In Ashes Lie (44 page)

1665-1666

Jack Ellin barely waited for the hackney coach to rattle to a halt before he leapt free like a schoolboy released on holiday. Flicking a coin up to the driver, who caught it adroitly, he dodged through the press of bodies, horses, and carts that filled Lombard Street, and across to a familiar door.

Two clerks sat in the front room, tallying up accounts for the goods that filled the rest of the ground floor. Once there had been more, but Antony’s wealth had suffered almost as badly as his health during the King’s long exile. He had regained the house, but not all his former stature. The clerks nodded greetings at Jack when he passed them, heading for the staircase that led to the family’s living quarters.

The manservant Burnett met him at the top. “Is Sir Antony in?” Jack asked.

“He is, Dr. Ellin, but not in good spirits. Ill news came today, I believe, and Lady Ware is away—visiting family in Norfolk.”

Jack had forgotten. Kate’s absence was a great pity; she, more than anyone, could lift Antony from his black moods.
Well, I shall have to do my best.
Jack slung off his cloak. “He needs distraction, then. He’s in his study?”

He found Antony bent over a stack of papers. Guildhall work, most likely; the baronet had withdrawn from Parliamentary life just before the restoration of the monarchy, but he stayed firmly engaged with the politics of London. Last year he served as one of the City’s sheriffs. Jack would lay money on his election as Lord Mayor some day.

If he didn’t fret himself into his grave first. “Jack. I apologize for my distracted state—some business has me concerned.”

The ill news Burnett had mentioned, no doubt. “Oh?”

“A plague death in my ward. On Bearbinder Lane.”

It dampened Jack’s good cheer, and more than explained Antony’s own mood. Plague raised its ugly head year after year, but to find it in Langbourn Ward was worrisome indeed. Professional curiosity sparked. “I knew there was plague in the pestered suburbs, St. Giles-in-the-Field and the like—but here? Are you certain?”

“The searchers verified it. But there’s some suggestion the man was a foreigner, a Frenchman, who had only just removed from St. Giles; we may hope the distemper will not spread here.” Antony rubbed his eyes tiredly. “But you did not come here for that. I judge by the spring in your step that you have some good news to share.”

It seemed less bright, after speaking of the plague, but Jack put on his best grin and offered Antony a florid, courtly bow. “And so I do. You see before you, my good sir, the newest Fellow of the Royal Society of London.”

“Wonderful!” Now the smile was genuine. “I should mock you for this; is it not enough to be both physician and surgeon? Now you must be a natural philosopher as well.”

At Antony’s gestured invitation, Jack claimed the room’s other chair. “My love will always be the physicking of people, I promise you. But theories have their uses. Take Harvey’s work on the blood—”

“My dear Dr. Ellin, if you are about to subject me to some abstruse lecture on anatomy, you may save your breath; I will not understand it.”

Jack waved the objection away. “Nothing abstruse, I promise you. Merely this: that Harvey showed the heart is a sort of pump, propelling blood around the body with its action. Now, knowing this does not change the fact that if you put a hole in a man, his blood will all come out, and he will die. But! Harvey’s observations suggest that the veins carry blood only
to
the heart, and the arteries
away
from it.”

The old man’s expression said clearly that he did not see the point.

Jack sighed. “It all depends on where a man is wounded. What has been damaged: an artery or a vein? We might find ways to improve the efficacy of bloodletting, were Harvey’s notions more widely understood. And you see, that is what the Society is about! Sharing knowledge, and
testing
it—deriving knowledge from observation of the world, rather than relying solely on ancient authority.”

Chuckling, Antony turned back to his papers and straightened them, sweeping aside fragments from a newly cut quill. “I have no doubt you will fit with them like a hand in a glove. You certainly have the curiosity.”

“And the disrespect for authority—only you’re too kind to say it.” Jack leapt to his feet, still bursting with excitement. Once he was sworn in, he would have the Society’s patronage behind his work, and the Society had the King’s. What could he not do with that? “Come! Let us have a supper to celebrate. We could see one of those Punch shows in Covent Garden, or go to the gardens at Vauxhall. I only wish Kate were here to join us.”

A shadow crossed Antony’s features, most unexpectedly. What ailed the man? Something more than a single plague death, or even the larger threat in St. Giles.

Simple loneliness? His children were all gone: Alice married, Robin at sea, and Henry maintaining polite distance, with letters and the occasional visit, but nothing more. The thriving trade Antony had once ruled over now faltered; though still enough to keep body and soul together in decent comfort, it no longer seemed to give the baronet much joy in life. Kate’s journey to Norfolk could turn a man’s thoughts to his empty house.

Or more than that. “Did you and Kate quarrel?”

Antony rose and crossed to the window, gazing out into the cloudy day—and, as it happened, hiding his expression from Jack. He stood there a long moment, hands braced on the sill, until Jack almost gave up and changed the subject. But then Antony spoke. “I dislike keeping secrets.”

Jack blinked. “Then don’t.”

His old friend shook his head. “I do not—in every respect I can. But there are some few things in my life I can never tell her about.”

Which meant he should not be saying anything to Jack, either; it only roused the physician’s curiosity. Asking would gain him nothing, though. Jack said, “For fear of what? That she’ll turn against you? Antony, your wife loves you. You could burn down a church with a hundred parish orphans inside, and she would try to find out what good reason you had for doing it.”

“Not that.” Antony bowed his head, and the gray light gleamed through the gray hairs on his scalp. “I simply—cannot explain my actions to myself. I surely cannot explain them to anyone else.”

Though rarely at a loss for words, Jack had little notion what to say to that. Antony was not the sort of friend who shared the confidences of his heart—and while Jack might know about the circulation of the blood, he had no skill for dealing with that organ’s less physical functions. He bit his lip, thought it through, then asked, “Do you regret what you’ve done?”

Antony went still. “No.”

“Then why do you need to explain it, to yourself or any other?”

After a moment, the old baronet laughed ruefully. “I suppose I do not.”

“Just so. Now come.” Jack came forward and took his friend by the arm. Antony, surprisingly, permitted him the touch. “Supper, and some good cheer, and I will tell you about this ridiculous chymical physician who’s trying to gain entrance to the Royal Society.”

The audience roared with laughter as a gaily painted actor tumbled to the boards of the stage. The air in the Red Bull was stiflingly close and none too sweet, its foulness hardly veiled by thick clouds of tobacco smoke, but Lune laughed with all the rest, as coarsely as the red-faced mortal she pretended to be. Carline had persuaded her to come and see the new innovation of women actors, and while Lune thought the Bull’s lady shrill and overwrought, she was glad of the chance to distract herself.

The decision to come was not easy. There were six fae in the theatre that night, which meant six pieces of bread consumed—or rather, four pieces of bread, and two swallows of milk, though the latter was rarely seen in the Onyx Hall. Scarce resources nowadays; of the mortals who followed them from Berkshire, some had drifted away slowly, others with more speed, once the plague broke out in London’s parishes.

But Lune needed the diversion. Her messengers—she might call them spies—had returned again, footsore and annoyed, without word of Vidar. It worried her, not to know where he hid; she did not believe he would flee so far she could not find him. Not that her reach was so long, but she knew Vidar, and knew his arrogance. To take refuge in Italy would be to admit that he had failed, and that he would not do.

Nicneven had not found him either. Which was less of a surprise, the Gyre-Carling having a shorter reach than Lune’s own—but it did not put her heart any more at ease.

The Red Bull Theatre was glad to provide the diversion she needed. Why exactly the man now onstage was wearing a wooden tub around his naked body, Lune did not know—she had missed the explanation, if indeed there had been one—but the sheer absurdity of it was infectious.

All her amusement fled, though, when she spotted a figure forcing his way through the patrons of the Red Bull. Antony did not belong here; his back was stiff with disapproval, and more than a few of the men he shouldered aside glared at him. The baronet paid them no heed.

It did not take a great sage to realize some pressing errand brought him. Lune touched Carline’s arm and murmured in her ear, then rose to greet Antony.

“A moment of your time?” he muttered.

“Of course.” A man behind her was already complaining that she blocked his view; she eased her way clear, stumbling as someone’s foot snagged her hem.
I am no Queen here,
she thought wryly.
Were I mortal and Christian, I would call it a lesson in humility.

Being neither of those things, she had no particular appreciation for humility, and was glad to gain the freer air of St. John’s Street outside. Straightening the disarray of her skirts, Lune opened her mouth to ask Antony what was so pressing it could not wait a few hours for her return.

He spoke before she could get one word out. “What in God’s name do you think you are doing?”

The harshness of it put her back up, for it evoked the guilt she felt in spending their scarcity on an evening’s entertainment. “I’ve hardly spent a moment outside since returning from Berkshire,” she began, prepared to defend her choice.

Antony cut her off with a violent motion. “That theatre is supposed to be
closed.
All of them are, by command of the King and Lord Mayor. And I find you in their midst, with no regard for the law!”

Lune winced. She could not pretend she hadn’t known. Kings came and went, but the plague orders remained the same: in times of sickness, all such public gatherings were banned, to prevent the spread of the distemper. After the strangulation of the Puritan era, though, London’s inhabitants, mortal and fae alike, were wild to partake of the licentious mood fostered by King Charles the Second—even in the face of danger.

“Fae are not vulnerable to disease,” she said, in vain defense. “We can neither contract it nor spread it; our presence here makes nothing worse.”

“It makes nothing better, either.” Antony snatched off his hat, crumpling the brim in his fingers. The hair beneath was thinner than she remembered it, and brittle. Their exile had broken his health; Antony had never fully recovered. But there was life in him still, and most of it currently burning with anger. “Lune, the plague is
spreading,
and at such a rate as to frighten me. They say it is God’s judgment for our license. I do not know about that, but certainly such behavior does not help.”

Lune spread her hands in bafflement. She was not to blame for the folk inside, and she could not see why Antony behaved as if she were. “What would you have me do? Send Bonecruncher and his friends in without glamours, to frighten everyone out?”

“It would be a start. But I had in mind a great deal more than that.”

She blinked. “Such as?”

He stepped closer, until only the crown of his hat separated them, so his voice would not carry. The passion in him had faded, leaving behind something less easily read. “You have more at your disposal than simple plague orders and medicines.”

“Magic?” Lune, too, kept her voice low. “Antony...our enchantments have no power over this sickness.”

“None?”

She let him see the honest regret in her eyes. “Disease is not something we know. We may speed the closing of wounds, a little; there are tales of greater things, that have more power to heal. But none in our possession. And none, so far as I know, that can banish the plague.”

Frustration hardened his features anew. Deven had asked this once, too; the plague was a frequent visitor to London. Lune had expected it from Antony during the last great visitation, some years before the war. It might have been easier for him to accept back then, before his own age made him so aware of his inevitable death.

Or not.

The Prince half turned away, jammed his hat back onto his head. Then he said, “There are other possibilities. Some of your stealthier folk could watch shut-up houses. The watchmen assigned to keep them closed are sent away on errands, and then the people escape; or else they threaten their watchers outright, hold them off with pistols or swords while their families flee, carrying the plague with them.”

“Antony—”

“Or the gentler ones, they could bring comfort to those in confinement, and perhaps keep healthy those who have not yet fallen sick.”

“Antony!”

Her call silenced him for just an instant, and into that gap came the sound of a bell. It did not ring the hour, which had passed just short while ago, but tolled six times: the death of a woman.

It might not be plague, but she knew they both thought it.

As the holy sound washed harmlessly over her, Lune said, “How often are the bells heard? Too much for safety. You will tell me I should not have spent bread on this visit to the theatre, and you will be right. But even without that—Antony, we cannot afford to be in the streets, not such as you ask. Not with people praying constantly for deliverance; not with crosses painted on the doors of the sick.”