Plague

by Jo Macauley

  First published in 2013 by Curious Fox,

  an imprint of Capstone Global Library Limited,

  7 Pilgrim Street, London, EC4V 6LB

  Registered company number: 6695582

  www.curious-fox.com

  Text © Hothouse Fiction Ltd 2013

  Series created by Hothouse Fiction

  www.hothousefiction.com

  The author’s moral rights are hereby asserted.

  Cover design by samcombes.co.uk

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978 1 78202 045 5

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner.

  ebook created by Hothouse Fiction Ltd

  With special thanks to Adrian Bott

  For Sabrina

  Prologue - London, August 1665

  Death walked the streets of London, visiting households unseen in the night, and leaving bodies stiff in their sheets by morning.

  The tell-tale red marks of the plague appeared without warning on living flesh, branding it as Death’s own. As if the disease had been a demon or a vampire, people attempted to ward it off with herbs, prayers and mystic signs. Even learned men walked with folded abracadabra-papers in their pockets, but none of these measures seemed to slow the plague’s progress.

  Inside the Four Swans tavern, which lay deep in the nested streets of the city, the atmosphere was stifling and airless. The windows were shut fast even in the baking heat of August, for fear that the stench of plague would enter and carry the disease with it. Tempers flared like hot coals, and an argument was growing loud in the half-empty bar. Already the other drinkers had begun to shift their chairs away.

  Tam Dixon swigged at his ale and glared with bloodshot eyes at his two companions.

  “I’ll not be mocked! You’re always mocking me! The pair of you, in fact. One more word and I’ll crack your heads together, don’t think I won’t!”

  “You couldn’t crack the head of a louse, you great lump,” sneered Martin, one of his erstwhile friends. “Sit down and drink.”

  Tam hesitated, swaying from the alcohol, fuming like a powder keg ready to explode. He didn’t pay any attention to the thin, hollow-cheeked man who sat only an arm’s length away behind him. The man had been there all evening, apparently waiting for a companion to join him – at least, that was the message implied by the hat he’d left on a neighbouring chair, as though he were saving it for someone.

  Just as Tam seemed about to sit back down, a fly settled on the lip of his beer mug.

  Jack Hardy couldn’t resist. “Now there’s a drinker who can hold his beer better than Tam!” He roared with laughter.

  The table went flying over. Mugs shattered and a serving girl gave a theatrical scream. Martin and Jack were on their feet in seconds. Tam swung for Jack first. Fist met face with a resounding smack, and as Jack went staggering back through the chairs, Martin leaped and grabbed Tam round the neck. Tam roared and swung Martin back and forth, trying to loosen the stranglehold. Martin, teeth bared, hung on grimly. In the background, Jack coughed and spat a bloodied tooth onto the floor. The thin man, meanwhile, simply sat and watched the fight happen right in front of him, as if he were too much of a fool to move out of the way. He was very good at appearing foolish.

  He had put a lot of work into it while training as a spy.

  Tam thumped Martin hard in the guts, finally breaking his grip. As Martin fell backward, the thin man leaped to his feet and caught him before he could hit the floor.

  “Steady, there!” he said, patting Martin on the shoulder. His other hand slipped into Martin’s pocket as fast as a striking adder. The afflicted man didn’t notice. Nobody did. The movement was as quick as the flicker of an eyelash, and drew about as much attention. The spy’s thin fingers closed on a small piece of paper. The prize. At last.

  Martin shoved himself away without so much as a thank you, and the spy gave an offended harrumph. Clapping his hat upon his head, he left the tavern without looking back. The paper was still in his clenched hand, curled tight as a clock spring.

  One little twist of paper could do a lot of things, the spy thought to himself as he hurried through the London streets. It could entitle you to a fortune, or strip you of one. The right words, with the right signature beneath, could condemn a man to death. And once in a while, a single scrap of paper like this could be the fuse that lit the gunpowder and blew a whole city sky-high.

  Moments later, the spy brushed past his master at the agreed place. The paper changed hands safely. Once his master had gone, the thin man drew out a handkerchief with shaking hands and wiped nervous sweat from his forehead. For such a tiny thing, the paper had been a monstrous weight to carry.

  His heart lighter now, he made his way back through the streets, heading for home. A quick glance over his shoulder told him he wasn’t being followed. If it hadn’t been for the groans of the dying and the pale bodies lying unburied by the roadside, he might have whistled a merry tune.

  He turned down a side street. Home was only a stone’s throw away now, and he thought with relish of the cold ham and the keg of beer waiting for him...

  From behind came the sound of footsteps, hurrying up swiftly.

  The spy frowned. Suddenly, he was no longer sure he hadn’t been followed. He was no longer sure of anything. He began to turn round, but he never saw his attacker. The last thing he felt was an agonizing blow to the head.

  Then there was only the sound of a body being dragged away over the cobblestones...

  Chapter One - A Surprise Announcement

  “Is it very bad, Miss Beth?”

  Beth Johnson, dressed in a pastel-blue shepherdess costume, her chestnut-coloured curls done up in bows, sighed as she peeked through the curtains into the theatre. “Well ... I’ve seen emptier houses on a first night. But not often.”

  Maisie White, the theatre’s orange-seller and Beth’s young friend, peered up at her with wide, concerned eyes, her face framed by her own brown ringlets.

  “That means bad, don’t it?”

  “Shh! You must whisper backstage. Do you not have fruit to sell?” Beth’s fellow actor, Benjamin Lovett, muttered at Maisie as he strode by adjusting his costume.

  “There’s hardly anyone to buy them,” Maisie retorted, shifting the basket of oranges on her hip.

  Beth turned to Maisie and gave her an encouraging smile. “It’s not looking very full out there, that is true. But they’re still our audience, large or small, and the show must go on.”

  Maisie looked doubtful. “But Mister Huntingdon was saying we need the numbers if we’re ever going to stay open...”

  “Hush, now,” Beth scolded her lightly. “We mustn’t complain of empty seats in our dear theatre. Not when there are empty seats around so many families’ dinner tables.”

  But as Beth peeped once more through the gap in the curtains at the rows of empty seats, dotted here and there with troubled-looking faces, the sight wrenched at her heart. This would be a tough crowd to entertain, and she couldn’t blame them one bit. It was just as well, she thought, that tonight’s show was a romantic comedy. It was the first night of Love’s Green Garlands, or Trust Repaid, a light-hearted piece on the good old reliable themes of mistaken identity, messages misunderstood, long-lost sweethearts reunited and true love triumphant in the end.

  William Huntingdon, the well-respect
ed theatre manager, ambled up. “Three minutes to curtain, you lot. Look lively!”

  “I hope to goodness that there isn’t any plague where my father is,” Maisie said. “It’s not everywhere, is it, Miss Beth?”

  “Not at all,” Beth said, reaching an arm around her young friend and squeezing her shoulders. “We just have to keep faith that he, and everyone we love, will be all right.”

  Maisie nodded and smiled bravely, but there was little hope left in her eyes. Born in the Americas, the daughter of a convict mother now dead, ten-year-old Maisie longed to find her father in London.

  Beth took a deep breath. She expected a few of the audience to at least look excited in the last moments before the curtain went up, but there still wasn’t a smile to be seen on any of the faces out there.

  “Just pretend you’re playing to a packed house,” her aged actor friend Brian Appleworth told her. “You’ll have them wetting themselves, plague or no plague.”

  “Please stop saying that word, Mister Appleworth,” shivered Maisie. “You can call it in upon yourself if you name it.”

  “Don’t be preposterous, girl,” said Lovett scornfully, squeezing past them to get his own look at the audience before the curtain went up. As Beth’s devoted rival, he could be counted upon to put in an unkind word for her – or her friends. “The plague’s a disease like any other, borne upon the air. It’s not some night-hag out of your story books that has to be called over the threshold!”

  “I reckon it’s the Dutch who are behind it,” Brian said thoughtfully. “We’re at war with them now, aren’t we? So it stands to reason. Who but the Dutch stand to gain by wiping out the English?”

  “Everybody, hush!” barked Mr Huntingdon. “Curtain up!”

  Beth bounded onto the stage, her brown curls flying. Scattered applause greeted her as the audience recognized her as the young actress most of them had come to see.

  “Oh, little lambs!” she cried, shading her eyes as she looked around. “Oh, whither have you strayed? Be not affrighted, sweet and tender lambs! I’ll seek you out and lead you safely home, from out the grasp of this unwholesome wood!”

  A few hesitant laughs came from the audience. They could tell she was playing a lovely young shepherdess whose lambs had gone wandering, but she meant her words to comfort them too.

  That’s the way, Beth thought. I’ll cheer you up if it takes me all night.

  With open arms and a sweet smile she set to work, delivering her lines in such merry, soothing tones that the audience soon began to smile back at her. It was working – but she had to wonder how long she could make the happy mood last. At the end of her next speech the prince would cross the shepherdess’s path, and by the looks of Lovett, he couldn’t wait to upstage her.

  Well, let him wait!

  Instead of finishing her speech, Beth led the audience into a song, one she was sure they would know. She couldn’t sing to save her life, but she cued them in with the words: “Down in a glade, diddle diddle, where flowers do grow...”

  Sure enough, some of the voices began to sing. “And the trees bud, diddle diddle,” they sang back to her, “all in a row...”

  Beth conducted them with her hands, smiling brightly, while Lovett glared from the wings like a fierce bull penned up in a field. “She can’t do that!” Beth heard him hiss furiously to Huntingdon. “Those aren’t her lines!”

  “Shepherdesses have been known to demand a song or two, Benjamin,” the theatre manager said, with just the hint of a smile. “In fact, they’re rather renowned for it.”

  “But she’s mutilating the script!”

  “Ah, yes, the script,” said Huntingdon dryly. “I shall make sure that the song is written in for all future performances. It suits the scene rather well.”

  Lovett had clearly heard enough. Swirling his cape around him, he strode out onto the stage, right in front of Beth who was about to lead the audience into another chorus.

  “WHO SKIPS SO PRETTILY THROUGH THIS DANK WOOD?” he boomed.

  Beth bit her lip with rage. Lovett had moaned about her changing the script, but those weren’t even his proper opening lines! The prince was supposed to say “Wait, gentle maid, I’ll do to thee no harm,” but Lovett clearly had other ideas. He held his cape up over his arm so that it hung in front of Beth like a second stage curtain.

  “Some nymph it is, with more than mortal grace! But wherefore dost thou hide, my bonny one?”

  Beth wanted to scream “I’m behind you, you stage-hogging trout!” But if she lost her temper, Lovett would have won. Instead, she skipped out from behind his cape.

  “For fear that I should come to dreadful harm,” she ad-libbed. “For robbers lurk and brigands wait to pounce ... but hold! Art thou not prince of all these lands?”

  Now it was Lovett’s turn to flounder as he tried to come up with a line.

  Beth couldn’t resist. “I fear this man has forgot who he is,” she told the audience with a shrug. That got a hearty laugh.

  Lovett looked desperately to the prompter, who gave him a helpless look. Serves him right for making up his own lines, Beth thought.

  “Indeed I am the prince of, er ... all these lands,” Lovett said. He crossed the stage to stand in front of Beth once again, and began to recite his long speech about what a fancy castle he lived in, but how his real passion was to wander in the woods disguised as a common peasant. Lovett started to add more made-up lines, with pompous details about his royal forefathers and the heavy burden of being heir to the throne.

  Beth wasn’t having that. She yawned loudly, bringing the speech to a sudden halt. That brought more chuckles from the audience and a red face from Lovett.

  From that point on, it was war. Lovett did everything he could to wrong-foot her – hogging the stage, feeding her the wrong lines, even standing on her toe. Beth bounced back from everything he threw at her, keeping the audience entertained with witty asides until they were eating out of her hand.

  As the scene drew to a close, Beth felt triumphant. We’ve done it, she thought. We can’t cure the plague, but we’ve proved we can help people forget their troubles, even if it’s only for a couple of hours.

  Lovett had given up trying to throw her off, thank goodness. “Sleep now, sweet maid, upon this mossy bank,” he said, “’til love shall wake thee when I do return. Let prince’s royal garb make soft thy rest.”

  Beth lay down against the painted scenery and Lovett unfastened his velvet cloak, kneeling down to drape it over her. The audience held their breath. She felt the heavy warmth of the cloak settle on her body and crossed her fingers, hoping for a storm of applause as the curtain fell.

  “PLAGUE!”

  The shriek had come from the front row of the audience. Lovett stood stupefied, staring out over the half-filled theatre, completely at a loss.

  “Look at his arms!” the woman screamed. “It’s the rash! The red roses!”

  Beth pulled the cloak away from her face and saw what the woman was pointing at. All the way up Lovett’s bared arms were red blotches, as if cruel fingers had pinched the skin hard.

  “Plague!” the scream went up, spreading throughout the audience. “Plague!” People were stampeding into the aisles now, running for the exit.

  “Wait!” Lovett demanded. “It’s not the plague, you fools! It’s nothing but louse bites! These rotten cheap costumes they make me wear, they’re full of lice!”

  Beth sprang to her feet. Without a thought for her own safety, she grabbed Lovett’s arm and looked closely. The scarlet marks on his skin were ugly, but they were nothing like the sores that had appeared on the plague victims. Lovett was telling the truth.

  “Everyone, please!” she begged. “There’s no plague here! Calm down!”

  The audience ignored them completely. The terror of the plague had seized their hearts and minds, and Beth and Lovett could do nothing but look on, united for once in their helpless misery, as the theatre emptied around them. Less than a minute had passed before
the last panicked theatregoer crashed their way through the doors and out into the streets. Beth sat down heavily, her skirts rumpling around her. Lovett joined her, swinging his heels over the edge of the stage like a heartbroken schoolboy on a swing.

  The rest of the cast slowly filtered onto the stage, looking out at the empty auditorium as if they had to see for themselves how bad it was. Young Robert looked like he was about to cry. Maisie was shaking her head, quietly saying “I told him it was bad luck.”

  “Philistines,” Lovett said bitterly. “My talents are wasted on the likes of them. What’s London, anyway? A provincial village on a muddy old river, that’s what.”

  “They’re afraid!” Beth said angrily. “Everyone in this city is. You might not take the plague seriously, but they do!”

  “Seriously enough to run like rats from a sinking ship,” Lovett said scornfully. “Just for the sight of a few louse bites. Idiots.”

  “Tired of London, are we, Benjamin?” said Huntingdon, with a dark look on his face. He was tapping a letter into the palm of his hand. “Well, you’ll be glad to hear you won’t be here for much longer.”

  Beth gaped. Lovett had finally done it. He’d upstaged her once too often, and Huntingdon was dismissing him from the company!

  “What?” Lovett blustered. “L-leave London?”

  “Our patron, His Majesty the King, has sent us a command under the royal seal,” declared Huntingdon, holding up the letter for all to see. “While the plague is rampant in London, it is no longer safe for us to stay here. We are to leave for Oxford on the morrow.”

  “Tomorrow morning?” Beth burst out. “But we can’t leave - we’ve advertised other performances! People will come here, expecting us. The play’s only just opened!”

  “I’m sorry, Beth,” said Huntingdon. “It was a good play. It deserved a better run. You all did your best.”

  Murmuring to one another quietly, the subdued company made their way out of the theatre. Beth and Maisie left by the stage door, with Beth feeling like she had to slip out quietly, in case she was seen after the disaster of the abandoned play.