At least his pillow was soft, thanks to the chicken down in it. He snored into the darkness within seconds of falling on it.
In the alley, Peter the Hedgehog put out the torch and grabbed up some of the pig guts and chicken heads just lying around, only a little gnawed – they must have been dumped only minutes before. There was good eating on them, once you’d roasted them, some people even made a stew out of them.
He felt obscurely that the poet had somehow bested him but Peter wasn’t too upset. He had a penny that he had stored carefully in his crotch, the promise of some pennies for giving the poet a few lists of names and one could be re-used for Catlin, so that was all right.
He wiped his nose on his sleeve again, feeling the crackle of previous swipes. It was no good crying after spilt milk, but he did miss Susie so much. She was all he’d had for a long time and she’d gone to work for them both as soon as she could. She’d just been making some proper money from the gentlemen now her tits had grown. Well she could have done it earlier, but she said it hurt too much. She’d said he could go to school and learn his letters and be a lawyer and make them both rich. She’d made a chickenhead stew for them once with potherbs Peter stole from the gardens and she told him stories about being rich.
They knew about lawyers because they had served one once, him as the lady’s kitchen boy and Susie as a tiring maid to her daughter. Then something went wrong and the lawyer’s mother-in-law told them both to go and so they’d gone. She was a good sister. It was a pity she’d ended as dead as French Mary and Kettle Annie and with her innards cut into just the same way, disgusting it was. He couldn't bear to think about it. A long time ago. Maybe mid-September before it got cold and wet. Everything had gone wrong after that so it was hard to remember beyond the constant griping of hunger in his guts.
Peter the Hedgehog crept away down the street and found some beggars sheltering in a crypt from the frosty night. Because he had some food with him they let him sleep behind one of the graves and they even let him have one of the roasted chickenheads to chew which was nice of them. Tomorrow he’d buy the penny ordinary somewhere and fill himself up to bursting and hope he wasn’t sick like the last time he’d had a penny.
Portia looked out at the dawn and smiled because it was promising a fair day, for once, if cold. She was still tired but had slept from just after sunset until the new light woke her again, sliding past the curtains of the bed. The grey cat had given her a few more fleabites but it was a small price to pay for the furry warmth against her stomach which meant she didn’t need to light a fire. Coals were desperately expensive in London and so was firewood. The coals still in the fireplace were stone cold and there was no other fuel at all in the room, apart from furniture which she was loath to use. And she certainly wasn’t going to leave turds there to dry out and burn as her brother had once suggested because that was disgusting.
She pulled on a dressing gown against the cold, collected her slightly stale penny loaf and the sausage which had been in the food-box. There was the end of a wedge of cheese there too which had some blue mould on it – it would have been nice to get the fire going because she could have used the dish-of-coals that stood by the empty fireplace and toasted the bread with the cheese. But there wasn’t so she couldn’t and she was too ravenous to wait until she was dressed so she munched away on the bread and cheese and sausage, washing them down with the jug of small beer.
Sometimes she thought of her old household and her kitchen, in the completely other world she had lived in before the smallpox came. Her husband had delighted in the sweetmeats she made, especially the fruit preserves like the spiced apple cheeses that went so well with bread and butter and would add to stews and give them an extra tang. Her children had loved them too, in the way of children who always love sweets.
She now had neither the money nor the time nor the equipment to make things like that. She didn’t even have a flitch of bacon hanging in the chimney because she had finished it and finished the pease pudding she made with the ends as well. And she had decided overnight while sleeping that she definitely couldn’t wear her shirt or her hose again and so would have to get them washed, along with the other two shirts she had inherited from her brother when he disappeared. As soon as she could afford the linen, she would make herself a new shirt or two with blackwork on the collar and some kind of better arrangement to hide her breasts as well.
She spent some time hanging her doublet and cannions up on hooks and putting springs of rosemary, rue and wormwood inside them to cleanse them a little. She would like to buy a stick of incense to burn inside as well but that would have to wait for another influx of money. The money Fleetwood's clerk had given her had almost all gone to pay arrears of rent and her tab at the Cock. She had never realised before how hard it was to be on your own, even in a great city like London where you could simply buy things like bread or bacon without having to make it yourself.
Then she pulled her stays on over her head and laced them up. Jesu, she was rattling around inside them, she would have to take them in at the sides. She had knitted woollen stockings which she gartered at the knee and put her old boots on. It was lucky she had big feet and had been able to go and buy a secondhand pair of man's high hobnailed boots, since her brother had taken his own boots with him when he disappeared. Which in any case would have been far too big for her. Her bum roll went on next and her old-fashioned modest farthingale with her petticoat over the top of it. And then she took a deep breath, dived into her cramoisie wool kirtle with the tawny velvet trim and the doublet-style bodice for winter, struggled it down and around her and started fastening the buttons down the front. She had had a fur-trimmed gown of black velvet once but that had long gone into pawn and nor did it presently look at all likely to be redeemed.
She put on a plain falling band because they were a lot easier to launder than a ruff and she washed and starched them and her caps for herself, using the soapwort she had found growing unexpectedly out of a stone wall near Whitefriars – a rare instance of there being a real advantage to doing what she was doing. A man wouldn’t have recognised it, a woman could not have dared go there. As James Enys she had been able to pull up the roots and leave some for others as well. However laundering shirts, hose and sheets was a very different problem as she had no buck or copper or fire to do it in. For the last lot she had paid a woman inflated London prices to do it and had not been impressed. She had come up with a different solution which she hoped would work since she didn't have the money for a laundress again anyway. And she hated wearing dirty linen.
At least her modest white married woman’s cap was clean and went on easily over her short hair, then the hat on top which was old, small and plain and very dull beside the high crowned beaver creations that were all the rage at the moment. But then she didn’t have the new barrel-shaped farthingale either and didn’t much care. Once she had cared about such things which accounted for the bright tawny velvet trim on her kirtle, but no longer.
She picked up her bag of dirty linen and put it in her marketing basket, found the sixpence she had put aside for this and a couple of pennies for her dinner.
As a woman alone she couldn’t just walk into any alehouse on her own and order food or the men there would make assumptions about her that she couldn’t afford. But she could go into and eat at one of the better inns if she had another woman with her and that went along with her plan for the day.
All she had to do now was brace herself for going outside as herself, as a woman. For some strange reason, she could do it without trouble when trussed up in doublet and breeches as her brother James Enys. Somehow wearing a man’s hat and sword made her into a different enough person that she was numb to the horrors of eyes that had come on her after she got better of the smallpox... Well, it was still there but it changed. She felt superior as James because she was fooling them, they didn’t know her and besides, a man with a pocked face was nothing strange nor pitiful. It was different as a young wom
an. She could well understand how Lady Sidney refused to leave her house.
She knew her heart was already beating fast and her mouth was dry. Her hands shook as she pinned her hat firmly to her cap and took the stiff-backed black velvet mask she had bought on impulse a few weeks ago. Forcing herself to face her small silver mirror, she lifted it to look. Her cap was straight. Her face... (oh God, her face...).. was clean. She eclipsed the moon with the mask and bit firmly on the button at the mouth to hold it on without need of strings. Her face suddenly was a darkness under her hat, not a shock. Yes, that was better. Her heart steadied, despite the stink of the thick glue the maskmakers used to stiffen the velvet.
She picked up her basket, slipped her pattens over her shoes, opened the window and shooed the cat out. It took a while, the cat was very reluctant to move from the warm bed into chilly sunshine and clung to the coverlet with all his claws. At last, she shut the window against hookmen. Then she unbarred her front door, pushed sideways past it and locked it behind her. On the landing she steadied herself, breathed deep, let it out. Holding your breath helped, she knew that, although sometimes she forgot and found herself fainting again. At least it felt wonderful to have space around her legs instead of the clothy confinement of hose and she wondered how men could stand it, poor loves.
She went down the stairs slowly and carefully and out into the sunlight where she paused on the step for a moment. The sunlight glittered on the edges of the eyeholes and she couldn’t actually smell the fresh air through the small air hole but... Still. She felt like a prisoner released upon license for the day.
It had taken her a long time to breakfast and dress so the street was full this late – past eight of the clock, she thought. Some of the gentlemen in lawyer's gowns who were walking up the lane to Fleet Street near her, raised their hats to her. A few bowed, knowing her by her kirtle as her brother’s widowed sister. She smiled and bobbed her curtsey back, almost dropping the black velvet mask and feeling a swoop of panic. Seeing through eyeholes reminded her very much of a fashionable masqued ball she had attended last Christmas with her brother at Gray’s Inn, which had ended badly. She had forgotten that.
“Mistress Morgan,” said one man, with a good stomach to him and his lawyer's robe hanging casually off his shoulders. “How are you? Mr Enys told me you had a severe megrim.”
Damn it. She couldn’t actually speak with the mask on since she had the button between her teeth – a detail she hadn’t considered before. She put her hand up to hold it in place,especially as she was always worried about speaking to someone she knew as James Enys. This was William Craddock, a brother lawyer of Middle Temple, and a very pleasant man – though married. He had what looked like a nasty cold sore on his upper lip. Had she met him as herself or only as her brother? She couldn’t remember.
“Thank you, sir,” she said in a high voice, compromising with a curtsey, “I am much better of it although I find the sunlight often hurts my eyes.”
Craddock tutted and chivalrously began to walk beside her.
“Then that brother of yours should take better care of you than to let you venture out without an escort.”
Oh God, did he suspect? She looked sidelong at him through the eyeholes. His broad face seemed kindly.
“He does take care of me, sir,” she said, “But he is much pressed with business for my Lord Chamberlain Hunsdon.”
“Then I’m delighted for it,” said Craddock. He clearly wasn’t – no fellow barrister could be entirely happy to hear that a competitor had landed such a wealthy and powerful client – but he was polite. “Perhaps he will be able to find a woman to attend you as well?”
“Yes, I am in hopes of finding someone suitable today,” she told him, “But it is difficult and expensive in London.”
“Ah, but with my lord Baron Hunsdon as his good lord, be sure your brother will prosper,” said Craddock with another kindly twinkle, “The Careys are constantly suing each other and everybody else – a wonderfully litigious and open-handed family.”
Portia smiled back at him although he couldn't see it. “My brother says that my Lord Hunsdon is a most kindly and wise lord.”
“And indeed he is,” said Craddock, “But his many sons... they're wonderful men... for injuncting each other.”
“My brother has told me very little about you, sir,” she said, needing to change the subject before she let slip what she knew of Hunsdon's youngest son. “Do you serve my lord Hunsdon as well?”
“Occasionally,” said Craddock, offering her his arm as she had to pick up her skirts and step over the gutter and into Fleet Street itself. “I have had to do a little with some of his purchases. The Earl of Southampton is also my very good lord and so on, a little dusting of equity and church court work, court of Requests and so on.”
Portia was sure she had never been against Craddock in court yet, but he had a good reputation as a solid drafter of correct pleadings. However, this had to stop or the women at the conduit would talk.
“Mr Craddock,” she said, “Thank you for your company, but I pray you will not go out of your way with me.”
“Of course, of course,” said Craddock, bowing and looking concerned, “Until you have a woman with you, I quite understand. Quite right, quite right. Besides, it wouldn’t do to make my lady wife jealous.”
That was sweet of him, she thought, considering no woman would likely be jealous of her. He smiled and tilted his head as she curtseyed to him. She hurried up the street, very relieved to have got rid of him.
So far the mask was working. She had conversed in the open air, she could walk up a street full of people without feeling the yawning lack of air and roaring in her ears that presaged a faint, something she was horrified and frightened by. She knew very well, with the rational part of her brain, that nobody was really staring at the ruin of her face, that even when she wasn’t wearing a mask, most people were content with a quick glance and a wince and that was the end of it. Her old nurse had scolded her long ago when she agonised over minor adolescent whiteheads and blackheads that it was plain sinful vanity to think anyone was more interested in herself than they were in themselves. Which was perfectly true. But. Somehow she felt burnt up by people’s most glancing looks, as if she could actually feel the invisible rays coming from their eyes that that Latin writer claimed enabled everyone to see.
Mind, she wasn’t the only woman in the crowds hurrying to and fro who was hiding her face: many women had similar vizards to her own to protect their complexions against the sun, others had a neckerchief high over their mouth and nose and their hats pulled down.
Hm. The sun. That was a thought. She was hardly brown like a peasant but inevitably when she went about as James Enys, she couldn’t veil her face to keep it a ladylike white.
Perhaps she could visit an apothecary – she knew of one in the City that was reliable, although she had heard he had taken the Plague from trying to save others with his medicines. No doubt he was dead now but someone might have taken over his shop. Everyone knew that Mr Cheke, apart from being a dedicated alchemist, sold good quality face paints.
She changed direction and speeded up until she was heading down a street that had two or three shuttered and sealed shops in it. Mr Cheke’s shop, however, seemed to be open again – his forty days of quarantine must have passed.
An utterly cadaverous man in a doublet two sizes too big for him sat on his doorstep. Portia had to look twice before she realised that it truly was Peter Cheke, with bandages around his neck.
“Mr Cheke,” she exclaimed, having to catch her mask quickly, “... I am so happy to see you are saved, thank God!”
He turned to her and smiled. “Is it Mrs Morgan?” he asked slowly.
“Yes, yes, of course, I am sorry, this mask is...”
He nodded. “Does it answer to your previous malady of fearing the public forum, mistress?” he asked in his rich deep voice.
“Yes, I think it does.”
“Then I’m glad
,” he said, “Forgive me for not standing, mistress. The plague finders have only this day released me from quarantine and my legs are still weak.”
No surprise there, the knees under his robe looked to be as bony as a carter’s donkey.
“Do you need food or drink?” she asked, “The baker’s is still open...”
“No, thank you kindly, mistress,” he said quietly, holding up a pennyloaf of manchet spread with fresh butter in a hand so thin it was nearly transparent. “I have been... I have been most generously cared for by my family.”
“I thought your family was in Kent?”
“It is, in Canterbury. I mean rather the family of... of... well, my patients.” His voice sounded puzzled. “I must say, I’m still a little astonished at it myself since I do not think I have ever been able to help anyone that caught the plague with my physic, not even myself.” His smile was very rueful. “It’s a tale in itself."
Portia nodded encouragingly. She liked him and he was willing to sell face creams on credit, or had been in the past. He steepled his fingers. "When I came down with the high fever and had a nosebleed and realised my armpits and groin had been aching for a day or two, which I hadn’t noticed for being so pressed with work, I sent my neighbour’s boy to fetch the plague-finders to lock up the shop. I thought I was sure to die since all my precautions had clearly been to no avail and I had had no time to lay in stores. And of course, I had no one to nurse me since I could not risk the lad who normally helps me. So I lay down on a pallet in my shop to be nearer the bucket of water and another bucket to void myself and also...” He looked a little sheepish, “... nearer an important experiment that was still proceeding in my laboratorium at the back of the shop. At least, I thought then that it was important. That was all I knew for many days, I think, except once I thought I heard a loud voice I knew calling out my name. ‘Mr Cheke!’ it said, ‘Mr Cheke, is there anything you need?’ The voice was familiar but I couldn't remember the name.
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