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She could not think of any way in which she could offer him comfort. Her own certainty, newly acquired, in the positive and abiding glory of life was too fresh and unfamiliar for her to have words to describe it to him.
‘We have to take both good and bad, Andrew,’ she said, fumblingly. ‘Life offers us both. I will not pretend that I am not very sad to have lost my baby, but I have found other things.’
He looked at her pityingly. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, but she could see that he did not believe her.
She made a last effort. ‘Even when it rains,’ she said, smiling, ‘there is the smell of wet flowers and the clean look of the streets and the freshness everywhere . . .’
She thought of the bright dawn sky, the song of
a thrush in the lilac outside her window, the rush of exultation she felt when Rendel held her in his arms. Her eyes shone at him, radiant.
Andrew turned away. ‘I am glad you are happy,’ he said thickly.
When he had gone, she felt depression sink into her mind. She had failed him. She had not managed to communicate to him the confidence she felt in life; indeed, she suspected, she had only increased his terror.
A few days later her mother, waking to the pale morning light when Cornelia brought her the breakfast tray, gave a scream of terror as she lifted her arm.
‘Child, child ... in my armpit ... a buboe . . . Oh God, God, it is the plague!’
Cornelia almost dropped the tray, then, recovering, bent over her in alarm, only to have her shrink away.
‘No, you must not come near. . .Send for Andrew. . .’
‘Mother, calm yourself. I have been with you all these days. If you have the plague I will have been in the same danger. Let me see the lump. It may be something quite harmless.’
But, when she probed gently, she broke out in a cold sweat of fear.
Hard, hot to the touch, the swollen buboe was unmistakable. She touched her mother’s forehead. It was burning. Now, looking at her with terror and pity, she saw that her eyes seemed sunk in her head, her face blotched with fever.
Mistress Brent fell back, sobbing. ‘I have it, I have it! God have mercy on me....’
Cornelia ran down the stairs, then stopped dead as she saw her father come out of his counting-house at the back of the hall.
‘Father,’ she cried shrilly. ‘Do not come near me. . . Mother has the plague.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Like a slow, creeping tide, the plague had been spreading its contagion around the outskirts of the city for a month or so; an isolated case here, another there, then a whole rash of them together. London, used to such small outbreaks, had taken little notice.
It was still only the beginning of June. The summer was not in full flood. The King was in residence in the capital, and his presence was reassurance enough for the faint-hearted. He would have fled the city had there been any serious danger, surely.
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.
