Plague (33 page)

He straightened. “Come, don’t you know me, Mrs. Chalker?” he said, after a moment. “Nay, you are being coy with me.” He smiled. “For how can you not know the man whom you have secretly loved this many a day?”

She did know him, of course, and everything that had been murky in her mind came clear. Her husband had not told her what he was about the day he disappeared. But it was only days after she had confessed her fear … of the man who stood before her now. John had vowed to deal with this lord who so disturbed her in the theatre, who’d gripped and bruised her wrist. But her John was the one dealt with. By this man. Never in her life of seeing things that were there, and those that were not, had she been more certain of anything.

All this thought flashed in near a second; the same one that had her snatching out the knife, driving it at his face so fast that only a jerk of his head saved his eye, at the cost of a cut along his temple. She pulled the blade back, but his hand fell upon her, fingers like metal wrapping around her wrist, instantly squeezed so hard she had no choice but to drop the weapon. She shot her left hand up, fingernails reaching, but his other gripped her as she struggled, jerked, kicked, could not break free. The man was as strong as she’d ever known. Stronger even than John Chalker.

The memory of her husband, how she’d last seen him, took her strength; she sagged, ceasing her struggles. He dragged her across the room, dropped her onto the one chair. As she rubbed her agonized wrists, he stooped to pick up her knife, at the same time pulling a square of linen from a sleeve to press against his temple. The white
mouchoir
crimsoned immediately. “Well,” he said, “I do not blame you for this. You were startled, that is all. And it shows you are a woman of courage, of spirit. That is good. You will need spirit for the week we will have together in this house—” he dabbed at the gash “—and for the time beyond its walls. You will need it to survive the End of Days that is so swiftly approaching. Which you and I shall face hand in hand.”

He crossed to the table, placed his fingers on the book that lay open there, beneath the martyred saint, leaving a trace of blood on the paper. “Spirit, and faith also,” he continued. “I suspect you have not been instructed in the truest words of God, those found mainly in the prophecies of Revelation and of Daniel, have you?” That half smile again. “No matter. It will give me the greatest pleasure to instruct you.”

She’d regained enough breath to propel herself to the door. It was not locked. She flung it open. Maggs stood on the other side. When she tried to push past him, he seized her arms, shoved her back into the room.

“There is something else,” Lord Garnthorpe continued, as if she had not moved. “Someone else. A great sinner, full of filth and degradation. Yet one who was corrupted by a devil in the guise of a lord. It is our duty to King Jesus to save them. Just as I shall save you.”

He left the room. Maggs stared down, his face blank. She heard Garnthorpe cross the hall, a second door open, feet descending. That
sob came again, louder, then it stopped. Sarah heard Garnthorpe returning and the sound of something being dragged.

He entered, hauling someone behind him. “Behold,” he said, “the mother of harlots.”

And he threw Lucy Absolute onto the floor.

 

One week later

“Coke? Captain Coke? Are you awake?”

The whisper entered his dream. It was not welcome.

He was in a bath, the one his sisters had drawn for him when he’d visited home after three months in the field. They’d teased him for the colour he’d turned the water. Murkier than a pond, they said. A habitation for frogs, they said. He told them he’d eaten frogs when he’d followed the prince to France, though he thought that strange, since he’d only gone to France after his sisters were dead. Still, he began casting around in the warm murk for anything living. Right now, a frog fried in a parsleyed butter would be the best thing he’d ever tasted. A raw one would do near as well.

“Wake, Captain. ’Tis time.”

Captain? Hadn’t he asked her to call him Will?

“Sarah,” he said loudly.

“Hush, man!” A finger was placed on his mouth. “You’ll rouse them all.”

He brushed Pitman’s hand from his face. “Leave me be.”

“Then I would also have to leave you in Limbo. Rise. Macready’s here.”

“I am. Still alive! Still alive!”

There was little light there during the day, just what the cracks in the stones of the gatehouse floor, directly above, admitted. The only way to tell day from night was when there was no light at all—as now. But Coke heard the distinctive
huh-huh-huh
wheeze of the Scotsman, like a magpie’s mocking laugh, could picture his ragged face. The nose half gone, bitten off in a fight, he said. The black crossed eyes. The toad skin he wore on a string around his neck as a ward against the plague. Perhaps the talisman had worked, for Macready was most distinctive in this: he had survived in Limbo for nearly six months. Three months longer than any in living memory. The guards made bets on his longevity, and many were happy to hear that wheeze each morning. Some fed him a little better, like a fighting cock they kept alive for sport.

The wheeze came now. “Are you ready for this folly, lads?”

“Ready,” replied Pitman.

“And I,” said Coke, sitting up.

“Then set about what ye must do. Have you my reward to hand?”

Coke felt for the gold guinea, the one he’d swallowed as a precaution before he ever set foot in Newgate, and which had done its journey through his guts to eventually emerge bleached but whole. “I do.”

“Don’t you forget to leave it me. I have such plans for it!”

Macready laughed, but the laughter quickly dissolved into wet
coughing. “I’m not sure you’ll live to spend the gold,” said Coke, leaning away. “Is that a plague cough I hear?”

“Plague?” The man snorted. “You’re such a new one here, Captain Cock.” He sniffed, a long wet intake. “What I have, sir, is jail fever! A superior form of sickness entirely. I’ve got weeks of life in me yet. Time to spend that gold while you two are being chased down to Tyburn gallows by the Black Dog hisself.”

Coke shivered. The Black Dog of Newgate. He’d scoffed at it, this story to frighten children to sleep. But after one week there, he could swear he’d heard its paws padding above the dungeon each night.

“So look you do not try to cheat me,” added the Scot. “Now, about it, boys.” He wheezed off.

“This
is
folly, Pitman.” Coke coughed. “Entwining ourselves with plague victims. How shall we ’scape the fell disease ourselves?”

“Many dwell side by side with the dying—nay, lie in the same bed and never catch it. Others do and yet live. Only God decides who he takes.”

“Very well,” said Coke, rising. “Let us see if we can cheat the Black Dog a little longer.”

Immediately they set about it. “They will go to lengths not to touch you,” Macready had told them, “if they see the plague marks clear. And they will not study them close, for fear they will be studying them closer still—on themselves.”

Spit, piss and charcoal made a fair black dye, they’d discovered, in the little light that arrived with day and the rare opening of the dungeon’s trap door. Pitman now daubed oval rings—darker upon the outside, lighter in the middle—first on his own throat and chest, then repeated and varied the patterns on Coke. They did the backs of each other’s necks.

Then it was the captain’s turn. With the knife he’d brought and the rats he’d killed with it, he fashioned oval pouches of the skins, which he then stuffed with fetid straw blackened with that same charcoal mix. He pressed them into Pitman’s groin and one armpit. They’d pass as buboes if the observer did not study them too long. After tying them in place with dyed, plaited straw, he let Pitman tie others onto him.

Now there was only the waiting.

“Where will they take us, do you think?” Coke whispered.

“I heard the city cemeteries are all full. They’re digging pits beyond the walls now.”

“That means longer in the wagon?”

“Aye.”

“But what if Newgate is the first call, not the last? We’ll be in the bottom of the damned cart.”

“You’ll still have to bide as you can.”

“Christ, this I pray: that I am not thrown first into the cart. Indeed, I pray most of all I am not under you. You may be shrunk from what you were, but you are still a great ox, for all that.”

Pitman smiled. “My only prayer is they place us so that for the entire journey your Royalist nose is up my Puritan—” He broke off. “But whatever happens, man, cling to this: if you do not escape, whatever danger Mrs. Chalker is in continues. If I do not, more of my chicks will die. And I jest when I speak of my only prayer. My true one is that the Almighty preserve us a little longer, to do his will and catch the fiend.”

“You still do not recall his face?”

“His face, aye, but not the name that goes with it. If—”

“Huh-huh-huh.” The wheeze was close in the dark. “They come.”

And they did, as always, with the scrape of the iron bar run
along stone and thrust into the metal hoop, with the squeal as it was twisted, lifted. Immediately there was light, flaring torch light, which had all below holding their arms before their eyes, at the same time crying out—for pity, for water, for their God, however they knew him, to deliver them.

“Macready,” the jailer called, “are you alive, ye hound?”

“Ow, ow! Still alive, Cap’n, still alive!” the Scotsman howled. “So that’s another tanner you owe your corporal.”

Laughter mingled with some curses until the voice sounded again.

“And what’s the bill of mortality in Limbo this night, Macready?”

“Ah, the Black Dog has run among us, sure,” was the reply.

“There’s one dead of fever as I can see, one choked—did you know there was murderers down here, Cap’n? It’s shocking!” More laughter. Then the Scot added, “And the plague’s taken two.”

The laughs ceased. “I’m sending down for the corpses. Clear away, do not any paw them or none will get their bread and gruel.” The Limbo dwellers who’d started to crawl onto the stone stairs hurried aside. Four other prisoners—mere thieves, no doubt, their clothes a little less ragged, their faces swathed in cloth—scurried down the steps, pausing on the last one. “Blade? Fever?” one asked, and Macready pointed. Two bodies were removed, then the men returned. “Plague?”

Pitman was the first they picked up, amidst much swearing at his weight; the two men then carried him away up the steps, his long arms dragging. Then they came back for Coke. “Shite, look at that buboe,” one of the men said.

“I’d rather not,” said the other, his voice a little more genteel.

“Now, grab his arms, sir, and let’s be done with him.”

“You grab his bloody arms,” the first said. “I’m not going near that scab.”

Coke was halfway up the stairs, when the hiss and cough reminded him of the last thing he must do to ensure escape. Carefully he unclutched his hand and let the gold guinea slip.

“Thank you, Cap’n. Ow! Ow!”

“What are you thanking me for, Macready?” the officer asked.

Coke didn’t hear the answer; he was out of the cell and being run through the gate. It appeared that his bearers wanted rid of him fast. He risked the half opening of one eye—then wished he hadn’t. He was being borne toward a cart piled high with bodies. In a moment, he was thrown atop them.

The gates slammed shut. Two men mounted the bench of the cart. “Bring out your dead! Bring—”

“Belay that, ya fool,” said the second man, taking the reins. “One more body and this starved nag ain’t moving. Get on, ya bitch!” He cracked a whip and the cart lurched.

“Where to?” asked the first man.

“Moorfields,” the second replied. “They dug a new hole yesterday. ’Alf filled it already.”

Coke could not help the laugh that shook him. He was out of Limbo! Then he felt scratching under his left thigh. Too consistent to be a flea. He looked around, down.

Into Pitman’s face. The man did not open his eyes but had a finger across his lips in the gesture of silence. But Coke found it hard to obey when he saw that it was in fact the Puritan who had his nose pressed up the Royalist’s arse.

Between the swaying of the cart and the shifting of the bodies as it did, Pitman was slowly able to free his own limbs from the tangle. Though his head was close to a living man, it was the dead around who concerned him. He felt them pressing him all over—a child’s
arm over his thigh, a woman’s breast at his belly. He could see the oval plague token clear on that by moonlight, which was bright as a noonday sun to him after Limbo. He needed all his will not to burst from the middle of the pile and run screaming into the night.

He knew he must not. They had discussed it, Coke and he, every day in that darkest level of hell, and had agreed: though death was on every street in the city, in such numbers that the ink to note it was running low, even so every man’s death must still be recorded in the parish ledgers. If the notorious murderers Pitman and Coke were to rise from a death cart and flee into the night, there would be such a hue and cry that they would soon be caught and returned to prison. Already
dead
, they had a chance to do what they must to save those they loved.