A Plague on Mr Pepys, page 10
‘You look smart, cousin,’ she said.
He was wearing what looked like a clerk’s suit, and under his hat, a dark wig tied up in a sash. He examined her with an assessing eye. ‘I didn’t come for Will’s sake. I’m here on my own business. That’s the Lily Allen over there. He’s gone then?’
She swallowed. The words made his departure seem real. ‘Yes, not a quarter hour ago. I take it I’ll be minding the boys tomorrow, like you said?’
‘They’re with Mrs Minty. My man Fletcher will drop them off in the morning, about seven bells.’ He gestured to the pot-bellied youth behind who was loading crates into a tender. Bess glanced over; Fletcher was ill-shaven with ears too big for his head and an insolent manner about him.
‘Pack them some playthings to keep them occupied, won’t you? I’ve still got my piece work to do.’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘I’ll see to it.’
‘Is this your snuff?’ Bess pointed.
‘No. Exports.’ He moved to stand in front of them. Something about this suggested he was hiding something. Fletcher grasped the top crate, and balanced it on his heavy stomach. As he lumbered towards the boat she heard the chink of bottles.
‘What’s in the crates?’ she asked. ‘Wine?’
‘Yes, wine,’ Jack said.
‘Well I hope it’s making a good profit. It’s our money you’ve got in those crates!’ She laughed lightly.
‘Ah, the beautiful Bess. Always greedy for more.’ She bridled. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Just a figure of speech. Your money’s safe with me.’
A boy ran up and skidded to a stop before them; a boy Bess had noticed earlier, a weasel-faced beggar loitering under the sconces by the tavern. She’d feared him to be a pick-pocket and given him a wide berth.
‘Mr Sutherland!’ he said, panting for breath. ‘The customs men. They’re coming this way.’
Jack turned to shout orders to Fletcher. ‘Get everything on board. Quick as you can. Fetch the others.’ To Bess, he said, ‘You’ve held me up. We need to catch this tide.’ He called to Fletcher, ‘Don’t cast off without me, I‘ve papers for the Master. You can row me back afterwards.’
She was forced to stand back as another four men elbowed in front of her to load Jack’s cargo aboard. Something about Jack’s furtive disappearance when the customs men were coming triggered a warning in her mind.
All at once, the quay emptied. Behind her, the post-boy called for final passengers for the carriage to the city, and Lucy was frantically gesturing at her from the door. She ran to catch it and climbed in. As the coach rattled away from the quay, iron wheels ringing on the cobblestones, she turned to look back through the window. She could see nothing but the black spires of ships yet to sail, and a moon floating above like a hole cut in the sky.
At Thames Street they climbed out of the carriage and headed for the ferry home. Home. The word seemed odd now Will had gone. There was no ferry yet, so they had to wait.
Across the glimmer of the river, her eyes were pulled towards Ratcliff, to the smudge of houses where she’d first met Will, when he’d just been a jobbing joiner in a small boatyard. A twitch of nostalgia for the coarse friendliness of life on the other side of the river made her shift from foot to foot. She remembered pushing her mother away, and the hollow of guilt swelled. She doubled over, clutching her ribs to relieve the emptiness. Lucy stared at her, as if she’d lost her mind.
When the boat came, she sat with her back to her past.
She could not bear to turn and look.
~ PART TWO ~
I can get no remedy against this consumption of the purse:
borrowing only lingers and lingers it out, but the disease is incurable.
Shakespeare - Henry IV Part II
Chapter 15
Six months later - February 1664
Agatha Prescott leaned over the body of Alfred Hastings, tailor – a young man, white-skinned and fair, with a powdering of freckles. He was too long for the table and his feet poked off the end, pale as milk, and still soft. Too young, Agatha thought, as she rolled him quickly over to wash his back with vinegar infused with lavender water.
‘There, my love,’ she said, her breath white in the cold air, ‘that’ll keep the flies away and make you smell sweet.’ She saw nothing odd in talking to corpses. After all, who knew how long they could hear for, once they’d passed over?
Agatha drew the bundle of dried herbs from her basket and crumpled them in her fist until the tang of thyme filled the room. Since being widowed, as well as layer-out, she’d taken on the position of searcher of the parish, one of the women who examined the dead for the cause of their death.
She coughed. The chamber reeked of smoke, for she’d made Hastings’s woman douse the fire. Chill was best, as far as corpses were concerned. Still, it was a mystery why this one’d gone. A newly-wed couple, and him just dropping over by his cutting table, with half a pair of breeches still to stitch.
She ran her eyes over him; felt his chest again, his long limbs. Smooth as marble, but with the cold, gooseflesh feel of the dead. She gave him a slap with her palm, the way she slapped bread-dough. ‘What do you think you’re up to, eh?’
It was a death with no obvious cause. She liked to be certain what she was telling the authorities. It was an important responsibility, reporting for the Bills of Mortality.
She stood back to scrutinise him. He didn’t need to be cut and padded with herbs, like the rich ones did. Just his mouth and nose closed with thyme to stop them sinking, so he still looked decent when his poor distraught wife came back to look. Agatha liked to make them look peaceful, even handsome, if she could. It was her duty to do so. This one had been a looker, she could tell. He’d be buried that night, before the flesh could rot.
She pushed the herbs into the man’s mouth and clamped the jaw shut, tying around the head with a muslin bandage to keep it there until the stiffness set it firm. With effort, the veins standing proud on her sinewy arms, she pulled the tailor straight on the table.
Praise God, I’ve still my strength, she thought.
She gazed down on him. Must be the same age as her Bess’s husband, William. Agatha pondered Bess and Will. Bess had married for love, and at first Agatha couldn’t help wishing Will was richer. But the thought of them growing richer gave her a desperate feeling. She missed Bess, and the thought that she would no longer see her daughter hurt.
Now they’d moved away to Deptford and plain woodwork wasn’t good enough for him. Oh no. Will wanted to be an artist in wood, Bess said.
An artist. Pff. Agatha blew out her disgust through down-turned lips, and tore at the herbs with a venom, then pushed a plug of it into each of the man’s nostrils and sealed them up with beeswax warmed over the candle.
Heaving the man’s shoulders off the table, she dressed the tailor in his half-shirt, and breeches cut open for the purpose, and put the boots back on his feet.
‘That’s better, now. You look like a proper gent.’
Funny how a man didn’t look dressed until he had his boots back on. Then she combed the corpse’s hair.
‘You’re a mystery, you are,’ she said to him. ‘Don’t know why you wanted to up and die, and leave your poor wife grieving so. Night, night.’ Her breath stood in the air like a ghost. Was this what a ghost was, the last of a man’s air? She tutted at herself for such ungodly thoughts, and covered him over with the cerecloth, so he would be fit for visiting.
‘Stopping of the stomach,’ that’s what she’d tell them. His insides felt hard, and though that could merely be the rigor setting in, it was all she had to go on. There were always unexplained deaths – it was part of the mystery of God – the giving and the taking away.
Her mind drifted back to Bess. Life was short, she knew that now. And it could be lopped off at any time. Like this poor tailor. One minute cutting out breeches, the next, cold and gone. It was more than a month since she’d last tried to call on her daughter. The door was always locked. She’d even had to leave her New Year gift – a plum pie – on the doorstep.
Perhaps it had pricked Bessie’s conscience. The thought of her daughter filled her with longing. She’d left it a few months, but she’d not give up. Maybe she could catch her unawares. After all, blood was blood.
*
The next day, Bess placed a sprig of winter greenery in the best glass vase, and laid the table prettily with a linen cloth and her best cups and pewter plates. This week Mrs Fenwick’s ladies were meeting at Bess’s house, and Lucy had been scrubbing and polishing for days to get it ready until the windows gleamed, and the whole place smelled of beeswax and lavender.
She’d persuaded Lucy to take the boys out, but as luck would have it, on the day, the sky split and delivered a downpour that bounced knee-high off the road. Lucy was reduced to hustling them downstairs to the workshop to get them pinning gloves for Hutchinson’s. Their high-pitched protests were still audible as the ladies bustled in, exclaiming about the wet and shaking off their hats and cloaks.
Once Lucy had hung everything, and after a few complaints from Mrs Gordon about how inconvenient it was to meet in an upstairs room because it affected her bad hip, they were finally all seated around Bess’s table, and Lucy disappeared below. Despite their work, Bess was conscious of the lack of feather cushions on the chairs, the cheap tallow dips instead of proper wax candles, and the fact that her cups were thick, practical earthenware and not the new ‘china’. The fire blazed cheerfully though, and the air began to reek of steam and wool.
‘What an interesting view,’ Mrs Gordon said, rubbing a finger on the glass and peering out of the window. It seemed to dismiss the rest of the house as being totally unworthy of comment.
She returned to the table and set down her collecting box with a thud. Mrs Fenwick weighed the older woman’s collecting box in her hands, ‘Well done, Mrs Gordon.’
‘It’s mostly silver,’ Mrs Gordon said, flapping her hand dismissively. ‘I went around the Exchange this month, to appeal to my husband’s businesses there.’
Mr Gordon was a mercer, selling imported cloth in the fashionable part of the Exchange, and he owned two shops – both of which were so expensive that Bess couldn’t even afford a set of hair-ribbons from his counter.
Bess undid the brass catch and slid open the top of her box. She knew her box was only quarter-full again. Folk in Deptford were not so well off that they could spare much, and as well as dipping into it herself, she’d found herself too busy to go knocking on doors further afield. Last time they’d met, just after Christmas, she’d pressed a half-sovereign’s worth of coins into Mrs Gordon’s hand. The money had come straight out of the collection box, so it had depleted her takings still more.
‘What I owe you,’ she’d said.
Mrs Gordon had frowned at the odd collection of change, then ostentatiously dropped it into her box.
Today, Bess was even more reluctant to pour the contents of her box onto the table for Mrs Fenwick’s inspection.
Oh no. Practically all leather tokens, except for one solitary silver thru’penny piece which looked paltry beside the other women’s heaps of glinting coin. And she knew where that one had come from – from Hertford where she’d called earlier in the week.
‘I’ve been rather busy,’ she said, as an apology. ‘I’ve been helping out a friend at the glover’s, whilst Will’s away.’ She tried to make it sound like a diversion rather than a necessity. She wished Will had not taken on another three-month stint at sea.
‘You need to hire another girl, then,’ Mrs Gordon said. ‘I can recommend my girl’s sister. She’s looking for a post.’
‘I’ll ask Will,’ Bess said, knowing they couldn’t afford another girl, and she’d do no such thing.
Below them, the noise of the boys quarrelling.
‘I did not!’ Hal’s voice.
‘You did. He did, didn’t he Billy?’
‘Ow!’ A wail like a dog in pain.
‘Excuse me a moment,’ Bess said. ‘I’ll fetch refreshment.’
She shot downstairs and poked her head round the door. ‘Auntie Bess,’ whined Billy, face red and tearful, ‘Toby stuck me with a pin!’
‘Did not,’ Toby said.
‘Just keep quiet, the both of you,’ she hissed. ‘Or there’ll be no dinner. Lucy, just get them out of here.’
‘But it’s raining—’
‘I don’t care. Just for an hour. Those are my orders, Lucy.’
Back up the stairs, shielding her hair from the wet with an arm across her head. In the parlour, Mrs Fenwick tallied the coins, heaping them into neat piles.
The noise of the door below, and silence. Breathing a sigh of relief, Bess went to bring refreshment. By the time she’d returned, Mrs Fenwick had brought out a damp parcel, cut the string with the scissors from her reticule, and unwrapped a bolt of white cotton.
‘I thought we could make cover-alls,’ Mrs Fenwick said. ‘I have a pattern book with the sweetest pin-tucks around the bodice.’
‘Who are these for?’ Bess asked, fingering the clean, white fabric.
‘Why, for the children of course.’
‘You mean, the children in the school?’ She had a momentary vision of Billy and Hal glowering at each other.
‘Of course. Our children. The ones we will be educating.’
‘Are they going to get dirty?’
Mrs Fenwick gave a tinkling laugh and looked to the other ladies, who simpered back. ‘No. It’s not to keep the dirt from them, but to prevent it rubbing off on us! It will cover up their dirty clothes, and keep them clean. And I’m determined to endow them with a sense of pride.’
It was then Bess realised. They would be treating the children like playthings; like dolls to be dressed up, not real children like Jack’s. Not ones with hungry bellies and cold hands. How would these women cope with the infections; with the lice-infested hair? They had no idea what life was like for those children. No idea at all. But she held these thoughts back.
‘How much did it cost, the material?’ she asked.
Mrs Fenwick smiled. ‘Mrs Gordon arranged for her husband to allow us a special price, seeing as we were buying so much. Only six pence a yard.’
Bess stared at the fabric. It was just an ordinary cotton, like you could buy on any cheap market stall. Six pence a yard. She could barely believe it. There must be yards and yards of it. That many sixpences would feed a family for a month! Not only were they making useless aprons, but they were giving the business straight back to Gordon’s. Hard-earned pennies were going to this … to this game. For that was what it was – a game designed to keep these idle ladies busy.
‘I really think we should concentrate on necessities first,’ Bess said, ‘like perhaps giving the children a slice of bread each morning.’
‘Bread? Oh no, we’re not feeding them. We’d be inundated with all sorts of undesirables,’ Mrs Fenwick said.
‘And we don’t want to be a workhouse,’ Mrs Gordon agreed. ‘The cover-alls will send the right message. Clean bodies, clean minds.’
‘We shall teach Latin and Greek, and Bible studies,’ Mrs Fenwick said.
‘But we’ll need pencils first,’ Bess said, ‘and nibs, and ink and paper.’
‘Well, we’ll all have to make a little more effort with our collecting then,’ Mrs Gordon said, looking pointedly at Bess.
She was about to retort when there was a sharp knock at the door. Her first thought was that Lucy was back, with the boys. Bess rose and drew open the door a crack, but the wind whipped it open. A splatter of rain whooshed into the room, along with a dark billow of cloak and a smell of wet fabric and something sharper; more medicinal.
Bess’s mother pulled the bedraggled hat off her head and shook it, sending drips over the polished wooden floor. ‘It’s pissing cats out there,’ she said.
The words fell into the silence like stones.
Bess hurried over. ‘Can’t it wait?’ she whispered in her mother’s ear. ‘I’m busy right now.’
Her mother ignored her. ‘What a day!’ She thrust her wet cloak, reeking of what smelt like camphor, into Bess’s arms, then rubbed her damp hands together as she headed for the seat where, until a few moments ago, Bess had been sitting. Bess hastily moved the white cotton onto the sideboard out of her mother’s reach. Agatha settled herself down into the chair and leant her elbows onto the table. The fabric of her woollen sleeves was worn threadbare, and the sight of it made Bess shrink with embarrassment.
‘I came to tell Bessie there’ll be war with the Dutch, sure and certain. The broadsheets are full of it. The Dutch whipped our men shamefully in the East Indies. Then they hung the St George flag beneath their own, and made a solemn oath they’ll be masters of all the world.’
The other ladies leant away from the table, but stared in fascination. It was no wonder. Her mother’s face was lined and creased, and her hair hung limp and grey from its straggling bun. It was as if poverty itself had walked into the room. Beside her, the other women were plump and shiny, in their taffeta and velvet, their silks and furs.
‘“Sovereign of all the South Seas” they’re calling themselves.’ Her mother wouldn’t meet her eye. Damn her. She knew Bess couldn’t ask her to leave without appearing rude before the other ladies.
‘Is your husband in the Navy too?’ Mrs Gordon asked, with a sidelong glance at Mrs Fenwick.
‘No. I’m widowed. But I like to keep myself informed, and I like to look in on Bessie, see how she’s doing.’
‘This is my mother, Mrs Prescott,’ Bess said, finally, in as neutral a voice as she could muster.
‘Mrs Fenwick,’ Bess’s neighbour replied. The others mumbled their names too.
‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, I’m sure. What are you collecting for?’ Agatha asked, tapping a fingernail on the nearest box. ‘Mission, is it?’
‘The Christian Educational Fund,’ Bess said. ‘But we were just finishing, weren’t we, ladies?’
‘But we haven’t yet discussed—’ Mrs Fenwick began, but Agatha immediately interrupted.
