In Ashes Lie (49 page)

Jack had nothing over his mouth; he should be wearing a kerchief, or one of those ridiculous beaked masks some doctors affected, stuffing the front with strong herbs to cleanse the air they breathed. The man’s hands felt like ice through Antony’s sodden linen shirt. He shivered uncontrollably and tried to push them away, but Jack evaded him with ease and yanked the laces open. Antony gasped in pain as the physician rolled his head to one side and then the other, checking his neck and under his arms; then agony lanced through him again as Jack pulled aside his drawers to examine his thighs.

The doctor growled an oath, and that forced home the truth Antony had been denying all this time. Telling himself it was just a fever. A headache. It would pass.

“I am dying,” he whispered.

The pain was unmistakable. Bad now, it would only grow worse, until he ran mad, and thought of ending his own life to end his suffering. Antony could feel the swellings in his groin, not just tokens but the very stamp of the plague.

“You will
not
die,” Jack said violently, and shifted his weight back, preparatory to a burst of activity that would bring all his medicinal art to bear on the task of saving Antony’s life.

Antony caught his arm before he could stand, digging his fingers in hard. “Listen. You must do something for me. You
must.
”

Jack covered the hand with his own. “Tell me.”

“You must do it. Your oath on it. Swear to me, before God, that you will do
exactly
as I bid you. No matter—no matter how strange it seems. No matter what you see.”

The physician’s face grew hesitant. “Antony—I must fetch my medicines, lance the swellings—”

“Later,”
Antony rasped. He did not know whether it was sweat or tears that ran down his cheeks. “Swear it!”

Jack swallowed, then nodded once. “As God is my witness, I will do as you bid me. If it will get you to cooperate, I’ll do anything.”

Antony sagged back against the pillow, made weak by relief. His hand trembled against Jack’s arm, its grip now slackened. “Thank you. God bless you, John Ellin. You may save my life indeed.”

What in the name of the Devil’s unholy arsehole am I doing here?

Fulfilling his oath to Antony. Every stride Jack’s horse took northward felt like another strip carved out of his heart; he should be back in Lombard Street, burning quicklime and spices to cleanse the room, getting opium and hopefully some food into his afflicted friend.

But Antony would not rest; he kept repeating his feverish words. And so Jack rode north into Islington, on the word of a dying—

Do not say “ dying.”

On the word of a very sick man.

The faster Jack carried out his duty, the sooner he could get on with his treatment. It had saved some patients, he believed. None of them so old as Antony, true—

He snarled the thought away, and dismounted behind the Angel Inn.

Go to the rosebush,
Antony had said,
and tell it your name.

Jack felt like an ass, but he suspected a secret meaning in the instruction. Antony had friends, he knew, from before the King’s restoration, and subtle means of passing information; Jack had long thought some of them associated with the Angel Inn. Speaking to the rosebush was no doubt a signal. But he didn’t share Antony’s apparent conviction that someone would be watching, ready to receive his message.

Nevertheless, he had sworn it. So, taking a deep breath, Jack bent to one withered, rain-starved blossom and said, “My name is Dr. John Ellin. Sir Antony Ware has sent me to say that he has fallen ill with the plague. He is in his house in Lombard Street, and begs—”

He got no further, because the rosebush began to move. The tendrils stretched themselves upward, forming a graceful arch. Jack stumbled backward in surprise, then fell without dignity on his rump as a woman appeared in the arch. “Lord Antony? Sick? Oh,
no
—”

Then
she
stopped, because a familiar sound rang out over the grassy field: the church bell of Islington, tolling the death of a parishioner.

The woman’s eyes rolled up in her head, and she crumpled to the ground.

Jack sat in the grass, staring.
Did a three-foot-tall woman just come out of a rosebush and faint at my feet?

He had his answer an instant later, when a second woman of equally small stature popped out of the arch, looking harassed and bearing a tiny cup in one hand. She made an exasperated noise when she saw the figure on the ground. “Honestly, if she had just listened—I warned her not to come out unprepared.”

Reflex took over; Jack crawled forward and supported the unconscious woman—girl? No, she was mature, though dwarfish in size—helping the other pour what looked to be a swallow of milk down her throat. “She fainted—”

“Yes, the bell. I heard it.” The woman tucked the cup into her rose-embroidered apron. “Come now, Gertrude, wake up—there’s a good girl.”

Honey-brown eyes fluttered open. She blinked twice, dazed, before seeming to realize she was lying against Jack’s knees. Then she sat bolt upright. “Antony!”

He rose, backing up a pace, and brushed the dirt and dried grass from the knees of his breeches. The two women were so much alike, they could only be sisters; were it not for their different aprons, he would have trouble distinguishing them. Antony had told him to bear this message to “the sisters,” and one thing more, to a specific name. If the woman with the daisies was called Gertrude, then the other...“Are you Lune?”

The woman with the roses blinked. “What? No, of course not. She isn’t here. Why—”

“I have a message for her as well.”

Focusing his mind on that errand helped. As long as he concentrated on his promise to Antony, he could keep the rest of that promise: to carry out his task no matter what he saw.

Both of the women were standing now. “Tell us,” Gertrude said.

Their faces were pitiful with concern; whoever else—
whatever
else—they were, Jack believed them true friends of Antony’s. But his oath was the only thing holding him together right now. “No. The words are for Lune alone; I’ll give them only to her.”

“Young man,” the rose-woman began, but her sister cut her off. “Rosamund, we haven’t the time. Lord Antony sent him; we must trust him. And the Queen will want to know, regardless.”

Catherine of Braganza? She was in Salisbury with the King.
Let it pass.
Rosamund fixed him with a piercing glare and said, “For Lord Antony’s sake, then—follow us, and do as we bid you, without question.”

He’d already sworn it, but there was no point in wasting time telling her that. Jack nodded, and they both sighed in relief. “I will make the horses,” Gertrude said, “and we shall go.”

He went along with everything. He didn’t ask why Rosamund and Gertrude were taller when they mounted up for the ride. He didn’t blink when they stopped at an alder tree along St. Martin’s Lane and the sisters’ horses seemed to vanish into thin air, straws falling to the ground where they had been.

He even managed to keep from screaming when the alder tree swallowed him whole.

A distant, perversely calm part of his mind suggested that his brain was too dazed for questions or even fear, but that when he had a moment to think, he would react very strongly indeed. It was probably true. For now, Jack just gaped at everything, like a clod of a farmer come into London for the first time.

Smooth black walls rose around him, lit by cool lights that seemed to float without support. Creatures stared at him as he passed—beings that made Rosamund and Gertrude look entirely normal by comparison. The very
air
felt different, secret and hushed, as if he walked in a shadow made solid.

Any doubt he might have had as to the nature of this place and its inhabitants fell into dust when he walked into a great, vaulted chamber and saw the woman on the throne.

She sat beneath a glittering canopy of estate that would have beggared Charles to buy, framed by the sweeping arch of silver that formed the throne’s back. Her own hair gleamed as brightly beneath the fanlike coronet that capped it, while the midnight silk of her gown provided a splash of jeweled color. The high bones of her face never belonged to anything human.

The elfin woman was speaking to a serpentine man, her tone quite sharp, but she cut off when the sisters hurtled past a startled and sticklike usher, their shoes tapping a rapid beat against the marble floor. “Gertrude? Rosamund?” she said, in clear, resonant tones. “Is something amiss?”

They dropped perfunctory curtsies, as if begrudging even that instant of delay. “Your Majesty,” Rosamund said, “this man bears you a message from Lord Antony.”

Immediately, every eye in the chamber was on Jack. He had followed at the sisters’ heels, but forgotten in his stupor to bow; he did so now, as clumsily as he had ever done, and felt the amusement of some of the watching courtiers. The resulting spark of anger steadied him, and when he straightened, he met the faerie Queen’s gaze without flinching. “Are you Lune?”

“I am,” she said, ignoring the gasps at his insolent address.

“Then Sir Antony bids me ask you this: if you will not save London, will you at least save him?”

Dead silence. No one so much as breathed, let alone laughed. Seeing Lune’s stricken face, Jack wondered for the first time at the content of Antony’s message. He’d taken it without thinking, assuming it all to be part of the man’s feverish rantings—but no. Clearly it had meaning.

A meaning that hurt this elfin Queen, struck deeply at her heart. He had not realized, coming here, that his first words to her would be so terribly cruel.

“Madam,” Gertrude whispered into that terrible hush, “’tis the plague.”

The Queen came to her feet in a movement so swift his eye missed it. “Take me to him.”

The stench of putrefaction and death filled the house, a foul miasma that choked Lune’s breath. The doctor hung back, strangely reluctant, and nodded at the staircase. Covering her mouth, she hurried up the stairs, terrified of what she might find.

His skin was corpse-pale and beaded with sweat, and he did not so much as twitch when she threw the door open. Lune hesitated on the threshold, trembling in every limb. Mortality, in its most dreadful form: the slow rotting of the flesh, with agony as its excruciating handmaiden. Gangrenous black spots marked his throat, striped with red where he had torn at them with his nails. Plague had come to London before, many a time; she knew enough to recognize what she saw.

And to hope, for one awful moment, that he was dead already, and free of this suffering.

The physician was behind her. Lune forced herself forward, one unwilling step at a time. “Is he—”

The man knelt at Antony’s side. John Ellin; that was his name. Jack. The memory swam up through her horror. Ellin covered his hand with a kerchief and pressed his fingers into Antony’s neck. “His pulse is weak, but he lives.”

Her breath rushed out in a gasp. Ellin examined Antony with gentle care, then paused. Not looking at her, he said, “He told me you would save him.”

The gasp became almost a sob.
It is the war, all over again. Had I acted more decisively, and sooner—

She could not have stopped the spread of this plague. The mortals believed it was God’s punishment, for the licentious behavior of the City and its King; whether that was true or not, she had no power to halt it.
But I could have kept him below.

He would never have stayed there, not when London needed him. If he sheltered in the Onyx Hall, though, where the air was unfouled, where there was no filth to breed disease...or if she had done as he asked, aiding in the mortals’ plight, so he did not exhaust himself in a battle he could not win.

Ellin pivoted on his knee, his pale face desperate. “If you have some charm that can save him,
use it.
I don’t know how long he has.”

Lune forced away her anguished thoughts; there would be time enough for those, later. The reply hurt her throat. “I—disease is not something we know. I cannot make him well.”

She watched the light in his eyes die. “But he believed—”

“He
hoped.
” Lune came forward, standing over Ellin’s shoulder, unable to look away from her dying Prince. “Had we any charm to dismiss the plague from a man’s body, I would have used it ere now. But we do not. The best I can give him...”

She trailed off, lost. Ellin shot upright and seized her by the shoulders.
“What?”

The sheer affront of his conduct tore her attention away from Antony at last. “We might strengthen him,” she said. “A draught—something to aid him in the fight.” Whether it would do any good, she did not know.

“Then fetch it,” Ellin said. “At this point, nothing can hurt.”

Cramps bent Antony’s legs up to his chest, setting off an agonizing fire through his hips and thighs. He cried out, driven from hazy, tormented unconsciousness into a waking state he had not thought he would see again.

Delicate hands touched his face, bathing his brow with blessedly cool water. He wept at the pain, and a voice soothed him, whispering reassurance it did not believe.
I am dreaming,
he thought.
The fever has sent me mad.

If so, his madness was cruel. It should have brought him both Kate and Lune—though it was not safe for Kate to be here. He did not want her shut in with him.

Lune could not be here, not as he saw her, wearing her own face. But then a bell tolled, black herald of yet another death, and she shuddered; and that convinced him. This was no fancy of his fevered brain. She truly was here, without glamour, without protection, comforting him in his extremity.