The Wildest Rake: a stunning, scandalous Restoration romance Page 13

  It was always on the outskirts that the plague began, in the rambling, huddled slums which fringed the city walls and ran out along the encircling roads leading north, south, east, west.

  The narrow, twisting alleyways between the cramped wooden houses were a nesting place for rats. They scampered to and fro by day, black tails flicking. They bit the children and savaged the dogs. Refuse lay in foul, mouldering heaps until the over-worked scavengers could come to pick over it. What they could not sell they left to decay into a black, evil-smelling sludge which made the alleys like bogs in winter. Only the slashing rain could wash the streets clean for a brief while and give a temporary sweetness to the foetid air.

  Outside the city walls, the poor, the unemployed, the country people newly come to London to seek work collected in the same kind of mass. They fell sick and died without causing more than a faint ripple on the surface of life.

  The plague, beginning slowly, as though it only played a game with the city, chose arbitrarily at first: a child, an old woman, a young man. Fevered, with hard lumps in groin and armpit, they twisted in agony, then the buboes burst into running sores and the skin became blotched with dark stains beneath the flesh.

  When Mistress Brent fell sick, the whole household gave up all hope for her. Death was almost always the end for such cases. Some died within twenty-four hours; others, in extreme agony, lived on for two or three days. Some, however, struggled for weeks and emerged alive, but there were few of these fortunate ones.

  The servants, huddling together in the kitchen, lit a great fire, and ate their bread sprinkled with sorrel and sage, with rue, believing that this odd mixture would cleanse their blood of any plague contagion and protect them.

  They would not come near the family, nor would wild horses have dragged them within a mile of Mistress Brent. Had they dared they would have fled the house, but the Alderman had, by informing Andrew at once, put his whole household into quarantine, and the watch had been posted outside his house to make sure no living soul escaped.

  A red cross, a foot long, had been marked upon the middle of the front door. Above it in uneven letters ran the pious words, ‘Lord Have Mercy Upon Us’.

  Cornelia had watched the constables attending to this customary task from a window, and had shuddered. The windows had been closely shut, as it was possible that the contagion was in the air, and might go in and out invisibly. A fire was lit in every room. The straw from the floors had been burnt in the garden.

  Mistress Brent, moaning in acute pain, had wept, ‘They will burn my new hangings. They will burn all my best furniture ... my bed curtains, my best linen. . . Alas, alas. ...’

  Andrew watched her sombrely. Cornelia plucked at his black sleeve.

  ‘Can you do nothing? I cannot bear to hear her cry like that. She is in agony. It wrenches my heart to hear her.’

  ‘I can soften the carbuncles and lance them,’ he said gently. ‘I can lessen the symptoms, yet not cure her. There is no cure I know of, I am afraid.’

  ‘You mean she will die, she must die?’

  ‘No,’ he said heavily. ‘She may live. Only God knows her fate. I cannot do much. Have you got the nitre to hand?’

  He had asked her to procure nitre, tar and rosin, and now he placed these on the leaping flames of the faggot fire which she had laid, at his instructions, for the sweeter odour of burning wood was better than the oily smoke of sea-coal fires for freshening plague-ridden air.

  The thick odours of the burning filled the chamber. They coughed and stumbled away.

  Mistress Brent was rolling her head around, torn between the pain of the plague and the pain of her hip.

  Andrew gave her some physic which calmed her a little. From the smell of it, Cornelia guessed it to contain some sleeping draught.

  Her mother was delirious, mumbling thickly from blackened lips.

  Andrew moved to the door. She ran after him and caught at his arm. ‘You are not leaving her? You cannot go and leave her to die like this. ‘

  He sighed. ‘I have other patients, my dear. Ellen is sick with the plague, too, and likely to die.’

  ‘Ellen?’ She shrank back, eyes widening in horror. ‘Ellen? Oh, God, no.’

  He looked at her in some surprise. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She, too, sickened suddenly overnight.’

  ‘God, God, it is my fault,’ Cornelia moaned. ‘I asked her to visit my mother. I brought this thing into the house.’

  Andrew frowned. ‘You could not know that this would happen. We cannot even be sure your mother caught it from Ellen—they may both have caught it from some other person. Nobody knows how the plague is carried. Some say it is in infected linen, others in water, others in the very air we breathe.’

  ‘It is my fault,’ Cornelia repeated feverishly.

  He looked at her in anxious alarm. ‘You must not excite yourself. You must stay calm.’

  She laughed at him, her voice high and shrill. ‘Stay calm at such a moment? Only you could say such a thing. Andrew, I am frightened. I do not want to die.’

  He looked into her eyes, his own cool and compelling, and gripped her by the shoulders.

  ‘You are not going to die. I will not let you.’ The ice in his voice was the surface of a cold and grimly determined passion. She heard the strength beneath, and responded.

  ‘I am sorry.’ She stepped back, trying to smile, her lips quivering wistfully. ‘I am behaving badly. See, I am myself again, now.’

  He nodded. ‘Good. Now, give your mother the medicines I have left at the intervals I commanded. Keep her as warm as you can. Keep the windows tightly shut. The fire high. Burn the nitre from time to time. And, for yourself, eat and drink sparingly, but so that you are never hungry. Be moderate.’

  ‘When will you come back?’ she asked.

  ‘When I can do so. I will not be able to visit my patients now unless they have the plague, for fear of carrying it to them. But there are plague victims enough for me, I fear. Now that it has entered the city it will spread like fire.’

  She was horrified by this thought. ‘You believe so? Oh Andrew, what are we all to do?’

  ‘It is the judgment of God on our sins,’ he told her, his blue eyes flashing.

  She did not know what to say to that, but let him go.

  Mistress Brent grew steadily worse during the evening. Her body, weakened already by the pain of her broken hip, could not stand up beneath the new strain. She was beyond recollection now, wandering in her thoughts, calling in a childish voice for her mother, weeping over the death of a long-dead cat, crying in a shrill voice that she was dying, dying.

  Cornelia sat beside her bed, gently wiping her face with a damp cloth, giving her the physic and cooling drinks of water. The room grew overpoweringly warm. The heat of the fire, the closeness of the room, with its closed windows and door, even the keyhole being blocked with rag to keep the plague odour within, made her feel faint. But she retained a grip upon herself and forced herself to stay awake.

  The long night hours were the worst. She could hear outside the muffled talk of the watchmen, with their long halberds, put to guard against any escape from the house. She could hear the creak of her father’s slow footsteps as he paced in his own chamber, praying under his breath, and weeping. From the kitchen, she heard stifled bursts of wild laughter. The servants were drinking themselves into oblivion, too frightened to go to sleep for fear of waking with the dreaded signs of the contagion.

  The only other human being in the world seemed to be Nan, who, although Cornelia barred her firmly from the sickroom, came at intervals to the door with necessary food and drink, pleading each time to be let inside the chamber.

  She scolded, begged and coaxed, but Cornelia would not open the door to her, and would not fetch in the food until she had heard Nan’s footsteps going down the stairs.

  Once Nan tricked her by going noisily, but on silent tread returning quickly. Cornelia, as she unbolted the door, heard the soft flurry of Nan’s skirts as she hurr
ied, and slammed it shut again, railing indignantly at her through the crack.

  ‘Nan, I will not let you into the sickroom, so go away. Do you want me to starve? I will not open this door at all if you do not obey me.’

  Weeping, Nan went away.

  ‘Who will nurse you if you take the plague?’ she threw back up the stairs at her.

  But Cornelia, firming the tremble of her lower lip, glad that Nan could not see her face, said with false confidence, ‘I shall not take the plague.’

  Andrew returned in the cool dawn. His white rod, mark of the plague doctor, and the red cross stitched on his cloak, kept passers-by at bay as he walked through the streets. Shrinking, whispering, they eyed him in terror.

  The watch drew back from him, too, as he knocked for admittance at the house.

  Nan opened the door and at once began to argue with him. ‘Why cannot I go into the chamber? My lady is too delicate for such a sad task. Let me go in and help her. She is worn to a shadow. She will die. I am strong. I will not sicken. If you do not let me go in to her I will break down the door, I swear it.’

  ‘Where are the other servants?’ he asked, without replying to her pleading.

  ‘Them? They are drunk as stoats who have sucked blood. They lie in stupor in the kitchen.’ She grimaced. ‘They are too terrified to move out of the room.’

  ‘Then if you go in to your mistress, who will fetch and carry for her? We must keep the contagion within that room if we are able. No, Nan, you must be free to move to and fro for your mistress.’

  Nan growled angrily, but said no more.

  The hard carbuncles had burst. Mistress Brent was breathing fast, shallow, her face contorted with the effort.

  ‘It has attacked her lungs,’ said Andrew heavily.

  Cornelia looked from him to her unconscious mother in terror. ‘Is it serious?’

  He hesitated, then said harshly, ‘It is the end.’

  Cornelia gave a sharp cry, then forced her clenched fist against her teeth, biting on her knuckles until the blood sprang along them.

  She made herself breathe slowly, deeply, until she was calm enough to ask, ‘And Ellen?’

  His white face grew fixed. ‘Dead,’ he said. ‘She died an hour since in my arms. It was a hard death.’ He closed his eyes briefly, then bent over Mistress Brent and touched her forehead. ‘Your mother is weakening by the hour.’

  Cornelia looked towards the door. ‘Should . . . should I call my father?’

  Andrew shrugged. ‘Wait here. I will speak to him.’ He went out. Cornelia held her mother’s restless, fretful hand. The hot fingers could not stay still within her grip, but beat frantically for escape, and plucked at the sheets endlessly. The babbled words were unintelligible, but Cornelia answered gently.

  ‘Yes, Mother, yes.’ She moistened the cloth, and drew it again across her mother’s face.

  Andrew came back, frowning.

  Cornelia looked at him. ‘My father?’

  ‘He would not open his chamber door,’ Andrew said, expressionless. ‘He is too frightened to speak to her even from the threshold of this room.’

  Cornelia sighed. ‘Well, she would not know him anyway. It may be best.’

  Andrew nodded. ‘Yes, there is always great danger in entering a plague room.’ He looked at Cornelia with a wild, almost savage expression. ‘You know that, do you not?’

  She looked back with a dull acceptance, feeling a strange pang of pity for him. ‘Yes,’ she said coolly. ‘I know that. Andrew, how brave you are—you go in and out every day, never caring how close to death you tread. I love my mother dearly, but I have been half frightened to death every minute I have spent in this chamber.’

  Mistress Brent gave a thick, choking cry. They both turned towards her. Andrew moved hurriedly back to the door and called to Nan to run and ask the watch to fetch the minister from the church to give her the last comforts of the dying.

  Cornelia knelt beside the bed with him, praying. She had rarely seen death, but she knew it now.

  Nan came a short while later, and called through the door that the watch had said that the minister was already at such offices elsewhere, but would be told of Mistress Brent’s sickness when he returned.

  Andrew, bending over the dying woman, shook his head. ‘Too late,’ he said softly.

  ‘Mother,’ Cornelia sobbed.

  The restless, searching hands were still at last, lying flat upon the crumpled bedlinen.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The watchmen, standing beside their fires in the street, studied the cart as it drew up outside the house. Cornelia, with streaming, bloodshot eyes, peered from her window to see her mother’s body, wrapped in a shroud, being carried out and placed in the cart. None from the house could walk in procession behind. Her mother would go to her final resting-place without one member of her family to mourn her.

  She was to be buried in the churchyard though, unlike those poor slum paupers who, for want of friends or money, were thrown in hurried confusion into a mass grave as though they were unwanted offal.

  They stripped the great chamber where she had died. Every piece of cloth was burnt in the street: the handsome bed curtains, the good linen, the curtains from the window. All Mistress Brent’s fine clothes were thrown out of the window and pitchforked with casual indifference upon the flames by the watchmen, who were careful to keep their distance from these infected remains. Some poorer women, watching from a few houses off, wailed in regret as they saw fine silks burning merrily on the pyre.

  Cornelia’s bed linen was brought into the chamber for her to use.

  She had decided, against Andrew’s advice, to remain in the chamber. A fatalistic calm lay now upon her spirits.

  ‘If I am infected I cannot escape,’ she said, shrugging. The watchmen had refused to let her send a letter to Rendel, explaining her peril, and she feared what he would do when he discovered what had happened.

  She longed to see him, yet knew she must not do so until the full month had elapsed since her mother’s death.

  No member of the household could be permitted to leave for that month. No outside person could enter, either, except Andrew, or the officers of the parish.

  No letters could pass out. No news came in except that which was bawled by the watchmen through the windows.

  Three days after Mistress Brent’s death a loud wailing from the kitchen told the whole household that the plague had claimed another victim. The cook was infected. The servants grew hysterical with fear. Cornelia heard them screaming and weeping.

  Their fear proved justified. One by one they fell sick. The cook died next day, a maid two days later. Nan, kept busy watching them all, grew ever more irritable, but herself showed no sign of infection. Cornelia offered to nurse the sick, but Andrew would not permit it.

  ‘There are five of them. Let them nurse each other. They have been shut up together for days.’

  Thomas died suddenly, sickening so rapidly that Andrew had no time to visit him. He fell down, choking, and was dead within an hour, with no visible sign of what had killed him.

  ‘It must be plague,’ said Andrew, but he could not be certain, and certified death from natural causes to the parish, knowing that there was already enough panic over the numbers of deaths from plague.

  The city had begun to empty rapidly. Everyone who had enough money fled by horse or in a coach, taking all their households with them if they could, or turning off servants callously to wander the plague-ridden streets and die in extreme poverty and distress.

  The authorities, terrified by the mounting deaths, falsified the figures. Many plague deaths were given other names.

  One superstition held that sexual licence was a preventive against the plague, and the prostitutes did a roaring trade. Men and women danced lecherously in the streets, making love openly, believing that they were saving their lives in doing so.

  A pall of black smoke seemed to hang over the city. Every street burnt fires. Rings of flames see
med to dance around the houses. Many houses burnt down, their wailing inhabitants running forth in night clothes, the plague victims mingling with the healthy, spreading the contagion further.

  Some people, so terrified that they lost all sense of honour, fled from plague houses, spreading the contagion throughout the countryside.

  The villagers beyond the city stood at the entrances of their villages with pitchforks, driving off the poor of London who fled to them, leaving them to perish in the open air, hungry and weak from exposure by night.

  Some who bore old plague scars were killed out of hand when they tried to enter the villages.

  ‘The world has gone mad,’ Andrew said, recounting these tales on his occasional visits. He was so frail now that Cornelia, looking at him, wondered that a puff of wind did not blow him away.

  How he managed to stay alive, working as he did in the worst contagion, she did not know.

  He seemed to go on as a weary horse plods on, by instinct and habit, working from early morning until midnight, snatching a few hours of sleep and then going on again.

  She asked him anxiously once more if he had heard nothing of her husband. Andrew had promised to see that word reached Rendel. She did not expect him to return to the plague-stricken city, but she had, foolishly, weakly, hoped for some news of him.

  It had occurred to her that Rendel himself might be ill. The idea had struck her numb with fear. She was possessed by a dark terror at night, lying in her bed, twisting to and fro, wondering if she could ever see her husband’s face again.

  One morning she rose, dressed and went to the window. The early sun lay like molten gold on all the sloping roofs. The birds sang deliriously, sweet as flutes. The sky was a clean, washed blue. Pale wisps of smoke twisted up into it.

  The watch stood, leaning over their smouldering fires, their shoulders drooping.

  A cart rumbled past. She shuddered, turning her eyes away.