London

by Edward Rutherfurd

  With a sigh Julius left him; and for half an hour he made his family wait before once more returning to have a last try at persuading the young man. But he discovered that Meredith had already gone out again, leaving only Ned guarding the door.

  Sadly and thoughtfully he went back to his house, took his pistols, as he always did when they were travelling over the empty roads down to Kent, and having loaded them, ordered his family to get into the carriages. A few minutes later they were moving down Watling Street towards London Bridge. It was only then that he ordered his carriage to stop for a moment. For there was at least one small service he could perform for his young friend.

  Ned wagged his tail as he saw Sir Julius approaching the house again. He knew he was a friend. He started to get up. He liked to greet friends even if his master was not there. Sir Julius was quite near now. He had paused for some reason. He was holding out his hand. No, he was pointing at him. Why was he doing that?

  The great bang, the puff of smoke, and the huge blow that slammed him back against the doorstep were a single, flashing, unreal moment to Ned. There was a huge pain in his chest. Something warm in his mouth. That was the end of what Ned knew.

  When Sir Julius had shot Ned, he tied the dog by a length of rope to the back of the cart and dragged him behind them. At the river, Ned was thrown in. Sir Julius had no doubt about the rightness of this action, sorry though he was to do it. After all, didn’t most sensible people know that dogs and cats carried contagion? But knowing Meredith’s affection for the dog, Julius knew he’d never have the heart to do what was necessary himself. At least Ned wouldn’t infect his master now. “It was,” he said, “the least I could do to save that brave young man.”

  “The dog was a good ratter,” his son remarked. “Meredith hadn’t a rat in his house.”

  “True,” Julius replied. “But hardly relevant.”

  By mid-August the Mortality Bill was at four thousand a week; by the end of August, six thousand. Each day, Richard Meredith put on his great leather uniform and went out.

  At times he almost thought he must be in some other city – like London, yet different. The streets were almost empty, the stalls in Cheapside all gone, and the houses shut up as though they meant to stop their mouths and noses against the contagion. The court had gone clean away to the West Country city of Salisbury. Since late July a stream of carriages and wagons had been rumbling out to the bridge or the gates: gentlemen, merchants, the richer artisans even, all bound for safety. With only a few exceptions, it was the poor who remained.

  How eerie it was. As he wandered from parish to parish, Meredith could see that the mayor’s regulations were being enforced. The moment the plague was confirmed by the city examiners, the house was closed, a watchman with a pike set on guard to stop anyone entering or leaving, and a terrible red cross painted on the door with, usually, the sad words: “Lord Have Mercy”. Only a doctor dressed like himself could visit the patient then. When a household signalled it had a corpse, the searcher came to verify the cause of death, and soon after, most often at eventide, the bearers arrived with their cart, ringing a handbell and calling out the haunting, mournful cry:

  “Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.”

  Some parishes, almost a quarter in total, were free of the plague. On the last day of August, walking by St Paul’s, he encountered a man named Pepys whom he had met several times at gatherings of the Royal Society. Pepys was an official at the Navy Board and, Meredith knew, had access to information of all kinds. “The real number of deaths is higher than the Mortality Bills show,” Pepys told him. “The clerks are falsifying the accounts and some of the poor aren’t being counted. The bills show seven and a half thousand last week.”

  “And the real figure?”

  “Nearer ten,” Pepys replied grimly. “But perhaps, Doctor Meredith,” he added more cheerfully, “if God spares us both, I shall have the pleasure of hearing a lecture from you one day at the Royal Society, upon what is the true cause of the plague.”

  No subject, indeed, could have been nearer to Meredith’s heart. As he had gone from house to house, seen people – whole families – feverish, delirious, screaming in the agony of death, he had felt a terrible sense of helplessness. He was a physician; yet the truth was he could do nothing about plague and he knew it. And why, he considered? Because of his, and everyone else’s complete ignorance. How could he suggest a remedy, or even alleviate the condition when he had no idea what caused it; how to protect his patients when he did not even know how it was transmitted?

  He had formed certain suspicions. It was assumed that people gave the plague to each other: hence the attempts at quarantine. Certainly, as he went into some of the worst areas – Southwark, the parish of Whitechapel outside Aldgate, the road up to Shoreditch, Holborn – and saw whole streets where nearly every door bore the dreaded cross, this seemed a fair assumption. But why was the plague so concentrated in these places? Many people were smoking pipes because the smoke was supposed to cleanse the air. It was said that not a single tobacconist had caught the plague yet. But if it was carried in the air, then why did he find plague in one city parish, yet not in the parish a street away? Nor could he discover anything in common between the worst affected areas – one marshy, another dry and airy. It can’t just be the air, he decided. Some other agent carries the plague. But what? Dogs and cats? He had heard from a neighbour that it was Sir Julius who had shot Ned and removed him. For a week he had been furious, but now he was no longer. God knows how many cats and dogs had been destroyed by now on the mayor’s orders. Twenty or thirty thousand, he guessed. But even if it were dogs or cats, how did they pass it on?

  A possible solution to the question of transmission came to him early in September, when he was attending a dying man down in the Vintry.

  The plague came chiefly in two forms: in one, the bubonic, about one in three who caught it lived; in the other, pneumonic form, hardly any survived. The patient’s lungs filled; he sneezed a lot, coughed up blood, had sudden, terrible fits of fever and chill, and then fell into a deep sleep, that grew deeper and deeper, until he was still. The poor fellow before Meredith had been a humble water carrier, with a bent back and six children. Shivering with the chills, he looked hopelessly at Meredith. “I’m going,” he said simply. Meredith did not deny it. One of his little children came over to comfort him. And then the fellow sneezed. He could not help it. He sneezed into the child’s face. The child winced. And Meredith, with a terrible instinct, rushed to the child, seized a rag, and wiped off its face. “Keep them away from him,” he cried to the mother. “Burn this cloth.” For it must be so, he thought. The phlegm and spittle of an infected person must carry contagion, since they derive from the most affected part. A week later, the child died.

  Martha still hesitated, though her stepson Dogget was insistent.

  “I’m safe where I am,” she said. Though they had returned from Massachusetts together, she had not, for a long time, felt close to the younger Dogget boy. He lacked spiritual direction. Indeed, though she did not like to frame the thought, she was glad he was not her own. He had married and become a waterman instead of taking up a craft. But he came to see her every week and she reminded herself that there was good in almost everybody.

  “I see what it is.” A soft chuckle. “You think you’re safe, old girl, don’t you? ’Cause God’s on your side.” Dogget put his arm round her affectionately. “You think it’s just us sinners that are going to die.” And though she disapproved of his tone, Martha did not deny the charge. It was exactly what she thought. For Martha knew what caused the plague: wickedness.

  Most people in a general way would have acknowledged this. Plagues and disasters, after all, were in the hands of God and had been sent to sinful mankind ever since Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden. And if there were any doubt about this case, she would point out: “Where did the plague begin?” In Drury Lane. Why Drury Lane? Every Puritan knew the answer to that. The
new theatre, patronized by the king with his women, and his lewd, extravagant court. Hadn’t London been warned half a century ago when Shakespeare’s Globe had burned down? Now, in the moral ruin of what should have been God’s shining city, Martha could see the truth clearly. She could not think it likely, therefore, that the plague should visit her.

  Yet it was certainly coming. From the Vintry, last week, it had steadily been making its way up Garlick Hill towards Watling Street. It was not surprising that her family should be concerned about her.

  If only Gideon were still there, but he had died three years ago. His place had been taken, as far as was possible, by young O Be Joyful; but though the woodcarver was nearly thirty now, and the delight of her old age, he had not the authority of his father. He was still a journeyman, rather than a master and could only just make out his letters. It was nonetheless O Be Joyful who now decided the issue.

  “We are going too,” he told her quietly, indicating his wife and two young children. “Please come with us, Aunt Martha, and be our spiritual guide.” So, reluctantly, she agreed; and half an hour later, that warm September morning, she and the two little families walked solemnly down the hill to the riverside, where Dogget put them all in his wherry and began to row. Only as they got out into the stream did Martha stare ahead and ask in horror: “We are going to that?”

  Their destination was certainly the strangest sight. It lay in midstream and, though large and growing before her very eyes, it was hard to say exactly what it was. “Waterman’s Hall, I call it,” Dogget said genially; for it was the river folk who had thought of it. Consisting of scores of rafts, wherries and other little craft lashed together, the whole structure formed a sort of huge, ramshackle, floating island. Even as they approached, men were hard at work enlarging it, adding decking and constructing little shelters upon it. Their reasoning was instinctive, but logical enough. If they could remain out in the river, isolated from the contagion, they might hope to survive. “There’s water. There’s fish. All we need is to build some shelters,” Dogget continued. And when Martha enquired what he and his friends would do if anyone on this watery refuge developed plague, he grinned. “Throw them in the river,” he said.

  By mid-September it had become harder and harder to cope with the plague. The living were no longer obeying the mayor’s orders. People were no longer observing the quarantine rules. Plague victims were being concealed; people were refusing to remain cooped up in infected houses, or trying to smuggle their children out to safety. And with the limited number of watchmen, it was impossible to control them. In an attempt to separate the sick from the healthy, the mayor had ordered that numerous poor victims should be kept apart in the city hospitals. But there were so few: there was old St Bartholomew’s, another hospital dedicated to St Thomas, in Southwark and St Mary’s up by Moorfield. They were full to bursting. The city had opened extra ones – called pest-houses – to the north and east of the city, and at Westminster. They were full too. Even more shocking, to Meredith, was the condition of the dead. The parish graveyards had not enough space. Great plague pits had been dug, mostly outside the walls, into which bodies were flung by the dozen. But still, Meredith observed, sextons were continuing to pile the bodies into the graveyards until the top ones were covered by only a few inches of earth. In one yard, he had actually seen feet and arms sticking out of the ground.

  He frequently went over to the pest-houses at Westminster, and it was one day, starting back towards the city, that he was accosted by a watchman with a request that he would come to a house nearby where a patient had need of a doctor. Minutes later he found himself entering a small but pleasant house in Petty France.

  Six days had passed since Jane Wheeler had begun to feel feverish. At first she had tried to ignore it. The twinges of pain in her arms and legs, similarly, she dismissed. After all, she reminded herself, I am over eighty years old. By that evening she felt weak, but could not sleep. The next day she began to feel giddy. At midday she decided to go out, but she had only gone ten yards when suddenly she began to stagger. Hardly knowing what was happening to her she had turned to go home. A neighbour came to help her. She remembered little of the next few hours. She thought her neighbour had come again in the evening, and the following morning. Then a strange woman came whom she had never seen before. A nurse of some kind. But by that time she could only think of one thing. It was in her neck, her armpits and between her legs. Great lumps: she could feel them. And the pain. The terrible pain.

  Meredith sighed. If the pneumonic form of the plague killed swiftly, the other form, called the bubonic, was even more terrible to behold. The old woman before him had the bubonic plague and was suffering the final stages.

  With bubonic plague, the lymphatic glands become horribly inflamed, swelling into lumps – buboes, as they called them. The body bleeds under the skin, causing dark spots and purple blotches. Patients are often delirious. At the very end – and this is what Meredith now saw – rosy-coloured spots often appear on the body. But, in this last crisis, the old woman was lucid. And it seemed she wanted something.

  “Can you read and write?”

  “Of course. I’m a physician.”

  “I want you to write my will. I’m too weak.” She shivered. “There’s pen and ink in the corner.” He found them and, sitting down on a chair, he took off one of his gloves and prepared to write as she began: “I, Jane Wheeler, being of sound mind . . .”

  So that’s who this woman was. She had no idea of his identity; but though he had not seen her since he was a boy, he remembered the scandal about her. Poor woman, he thought, what a way to depart.

  The will was short and to the point. She had no children. She left her little fortune, which it seemed had been diminished by time, equally to all the surviving children of John Dogget deceased, with the exception of the child by Martha. Hardly surprising, Meredith thought privately. “Is that all?” he asked.

  “Nearly,” she said. “But there’s one thing more.”

  Richard Meredith was not aware, as he was writing, that under the floorboard of the room a black rat had just died. Nor could he have seen for it was very small indeed, the flea that had just come through the crack between the boards.

  The flea was in poor condition. For several days it had been feeding upon the blood of the black rat, which had the plague. The bloodstream of the rat had contained hundreds of thousands of the plague bacilli, and some tens of thousands had been transferred to the flea. Inside the flea’s stomach, the plague bacilli had multiplied, blocking the entrance. As a result, the flea was very hungry. Now the flea, finding its host lifeless, was looking for another body on which to feed. As soon as he punctured the skin of the next creature, he would try in vain to ingest blood through the blocked entrance to his stomach; meanwhile thousands of bacilli would seep into the new host where, they would quickly multiply, and multiply; and multiply again. The flea was death. It hopped on to Meredith’s coat.

  The last paragraph of Jane Wheeler’s will was startling.

  Finally, with this my last testament, and with my dying breath, to Sir Julius Ducket, thief and liar, who has stolen my rightful fortune and caused my ruin, I bequeath my curse. May God, who is just, send him to hellfire for his sins, and may his family be cursed hereafter and his inheritance stolen as mine has been. Amen.

  “Are you sure you want to say that?” Meredith asked.

  “I am. Have you written it? Show me. Good,” she breathed. “Give me the pen.” She signed with difficulty. “You and the nurse witness.” Meredith did so. The nurse made her mark.

  The flea hopped on to Meredith’s sleeve.

  “I must go now,” Meredith said, and pulled on his glove again. Jane hardly seemed to hear him. Suddenly she cried out in pain. The nurse and Meredith looked at each other. It would not be long now. He decided he would not tell poor Sir Julius that he had been cursed.

  The flea could get nothing from the coat. He was just preparing to try Meredith’s bare ha
nd when it vanished inside the long leather glove. As Meredith went towards the door, the flea leaped on to the nurse.

  By the month of October, the plague seemed to pass its peak. For the first two weeks the Bills of Mortality were in the four thousands; by the fourth week, fewer than fifteen hundred; then about a thousand for three weeks. Then a falling away. Although cases would continue to crop up into February, by November London was cautiously opening up again. By late January, the carriages of even the wealthiest citizens and their doctors were rolling back into town.

  The total official death toll of the Great Plague is over sixty-five thousand. The true figure was certainly more, perhaps nearly a hundred thousand. One curious feature of the plague however, which is often overlooked, was the colony of folk living on floating islands in the Thames. There were a considerable number of these huge and curious structures. Altogether some ten thousand people lived on the river like this for several weeks. As far as is known, few if any of them caught the plague. It was a fact which Doctor Richard Meredith noted, but was still, to his chagrin, unable to explain.

  So it was, at the end of November, that Dogget and his family finally ventured back to their lodgings, to find they had gained a small inheritance.

  If Richard Meredith was saddened at his failure to understand the plague, nobody else did either. Not for almost two centuries would the true nature of the disease and its carriers be identified. Until that time it was remembered only for the fact that no herbs could cure it and for its symptoms – the rosy rash or the sneezing – recorded in the song which, a little time after, the children began to sing.

  Ring a ring o’ roses

  A pocket full of posies

  Atishoo, atishoo

  We all fall down.

  In later times, in North America, the “Atishoo” of the song, not understood, was changed to “Ashes”. But there were no ashes – only, that year in London, the terrible sneezing before death.