Portrait of an Unknown Woman (21 page)

 
          
Dame Alice stopped talking. I saw her take in my dusty, stained appearance for the first time. Father and she both stepped closer.

 
          
“A child died this afternoon,” John went on. “Suddenly.”

 
          
“A runaway from Deptford,” I added. “A girl of five or six.”

 
          
Even now there was no real surprise. But I saw dread etch its acid lines on both parents’ watching faces. There was a long silence while they considered what it might mean for us that the disease laying waste to London had reached this quiet country place. Then they both spoke at once, with the kind of simplicity that made you forget every trick they’d ever played with your heart, and love them.

 
          
“God rest her soul,” Father said. “Was it the sweat?” But he knew the answer.

 
          
“Are they burying her straightaway?” asked Dame Alice—the practical question of someone worrying about the spread of disease. “Are there others with her?”

 
          
At a hushed supper, at which we all felt as close as friends, Father offered prayers for deliverance and we echoed his thoughts with amens. There is no safety but God’s will, he said. John and Will had nothing good to tell us about how things were in the city—the streets half deserted, the shops and taverns boarded up, the apothecaries’ market full of desperate people.

 
          
And Father prayed for Elizabeth and William and Cecily and Giles, all still far away in their new homes. “How I want everyone to be safe; I wanted you all to be safe here with us,” he said. “But there’s no point anymore in begging them to come here. All we can do is commend them to God and pray for everyone to be spared. We are helpless before God.

 
          
“You must stay for as long as you want to and need to,” Father added, in a more everyday voice, and his gesture included John, who had sat down next to me, on the other side of Margaret, and was paying equal amounts of quiet attention to listening to Father’s every word and filling my platter and looking at me. Quiet, long looks. And I was looking back at him in the same way, and whenever I passed him dishes of this or that—Dame Alice’s lark pie, I noticed, catching sight of one from what seemed very far away—our hands found themselves brushing against each other.

 
          
“John,” Father went on. “I’m glad you’re here. You’ll be needed. And I’m glad you’ll have Meg to help you.”

 
          
John caught my eye again now and held my gaze for a second longer than necessary. Modestly, blushing at the nakedness of his look, I lowered my face.

 
          
We walked in the garden after supper. It was hot, and there was no
     
wind. The night sky was dizzy with stars and the air was full of the sticky scent of the first roses and we could hear the rush of the river in front. It was drunkenly, impossibly beautiful. Behind us, though, we knew there’d be the distant fires of the village if we turned to look. And, invisible now, the small grave of the small girl; and the weeping of the mother; and the terror of the young boy; and the hostility of the others in the barn, with the cloud of disease on them.

 
          
None of it stopped the fire inside me: the slow melting, the agonizingly private memories of pain all muddled up with the possibilities of pleasure, the way I felt the strong arm around my waist with every inch of my being.

 
          
“We shouldn’t be out here so late,” I said, trying to sound firm.

 
          
He sighed. I couldn’t see his face, so high above mine, so close—just the angle of a firm chin, just the tightening of his fingers against my waist and the instinctive knowledge that he was as near as I was to nudging my mouth against his and losing himself in a kiss under the swimming stars.

 
          
“You’re right,” he said. “We need to be back there early in the morning. We should get some sleep.”

 
          
He stepped back. I shivered. But I had only a fraction of a second in which to feel that sadness of his body leaving mine before he’d taken me back into his arms, unresisting, with the quietest of laughs, that even wrapped up inside his embrace I could only guess at having heard.

 
          
“Well, in a minute, maybe,” he whispered, and I could just see the way one side of his mouth was curling up in half a smile. “I can’t leave just yet.” And he bent his head another inch toward me and covered my lips with his as my hands crept unbidden into his hair and pulled his head closer still.

 
          
The gravediggers were at work again on the edge of the churchyard. Four of them, two in the pit, three or four feet down, with piles of fresh earth thrown up by its sides. They were sweating already from the rhythm of their work, although the air was still fresh, and they had kerchiefs knotted on their heads against the morning sun. The hole they were digging was bigger this time.

 
          
John stopped by them, a question on his face.

 
          
Their leader shook his head. “Just in case,” he said, and crossed himself.

 
          
We walked faster.

 
          
The barn was empty. Boys were dragging logs down to the other end of the five-acre field, where the fire and the cauldron had been moved.

 
          
The hungry were sitting down there, in the shade of the hedgerow. Even from the barn we could hear their buzzing, as angry as swarming bees.

 
          
Outside the barn, by the stinking trench with its buzzing insects, the only people left were the mother from Deptford and her boy. He must have brought more water up from the stream by himself. Two leather buckets nearly as big as he was caught the sun in flashes. He was as pale as ever, standing helplessly to one side with his thin little arms trembling in the light. He looked as though he might have been standing there all night. But she was red-eyed and wild-haired, with horror on her face, squatting on the ground underneath her blanket roof, wrapping herself in scraps of blankets, then pulling them off, half mad with grief and fear. She saw us and her eyes lit up as she flung herself toward us. “You got to help my boy,” she implored. “Those bloody bastards won’t let him near. They gone down there. They took his bowl off him. How’s he going to eat?”

 
          
“Calm down,” John said, and he lay her down under the biggest blanket and began to wipe at her with one of my cloths. It wasn’t just grief and fear that were driving her mad. The sweat was beginning to come. “We’ll see to it.”

 
          
I left him, and the boy, and the woman. I walked down to the cauldron, with its greasy bubble of vegetables and a pigeon carcass bobbing around on top. I was aware of my feet treading heavily on nettle and burdock and cow parsley and buttercup. I was aware of the hiss of hostile looks. Roger the miller stepped forward from behind the cauldron when I reached the little knot of people.

 
          
“Give me a bowl of soup, Roger,” I said evenly.

 
          
“Send ’em away, miss,” he answered, showing his last two black teeth. “They’ve brought death with them. We want them out of here.”

 
          
“The soup,” I said. “Now.”

 
          
He shook his head. His big meaty hands were playing a strangling game with the rope knotted round his waist.

 
          
“She’s sick already,” I said. “She’s in no state to be moved.”

 
          
He crossed himself. But he shook his head again.

 
          
I stepped forward and took the bowl I’d seen on the ground by him. “Don’t question the will of God,” I said angrily. He looked unsettled.

 
          
I filled the bowl from the cauldron myself. He didn’t stop me. “I’ll take the boy with me when I leave,” I added, and turned my back on him. I didn’t think the mother would live.

 
          
The boy never ate the soup. His mother was already in the throes of the sweat by the time I got back. I put the bowl down on the ground. John was cutting her shift away. I nearly said, Don’t bleed her, but I stopped myself: what was my basic schooling in herbal remedies, after all, compared with his years of study and his confidence with his patients? She didn’t complain. Didn’t cry out. Didn’t shy away from the blade that was taking the black blood out of her. Fainted, as she was supposed to. But she didn’t come round either. Mary from Deptford was dead within half an hour of our arrival. The boy went on standing there, not moving, looking down in bewilderment at the brown-stained blankets as John and I got up with the stink of finality on us. He only came up to my waist.

 
          
I left John to arrange for the woman to be buried. It wouldn’t take long, since they’d already dug the grave before she got sick. They’d be glad to tip her in and cover her up. They’d feel safer now she was gone.

 
          
I didn’t discuss what would come next with John either. I just took the boy’s hand and began to lead him back up the lane. I didn’t know what to do with him. I couldn’t bring him to the house. I couldn’t turn him loose.

 
          
Scarcely aware myself of where I was going, I found myself standing by the river with the unresisting child, then opening the door of the western gatehouse. The irons had gone, but there was still a scrap of blanket on the floor.

 
          
“You can lie down on that,” I said, hearing my voice sound more rough than kind. He stood, staring. “You’ll be safe here,” I added, rummaging in my bag. There wasn’t much in it: the clean rags I’d brought out for today, the bottle of willow-bark infusion I always carried, and a piece of bread.

 
          
“I’m going to get you some water,” I said. “There’s bread for you here. And I’m going to give you some medicine.”

 
          
I fetched in the gardener’s pail of water, sweating myself from the heat.

 
          
The child’s stare was unnerving. “Sit down,” I said. “Drink this.” And I held out the bottle. He didn’t want to take it at first, but I put his hands on it and guided it to his mouth. And he drank it down. “Now lie down,” I said. “Cover yourself with this blanket, and keep as still as you can. I’ll come back this evening.”

 
          
He was still staring blankly as I pushed the door shut. Outside, I arranged the chain over the door so it looked locked. And I strode off—not wanting to berate myself for not knowing enough to save the sick, but full of an angry vigor that I put down to pity—back toward the house.

           
I couldn’t eat. But I went in for the midday meal anyway. It was time. It was a kind of relief to do what was expected of you in civilized society—an antidote against the void that had opened up beneath my feet during the day. Margaret saw me first. “Where’s John?” she asked. I shook my head, beyond words. She understood without needing to be told that something bad had happened; she put an arm around my shoulders.

 
          
“Meg,” she said gently. “You’re doing so much good, but you look exhausted. Please take care of yourself.”

 
          
I nodded.

 
          
“Master Hans is here,” she added, trying to cheer me up. “Looking
     
very prosperous, with a full set of new clothes. And he’s got a bit fat.”

 
          
I nodded again. I couldn’t find space to think about Master Hans’s climb up the greasy pole now; there was too much else on my mind. I needed to wash and change. I needed to boil up more willow-bark tea. I needed to make sure there were more clean cloths. I needed to know whether John had noticed any fresh signs of sickness (or rebellion) in the crowd at the barn.

 
          
But when the painter bounded up, full of gingery-blond cheer, and chortled “Mistress Meg!” at me, I was charmed despite myself. He’d just sat down and had already speared a vast amount of beef and deposited it on his platter. He forgot it when he saw me, and stood, almost dancing up and down on his broad legs, with stories bursting out of him about Norfolk, where he’d been painting all the local gentry (which, I knew, meant he’d made friends with the Boleyn set’s relatives while he was at court, but I didn’t want to ask too much about that; it was his business).