At the Sign of the Sugared Plum (12 page)

And I would die unkissed, before I had hardly lived.

To our great relief the shop was open and the doctor was in, although it was his consultancy morning and there was a queue of people outside waiting to see him. They were going in one by one and talking to him privately, so we waited our turn, keeping our thoughts to ourselves and staying a good distance from everyone else. Indeed, some of them looked most alarming: one woman was greasy with sweat and moaning softly under her breath, and a man was naked to the waist, with great open wounds under his arm and on his chest. They were most gruesome to look upon, and I averted my eyes. Sarah whispered to me to keep away, for they were plague sores which had burst, and the man must be attending the doctor for healing herbs to be packed into the wounds.

It was Tom who opened the door to us, and when he saw it was me and Sarah waiting to see the doctor a look of such horror crossed his face that it almost brought tears to my eyes, for I knew then how he felt
about me, and that it was the same as the way I felt about him.

This was some small comfort to me for my mind was a perfect blank of dread. I began to pray, something I had not done properly, really meaning it, for many a month. I began to make God any number of entreaties and promises if only he would make Sarah well again.

I had already told Sarah of Doctor da Silva’s strange outfit, so she was not too shocked when our turn came. We were led behind a screen and she saw him sitting there with his bird’s head, his breath rasping through the beak of herbs.

‘I have a . . . a lump,’ Sarah stammered. ‘Here.’ She took off her cap and lifted her head, turning her face slightly so that he could see it more clearly. ‘It’s very painful,’ she said.

The doctor lifted a candle high and looked at the swelling, which to my eyes seemed to have grown since we left home. He pressed it with his fingers, and Sarah winced, then he directed her to open her mouth and probed inside with a small wooden stick.

‘Is it plague?’ I asked fearfully, begging God to spare her. ‘What can you tell?’

The doctor pulled off his beak headgear and put on his glasses, then he looked in Sarah’s mouth again. He smiled – a smile most delightful for us to see. ‘It is a tooth in your lower jaw,’ he said. ‘It has an abscess underneath which is full of poison, and this is what is swelling your gum.’

Tears began to swim in Sarah’s eyes and, seeing them, my eyes filled too. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked.

‘I am indeed!’ said the doctor, ‘and happy to be so.’
He reached behind him for a small bottle. ‘I will rub some oil of cloves on it, and Tom will give you a root of saxifrage to chew if the pain gets too much. But you must go and get it pulled.’

‘Can you not do that?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘But there is a man who pulls teeth at the sign of the Red Bull, by the coffee shop in Covent Garden. He wields a fair instrument.’ He gave Sarah an awkward pat on the shoulder. ‘I am glad to have given you good news.’

‘We . . . we must pay you,’ she stammered.

He shook his head. ‘No need. Instead, Tom and I will have some of your fine new sweetmeats against plague.’

Tom had heard everything and was smiling fit to burst when we came around the screen. He gave us a piece of dried root of saxifrage and explained again exactly where the man who drew teeth was to be found, then opened the door so that we could be released and the next poor customer could enter.

The feeling I had on walking home was one of such joy and relief that I felt I wanted to dance and sing aloud, and without thinking I began to hum a tune I’d heard the balladeers singing, linking arms with Sarah and swaying with her. My poor sister, though, was still in some pain and said to me quietly, ‘The plague is still around, Hannah. We are not through it yet. We must still be vigilant.’

I stopped humming and swaying when she said this, for indeed I had heard – could always hear – the bells of many different churches tolling for more deaths.

Sarah, being very frightened of the tooth-puller,
waited to see if the medicaments that the doctor had prescribed had any effect. They worked but a little, though, so at noon we went down to Covent Garden and found the tooth-puller at his booth by the sign of the Red Bull, and indeed we did not have to hunt for him, for the fellow – a man as big and as sweaty as an ox – was waving a frightening instrument in his hand and calling at the very pitch of his voice that he cut out ulcers, drew wormy teeth and lanced boils in the mouth.

Sarah hung back when she saw him. ‘He looks a dirty and ignorant fellow,’ she whispered.

‘But the doctor recommended him,’ I reminded her. I held her hand and led her towards him. ‘And it will be over in a minute and then you can forget all about it.’

The man sat her on a little stool, bent her head back and pushed his fingers into her mouth so she had no choice but to open it widely. He looked at her gum, then he unclipped some pincers from his belt and thrust them in her mouth so that her face twisted into a strange shape. He fitted the pincers on to the tooth and pulled. There was a gurgled scream from Sarah and she squeezed my hand so tightly I swear she almost broke my fingers. Then, suddenly, he was holding the tooth aloft and proclaiming himself the fastest tooth-drawer in the city.

Sarah was pale and trembling all over, so I paid the fellow and we went home, only stopping on the way to buy an infusion of blackberry flowers and leaves to help heal her mouth. Sarah then went to bed and slept most of the rest of the day, while I opened the shop (but sold little) and amused myself by finding a stub of
pencil and making a list of what sweetmeats we were going to make and the ingredients we would need to buy for our new undertaking. I was reasonably content as I did this, for I knew Sarah would be well, I had Tom to think on, and – apart from losing dearest Mew – all was well with us.

That night, though, I heard it for the first time.

The plague cart.

There came the noise of wheels trundling on cobblestones and I went to the shutters to look out, for lately there had scarce been any traffic by our door.

What I saw was a big farm cart, like the one I’d ridden on to London with Farmer Price. At the front sat two men, gruesome-looking ruffians, unhatted, wearing long black coats, and holding flaming torches aloft in the darkness. Instead of their load being hay, the harvest they carried was bodies: about twenty of them, wrapped in winding sheets or tied into knotted shrouds, two or three of them stark naked, their limbs gleaming pale under the light from the torches.

‘Bring out your dead!’ they cried, ringing a bell. ‘Bring out your dead!’

As I looked on, horrified, a door opened in one of the houses opposite and an old man called to the drivers. One of them then went to the door of the house with what looked like a shepherd’s crook in his hand and, taking a step inside, he thrust in the hooked part and dragged out the body of an old woman wearing a nightshirt. This tumbled down the doorstep and on to the ground, prompting a cry of despair from the old man.

The back of the cart was let down and the men
manipulated the body with their crooks, throwing it all anyhow on to the cart, so that the poor corpse’s long grey hair tumbled to her shoulders and her nightshirt came up, exposing her white and wizened limbs to the world.

Without another word to the one who stood alone on the doorstep, the men stowed their hooks, got up on their seats and drove off. I watched their progress down the street, listening to the cry of, ‘Bring out your dead!’ until the words and the sound of the cart wheels were too far off to be heard.

When I crept back to bed I longed to wake Sarah, wanting to share with someone the awful sight I’d seen. I did not, however, feeling that she’d been upset enough that day. Instead, I laid in the darkness, going over what I’d seen and seeming to feel within me a thousand dormant symptoms of plague stirring into life. Would we survive?

Why should we when so many others were dying?

How cheap life seemed. How random.

Bring out your dead . . .
The words echoed around my head until dawn.

Chapter Ten
The second week of August

‘The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it.’

We had managed to get all the ingredients we needed for our new venture, and were now selling sugared chips of angelica and chervil, herb comfits containing leaves of rosemary and caraway seeds, and candied garlic and rosemary flowers. We had also prepared lozenges from rue which we had chopped with caraway seeds and mixed with sugar and rose water. Although we had not been told that this herb, rue, was a plague preventative, its old name was herb of grace, and Sarah felt that anything with that name was sure to be beneficial. Besides, a green man had called at our door selling flowers and herbs, and he had given us a large bunch of rue very cheaply.

I had prepared a notice to go outside the shop which advertised our new produce. In order to help our customers who could not read I had merely
written the word PLAGUE and drawn a cross through it, for now all, even the most ignorant, knew that dread word by sight. For those who could read I gave more information.

Excellent electuaries against the Plague may be bought
at the sign of the Sugared Plum.
When you go abroad, chew the sugared root of
Angelica or the herb, Rosemary.
Also take our lozenges made with the ancient Herb of
Grace.

I had copied some of these words from bills I had seen posted on tavern walls and windows, and I was very pleased with the result.

Even though the streets seemed thin of people, within three days we had sold out of everything we had made and had to prepare more. One of our customers – a proper gentleman, with velvet and gold-laced jacket and long curled wig – told us that he had never found the taking of medicine more delightful than when it was coated with sugar candy.

‘And never has it been served by two more delightful gals,’ he added, chucking me under the chin and giving me an extra twopence when he handed me his payment. I could see by the look in his eye that, given any encouragement, he would have come round the counter and put his arm about my waist, so I merely dropped my eyes and thanked him demurely.

Scowling at his departing back, I asked Sarah who he was.

‘Someone at the Admiralty,’ she said. ‘I forget his name. Someone very high up, I believe.’

Soon after his visit, Mr Newbery came in to buy some lozenges from us.

‘For I’ve heard that these are very tasty and strong,’ he said, and I assured him that indeed they were, and that they had been praised highly by members of the Admiralty.

Sarah came through from the back and asked if he knew what the Bills were for that week.

‘I do, and I wish I didn’t,’ Mr Newbery said, ‘for they are three thousand!’ As Sarah and I gasped, he added, ‘Three thousand – with another thousand of what they call “other causes”.’

Sarah shook her head worriedly. ‘The plague is now in every parish of London, I have heard.’

‘That’s true. And I have heard that there are five plague pits dug to accommodate its victims.’

‘We have heard of them – have you seen one?’ I asked Mr Newbery. ‘I did wonder how . . . how big they are.’

‘Hannah!’ Sarah rebuked me.

‘For I cannot imagine . . .’ my voice trailed away. We had heard reports of these pits which had had to be dug because the churchyards could not take any more corpses. Rumours said that they were vast holes that held forty . . . sixty . . . eighty bodies or more.

‘I have heard that the biggest can hold two hundred!’ Mr Newbery said. ‘They are dug as deep as a man can stand in the ground, and can be as wide as the church of St Paul’s. They are needed, too, for I have heard that in some parishes the death cart is coming by day now as well as by night, for the hours of darkness are not enough to take all the corpses.’

Sarah went through to our back room, shooting me a glance which meant we had heard enough of such matters.

‘But have you heard about the piper?’ Mr Newbery asked, and I shook my head.

Mr Newbery popped a comfit into his mouth. ‘Well, they do say that a piper – just a common music man – fell down in the street insensible with drink. In the night the plague cart came round and thinking he had been struck dead, hooked him up and threw him on to a cart already piled with bodies. He was buried under more, but the jolting of the cart woke him just as they reached the pit, and he sat upright and began playing his pipes to draw attention to his plight.’

Mr Newbery paused to suck noisily on the comfit. ‘The drivers of the cart couldn’t see him in the dark, just heard uncanny music coming from the load of bodies, and they bolted in terrible fright, saying that they had taken up the Devil himself on to their cart!’ He laughed. ‘Now, what think you of that?’

I smiled, although in truth I did not know whether to laugh or cry.

‘Truly, the spectre of death stares each of us in the face!’ Mr Newbery said cheerfully as he went out.

That night I had a terrible nightmare. I was alive, but lying in a plague pit under a press of bodies which weighed down on me so that I could neither move nor hardly breathe. Something – some foul-smelling piece of dead flesh – was hard against my mouth and my hair was held knotted in a dead man’s grip so I could not change the angle of my head to enable me to gather my strength and scream. I had no way of knowing how far down the pile of corpses I was and knew I would suffocate unless I could claw my way through them and reach the top of the heap.

My nightmare was ended when I kicked out and hit Sarah in my efforts to climb, and she woke me properly by shaking my shoulder and calling my name. She went back to sleep quickly but I lay awake for an age, wishing I could feel the comfort of Mew’s little body on my feet and wondering when the Bills would show a downturn and we could go back to living an ordinary life.