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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.
On such a glorious morning, the sight of the death cart was like a blow from death itself.
She waited for Nan to bring her breakfast. But it did not come. A frown crossed her face. Nan was late today. Could another of the servants be ill, even dying?
She went to the door and opened it carefully. She called out along the landing. ‘Hello?’ Her father answered, his own voice shaky. He had not set eyes upon her all this time, nor she on him. He kept himself so strictly to his chamber that she hardly remembered his existence.
‘Nan ... Where is Nan?’ he called back, then added urgently, ‘Do not come out, child. Go back inside.’
Cornelia hesitated. Then she called Nan again, more loudly, and heard a slow dragging sound on the stairs, then a choked cry.
For a second Cornelia stood, frozen, listening to that frightening sound. Then she flung all caution to the winds and ran down the stairs.
Nan, hunched in agony, lay face downward, her back against the plastered wall, her arms stretched forward, as though she had been trying to drag herself up the stairs. Her fingers were arched, the nails dug down, like claws.
Cornelia dropped down at her side and raised her. ‘Oh, Nan,’ she sobbed.
Nan’s eyes opened. Filmed, dull, they had the deep light of fever.
‘I ... I am sorry,’ she mumbled through cracked lips.
She was fever hot. Cornelia knew before she examined her that it was the plague. She had seen all these signs in her mother.
She managed, somehow, to drag and carry her up the stairs and laid her on her own bed.
Then she went to the window and called out to the watchman to send for Doctor Belgrave at once.
‘What? Another victim?’ The watchman spat on the ground and made a half-hearted cross upon his breast, snatching down his hand as he remembered that this old sign of faith might be misinterpreted.
Cornelia went back to the bed and began to undress Nan. There were the familiar, hard swellings, the burning heat of the body. She gave Nan water to drink, washed her face and hands, wrapped her in warm bedclothes and built up the fire, flinging nitre on it and coughing at the scent.
A shuffling sound at the open door made her turn. Her father, hunched in his loose robe, stared at her dully. He had aged considerably in the last weeks.
‘I am hungry,’ he wailed fretfully, with a childish selfishness which wounded her.
She could so well remember her strong, sure father from her childhood. This old man, senile in his self-interest, was a stranger to her.
‘Keep off,’ she said, as gently as she could. ‘Nan has the plague.’
He shrank back at those words, shivering beneath his robe. ‘I am frightened,’ he said. ‘I am afraid to die. I don’t want to die.’
