At the Sign of the Sugared Plum (11 page)

The next room was even more sumptuous, with diamond-paned windows which overlooked the flowered courtyard below and a vast carved wood fireplace which reached the ceiling. This room had silver-gilt chairs and nests of drawers patterned in flowers, with Chinese vases and silver candlesticks atop, and was all very fine, so that I could not but gasp at the beauty of it all. ‘I never thought furnishings of a house could be so elegant,’ I said to Abby, for indeed all the houses I’d been into – big and small – had been in the country and of rustic style.

‘Oh, ’tis all for show!’ she said. ‘They never come into these rooms. But you should see the bedrooms! The mistress’s room has Venetian mirrors all over, and she sleeps in a four-poster with gold hangings that are said to have come from Persia.’

Once she’d told me this, I longed to go upstairs and
see these things, but Abby said she didn’t dare take me. She did say, though, that if I went up the servants’ stairs to her room, then she would go to the nursery and bring the babe to see me.

To tell the truth I was not that bothered about the babe, having seen more than enough of my little brothers and sisters as infants, but Abby said it was a pretty one and seemed so eager to show it off that we went to her room and I waited while she fetched it.

It
was
a pretty babe, about three months old and still swaddled, with thick dark hair. She was awake and smiled up at us, so Abby loosened the cambric sheet around her and let her wave her arms.

‘This is Grace,’ Abby said. ‘And she must think I’m her mother, for it’s been me who’s been looking after her since she was born.’

‘How is she fed if your mistress is so ill?’ I asked. ‘Does she have a wet nurse?’

Abby shook her head. ‘They won’t allow a wet nurse for fear of contagion, so a maid with the milch-ass calls here twice a day.’ She stroked the baby’s cheek. ‘I trickle the milk down my hand and this little squab sucks my fingers.’

I was silent for a moment, and then I asked in a low voice, ‘It’s not plague that your mistress has, is it?’

Abby laughed. ‘’Tis not! Plague would have carried her off by now. It’s just childbed fever. Though, to tell the truth,’ she added, ‘when I wash her, I always look her over for the tokens, for I know that plague is no respecter of persons. It can visit a lady as quick as an ale-house wife.’

‘And do you take a preventative yourself?’

She nodded. ‘The mistress’s doctor made us up
some treacle with conserves of roses before he went into the country. And we all chew a piece of angelica root when we go out.’

Talking of the preventatives made me think of Tom, and, rather embarrassed, I brought his name into the conversation and asked Abby whether I should allow him the liberty of kissing me or not. ‘I mean proper kissing – on the lips,’ I explained.

She laughed. ‘Of course!’ she said. ‘For what’s a sweetheart for if you don’t get one or two kisses from him!’

‘Mother used to say—’

Abby waved her hand dismissively. ‘It’s different in London,’ she said. ‘And different now, when no one can count on living two days at a time. If you’re visited by the plague—’

I gave a little gasp of fright.

‘You don’t want to go to your grave unkissed, do you?’

I smiled and blushed. ‘Indeed I don’t!’

‘Well, then,’ she said.

Laughing, I said I would think on it, and bid her goodbye.

Chapter Nine
The first week of August

‘And I frighted to see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard where so many have been buried of the Plague.’

‘Praying is all very well,’ said the stout woman in church, ‘but I cannot fast! And I do not see why I have to. I don’t believe the king will be fasting. I’m sure he and his court will be sitting down to their grouse and oysters and lobsters and geese just the same as they always do!’

Sarah and I smiled at the woman, who was as wide as she was high, and moved slightly further down the pew and away from her. She was hot and red-faced and we did not wish her breath to fall on us, for the latest rumour was that you should keep cool and keep your distance from others as much as possible in order to avoid contaminated air. It appeared that the authorities did not know this rumour, however, for we were still required to attend church regularly, and without fail on the first Wednesday in each month.

The Bills had shown that near two and a half thousand had died of plague in the past week, and on the way into St Dominic’s that morning I had not been able to avoid seeing how the ground in the graveyard had risen; how corpses had been laid upon corpses so that the ground on each side of the pathway had swelled to a height of several feet. It made me shudder to see it, for I could not help but imagine them all lying there in the cold earth in their winding sheets – for few were given the sanctity of a coffin – old piled upon young, men upon women, laid without care or ceremony.

Once seated in church, we discovered that our own minister had moved to the safety of the country, and another now stood in his place. He gave a violent and frightening sermon which lasted nearly two hours, telling us that the plague was a judgement on the behaviour of the people, and of the terrible death and hellfire which awaited us unless we truly repented of our blasphemies and sins. He affrighted me so terribly that I had to take Sarah’s hand, but she whispered to me that he could not mean the likes of us, for a just God could not account any sins
we
had committed as being evil enough to take us to Hell.

Going home, we saw a sad sight: a young woman carrying a small box in her arms, weeping aloud and calling, ‘Oh my child . . . oh my precious!’ as she trudged towards St Olave’s churchyard. Sarah whispered that she probably wanted to take the baby to the graveyard herself and make sure it had a decent burial. ‘For she will surely be shut in as soon as the authorities find out the child has died,’ she added.

Another strange sight we saw was that of a poor
madman, raving deliriously, clad with only a cloth about his loins. He was beating his naked breast and screaming out to the Heavens to deliver him from his life on earth, for his whole family had been taken with the plague and he no longer wished to live. Sarah threw a coin to him and we hurried past without speaking.

When we got home, we found that a letter we had tried to send to our family telling them that all was well with us, had been returned undelivered. A man from the carriers told us that, despite this letter being steamed over a pot of boiling vinegar to kill any contagion, the authorities in Chertsey had refused to accept it. He said that many towns were no longer taking letters from London unless they concerned official business, or were a matter of life or death.

‘Do you suppose they will know in Chertsey that the plague is upon us?’ I asked Sarah.

‘They are sure to,’ she nodded. ‘And Mother will be worried, no doubt. But they will think no news is good news.’

We changed out of our church-going clothes and, both being very hungry – for we had not yet broken our fast – we ate some of our sweetmeats. Sarah said it could not count as proper eating just to sample the stock, and besides, we had been left with rather a lot of crystallised violet and rose petals of late, because our trade had fallen off so much.

‘To be plain, I am worried,’ Sarah said. ‘Our takings are down to less than a half of what they usually are.’

I was rather distracted, for I’d finished my violets and was looking at myself in a little mirror that I’d bought from a pedlar. It seemed to me that, despite all
my efforts, my hair was wilder and curled more than ever.

‘Hannah!’ Sarah said. ‘Did you hear me? With more and more of the quality going out of town, I fear we will soon not be making enough money to buy our daily food.’

‘There won’t be food to buy anyway, will there?’ I said, putting the mirror away. ‘Half the shops are already shut, and if it gets any worse Mr Newbery says we’ll all starve!’

Sarah shook her head. ‘We will not,’ she said, ‘for I have heard today of where we may buy provisions.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘While we were waiting to go into church this morning and you were staring at the graves and thinking of God knows what horrors, I was speaking to a man who lives near Lincolns Inn. We talked of the difficulty of getting food and he said that there are some country wives who are not willing to come into the city for fear of contagion, but who bring their wares to town and set them up for sale by the city gates. They bring rabbits and chickens and all manner of pies, and they are there every day of the week.’

‘And we will always be able to get bread – so we will not starve after all!’ I said.

Sarah shook her head. ‘No, indeed. But about our trade. How can we sell more sweetmeats?’

We both fell to thinking.

‘I could go out with a tray,’ I said, and at Sarah’s frown, added, ‘Indeed I would not mind a bit.’

Sarah shook her head. ‘I don’t think it would be wise for you to walk the streets any more than you have to.’ She thought some more. ‘If we could make
something which the poorer people needed, then we wouldn’t worry about the quality going out of town.’

And then I thought of the answer. ‘We must make sweetmeats which prevent the plague!’ I cried.

Sarah clapped her hands. ‘The very thing! Why didn’t we think of it before?’

‘We must look through our recipes and see what seeds and herbs are of most use,’ I said, then hesitated. ‘But how do we know anything will truly work against the sickness? How can we say what will work more than any other thing? Won’t we be just like the quack doctors who set up stalls overnight and sell pellets of stale bread and call them plague pills?’

Sarah shook her head. ‘There are a hundred different preventions now, and who is to say what works and what doesn’t? Even the real doctors and apothecaries – even Doctor da Silva – don’t know for certain what is of use.’

I nodded slowly. ‘We may make the very things which make a difference.’

‘We will make sugared comfits from the little spikes of rosemary! Everyone says rosemary is most efficacious.’

‘And it will cost almost nothing, as we have a bush of it just outside our back door,’ I said.

We sat and thought for a while, and looked through some of our aunt’s papers, and in the end I went to see Tom at the apothecary’s, for I assured Sarah that he would know as well as anyone what would be the best plants to use.

To my regret, Tom was not there, having apparently gone to the docks to fetch some very rare mineral compound. Doctor da Silva, who was boiling herbs in
a pot, assured me, however, that rosemary comfits would be beneficial.

‘And even if not beneficial, at least not harmful,’ he added.

‘And what else could we make into sweetmeats?’

‘What of angelica? This is a most powerful herb of the sun in Leo and it would be right to gather it now.’

I nodded eagerly. ‘We can candy the stems of angelica into sugar sticks.’

‘And chervil has a root similar to that of angelica,’ the doctor went on thoughtfully, ‘and is said to be as effective, and there is also dragon-wort, which expels the venom of plague – although you may not know where to find it at this time of the year. The root of the scabious boiled in wine is a very powerful antidote, although I do not know how you would convert this into a sweetmeat.’

‘But rosemary, angelica and chervil,’ I said thoughtfully, ‘we can use all these.’ I spoke slowly, looking around the shelves of the shop, at the dusty bottles and phials, and hoping that Tom would arrive back before I left.

‘And the flowers of garlic may also be candied,’ the doctor said. ‘Garlic is an efficacious remedy for all diseases.’

Some more customers arrived to see the doctor then, and feeling obliged to go home, I bobbed the doctor a curtsey and thanked him for his trouble.

‘’Tis nothing. We must all help each other in our distress,’ the doctor said, and as I went to the door, added, ‘Oh, by the way, some young ladies swear that an ointment made from cowslips rids them of their freckles.’

I was tempted to ask further, but as I did not wish to be thought of as an empty-headed baggage, I just said, ‘When we are over our troubles, perhaps,’ and asked him to please commend me to Tom.

Two days later, Sarah and I rose at the call of five o’clock, for we were going out to see if we could find angelica growing on the marshes. I had washed and left my washing water ready for Sarah – for it was not at all dirty – when she suddenly cried out my name in a most despairing voice.

I looked round, alarmed, and she was sitting on our bed in her shift, her face flushed and a hand pressed against her jaw. I immediately began to shake with fright, for I knew what must have happened:
She had found some swelling
. . .

I crouched down beside her. ‘What is it?’ I asked her urgently. ‘Is it a lump?’

‘I believe so,’ she said shakily, feeling along her face. ‘Just here.’ She took my fingers and pressed them against her face, although – God forgive me – for an instant I wanted to recoil and snatch them back. ‘Can you feel it too?’

I felt along the line of her jaw. ‘I . . . I think so,’ I said.

‘There is pain, too, all down the side of my neck. And it has been so all night.’

‘And on the other side?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Do you have any other symptoms?’ I asked, my voice trembling. ‘Fever? Do you feel sick? Have the giddiness? Do you have a headache?’

She shook her head to all of these except the last.

‘Let’s go quickly to Doctor da Silva, then,’ I said, and she nodded speechlessly, her face as white as her shift.

While we dressed my mind was whirling ahead of me. If it indeed
was
plague, then without more ado we would be shut up in the house with a brutal minder at our door. I would have the same symptoms in one or two days, then Sarah would die, and I would follow. Mother and Father would find out in a letter from someone – a minister at the church, perhaps – and would come to London, but would be unable to find our grave.