London in Chains (37 page)

‘Aye, she caught it from her mother,' said Susan. Her voice was strangely hard. ‘Mrs Stevens was beginning to recover when her daughter fell ill. She miscarried the baby. It died, poor little thing, before it ever saw the light. But Hannah lives; indeed, she's on her feet again and growing stronger every day.'

‘Thank God!' said Lucy fervently. ‘You nursed them both?'

Susan nodded wearily. ‘I nursed
all three
of them. Mr Cotman caught it, too. He'd sent for me as soon as he saw Mrs Stevens had it.'

‘Oh, dear Lord!' Lucy was struck by a sickening thought: what if she'd been
wrong
about the cowpox? She'd gone to the Overtons' in the bland assumption that because she hadn't already succumbed to the disease, she was clean, but in fact it had been too soon to be sure.

Lucy swallowed, thinking of the Overton children. That she'd been
right
about the cowpox was no credit to her. She wanted to call it a mercy from God; only then she was left wondering why God hadn't been merciful to Cousin Hannah.

Susan, who'd trudged in silence for a little while, suddenly said, ‘It's an ill wind that blows nobody good. The Cotmans' maid upped and left when she saw that Mrs Stevens had the smallpox, and my place is safe now.'

‘I'd meant to speak to you about that,' said Lucy apologetically. ‘Mrs Overton put the word about that you were seeking a place, and—'

‘That's good of you,' said Susan, without giving her the time to finish, ‘but I'm well where I am now.'

The Cotmans' house in Stepney, where Lucy had spent so many boring Sabbath afternoons, was in disarray: unswept and festooned with wet sheets. Nathaniel Cotman was sitting alone in the parlour, huddled in a blanket. When Lucy was shown in, he glanced up with a stunned look. The smallpox scabs had fallen from his face, but the marks they'd left were still an angry red.

Susan went to him. ‘I fetched Lucy, sir,' she said, gently adjusting the blanket. ‘Do you need aught?'

‘Nay,' said Cotman with an effort. ‘Let her see her aunt.'

Agnes was upstairs, propped up in a big bed. The bubbling wheeze of her breath was the first thing Lucy noticed on coming into the room. Cousin Hannah was lying in the bed beside her mother, under the covers with her back to the door. There was a candle burning at the bedside and a fire in the grate, but both had burned low. Susan went at once to the grate and began to build up the fire.

‘Aunt Agnes?' said Lucy, coming closer. ‘Cousin Hannah?'

Hannah lifted her head, then sat up. Her face was much more pocked than her husband's and the disease had thinned her hair, so that the angry red scars could be seen through it all across her scalp: she looked hideous. She smiled weakly, and Lucy, wrenched by pity, came and hugged her.

‘I am so very sorry!' she whispered.

‘It is God's will,' said Hannah faintly. ‘The Lord chastises whom He loves. My mother was asking for you.'

Agnes made a choking sound and glared at Lucy. The smallpox scars on her face were scant and already beginning to fade but there were sores around her mouth and the whites of her eyes had turned yellow. Her cheeks were covered with a livid network of broken veins. Her expression was baleful and indignant.

On the walk over to Stepney, Lucy had been imagining a tearful reconciliation. That had clearly been a fantasy. ‘I'm here, Aunt,' she said.

Agnes made an indistinct noise and turned her face away. She wheezed repeatedly, struggling for breath, then gasped, in a bubbling whisper, ‘Take it, then, and go!'

Lucy blinked. ‘Aunt?'

Agnes made a horrible sound, part cough and part retch. ‘The silk! The damned silk! Take it and go!'

‘Aunt, I don't understand!' Lucy protested.

‘The silk!' said Agnes angrily and burst into a bout of coughing. Flecks of pus and blood sprayed from her mouth, but when Hannah tried to support her, she shoved the gentle touch away.

Lucy looked at Hannah and Susan in bewilderment and saw that, though they were shocked, they weren't confused at all.

‘My father left you a legacy in his will,' whispered Hannah. ‘He said you were to have “the bolt of rose tabby” to wear at your wedding. We searched all the house for it and found nothing but woollens and linens. My mother said you must have taken it without leave. Nat was so angry!'

Presumably this had happened before the smallpox made itself known. ‘I know nothing about it!' Lucy protested shakily.

Hannah nodded. She again put an arm about her mother's shoulders. Agnes stopped coughing with a groan and leaned against her daughter. ‘Mother,' said Hannah softly, ‘tell me what you did with the silk. It will ease your passing.'

‘Tom
loved
that inky slut!' said Agnes, starting to cry. ‘What right had she to come and steal his love away from those who had most right to it?'

‘Shh, shhh!' said Hannah, rocking her mother like the baby she'd lost. ‘That's all past now, part of this present darkness, and you are facing into the light. Let it go, Mama.'

‘It's in the bottom of my linen press,' confessed Agnes. ‘I put it there for you. It should have gone to you.'

‘Shh, shhh!' said Hannah again, and with a small movement of her head signalled Lucy to go.

Lucy went out and stood dazedly on the landing. After a minute, Susan came out as well, holding a bundle wrapped in canvas. She led Lucy back downstairs. Nat Cotman was still sitting in his parlour.

‘Sir,' said Susan, ‘Mrs Stevens had hid that bolt of silk in the bottom of the linen press. That's what she wanted Lucy for: to give it her. Here it is.'

‘Oh, dear Lord!' exclaimed Cotman. He looked wretchedly at Lucy. ‘When she came here that morning, with her things in a sack, I nearly sent her home again. Her husband ill with the smallpox, so she must needs bring it
here
? But Hannah was tender-hearted and said of course we must take her mother in. So she stole the silk?'

‘She said it should have gone to Hannah,' said Lucy numbly.

He got up, took the bundle from Susan and opened it. Silk the colour of a summer sunrise, of a dog-rose with the dew on it; a shimmering stream of pale streaked with dark, as beautiful as an April morning. Cotman drew it off the bale in rough arm-lengths. ‘Damascus tabby,' he said bitterly. ‘Seventeen shillings the yard. Ten yards, more or less.' He stopped, his arms full of the stuff. ‘A handsome legacy, certainly, but Hannah had the whole estate else!' Lucy realized that he was starting to cry. ‘The foolish, greedy, wicked old woman! To fret about her husband's gifts to his kin and not give a thought to the ill that killed him!'

‘Sir!' she said, touching his shoulder.

‘Why did she come here?' he demanded, looking at her with wet eyes.

‘She–she thought that falling ill was her husband's failing,' said Lucy, giving him the honest answer. ‘That she was immune to it. She wouldn't have come here if she'd believed Hannah might catch it: of that much I'm certain.'

He let out his breath slowly. ‘She's paid for her folly, and so have we. Take your legacy and go.'

‘Sir.' Lucy ducked a curtsey. ‘I am very sorry, sir, that you and Cousin Hannah should have suffered thus, while I knew nothing of it. I beg you, don't . . . don't shut me out again.'

He regarded her, his expression softening. ‘Well, then!' he said at last. ‘That is a most honest and cousin-like plea! Cousin Lucy, you'll be welcome here whenever you choose to come.' He glanced at the shuttered window and added, surprised at it, ‘It's late! You should not make your way back to the City alone so late. Stay for the night.'

‘Thank you, sir. I should be glad of it.'

She ended up cooking soup for the household, since no one had eaten supper. Afterwards she tried to clean the house a little. In a stack of papers she found a letter for herself, from Paul: nobody was sure when it had arrived. She was too tired to face it that night and so put it aside until the morning. She slept that night beside Susan in the maid's room: a comfortingly familiar arrangement.

Hannah stayed beside her mother all night, but Agnes confounded expectation by waking in the morning as baleful as ever.

Lucy walked slowly back to Coleman Street at dawn, Paul's letter in her apron pocket and the package of silk tucked under her arm. Ten yards of rose-coloured Damascus tabby at seventeen shilllings a yard: eight pounds and ten shillings' worth of silk. More than half a year's worth of the good wage she was getting now. When had Thomas bought it? Had it been in the loft all the time she slept there?

Probably it had. Probably he'd bought it before the war when he was rich and put it aside when the struggle ruined the market for such things, then decided at last, in his soft-hearted way, that it would do for his niece's wedding gown.

The thought of how Thomas must have imagined her wearing the silk gave her a twinge of guilt: she already knew that she was never going to make a gown of this beautiful, impractical stuff. No: she was going to
sell
it, though she'd cut off a little first, to remember Uncle Thomas by. Hard cash was a lot more useful than a gown she'd wear only once.

She was so numbed by what had happened that she didn't remember Paul's letter until halfway through the day, when she felt a paper in her pocket and took it out to see what it was. It did not make pleasant reading.

Lucy's first thought was that Paul couldn't have received her own letter when he wrote, but then she realized he must have, because Nat Cotman's letter had assumed that Lucy
would
lodge with him until she could be fetched home. She groaned, set the letter down and glared at it. How
could
Paul have managed to read her letter and still come away with the conclusion that she needed to be rescued?

She wrote a reply that evening, though she knew it wouldn't leave London until the following week: that week's post north had already left.

Agnes clung to life for another two days before she finally succumbed to her pneumonia. Arrangements were made for her to be taken back to Southwark so that she could be buried beside her husband. Lucy was invited to the funeral and endured another long-winded mumble from the St Olave's preacher before Agnes's shrouded body was lowered into the earth beside Thomas's. The thought of those two lying together for all eternity made her queasy. She told herself repeatedly that earthly concerns were left behind by those who'd entered Paradise, but she still had trouble imagining an imperishable Agnes, purged of all greed and selfishness. Perhaps, she thought, Thomas, who'd known the carefree girl, would find it easier.

There was no general funeral feast after Agnes's burial any more than after her husband's, but there was to be a dinner for the family, to which Lucy was invited. The Cotmans had hired a coach to carry the body to Southwark and had ridden in it themselves – neither Nat nor Hannah was recovered enough to walk so far – and Lucy rode back in it with them.

It was the twenty-fourth of December – Christmas Eve, if Christmas had been permitted. The streets were busy. Lucy had taken a day off work, much to Nedham's annoyance, and she enjoyed travelling in the coach, looking out at the bustle of people on foot. When they crossed London Bridge she noticed that the entrance to the church of St Magnus the Martyr had been decorated with rosemary and holly. She pointed it out to Nat, who frowned at it. ‘Godless idolatry!' he said severely. ‘I wonder it's permitted!'

‘I doubt it is,' said Lucy. She felt uneasy: if the authorities tried to clear the Christmas decorations away, there would probably be violence.

As they rode eastward through the City, they passed more churches decorated for Christmas, but when they got to Stepney the greenery vanished: the suburb had long been a stronghold of the godly. The coach stopped by the Cotmans' house, and Nat climbed down stiffly and paid the driver.

Some of Nat Cotman's kin had offered to prepare the dinner while the family attended the burial, so Lucy was not surprised to find the house unlocked and full of people. She was shocked speechless, however, when she walked into the parlour and found Paul sitting there – with her father beside him.

She hadn't seen her father for what felt like a whole lifetime. In her mind he was always a tall, stern, frightening figure, and it was strange and disturbing to see him sitting beside Paul and realize that he was a scrawny man of no more than average height, with greying hair and a lined face. His clothes were plain and travel-worn, and he looked nothing at all to be afraid of.

Daniel and Paul Wentnor both got to their feet when Lucy's party came into the room and stood respectfully holding their hats. Nat Cotman stared at them in bewilderment: he had met Paul only briefly and had never met Daniel at all. Nat's sister Deborah emerged from the kitchen and said, ‘Nat, these two arrived but ten minutes ago. They say they're kin to the Stevenses.'