?’

  Dodd shrugged. ‘All night according to his woman,’ put in Carey as he came clattering down stairs. ‘Is there anything you could give him that might bring him to his senses, calm him down? He won’t do anything except write, and I need to talk to him.’

  Peter Cheke thought for a moment. ‘A lenitive might be lettuce juice and a decoction of willow bark. If you can get him to drink it and keep it down, he might sleep and give his body time to recover. Perhaps.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to examine him?’ said Carey. ‘Won’t you cast a figure for him or taste his water or feel his pulses?’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Cheke gravely. ‘I am not a doctor. I know very little of the humours and I have never studied at Padua. I have none of your right doctor’s certainty. All I see in the many diseases of men is a great mystery. Besides, Mr Greene seems to think I am his enemy. I doubt he would let me examine him.’

  ‘Try anyway.’

  They trailed upstairs again and Dodd and Carey ignored frantic protests and held Greene down so Cheke could examine him. Greene fought like a madman and then stopped suddenly. ‘You’re not Jenkins,’ he whispered like a bewildered child.

  ‘No, you know my name is Cheke. May I use my poor skill to examine you, sir?’

  Greene nodded, eyes darting from Carey to Dodd and back. Cheke listened at the chest and breath, felt neck and armpits, poked at Greene’s stomach which produced a scream. At last he stepped back.

  ‘It could be a flux, but such violence…I would suspect a poison.’

  ‘What kind of poison?’

  Cheke shrugged.

  ‘You see!’ roared Greene. ‘I’m dying, I told you I was, the apothecary thinks so too.’

  ‘Where is Edmund?’ demanded Carey as soon as he caught a flicker of Greene’s fleeting clarity. ‘My father gave you five pounds to find him. Have you found him?’

  ‘Repent or be damned, oh ye atheists of London!’ bellowed Greene, picking up his pen and dipping. ‘Find him yourself, I’m busy.’

  ‘For God’s sake, man…’ said Carey, holding his shoulders. ‘Tell me what you discovered about Edmund.’

  Greene spat full in his face. ‘I’ve got to finish,’ he panted, shaking his head and swallowing hard. Back he went to his desperate scribbling, for all the world as if enough letters on a page could save him from hell.

  Carey let go of him and wiped himself off distastefully with a handkerchief.

  The apothecary was fishing in his bag, brought out a leather bottle. ‘I have the calming draught here,’ he said. ‘If he could but take it and keep it down. Goodwife Ball,’ he shouted down the stairs, ‘will you come up?’

  Greene’s woman came up again, wiping her hands nervously. She took the little cup of medicine and gently held it to Greene’s grey lips. He swallowed, gagged, pushed her away and grabbed his flask from under the pillow to wash it down.

  The apothecary put his bottle away, buckled his bag and shrugged the strap over his shoulder. ‘I will go to my shop to fetch laudanum since I have none left, and you should fetch a priest, Goodwife,’ he said as he left. ‘Pray God that that will help the poor gentleman.’

  For a while it seemed as if it did. Greene wrote faster and faster, shaking his head as sweat dripped down his face and off his nose, and then at last he seemed to finish for he signed the paper with a flourish, put the last piece on the pile beside him, stoppered his inkpot, wiped his pen on the sheets.

  ‘Now,’ said Carey firmly, turning away from the window where he had been getting a breath of fresh air. ‘Will you please tell me what you found out about my brother?’

  Greene had collapsed back on the pillows and was coughing. He seemed too exhausted even to talk. He whispered something indistinct and Carey bent close to make it out.

  ‘Dying. I heard…Don’t tell Heneage…where…Ohhh. Aaahhh!’

  Something terrible was happening inside the poet, as if some kind of animal was trapped in Greene’s bowels and was rending them, trying to escape. His eyes rolled up in his head and he jacknifed in the tangled blankets. Carey strode to the stairs and shouted for the woman again. Dodd turned his head away from the sight. ‘Och, God,’ he said, fighting not to vomit himself.

  Even in his agony, Greene turned himself so as not to puke on his swansong and the bright red blood flooded amongst the sheets, pooled in the lumpy mattress, endless amounts of it. Dodd heard Barnabus dry-heaving behind him.

  ‘Christ,’ croaked Carey. ‘Christ have mercy.’ Then he did a thing which even Dodd found admirable. He picked his way back to the bed and gripped Robert Greene’s shoulder, held onto him while death juddered through him, so he should know he was not alone while his soul battled clear of his flesh.

  After several minutes Greene’s eyes were star
ing and Dodd broke the paralysis that had clutched him, went to the window and opened it as wide as it would go, so Greene’s ghost could fly free. Joan Ball was in the room, pushing past Carey to fling herself across her lover and wail.

  Dodd looked down into the street, as full of people and noise as ever, breathed deep of the slightly less pungent air coming through the window. He heard a long shaky breath beside him and knew that Carey was standing there too.

  ‘Wait…wait,’ said Joan. ‘I’ll get it, darling, wait.’

  They turned to see her running down the stairs and Barnabus standing by the twisted body on the bed, gingerly turning it on its back, shutting the eyes and putting pennies on them, to keep the demons out.

  Will I die like that? Dodd wondered, alone with strangers, in my own blood. I deserve to, came the dispiriting answer, unless I’m lucky enough to hang or get my head blown off in a fight.

  Clogs sounded on the stairs as Joan Ball came running back up, incongruously clutching a couple of sprigs of bayleaves from the kitchen. She twisted them together in a rough ring and then took the nightcap off, pushed them onto Greene’s balding, carroty brow.

  ‘There,’ she said, kissing the bulbous chilling nose and wiping her hands in her apron again. ‘That’s what you wanted, my love.’

  ‘What the hell…?’ Dodd asked.

  ‘It’s a wreath of bays,’ said Carey remotely. ‘What they crowned dead poets with in Ancient Greece.’

  There didn’t seem anything to be said to that. In unspoken agreement they went down the stairs and out into the sunny street where nothing was any different. Barnabus emerged from the house too, a few moments later, blinking and looking shifty. Carey glanced at him and seemed to come to some decision.

  ‘I need a drink,’ he announced which showed he had some sense after all, and he led the way to the nearest house with red lattices.

  They sat in a tiny booth and called for beer and aqua vitae. Carey lifted his little horn cup. ‘To Robert Greene, may he rest in peace,’ he said and knocked it back. Dodd and Barnabus followed suit gratefully.

  The drink helped settle Dodd’s stomach and scour the stench of sickness out of his nostrils. Before he had quite finished the beer, Carey was up again, heading out the door.

  ‘Where’s the apothecary’s shop?’

  Barnabus led him there, and they met Peter Cheke hurrying into the street holding a bottle. Cheke stopped.

  Carey shook his head.

  ‘Dead?’ asked the apothecary. ‘Poor gentleman.’

  ‘How much do I owe you?’ asked Carey with strange politeness and Cheke put his bony hands out in front of him.

  ‘I can hardly charge for such unsuccessful treatment as I attempted,’ he said. ‘Alas, sir, I am not a doctor.’

  ‘I dinna think a doctor could hae done any mair,’ said Dodd. ‘There was death on him already.’

  Cheke smiled wanly. ‘As usual, I shall always be in doubt,’ he said.

  ‘Can we come in?’ asked Carey and the apothecary ceremoniously ushered them into the pungent dimness of his shop, and then, on Carey’s request for somewhere private, through a door into the kitchen at the back of the building. They sat at a scrubbed wooden table standing on painfully scrubbed flagstones; a womanless kitchen for the lack of strings of onions and flitches of bacon hanging from the rafters. Ranged like soldiers on shelves were a vast variety of cups and dishes and strange tortured things made out of glass. There was a bulbous-shaped oven instead of a fireplace.

  ‘You said you thought it might be poison,’ Carey asked, suddenly narrowing his eyes and sharpening up. ‘Do you know what kind?’

  Cheke shrugged. ‘There are so many, sir, some masquerading under the name of physic. I only gave him a painkilling dose, but who knows…It could have been white arsenic. That attacks the gut although it generally works more slowly. It can make a man who abuses his belly with booze bleed to death.’

  ‘That’s Greene, all right. Is there any way you can be sure?’

  Cheke shook his head. ‘Arsenic has no taste or smell so it is a favourite of those who work with poisons. More than that I cannot say.’

  Carey felt in his belt pouch and then produced the little twist of paper in which he had caught the beads of liquid metal in Edmund Carey’s clothes chest. Very carefully he opened it.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’

  The apothecary looked at the bead of bright silver, his nostrils flaring a little. ‘Certainly I do, sir,’ he said. ‘It is Mercury.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the art and science of alchemy we have various materials that partake of certain qualities: there is Venus, Mars, Saturn—and this is Mercury, the messenger and facilitator of the chemical wedding. It is a great mystery, for how can metal be a liquid? Some call it quicksilver. And so indeed it is, for after any reaction concerning it, you may find little dewdrops of it in your clothes, in your pockets, brought there too quickly to see.’

  ‘Could Mercury have anything to do with the Philosopher’s Stone?’

  ‘Certainly it is one of the principals in the search. Do you have any understanding of the great quest, sir?’

  Carey smiled. ‘None at all. What can you tell me?’

  ‘The Philosopher’s Stone and also its liquid equivalent, the Elixir of Life, hath the great quality of turning that which is base—such as metal or flesh—into gold, the highest form matter can take. By means of repeatedly wedding Venus to Mars, with the intervention of Mercury, by the transitions through the many stages, it is certain that we shall achieve the transmutation of matter.’

  ‘How d’ye do that then?’ asked Dodd with interest. ‘How can ye change a thing to gold?’

  Cheke’s eyes lit up. ‘Change is unnatural and stability natural. Whatever changes is at a lower state than that which always remains the same. Yes? But change is itself not merely unnatural but also wearisome. Therefore, if we force base matter through enough changes it will eventually in exhaustion revert to its natural state, which is gold for metals. The Philosopher’s Stone shortens the process much as bone ash aids in lead refining. It is actually a powder, of course, but I have seen such a powder, dissolved in boiling Mercury, change pewter to gold. I myself have seen it, with my own eyes.’

  ‘Where?’ asked Carey intently.

  Cheke smiled. ‘I am sorry, sir, I gave my word not to reveal where and exactly what I saw.’

  ‘Who else was there?’

  ‘The master alchemist that performed the reaction. Also a gentleman that was investing in the process.’

  ‘What did he look like, this gentleman?’

  ‘Reddish brown hair, a little the look of yourself, sir, but stockier.’

  ‘What was his name?’

  Cheke shook his head. ‘We did not exchange names.’

  ‘Who was the master alchemist?’

  ‘A most worshipful gentleman, a Dr Jenkins, though not previously known to me.’

  ‘How come you were there then?’

  ‘As an assistant, to grind the powder and assist with firing the furnace. I am not one of the cognoscenti, you understand, I must study and work a great deal more.’

  ‘No, I meant—who introduced you?’

  ‘Why, a poet, a scholar from Cambridge.’

  ‘Mr Greene?’

  ‘No, a Mr Marlowe.’

  Carey compressed his lips and leaned back a little on the bench. ‘Hmm,’ he said, his eyes narrow. ‘How well do you know Marlowe?’

  ‘Not well, but he too is a seeker after truth and the Stone.’

  ‘Oh, is he?’ muttered Barnabus. ‘Well, fancy.’

  ‘When did you see this demonstration, Mr Cheke?’

  ‘It was a while ago. Last month. I was greatly inspired in my own labours by it—to see base pewter discs smeared with the Stone’s matrix, and sealed in the pelican, heated in the furnace and then to see them come out transformed, transmutated into gold—wonderful. Truly wonderful. It seems to me that we are living in a new Golden A
ge, sir, when the mysteries of God’s creation shall be unwound, when we shall truly understand how the world is made, what drives the crystal spheres, the nature of matter itself, all is within our grasp and from that wisdom we shall know the mind of God Himself.’

  More mad blasphemy, thought Dodd, full of gloom, no doubt the apothecary would be dead of plague by tomorrow. And me too, perhaps, added the voice of terror inside, I’ve still got that headache.

  ‘Then the reaction did not take place here?’

  Cheke smiled again. ‘I promised I would not tell where it happened. I brought some of my equipment, that’s all, and some poor skill with the furnace.’

  ‘What was the gentleman wearing?’

  ‘He was very well-dressed, sir, black Lucca velvet embroidered with pearls and slashed with oyster satin.’

  ‘And he looked like me?’

  ‘A little, sir. Redder in the face as well as wider in the body.’

  Carey nodded. ‘Mr Cheke, you have been very kind and very helpful. Are you sure I cannot…er…pay you for your treatment?’

  ‘With the Philosopher’s Stone available, why would I need any gold in the world?’ asked Cheke rhetorically and smiled like a child. Carey smiled back, rose and went into the shop. Barnabus hesitated and then spoke to the apothecary quietly and urgently.

  Dodd came back to fetch him.

  ‘I make no guarantees,’ Cheke was saying. ‘If I knew of anything that was sovereign against the plague, I would publish a book about it.’

  Barnabus actually had hold of the man’s sleeve. ‘My sister’s family got it and half of them are dead,’ he hissed. ‘Can’t you give me anything? You could let my blood, couldn’t you?’

  ‘But I don’t think it works.’

  ‘Doctors do it against the plague.’

  ‘If the doctors knew of a remedy, why would any of them catch it?’

  Dodd thought the man had a good point there, but Barnabus wasn’t paying attention.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I’ll pay you. But you’ve got to give me something, or do something.’

  Cheke sighed. ‘Sit down,’ he said, digging in his bag again. ‘I’ll let your blood against infection and give you the best charms I can.’