by Ann Turnbull
The next day I returned to Hemsbury, to my work. As I folded and cut pamphlets, hung up printed sheets and dealt with customers, I thought much about my coming role as a wife.
I told all my friends – Martha and Kezia Jevons, Grace Heron, Em Taylor – and wrote to my brother, Isaac, who was apprenticed to a weaver in Bristol. The days crept by. Once midsummer was past, I would look up, heart thumping, every time there was a knock at the door; and I got into the habit, each evening, of walking down to the East Bridge and gazing out along the road in hope of seeing them coming.
The long days dragged.
“They will come in God’s good time,” said Mary.
But I was in a fever of anxiety and expectation. I feared illness, or some accident on the road. News-sheets from London told of war with Holland; the navy hard-pressed; plague increasing and spreading into the heart of the city.
At last, two weeks after they should have arrived, I heard Mary calling me. I was upstairs, and the urgency in her voice made me race down into the kitchen, alight with hope.
“Are they here?”
But Mary was alone. There was an acid smell in the room that caught at the back of my throat, and I saw that she was holding a letter over a small pan of boiling liquid.
I turned weak with fear. A letter now could only mean bad news.
“For me?” I asked. “From Will?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing?” I reached out for it.
“We are warned to air letters from London over boiling vinegar, to avoid contagion.”
Terror leaped in my heart. The plague. Please God, I thought, not Will.
“The ink will run!” I almost snatched the letter from her. “Let me see! Oh, Mary, what does he say?”
William
Less than two weeks before Nat and I were due to leave London, I walked down towards Blackfriars to look at some rooms for rent. It was evening, warm, and still sunny, and I had left work and arranged to meet Nat later and go to an alehouse for dinner. We had little means to cook at our lodgings; it was easier to buy pies, bread and fruit in the street markets, or occasionally to pay our landlady for a bowl of pottage.
I had looked at several places in recent days, but liked none of them. They might do for me, I felt, but not for Susanna. Nat and I had got into bachelor ways. I could not imagine Susanna, so clean and orderly as I remembered her, trapped in such poor rooms without means to cook or wash linen. This latest was cleaner and more spacious, but I feared the rent was too high; I said I would think on it.
I left, and began walking to Ludgate Hill, where I had arranged to meet Nat at the Crown. On the way, I daydreamed about having Susanna here with me. Often, as I walked around the city, I imagined showing her the sights: the river, the great ships being unloaded at the wharves, Cheapside, the shops on London Bridge, and all the new books that came to James Martell’s shop. But today I imagined the two of us in just such a room as I’d seen, naked in bed together, warm with love.
I was lost in these pleasurable thoughts when I reached the corner of Shoemaker Row – and pulled up in shock.
A soldier was lounging in the doorway of a house, his halberd propped beside him. It was a good-sized house, well kept, such as a successful tradesman might inhabit. But the door was chained and barred. On it was painted a red cross, with a printed notice nailed beside it: Lord have mercy upon us.
The sight sent a chill through me. Every summer that I remembered, whether in Shropshire, Oxford, or London, there had been deaths from plague; but I had never given it much thought, knowing it to afflict mainly the poor, who live crowded together in verminous conditions. And although I had heard of houses being enclosed and having the cross painted on their doors, it was a thing I had never seen before. Now I was struck, not with fear – for I felt too strong and alive to contract the sickness – but with horror and compassion to think that anyone should come to such a plight. The dead would have been removed, and those surviving would now be locked up for a month in the foul air of the house of sickness until the risk of contagion was over.
Nat was already at the Crown when I arrived. I observed him for a moment before he saw me, and understood why we Friends were usually recognized as such by other people, often before we spoke. There was something about his plain coat and rather old-fashioned hat, together with a quiet look of inward retirement, that marked him out. And yet Nat was not a solemn man. He had a quick smile that brightened his face when he turned and saw me.
“The rooms?” he asked.
“Fair. But too high a rent.”
“Thou can look about when she is here.”
“Yes.”
I sat down on the bench opposite him. Our Friends the Palmers had said Susanna could stay with them as long as she liked. But until we found rooms we could not live together as man and wife. Nat knew that.
“Thou’ll find somewhere quick enough when the time comes,” he said, with a wink.
We laughed. Men near by glanced our way, but no one troubled us. We had found people mostly to be more tolerant in London than in the country, and we were rarely threatened except by the authorities, who were zealous at breaking up meetings.
We ordered beer, and fish cooked in a pastry coffin. The girl who served us allowed her glance to flick between the two of us. She had dark, teasing eyes, and we were both conscious of her appraisal.
When she had gone I said, “I saw a house enclosed – the cross on the door.”
“I heard folk here speaking of it. So the plague is on our doorstep now.”
We’d both read the Bills of Mortality that were posted around the city every week, but that freshly painted cross, in its blood-red starkness, acted more forcibly on my imagination than any words. We were due to leave the city soon; I’d be glad to get away. Perhaps by the time we returned the danger would have passed.
The girl came back with our food, and I asked if she knew who lived in the enclosed house.
She was only too willing to tell. “Thomas Richmond, a shipping clerk,” she said. “Sickened and died within five days. And now his wife and four little children shut up, poor souls.” She put a hand to her bosom, where I had noticed a sprig of something was tucked. “I keep a bunch of wormwood and rue always about me; and take plague waters…” She glanced at Nat. “You work for Amos Bligh, the Quaker printer, don’t you?”
He nodded. “I do.”
“I’ve seen you about. Take care with the pastry – it’s hot.”
She left, and we caught each other’s eye and smiled.
The pastry was indeed hot, and we burned our fingers breaking it open. The fish inside was spiced with cardamom and nutmeg. We ate with relish, and felt glad to be alive. The plague was in the city – but danger was always present. We must go about our lives as usual, and trust in God.
During the next week, however, I began to feel a greater sense of urgency to be away. On the Bill of Mortality the figure for plague deaths had risen. I saw another house with the cross on the door, this time near Cheapside, in the heart of the city. Plague orders were posted all around: every householder was to keep the street before his door swept clean; large gatherings of people were banned (they’d use this to break up Friends’ meetings, I knew); the playhouses were closed; the great fairs – Bartholomew and James’s – would not be held. I had no interest in fairs and playhouses, and yet these restrictions on our liberty made me more afraid than anything else.
“You and Nat Lacon should leave the city as soon as possible,” my employer said.
We were in his bookshop in Paul’s Churchyard, in the shadow of the great steeple-house. I had been out delivering an order to a customer in Fleet Street, and had seen an apothecary come out of a house wearing a waxed cloak and a long pointed mask, like a bird’s beak.
“It is to protect him when he visits those sick with the plague,” James had explained. “The beak is filled with purifying herbs.”
He was old enough to remember such sights – ter
rifying to a child – from the last great outbreak of plague in London, forty years ago.
Dorcas, the Martells’ young maidservant, had set vases of rue and rosemary around the shop to freshen the air, and there were bowls of vinegar on the counter for customers to drop the coins into. But otherwise all seemed reassuringly normal. Cecily, James’s wife, was serving in the stationery section, and from the back of the shop I could hear a child’s voice: their eldest, six-year-old Agnes, reading a story to her brother.
I said, “Thou hast more need than I to leave – with thy wife and children.”
“We have nowhere else to go. All Cecily’s people live in the city, and I have only a brother in Aldgate. We shall stay here, and trust in God’s mercy. Cecily is of the same mind.”
Cecily was James’s second wife, much younger than he, and the mother of his young family. They were serious, sober people with a great love of books and learning. They had taken me on when I first arrived in London and given me work in their business – which thrived because James was known for his knowledge and honest dealing.
“I promised I would stay till the twenty-sixth,” I said.
“Thou need not concern thyself. It is a matter of days only, and I am well enough now. But the authorities may begin to restrict travel. Already they say towns outside the city grow nervous of receiving Londoners. Leave while thou can. Go to thy sweetheart.”
He smiled. And indeed he looked much recovered, and I knew his health need not hold me back.
I walked through the shop, passing the children, who were curled up together with a chapbook of Robin Hood. They sat on the floor in one of the bays between tall shelves of books, and Agnes paused shyly in her reading as I went by, then continued. “‘By my faith,’ quoth bold Robin, ‘here cometh a merry fellow…’”
I went to the desk where I kept records, and entered my delivery and the payment in a ledger. Agnes and Stephen watched me, glancing up from the book. They were quiet children, never troublesome; soft-spoken like their parents and able to amuse themselves. The family and Dorcas lived above the shop, but James and Cecily liked to allow the children downstairs, where, they said, they would gain a sense of right livelihood from the earliest age.
The children, I guessed, simply enjoyed all the places to hide and whisper. The shop was large and rambling, with many hundreds of books, pamphlets, and writings of Friends, and deliveries and orders coming all the time from Belgium and France, as well as English towns and cities. Nearly half the space was given over to stationery: quills, ink, notebooks and printed forms – a much greater selection than I had ever seen in Mary Faulkner’s shop in Hemsbury. James kept books of almost every kind – not plays, since he disapproved of the theatre, but poetry and music as well as theological and historical writings.
Back at work, I put the sight of the beaked man out of my mind, but next morning I talked to Nat.
“It seems cowardly to leave early.”
From near by we heard the bells of Gregory’s steeple-house tolling, and counted six for a woman, and then the years of her life: twenty – my own age. Was it plague, I wondered? And now that I thought of it, I heard other passing bells, many more than usual, further away, from all around the city.
Nat was at the washbowl, a mirror propped up, shaving. He had cut his long curly hair and paid Meg Corder to wash and iron some shirts for the journey. I had bought a new shirt to be married in. We had little else to do before we left. I felt a strong desire to leave at once. And yet we were committed to travelling with our friends.
“I spoke to Joseph Leighton,” Nat said, rubbing his face dry, and wincing at a cut. “He says we need not wait for them.”
“Can they not leave earlier than the twenty-sixth?”
“No. Their affairs prevent it.”
The Leighton brothers were elderly men, frail from prolonged imprisonment, yet alight with the spirit. They had felt called to visit Friends in prison in North Wales. For us to travel with them would be beneficial to all. We would have their company and the hire of horses, and would probably eat better and sleep more comfortably than if we travelled alone; and they would have our youth and strength should need arise.
Nat voiced my thoughts. “It would be churlish not to wait for them.”
I agreed. “Yes. For the sake of a week…”
And yet I wanted nothing more than to leave the stricken city. And we were ready; our employers would give us leave; we had nothing to hold us back, except our promise. To my shame, I felt irritation with the old men; what affairs could they possibly have that would take so long to set in order?
During the days that followed, the sense of crisis in the city grew apace. Everyone was leaving who could. We saw carts loaded with families and their possessions rumbling through the streets towards the city gates. A house was enclosed in Creed Lane, where we lived, making Nat and I feel, for the first time, afraid for our lives. Meanwhile the Leighton brothers calmly hired horses, received messages and parcels from Friends to be delivered along the way, and arranged with us to leave early in the morning on the twenty-sixth of the month.
But a few days before we were due to leave, we saw a new notice being posted at the conduit. It said that from now on travel out of the city would be permitted only if the traveller was in possession of a Certificate of Health; this to be obtained from the minister and churchwardens of his parish, and signed and sealed by a Justice of the Peace.
The news must have flown around the city. Nat and I went at once with the Leightons to see what could be done, and joined a long queue of desperate people. We soon discovered that few certificates were being granted and that it helped if you were known to the minister. All dissidents – Presbyterians, Baptists and the like – were given short shrift; but Friends in particular, who refused to pay church tithes, had no chance. We came away, after many hours, empty-handed.
“We will try again,” said Joseph Leighton, “another day.”
So we waited; and tried again, but without success. Money might have moved matters along, but we would not offer bribes. We were accused, as Quakers, of consorting with felons, and gathering in large and unlawful numbers in close rooms where the pestilence might breed. And perhaps the churchwardens were right, for on first-day we learned that a family from our meeting, the Ansons, had the sickness, and had voluntarily enclosed themselves. All of us must have been aware, though we did not speak of it, that only last week we had been in the same room as Matthias Anson, breathing the same air. Two of the older women, Jane Catlin and Ann Hale, said they would go in and take care of the Ansons until the end, whether that was recovery or death. Then we were silent and prayed for them.
Few of our meeting were able to leave; and of those who could, many would not, feeling it to be desertion – that they should stay and help those who suffered, and trust in God. I had no such scruples. All I wanted now was to reach Shropshire, to reach Susanna. I could not help regretting how far I was now from my father’s power and protection. A man of his standing would have had me out of the city without delay.
The twenty-sixth of June – the day we should have left – came and went. Another Friend, related to a magistrate, made an attempt on our behalf to gain certificates, but perhaps the news of the Ansons’ sickness made us suspect; again we were refused. The Leighton brothers accepted the change to their plans, and abandoned them for the time being. Their desire to leave London was less urgent than ours. Nat, too, was philosophical, though disappointed. But I railed against fate, and felt desperate. It was like being in prison again. I imagined storybook escapes: a counterfeit certificate; or hiding under the goods in a carrier’s cart.
On fourth-day in the first week of July, all Londoners were commanded to attend church and pray for God’s mercy and a release from the pestilence; markets, shops and taverns were to close. James Martell closed the shop, and we joined Friends as usual at Meeting. The authorities did not molest us. It was a quiet day that gave me hope.
Indeed, all this time,
I hoped against reason that the plague would abate, the emergency come to an end, and then Nat and I could be on our way to Shropshire. But then the King and court left the city for the safety of Isleworth; and about the same time, an order went out that all cats and dogs were to be killed, for fear they should carry the contagion from house to house. It was when I saw men going about the streets clubbing to death every cat or dog in sight that I realized we were on the brink of a calamity which had only just begun.
And so, at last, I took Nat’s advice to write a letter to Susanna and attempt to send it by post before that too should fail.
Susanna
Love, don’t fear if thou hear nothing from me for a while. The authorities may restrict the post – and even if they do not, I may hesitate to write to thee for fear the carrier should be infected. Take care to steam any letters from London over boiling vinegar; we are assured it is a preventive…
“How can I not fear?” I demanded of Judith. I had run to her in my distress. “The plague is in the city, in their street, in their meeting. Oh, Judith, I am so afraid he will die and I will never see him again!”
Judith put her arms around me and begged me not to despair. As she tried to comfort me, I was reminded of how helpless I had felt in the face of her own overwhelming grief when her first child died. But Will was not dead. I had lost nothing yet, except the chance to be married this summer – as Judith reminded me.
“The plague will go when the hot weather is over,” she said, “and then he will come, and all will be well. Truly, Su, it will.”
We were in the parlour of Judith’s small house in Castle Street. It reminded me of my parents’ house, with the curtained bed and oak storage chest in the parlour, and a hall and kitchen off. Judith had been shelling peas, and the sweet smell of opened pea pods scented the room. Benjamin was asleep in his cradle.
I wiped my eyes, ashamed of my weakness. “I did so long to be married.”
