Time Squared, page 24
A tug on her arm. Startled, Eleanor found a beggar woman at her elbow.
“Please, good young lady. My children are starving. For my children, young lady.”
“Away with you,” said an old voice behind her.
A look of panic on her face, the beggarwoman scrambled off.
Eleanor turned to find the Scotswoman watching her, the Widow McBee: tiny, tattered, her hands wrapped in rags. She was far from terrifying, but Eleanor’s father had got her appointed as a searcher of the dead, one of two old women in the parish whose job it was to inspect bodies and name the cause of their dying. Not even a beggar wanted to breathe the same air as a searcher. Her father said the power of naming was too potent. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
“Sacrilege, that,” he’d said. “I’d ask you not to repeat it if there was anyone left who might understand.”
“You shouldna be out,” the widow told her.
“I wanted to see,” Eleanor said.
“Well, you’ve seen, and now you’ll be off home.”
The bundle of rags took her elbow, but Eleanor snatched it back.
“I can go on my own, widow,” she said, although she was conscious at each step that the tiny tattered Scotswoman was following her to her uncle’s house and making sure she went inside.
* * *
They were lucky: their household was healthy. Her father looked tired and pale when his cheeks had always been a bright cheerful red. But despite his exhaustion he showed no more sign of plague than the rest of them, as the city died. Bells tolled endlessly, mournfully, each set in doleful harmony with the others. When the bells of one church went silent, it meant no end to the dying but was a sign that the ringer had died, or the sexton, or the priest—maybe all of them. No one dug graves anymore. Instead, they hacked trenches outside the city walls so the plague carts could tip in their loads and go back for more.
“Nell,” her father said one afternoon. He’d called her to his room, and the river light danced across his walls. “My child, it’s time to go. Tomorrow I have a chance to speak to the Lord Mayor about getting a certificate of health. Then it’s off to Kent.”
“We’re going?” Unspeakable relief.
“You’re going,” her father said.
“No, Father!” There might not have been as much conviction in her voice as there had been the first time. “No, Father,” she repeated more firmly.
He stood, ready to order her, and staggered. Wheezing, her father put a hand on his table to brace himself. Eleanor had never heard that sound but knew it was wrong. She ran around the table and managed to get her arms around his bulk as he went down, able at least to cushion the blow. She knew she was calling for help although the world went as silent as if God had folded it within a cloth. Her father’s lips were moving but no sound came out of them. Eleanor leaned close to try to hear but heard nothing. When she leaned back to look in her father’s face, he was staring over her shoulder with an expression she couldn’t decipher. Then his pupils widened in great surprise and he sat up in her arms before collapsing dead.
Commotion as Cook rushed into her father’s room, followed by her father’s men. The men stopped fearfully but Cook ran up and yanked her father’s garments over his head to find his underarms free of buboes. The guards stood down. Not the plague. And here was her father’s chest as hairless and innocent as a boy’s.
“He worked himself to death,” Cook said. “A saint, he were. A ministering angel.”
Cook elbowed Eleanor out of the way and got the men to lift her father onto his table, papers shoved by rude elbows onto the floor. There was a great deal Eleanor didn’t grasp or later remember, although Cook permitted her to help wash her father, and that she would never forget.
The Widow McBee was there. Eleanor didn’t know when she arrived nor understand why she was arguing with Cook when they seemed to agree. Cook said it was an apoplexy and the Widow McBee said it were, and Cook said she wouldn’t get more nor her groat she was owed for telling Them it weren’t the plague. Because it weren’t, she insisted, and the Widow agreed it weren’t, and said she wouldn’t take more than she were owed, not from his reverence. Nor indeed would the puir good minister go to his own grave, she told the cook, Eleanor crying out in shock but the widow saying the sexton and the gravediggers were dead, all dead. A funny look on Cook’s face when she said that then They didn’t have to know it were Himself gone, just a man from the household. They could all stay safely here, could they not, and the widow agreed once more, turning down the extra groat Cook now offered, a refined expression on her dirty face.
Then Eleanor was standing outside her uncle’s house before dawn. Her back was tight to the damp plaster wall as a creak-crack, creak-crick slowly heaved toward her. Creak, creak, crack. She didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to see it. Wanted it to pass by and knew that it wouldn’t.
The door opened behind her and the men carried her father to the plague cart wrapped in his winding sheet. The Widow McBee was still there, first of all murmuring to the men on the plague cart and then saying to Eleanor, “Come now.”
“We’re to go with them?”
Cook gave her a basket and embraced her for a long time. When Eleanor was free, she found the cart creaking up the street while the Widow McBee tugged her in the opposite direction.
“Come now. We’re for the stairs.”
“Why for the stairs?”
“A Scotsman with a punt there to take us cross the river, ur-en’t there?”
Eleanor didn’t understand. The widow kept tugging at her arm.
“To get you to your uncle in Kent.”
“But I don’t know how to get there.”
“Wull who’s going to take you, isn’t she?”
“But if you know a way out of the city, why didn’t you leave before?”
“Dudn’t have where to go, dud I?” A crow of triumph from the widow: “But won’t they be glad to see me now, and what I bring!”
Eleanor’s legs were saplings with thin roots bursting through her boots. They snaked out of her, wormed out of her to insinuate themselves under the cobbles in search of good soil. They were stealing all the vigour out of her and pulling her into the ground, under the ground like her . . .
“I can’t!”
“Come, little mistress,” the tiny ragged widow said, urging her onward. “Come on now. Come, my sweet. We’ll get you safe. We’ll get you home.”
1589
London
21
“Right now!” her aunt cried. “He’s disgracing the family, raising a cup with godless rogues.”
Eleanor kicked the rushes on the floor, having no intention of obeying her. She was eleven years old and didn’t like being ordered around like this, not anymore.
“I said . . .”
“Now, Clara, don’t be a scold.”
Her uncle spoke mildly as he looked into the hall, making her aunt droop in dismay. Eleanor’s uncle was the arbiter, taller than her father, more muscular, hawk nosed and masterful. Her aunt still looked at him as if they were sweethearts. Lady Anne Mowbray had once called her craven. “He walks this earth like the rest of us, Clara, and not an inch above it.”
“I only mean to say,” Aunt Clara said, “the girl can bring your brother back from the tavern when no one else can.”
He thought about this. “Then you’d better go,” he told Eleanor, and she ran.
It was still light as Eleanor dodged through the streets, wanting to make good use of the last of the sun. She darted first into the Hart, already knowing that he wasn’t there. Afterward she ran breakneck to the Boar’s Head, where she’d dreamed he was drinking, which made it true. The Head was dark when she clattered inside, the room crouched under oak beams and smelling of smoke and hops and roasted mutton, dust motes tumbling through the circles of candlelight.
Eleanor stopped just inside the door, letting her eyes adjust until she could look around the crowded room, waiting for a glimpse. She didn’t really know what glimpse meant, but the word had come to her as words sometimes did. The Boar’s Head was a jolly place, home to a club of players. They were always raucous, and today they were joined by a complement of sailors, rude men who had brought exaggerations home from their war against the Armada, so her father said. She couldn’t see her father, even though she knew he was there, the Head halfway to being his hearth and home—this despite the fact he was a minister of the Protestant religion. (Recently, it was true, without a church).
At the longest table, Eleanor saw her father’s friend Kit Marley standing with his tankard raised. He was reciting something she couldn’t hear above the hubbub, a poem or a ditty, maybe even a speech from the play he’d written, which her father said had made a what-ho-ho on the stage. Marley was enjoying himself, twisting this way and that, toasting his company, who roared back laughter and oaths. Eleanor thought she saw her father behind Marley as he swayed, and in a crouch she dodged among the tables followed by cries of, “What’s that? A rat? A ferret. William, they’ve loosed your ferret upon our liberty,” until she came to her father and looked up at him in his chair and saw the redness of shame on his face.
Eleanor didn’t like to think she’d shamed her father, and told herself it came from Marley saying godless things. Her father clapped her head against his chest and put his hand over her other ear and hoisted her to leave, legs dangling. With a push and a shove, they were in the street, where her father put her down, exhaling a fug of ale. His belch.
Eleanor was proud of herself. It hadn’t taken long, just sunset now, a rare rosy glow reflecting off the cobbles. She took her father’s hand, but they’d taken only a few steps when there was a hubbub ahead. Turning the corner were guisers, mummers in bright motley holding their horned masks under their arms—a deer, a goat, a big-eared horse—their tunics of bright stitched-together rags making them look like walking church windows. Eleanor was interested to see the guisers strolling in casual file, not performing now, not a parade, but on their way to a masque. A sailor without legs scooted among them on a rollered board, making himself into a jester.
“There shouldn’t be a masque,” she told her father. “It’s not yet midsummer.”
“Some nobleman has decided that it is.”
“May we follow them?”
“No, we may not.”
Eleanor prayed her hands up at him.
“It can come out of nowhere,” he said.
Eleanor didn’t know what he meant, and her father, in his cups, couldn’t remember, either. She saw a look of confusion on his face that often preceded him saying, “I must get past this.”
Then the horse mask caught his eye. “A stallion kicked you very badly when you were small.”
She remembered that and nodded. Together they looked at the mask and burst into laughter. Genial now, her father let her follow the mummers. Eleanor forgot she was supposed to bring him home and began dancing behind the horse-head, her feet skittering and hands raised, and when the mummer glanced back and saw her dancing, he joined in and the others followed, and then their small procession was a parade.
61 AD
Londinium
22
The Britons were advancing on the settlement, led by their queen. They said she was as tall and bloodthirsty as a man, hell-bent on driving Rome out of Britain. Eleanor had a memory of seeing Boudica in a forest striding along, beside her silent people dressed in cloaks and broaches, but when she said this, her aunt told her she was mistaken or having one of her dreams. Then she checked herself and asked Eleanor’s father if it was a portent. The girl was rampant with dreams lately, if they were dreams and not visions. An inconvenient time for this, and she wasn’t yet nine years old. But was Eleanor waking into the role of oracle?
It was dawn, their villa frantic as the slaves packed up their household, throwing goods helter-skelter into the wagon, tables piled on top of chests and afterwards the cauldron, still with a rope of garlic hanging out of it. Baskets of her aunt’s five-toed chickens waited cluck, cluck, cluck by the door until they could be put on top. Eleanor would have said the chickens were the portent, and not a good one, although she didn’t know why.
“Eleanora.” Her father knelt in front of her, speaking as seriously as befitted a high priest of Bacchus. “Describe your dream to me. Did you have it last night?”
“I don’t know. Yesterday morning?”
“Not at night. You were awake.”
“It was night, what I saw. They were in a dark forest and at first they were like tree trunks but then they started moving, and she was beside them. Hurry up! I don’t mean she said it. Just that she wanted them to hurry.”
“Were there a lot of them?”
“It was strange. I looked up and there was a comet in the sky. So many comets, and they were bright and loud. I didn’t know comets could be so loud.”
Her father stood up, raising his eyebrows at her aunt. Seeing the look on their faces, her uncle strode over. Her father said something to him quietly.
“We’re leaving anyway,” her uncle replied. As a patrician and a centurion, he would join the governor in his retreat from Londinium, which Suetonius had judged impossible to defend. The legions would regroup further inland. Meanwhile her aunt would take the household to a farm she owned in an obscure corner of the countryside, her aunt being a Briton who had married out. This didn’t make her popular among her countrymen but there was acknowledged wisdom in polishing both sides of a coin. Eleanor had heard the adults say that the neighbours would protect them until it was to their advantage not to. Afterwards, her aunt had a plan, in which she’d rehearsed Eleanor. If the Britons won, they were to say that the mosaic in the atrium was a portrait of Boudica, even though they didn’t know who it was. The last owners had put it in. Probably someone dead.
“Have you decided where you’re going, Father?” Eleanor asked.
He sucked on it a moment. “Better with you.”
“The child has grown uncanny,” her uncle agreed. “If we have to evacuate Britain . . .” He barked out a laugh. “We’ll take her to Delphi in Greece.” The prospect of war made her uncle jolly. No one else was.
When her aunt drove their cart through the gates, they found the town in chaos, everyone fleeing the city in a way that felt mysteriously familiar to Eleanor. The poor and the useless ran back and forth wailing and shrieking, hanging onto wagons, begging to be taken along. No one answered, treating them as if they were already wraiths. Boudica had sacked the colony of Camulodunum on her march out of her own country and her Icenians had massacred thousands. Soon they would arrive here. Gibbeting she liked.
Eleanor exchanged looks with a chicken as they rattled out of the small ramshackle settlement, a young temporary place but with a good port on the river that her uncle found promising. He’d been thinking of staying on, even though her aunt had proved childless. But as he liked to say, her aunt’s hair was the colour of gold, an augur of riches coming his way at the far reaches of empire. Eleanor knew the colour was really the work of their Frankish slave (vinegar and bird shit) but her aunt said not to tell him.
Outside town, they found themselves caught inside a great press of refugees bearing south. Boudica’s army was marching toward Londinium on the northern road, forcing anyone with imperial connections to flee for the coast.
Outside Londinium, they jostled into a rough file, people further back yelling at the ones in front to go faster, one red-haired man trying to bull his chariot to the front and being cursed back. Eleanor hated it, tossed between the rough boards of the wagon and the cauldron with every lurch of the wheels, quickly bruised and often sneezing from the stench of the chickens. She was grateful as the sun rose higher and the wagon train began to thin out, carts pulling away as families turned toward their country properties.
Finally enough of them were gone that her father let her get out and walk alongside the horses, exercising her cramped legs. Eleanor was happy now. The sky was high and the sun was warm and the remaining people were jollier. But the farm was a long day’s journey from town, and by late afternoon, they’d left the main road far enough behind that they found themselves alone.
Eleanor’s father said they were safe, that Boudica wouldn’t look for Romans on a lost road like this. But her aunt replied grimly, “I have more respect for my sex.” When a hawk flew above them, angling and swooping, following their path, she called it an augur and made Eleanor get back in the wagon. Whipping the horses, her aunt urged them up and down a steep hill until the hawk was gone and the horses lathered. Then she ordered Eleanor to get out again and walk as if it was all her fault.
The hawk didn’t worry Eleanor, but the panic in her aunt’s voice did, especially since she knew her aunt was right. Something was about to happen, although she didn’t know what. Jumping down, she ran ahead of the cart up another steep hill, this one thickly wooded at the top. When she reached the crest, she looked down at the cart labouring up and was relieved to see no danger behind it. It was a peaceful scene: a stream and mill on the valley floor, a few small farms in a patchwork on the slopes, the forest growing up to the crest where she stood.
Hoping she was wrong—knowing she wasn’t—Eleanor whirled in a circle to get dizzy, spinning so the world would spin even after she’d stopped. The air felt loud on her cheeks as she turned and turned, a whirlwind gathering around her when . . .
Hoofbeats. A messenger racing up the hill from the other side, riding as fast as a zephyr. Cresting the hill, he cried out to see her and tried to pull up. But his stallion reared and kicked and Eleanor felt a crack to her head. She fell, blinded, her head throbbing, the horse too close. Somehow the messenger stayed in the saddle, calming the stallion, and afterwards he rode in a slow circle to make sure it was only a child, only a girl on the ground. Then he slapped his mount and rode on, galloping down the hill and past the wagon—all of which Eleanor saw because she was floating out of her herself and hovering in the air before finding a tree branch to sit on. Not that she was tired.
