Mistress Shakespeare (27 page)

On one door just before I reached the inn were displayed the tell-tale signs of an infected house. Cursing myself for not taking the alley shortcut, which I’d feared might trap more dangerous air, I beheld the dreaded bundle of straw, the red cross painted on the door and, in whitewash, the scrawled plea, “Lord have mercy upon us.”

I stood still and stared. It was the first time terror had truly immobilized me. Then, from within the house, someone began screaming, maybe in pain, maybe grieving.

I went on but pressed myself to a wall once again as two men walking beside a cart pulled by a lumbering ox approached me. Someone selling food at steep prices, I thought, for I’d heard them go by in the streets the first day or so. But the stench struck me before the sight of the bodies did, piled in the cart like cordwood.

“Bring out yer dead!” the driver shouted as he reined in at the plague house I’d just passed. “Bring out yer dead!”

Holding my reeking onion clear up to my nose, I ran toward the huge, bustling inn where I’d first alighted when I came to London ten years ago. But the doors where carrier trains entered and set out for the shires were closed and bolted. Silence ruled here too but for the barking of a distant dog. I ran around to the side door that faced the alley. It was unlocked, so I darted in.

I saw only an old man burning something in the middle of the courtyard. That stench, too, hit me in the pit of my stomach, and I almost dry-heaved. Old shoes? Yes, it looked to be just that, with a saddle and leather reins and traces in the flames.

“You there!” he shouted when he saw me. “Stand clear.”

“I’m Anne Whateley. I have a Stratford pack train coming in today,” I shouted, not going closer.

He snorted and shook his grizzled head. “City gates closed, though there’s a way out of the city. It’ll spread, mark my words. It’ll spread if folks don’t prevent the distemper by burning leather like this to cloak the pest’lent air.”

I leaned back against the wall to steady my shaking legs. Without people coming in, that meant no food—and no pack trains with which to escape the city. Trapped. I was trapped like poor Kat under the river ice where she couldn’t breathe as I was afraid to take a breath of this contaminated air.

“The contagion got ye?” the old man demanded.

“No, but I just didn’t realize . . .” My voice trailed off. “Are there any horses here? I can pay.”

“One old nag, may have to eat her if this goes on.”

“Can she hold me? I need to leave the city by the way you mentioned—what is it?”

“Money means naught to me, mistress. Old as I am, I want to live—not sure why. Someone would take the horse right out from under you, but you can try walking out.”

“But if the city gates are closed—”

“Just after dawn, watchmen open the gates on the bridge for coaches, though hear tell most of the nobles already gone. You can run out beside a coach if they don’t stop you—food for sale right outside the gates, ’tis said too.”

Stunned, I went out and closed the door behind me. A rat scurried across my path, not an unusual sight. I took the alley home this time, opened the door with my key and shut myself in. I slumped at the table, feeling alone and scared. I was flushed—that was a first sign, was it not? Yet I had just run a ways. My stomach hurt, another dreadful harbinger, but it could be just fear and despair. Tormented perhaps by ordinary aches and pains, I was afraid to examine my armpits, neck and groin for the sore places that bloomed to the tell-tale black, putrid swellings called buboes.

How had it come to this, so alone without my friends, without Will, without anyone? Unless Maud came to stay with me as I had asked, I had no one, no one . . . Then too, not only Will’s livelihood but mine was now ruined by this visitation of the Black Death, and I could only pray my life would not be forfeit too.

 

 

 

The death carts
rumbled by daily. Drinking too much wine, just like Jennet, I planned my escape. I had a fat purse of coins I could not leave behind, for I’d heard thieves ransacked empty houses. I hid some up in the thatch over my room and sewed the rest into the hems of Jennet’s black mourning gown and into pockets I made inside my best boots until they became too heavy to lift and I took those back out. The coffer of stylish clothes I’d been so pleased with meant nothing to me now as I donned the black mourning gown with the heavy hem full of my fortune.

Whatever befell, I vowed, even though I would have to make the journey partly in the dark to be at the bridge at dawn, I was going to walk out of plague London. The child’s chant I hadn’t heard for years danced through my head: “London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, my fair lady . . .”

For yet another day, I lived and slept in the kitchen and pantry, closing off the rest of the house, including stuffing rags up the chimney. Outside air was the enemy, that and my dwindling hoard of food. I reckoned I had two more days of it left, and some of what I had was rotting. I saved dried apples and last year’s walnuts to take with me when I fled on the morrow.

The day I planned to leave, I slept fitfully on a pallet before the hearth where dreadful nightmares assailed me. I lost little Kate when she slipped out of my hands into the Thames . . . Kit Marlowe and Mr. Mercer with a rabble behind them pounded on my door to get in . . . I was pressed down, down by reeking corpses in a death dray . . . I was carted off to be tortured and hanged for being Will’s other wife.

I jolted awake so fast that I wasn’t sure where I was. There
was
knocking on my door, the alley door. And Maud—Maud’s voice, calling my name.

I scrambled up and tripped over my blanket to sprawl on all fours on the hard, cold hearthstones. “Maud? Just a moment!”

“I’ve more preventions and cures!” she shouted through the door. “I’ve sold much but saved some for us.”

For us, I thought. That sounded so good. I was glad she had returned. I would have company, a travel companion for my escape. And she had safeguards against the pestilence!

As I pulled the bolt on the alley door, I began to cry with relief. Was it noon yet? If so, we had hours to kill before we could head toward the bridge and Southwark beyond. Perhaps we could go to the sea, where the air must surely be fresh and free. Perhaps we could—

The moment I opened the door, Maud fell at my feet in some sort of swoon. Her basket of powders and perfumed waters spilled out and something sweet broke; a pile of groats with some shillings tumbled out to ring and spin merrily on the floor. She was sweating so hard that her bodice stuck to her as if she’d been swimming. I gasped and pressed both hands over my mouth as, appalled, I stared at her.

It must be the plague, and if it was, odds were we would both be dead by the morrow.

But I nursed her for hours, into the next day. I could have fled, but I washed her in white wine and covered her up on my hearth pallet. With some diseases, it was essential to sweat the poisons out. I wasn’t sure about the plague, but I was certain Maud had it. A big, black bubo had bloomed under her left arm. It horrified me and agonized her. Though she knew who I was, she babbled incessantly; some of it made sense, but some was feverish gibberish. I was so exhausted that I jerked asleep and dreamed I was tending my raving da before he died.

“A man told me drinking mummy in wine would help,” she said, waking me. “But we can’t get a dead body off the street. They’ve had the plague. We can’t use something so defiled.” She seized my wrist as I tried to bathe her throat and arms again. I’d stripped to my shift because it was so hot in here, even with no fire.

“Unicorn horn mixed with angelica root,” Maud rambled on. “I have the roots but not the horn, or I’d have made a pretty penny. But maybe both of us have been too greedy—theatre cushions and all. The Almighty has punished me with the Lord’s token,” she cried, referring to her bubo. “If He spares me, I’ll be a safe nurse and you too, hired by the nobles to nurse their sick . . .”

“Don’t talk, Maud. Just rest.”

“Remember that first day you saw me selling sweet herbs to make the body glad but heal the mind and heart? Remember that basil can take away sorrowfulness and rosemary cure nightmares?”

“Yes, I remember. Would to God it were all true.”

“It doesn’t work, does it? I must have lied. The Lord is punishing me with the Black Death.”

“Then why do some good folk die and the evil live?”

“You love him, don’t you?”

“Yes, I love the Lord.”

“No—your actor, Will, your genius.”

“Yes, that’s the way of it,” I said, because it felt so good to say it. Then I realized I was only admitting it to Maud because I believed she would not live, when I should not give up. And if she died, would I not be close behind without anyone to care or love or nurse me?

She began to recite recipes for tussie-mussies or herbal cures—I didn’t know or care. Her voice became weaker until she seemed to sleep. I nodded off . . . off the bridge into the rushing river.

To my horror, I jerked awake to see she was up, wandering the room. She tried to lift the door latch with all her wasted might. I’d heard those afflicted sometimes ran like demented souls through the streets.

“Maud! Maud, come over here and rest.”

“No rest for the wicked,” she told me with a strange laugh, but she came back into the center of the room. In a singsong voice, she said “Angelica, ivory, mithridate and black pitch to smear on that man’s face you hate. That wicked man, who has sold his soul somewhere, somewhere . . .”

When I tried to lead her back to her pallet, she pushed me away. “No!” she shrieked. “I want to die outside where I can see the sky. I want to be buried with sweet herbs, not in a mass grave with sick people—no!”

She swung a fist at me but missed and, like a rag doll, crumpled into the rushes on the floor. Rather than trying to drag her to the pallet, I brought the pillow over for her head, but I need not have. My friend lay dead at my feet.

 

 

 

I felt like a traitor,
dragging Maud’s body out when the death cart came. I stared horrified when the two men took her slender form, swung her once and heaved her atop the pile of corpses. But I had stuffed every sweet herb I could find inside the winding sheet I’d made from a curtain: dried roses, lavender, rue and basil and sweet summer meadow woodruff.

The man who approached the front door with both red and white paint stunned me. “Inside, then,” he ordered, pointing with his bloody-tipped brush. “Lord have mercy, because that and the cross is what I must put here now. Your back and front doors will be sealed, but someone will be by to see if you need victuals or water once a week, come Wednesday next, and you can haul things up to a second-story window.”

Wednesday, I thought. Three days away and I too could be dead by starvation or plague by then, and how would I ever get out of the city if they sealed me in?

I knew protest would avail me naught. Without a word, I went back in and closed the wine shop door. I hugged myself hard as the banging of nails in boards sounded from the front door and then the back as if I were being sealed in a coffin. I sat on the floor behind the counter in John’s shop and stared into the darkness. At least I did not feel feverish but cold, so cold, like being encased in ice. For the first time—no, perhaps the second, counting that day I’d heard Will must wed another—I understood why Kat had killed herself. She felt abandoned, all alone. She did not want to face life; she did not want to live.

But I did. I did! I had things to do, places to go, poems to read and Will’s plays to see. Huddled in the dark, I made a vow to myself: if I was not feverish or laid low with inward burning or agonized by a blasted bubo by two hours before dawn on the morrow, I was escaping this house somehow and getting out of town.

 

 

 

I had never prayed
so hard in all my life, but I prepared in other ways to flee too. Still shaking from losing Maud so terribly and so quickly, just like my da’s death, I dressed in my boy’s attire and bound my breasts and my hair. Gathering my last apple and a pocket of walnuts, I cut the hem with its sewn coins off the black skirt and wrapped and tied it around my waist. I rigged a rope as if ready to haul up food and water Wednesday next, but, Lord willing, I hoped to be far away from London by then. And the Lord must be willing because I had no signs of the Black Death on me, at least not yet, and I knew it always struck suddenly and finished its work as quickly as it had with Maud.

I mourned her, but I was not going to die or be buried as she had. After I stuck my head out of John and Jennet’s bedroom window to ascertain the street was empty—and it had been so for hours since a most stringent curfew was in effect—I let myself down my rigging. I rued the fact that someone might try to climb up the same way to get in, but perhaps the bundle of straw and warnings on the door would serve as safeguards. If not, I’d hidden pewter plates, extra clothes and the remaining wine behind heavy pieces of furniture.

Pulling my hat low over my face, carrying just one bottle of wine along to slake my thirst, I started for the river. My plan was to take a hired boat toward the bridge if I could find one; if not, I would run along Thames Street to reach the bridge. I could only hope that I was not spotted by bailiffs or the dreaded pair of plague examiners who patrolled each district. The penalty for leaving a plague house unbidden was heavy fines and prison. People who went abroad after knowing anyone who had been ill were to carry white staffs, but I even risked not doing that.

I was too soon out of breath, so I slowed to a fast walk. What Will would probably have called “rosy-fingered dawn” was barely visible. As I passed Blackfriars Gatehouse, I sniffed back a sob, remembering how we had danced and loved there. At Puddle Dock, I saw no boat-men waiting, nor even boats. The black river rippled past as if it too would flee the pestilence. For the first time in years, I longed for the gentle Avon with the small stone bridge spanning its banks, instead of the long, oft-crowded wooden one I must cross this morning.