Restoration (40 page)

I was tempted to say that, being a physician, I was quite familiar with the smell of corpses, but then I was glad that I had not made this reply, for our fellow travellers began to reveal to us the hatred that was felt for everyone in the world of medicine – from the surgeon to the apothecary – for their inability to find any means of prevention or any cure. "Doctors," announced a loud-voiced woman seated opposite me, "are become the people most despised in England." And she sucked on her teeth, loving the taste of the venom in her mouth.

We came at dusk into Cheapside, where Katharine's mother lived. We got out of the coach and the two sacks containing my worldly goods were handed down to me.

I stood still and took my first breath of the city. The scent of the air did not seem to have been altered by the presence of the plague. What I did notice at once, however, was a strange quietness in the street and beyond it, which was like the quietness of snow. It was as if the city had fallen into a trance, or else become a place that I was not really standing in, but only saw and heard from a long way off. I looked all around me. I could see a group of children running after the coach. I could see two women standing on a doorstep, one holding a baby. A cart, loaded with barrels, passed and I could hear the hooves of the cart-horse, but very quickly this sound and the sound of the children shouting faded and died and there was silence. I bent down to pick up one of the flour sacks. As I did so, I saw Katharine lift her skirts and squat down to piss into the gutter. "When you begin to carry a child," she said, "you do your business wherever you can and you cannot wait." At that moment, her mother came out of the house. She put her hands to her mouth and stared at the daughter she had given to the Keepers of Whittlesea, then crossed herself, as if in fear. Katharine, red in the face from the exertion of emptying her bladder, looked up at her mother and began to laugh. And I do not think I have ever witnessed – between two people long parted from each other – a more awkward meeting.

The mother is a tall, fleshy widow of forty or forty-five. She likes to be called by her two Christian names, Frances Elizabeth, as if they were joined together to make one name. She makes a living by writing letters for those who cannot read or write, but I have seen her writing and it is an ugly hand and her spelling is poor. A little sign by her front door reads:
Frances Elizabeth Wythens. Letters Written. One penny per line.
She learned to write, not from any school or teacher, but from her dead husband, who was a clerk in the Office of Patents. "He was," says Frances Elizabeth to me on our first night in her house, "a most conscientious scribe."

The house is narrow and dark and over-heated by the fires she keeps burning, one upstairs and one down, as a prevention against the pestilence, which has already visited two families in Cheapside. The place smells of smoke and of old varnish and camphor, and the windows are narrow and grimy. The room we have been given reminds me a little of the room I had long ago at Ludgate, which is only a short walk from here. In my bed there I knew oblivion of the very sweetest kind, but in this one I cannot seem to come to any unconsciousness or any forgetting. I lie awake and listen to the silence that has fallen upon London. It is Katharine who sleeps. Her tangled hair falls onto my shoulder and her arm is laid across my breast.

Not long after our arrival in London, while on an errand to buy ink for Frances Elizabeth, I met a group of men attired in rags and scourging themselves with cruel little whips, like the Flagellants of the Black Death in 1348. We were in Change Street and I presumed they were going up to St Paul 's church to pray for an end to the pestilence. And so, finding myself very curious to know what solace this hurting of their flesh afforded them, I followed them.

I noticed that whatever people we met coming in the opposite direction looked on these Flagellants with great fear, as if they themselves could be the source of the plague germ, and they crossed the street so that they would not come near them. And I thought how a great fear of one particular thing may often create in people the
habit of fear
, so that everything which is not familiar and comfortable to them makes them afraid. And this thought was followed by the realisation that, because I no longer hold my life to be a lovely and precious thing, I am no longer afraid of anything at all, not even of death. And I smiled to myself for, unannounced, the King walked into my mind. And he looked at this new fearlessness of mine and sniffed and said: "Good." And then, as is his way, he turned and walked away, not deigning to comment any further.

We were nearing St Paul 's. I did not know how long the praying of these Flagellant people might last once they went inside the church, and so, mindful of my errand of the ink, I decided to approach them straight away and ask them to spare me a few minutes before they began their prayers.

Coming up to the group from behind, I noticed how, on the shoulders of two of them, there was a rash of small wounds, as if the skin had been pricked and burst, and that some of these were infected and running with pus. And so I began my conversation with them by saying (quite loudly, so that they would hear me over their wailing): "Let me tell you good people that I am a physician and if ever the pain of your wounds becomes greater than you intend… I could give you a balm for it, to make it less…"

They turned and all stared at me and I saw that their faces were smeared with a white paste they had put on to make themselves resemble skeletons. I understood then that it was their intention to frighten people away and, indeed, they appeared somewhat affronted that I had had the temerity to approach them.

"Our pain," said one of them curtly, "is never greater than we intend, nor is it less, and as for you, the physicians, why do you not punish yourselves?"

I replied that, in my own case, fate had punished me so well that I felt relieved of all necessity to do so and I laughed at my own flippancy, hoping perhaps to elicit some answering smile from the Flagellants, but getting none. So I moved quickly to my question. "Look about you," one of them said in answer, "and you will see, not London, not a city with which you were once familiar; you will see a place come to chaos. The man who must live within chaos will go mad very soon. But we shall not. For we do not see it nor hear it nor smell it. All that we feel, all that we know is our own pain."

I thanked them and left them to go on their way. I walked very slowly towards Cloak Lane, where I hoped to purchase the ink for Frances Elizabeth, provided my ink-man had not died of the plague while I had been away. As I walked, I pondered the words and actions of the Flagellants and asked myself how best I should live in this "place come to chaos" in order to keep such sanity as remained to me. And I decided not to turn my face.away from the sufferings of the city but to try to measure them and define them. I would walk about. I would try to paint a picture of the plague (no, not on canvas!), a picture in my mind of where it was and how it traveled and all the things men and women had devised to make it leave them. And so I formulated a kind of plan with which to confront the slowness and sadness of time. And this making of a plan cheered me.

As Katharine grew heavier with her child, she became very heavy with sleep. And the mother, too, as if in sympathy with her daughter, would nod and doze over her letters in the room kept hot by the fire, and so I would creep out of the house, leaving the two of them to their dreaming, Katharine's white arm trailing down towards the floor, the mother's head fallen onto the table.

They did not ask or seem to care where I was going. They knew I would return, for Katharine had made me swear upon the green slippers never to practise or perfect any Leaving Step. And so I embarked on my "picture" of London, going sometimes north from Cheapside, but most often south towards the river and my old haunts, knowing that in these places every change would be visible to me and all of what I saw I would understand.

I did not visit Rosie. In her very street were two houses marked with the words "God Have Mercy On Us" and nesting near to the water at Southwark I saw a great quantity of rats. Yet you could not say that Rosie Pierpoint was in greater danger of the plague than any in Lambeth or Spitalfields or Shoreditch, because the disease did not seem to follow a traceable path along the ground, but rather to come out of the air, like seeds carried on the wind and falling here and there at random.

There was some noise, still, upon the river, but less than there once was, many of the fops and gallants and their women having fled into the countryside taking all their shrieking with them. I was told that some of the bargemen were starving, for lack of trade, and so made it my habit to have myself rowed some way on the water every afternoon. And for this act of charity, I was rewarded with the gossip of the river and heard how, to add to the melancholy of London, hundreds of poor seamen, sent away from their ships unpaid, had come in to the capital to beg money from the Navy office, and how these, because they had no shelter and no fire, were easy victims of the pestilence "but have no place to die in, Sir, but the street and so do make some disgusting deaths in the gutter."

"Why are they not paid?" I asked the bargemen and all of them gave me the same answer, which was that there was no money, the King "being very wasteful of what the Parliament gives him, as if he believes he has only to feed them false promises and they will shit gold on and on." And so I thought of what the King had said about his "honey-moon" being over. I had not believed him, but I saw now that he was right: he was loved less than before. Except by me.

It was only after several weeks of my wanderings about London that something of great importance became clear to me: I was not merely trying to understand the calamity of the city, I was trying to find for myself some role within it. So I began to ask the bargemen and the vendors of eel pies and the ink-man in Cloak Lane and everybody who would talk to me, "What can I, a trained physician, best do at this time?" But I got no satisfactory answers. Some people spat at me, as if the word "physician" had rendered me utterly repellent to them. Others advised me to go home and close my door and burn cleansing herbs over my fire and wait for time to pass. Others again began taking off their clothes and exhorting me to examine their bodies for spots and swellings. No one told me how I could become useful. And I think I would have continued aimlessly walking, noting, talking and watching if I had not one night woken up beside Katharine and heard in the room and in my mind a silence so profound that it is beyond words to describe because I cannot liken it to anything on the earth. I lay in it and looked at the dark and waited to understand what it was. And after a few minutes (minutes I could not
hear
passing but only sensed them pass) I knew that what had returned to me was the Silence of Pearce.

It is a thing that I find very difficult to endure, so lonely does it make me feel. I could not continue to lie motionless within it, so I rose and went down to the parlour and sat by the embers of the fire and waited for morning. But it was winter by this time, and I knew that this wait would be long, so to occupy the time I went upstairs again and fetched from under the bed (where I kept my few books and letters in one of the Whittlesea floursacks) the copy of William Harvey's
De Generatione Animalium
that had been given to me on my day of departure by Ambrose. It was Pearce's copy. It had been read so many times by him that the pages had become as thin and fragile as the petals of flowers, so frail in fact that one hardly dared to turn them. The black leather in which the book was bound was stained and torn, but it had been held for so long against Pearce's heart that it smelled faintly of him and, on putting it into my hands, Ambrose had said, "This was a part of John and is a replacement for the ladle."

I laid the book on my knee and opened it, turning the pages carefully, one by one. Certain of Harvey 's Latin sentences had been underlined by Pearce and on almost every page there were annotations in Pearce's minuscule writing. In the heart of the book, seemingly put there long ago and forgotten, I discovered two pressed primroses and laid into the pages with them was a piece of waxed paper upon which the Greek word meaning "prophylactic" had been written. Beneath this was a list – in English as far as I could decipher it – of ingredients, followed by short instructions as to how they should be mixed.

I took up this paper and brought it nearer to the light and I was able to see that underneath the list and the instructions Pearce had penned several of the ornate question marks with which all his medical books are peppered, the symbol having an absolutely precise meaning to him, denoting always "Absence of Proof". I was about to lay the thing back in the book, when I noted that one of the ingredients Pearce had written down was buttercup-root and my memory told me that, although this fleshy bulb is seldom used these days in any medical preparation, it is and always has been included in every preventative men have ever devised against the plague germ,
Pastuerella Pestis
. And so I concluded – rightly, as I was about to see – that what I held in my hands was Pearce's own prophylactic against the pestilence.

That Pearce should have written the thing on waxed paper was perverse of him, for ink cannot properly adhere to it and so the writing will soon enough become invisible. Luckily, he had employed a very sharp quill (he was always extremely fussy about his pens and liked them to be thin) and so, when I held the paper
in front
of the light, the words were magically illuminated, having been scratched into the wax.

And so my little role in London 's great tragedy was revealed to me: I would become a pedlar of Pearce's prophylactic. I would merchandise hope.

The money remaining to me at the time of my arrival with Katharine in London was almost gone. We ate food bought by Frances Elizabeth and kept ourselves warm with coal paid for by her. In return, I helped her with her letters, correcting her spelling mistakes and teaching her some elegant phrasing. She seemed content with this arrangement, but I was not. The notion that all that stood between me and destitution were letters of complaint and supplication (written for poor people who could not truly afford the price of the words) made me uneasy and afraid. And so I vowed to myself I would make a living by selling Pearce's remedy even if, to do so, I would have to have as my customers the relatives of the dead or dying and so find myself entering those houses marked with red crosses and with the words "God Have Mercy."