4 A Plague of Angels: A Sir Robert Carey Mystery (22 page)

‘Er…can’t remember, I only read the dedication.’

The woman came downstairs again, her face drawn and miserable. ‘He’s not making any sense, sir, and he particularly said he wasn’t to be disturbed…’ Carey slipped a sixpence into her hand and she shrugged. ‘…but you can go up if you want.’

They went up the narrow winding stairs at the back of the shop and into the room under the roof. It was almost filled by a small bed and a little carved and battered table next to it. Papers covered the elderly rushes on the floor, piled up in drifts and held down with leather bottles, plates, rock-hard lumps of bread and, in one instance, a withered half of a meatpie; there were books on the windowsill and books on the floor under the bed. In a nest of unspeakable blankets sat the barrel-like Robert Greene, wearing a shirt and nightcap he might have wiped his arse with, they were so revolting.

His skin was greyish pale under the purple network of burst veins, his face worked in pain. A full jordan teetered on a pile of books. Next to him on the table were a pile of papers covered in a truly villainous scrawl. With a book on his knees and a piece of paper resting on it, an inkpot teetering by his feet and a pen in his fist, Robert Greene was scribbling with the fixity of a madman.

‘Mr Greene,’ said Carey, marching in and bending over the man on the bed. ‘I want to talk to you about my brother.’

Greene ignored him, breathing hoarsely through his mouth and sweat beading his face, the pen whispering across the page at an astonishing rate.

‘Mr Greene!’ bellowed Carey in his ear. ‘My brother, Edmund. What have you found out?’

‘I’m busy,’ gasped Greene. ‘Piss off.’

Carey sat on the bed and removed the ink bottle. The next time Greene tried to dip his pen, he discovered it gone, looked up and finally focused on Carey.

‘Give it back,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Damn you, I’m dying, I must write my swansong…Oh, Christ.’

Seeing the man retch, Carey got up hastily and backed away. It was the one of the ugliest sights Dodd had ever seen in his life, to watch anyone vomit blood. There were meaty bits in it. When the paroxysms finished Greene was sweating and shaking.

‘Joan,’ he roared. ‘Get these idiots out of my chamber and bring me another pot of ink.’

He doubled up again and grunted at whatever was going on inside him, a high whining noise through his nose with each return of breath.

‘Edmund Carey,’ shouted the Courtier mercilessly. ‘Tell me what you found out about him?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ gasped Greene. ‘Who cares? I’m dying, I know I am, I’m facing Judgement and what have I done, I’ve wasted my life, I’ve drunk away my gift, what have I ever done but write worthless plays, books full of obscenity, garbage the lot of it, I must write something good before I die, can’t you see that, can’t you understand?’

There were tears in the wretched man’s eyes. On impulse Dodd took the ink bottle out of Carey’s hand and put it back on the bed. With only a grunt of acknowledgement, Greene dipped his pen and started scribbling again. Carey didn’t protest.

‘Dear, oh dear,’ said Barnabus from the stairs as Joan Ball pushed past him. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Why hasn’t he seen a doctor?’ Carey asked the woman.

‘They’ve all run on account of the plague.’ She was wiping sweat off Greene’s face as he panted over his page.

‘Plague? That’s not plague.’

Not as far as you could tell, although Dodd felt it paid to be suspicious. But there was no sign of lumps disfiguring Greene’s neck, no black spots. The smell in the room was unspeakably foul but more a muddle of unwashed clothes, old food, drink and an unemptied jordan plus the sour-sweet metallic smell of the splatter in the rushes by the bed. Plague had its own unmistakeable reek.

‘No, sir, but there’s plague hereabouts, and the doctors are always the first to know and the first to run for the country.’

Carey’s eyes were narrowed.

‘Have you heard about this, Barnabus?’ he asked.

Barnabus coughed. ‘There’s always plague in London,’ he said. ‘It’s like gaol-fever, comes and goes with the time of year.’

Greene had started whooping and bending over his belly, his face screwed up with pain.

Joan Ball scurried to the window with the disgusting pot, opened it wide, shrieked ‘Gardyloo!’ and emptied, before running to the bed. ‘Get the apothecary.’ She hissed, ‘Get Mr Cheke.’

‘The quality of the angels—there you see the cunning of the plot,’ gasped the man in the bed. ‘They’re all in it, by God, who could doubt angels,…urrr…And where’s Jenkins, eh? Answer me that?’ His face contorted.

They tactfully left the room and Carey turned to Dodd. ‘Go with Barnabus and see if you can find or kidnap a doctor or the apothecary,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get some sense out of him or I’ve nowhere to start looking for my brother.’

Dodd was quite glad to get away from the place. As they went down again into the street he tapped Barnabus on the shoulder. ‘Where’s Simon?’

‘Oh, he’s back in Whitefriars, looking after Tamburlain the Great.’

‘How is he?’

Barnabus didn’t look up. ‘He’s fine. Let’s try here.’

It was a barber’s shop with its red and white pole outside. There was only one customer and he and the barber glared suspiciously at the two of them.

‘What do you want?’ demanded the barber.

‘We’re looking for a doctor.’

‘Stay there. Don’t come any closer. Why?’

‘It’s not for plague,’ said Barnabus stoutly.

‘So you say, mate, so you say.’

‘I ain’t lying. Will you come?’

‘No.’

‘Well, is there anyone who will?’

‘Certainly not a doctor,’ said the barber and sneered.

‘What about Mr Cheke?’ Dodd asked.

‘The apothecary’s round the corner. He’s mad enough to try it.’ The barber was snipping busily again. As he left the shop, Dodd heard one of them sneeze.

They went round the corner and found the right place with its rows of flasks in the windows and a pungent heady smell inside, and a counter with thousands of little drawers all labelled in a foreign language Dodd assumed was Latin. A boy peered over the top of the counter.

‘Yes, sirs?’

‘Where’s the apothecary?’

‘Out, in Pudding Lane.’

Philosophically they went back into the street, turned left and then right, and found themselves in a street where every door seemed to be marked with a red cross and a piece of paper, where there were already weeds growing in the silted up drain down the centre of the alley and what looked suspiciously like dead bodies lying in a row down one end.

Both Dodd and Barnabus stopped in their tracks and froze. Down the centre of the street a monster was pacing towards them. It was entirely covered in a thick cape of black canvas and where its face should be was an enormous three foot long beak of brass, perforated with holes. Above were two round eyes that flashed in the sun and from the holes in the beak came plumes of white smoke.

In the unnatural silence of the plague-stricken street, a plague demon paced towards them with a slow weary tread, a bag full of souls in one hand, and its head moved from side to side blindly, looking for more flesh to eat.

‘Ahhh,’ said Barnabus.

Dodd was already backing away, sword and dagger crossed before him. Would blades kill a plague demon? Maybe. Who cares? It’ll not get me without a fight, he promised himself.

‘Sirs,’ said the demon, its voice muffled and echoing eerily from the beak, as it stopped and put up one white-gloved hand. ‘Sirs, don’t be afraid. I’m only a man.’

Holy water might stop it, Dodd remembered vaguely, or a crucifix; he’d heard that in the old days you could get crucifixes or little bottles of holy water blessed by the Pope to keep demons off, and neither of those things did he have with him. He had his amulet, but he couldn’t touch it because his hands were occupied with weapons that he wasn’t even sure could cut a demon and…

The demon took its face off and became indeed a tall pale man, with red-rimmed eyes and hollow cheeks. He coughed a couple of times.

‘Ah,’ said Barnabus. ‘Would you be the apothecary for hereabouts?’ All credit to him, thought Dodd, still shaking with the remnants of superstitious terror, I couldnae have said anything yet.

‘Yes, I am,’ said the man, giving a modest little bow before putting the beak and eyes back on and transforming himself into a monster again. ‘Excuse me, please, until we are away from the plague miasmas of this place.’

That was sense. Dodd put his blades away and they left the street as fast as they could walk, trying not to breathe in the miasmas, with the demon-apothecary pacing behind them. Nobody else in the next street gave him a glance, though a few stones were thrown by some of the children playing by a midden with dead rats on it. At last they were back in his shop.

‘Peter Cheke, sirs,’ he said as he took the beak and eyes off again and carefully sprinkled his canvas robe with vinegar and herbs. He wiped his face with a sponge soaked in more vinegar and cleaned the beak with it, then opened one end and took out a posy of wormwood and rue and a small incense burner which had produced the smoke. Dodd watched fascinated.

‘Does all that gear stop ye getting the plague?’ he asked.

‘It has so far, sir,’ said Peter Cheke gravely. ‘And I have attended many of the poor victims of the pestilence to bleed them and drain their buboes and give them what medicines I have.’

‘Did ye cure any?’

Cheke shook his head. ‘No, sirs, in all honesty, I think those that live do so by the blessing of God and a strong will.’

Without the sound-distorting beak his voice was unusually deep and rotund, speaking in a slow measured way. He seemed very weary.

‘How may I help you, sirs?’ he asked, blinking at them as if he was stoically preparing himself for more pleas for his puny help against the Sword of the Wrath of God.

‘We don’t think it’s plague,’ said Barnabus quickly. ‘It’s more like a flux or something. But he’s puking blood and getting pains in his belly something awful.’

‘Who is?’

‘Robert Greene.’

Cheke frowned. ‘Greene? When did he take sick?’

‘He was well enough when he was playing primero last night,’ said Dodd. ‘Or he seemed like it. Will ye come look at him, Mr Cheke?’

The apothecary passed a hand over his face. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I will, though I was up all night.’

‘I dinna doubt it’s all the booze,’ said Dodd. ‘Ye can rest after.’

Cheke smiled thinly. ‘I very much doubt it, the way the plague is moving in these parts.’

‘Spreading, is it?’

‘With the heat, the miasmas are thickening and strengthening at every moment. I was called to three houses last night, and by the time I came to the third, every soul in it had died.’

‘Och,’ said Dodd. ‘But it’s plague, man. Why d’ye bother?’

Red-rimmed eyes held his for a moment and Cheke frowned. ‘Do you know, I’ve no idea. I suppose I come in time to comfort some of them. Once I had some notion of finding the answer, of reading the riddle.’

‘What riddle?’

‘Why does plague happen? Why is one year a plague year and another year not? When London is full of stenches, why does one kind of miasma kill?’

‘Och,’ said Dodd shaking his head at the overweening madness of Londoners. ‘Ye’re wasting yer time, man. It’s the Sword o’ God’s Wrath against the wickedness of London.’

‘What?’ snapped Barnabus. ‘What’s so wicked about London? Compared to Carlisle?’

‘There isnae comparison,’ said Dodd, quite shocked. ‘London’s a den of iniquity, full of cutpurses and trollops that try and blackmail ye oot o’ yer hard won cash.’

‘Carlisle’s full of cattle thieves and blackrenters.’

‘That’s different. That’s making a living.’

‘So’s cutting purses.’

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ said the apothecary, putting on a skullcap. ‘Shall we go?’

By the time they came back to the cobbler’s shop, Joan Ball was back in the kitchen at the rear of the shop and Carey was leaning on the upstairs windowsill peering out.

Greene was putting a chased silver flask back under his revolting pillow, shuddering and coughing. He bent over a new piece of paper, still writing frantically. Next to him was the jordan full of something that looked like black soup. The stench was appalling.

Peter Cheke went in cautiously. Greene surged up in the bed, hands over his belly and started roaring with foam on his lips.

‘You!’ he shouted. ‘You dare come in here…’

‘Mr Greene, your friends…’

‘I’ve got no friends and never you, Jenkins, never you, atheist, alchemist, necromancer…Get out, get out…!’

A book whizzed through the air and hit Peter Cheke on the head. He turned and walked down the stairs.

‘I didna ken that Greene had a feud with ye as well,’ said Dodd, hurrying after him. ‘Why did ye not say, I wouldnae have wasted yer time.’

‘If I had known, I would have mentioned it,’ said Cheke. ‘But we have never quarrelled before. It is clearly not plague that ails him, but nor does it seem to me a flux. For how long has he been purging blood?’