Yes indeed, softer parts, hard to say goodbye. It’s strange, though, isn’t it? I’m islanded in bed, a dying man, a month to go, less or more, it’s no great matter. The floors are seas I can’t cross, the walls are borders, the rooms beyond – other continents. I used to know them well but they’ve become strange lands I never visit, not any more. And drifting in and out of my island port are folk like Francis, from the everyday world that now seems strange. I yearn to wear their clothes, so tangibly simple, as I inhabit my shroud, laid out as I am on my winding-sheet. And this incessant talk of food. With Francis, of course, it’s a passion. But they’re all worrying and chattering about it, the daily bread of existence that I’m slowly leaving behind, letting it go.
‘Well at least he didn’t actually starve to death,’ Francis suddenly said.
Starve? Who?
‘Greene.’
Oh, Greene. No he didn’t starve. And it could have been a lot worse than it was, with the pest well on the go. Plague was the roaring requiem and backdrop to Greene’s exit from the world’s stage, and the bell that tolled for Greene in the autumn of ’92 tolled for ten thousand more between the next two Christmases: a vast mass of London flesh just plucked into the dark.
Yes, it was back. After decades of lurking in the dark, it returned with catastrophically ironic timing, on Midsummer’s Day, at the height of human happiness.
‘Inconsiderate.’
Unpredictable, Francis, like falling in love. Yes, even so quickly. You could be administering the sacrament, committing a murder, doing the very deed of darkness. And you could be ill before your prick was dry and the sweat grown cold on your balls. Voilà. One moment you’re living your life, minding your own business, your hand in your purse or crutch, or someone else’s, the next your world is smashed sideways by a force you can’t even begin to understand. That’s the two things about the plague that struck folk, apart from the pain: its speed and its complete absence of logic. It couldn’t be rationalised or even imagined, except as God’s ultimate arrow: accurate, afflictive, agonising, deadly – and, of course, divine: nippy as an angel on the wing, the angel of bloody death. Bloody is the word, Francis. You’re just a slip of Warwick, too young to know. Do you want the symptoms?
‘I want you to shut up. And I want my pie.’
It started innocuously enough. A-tishoo. Dear me, I must be coming down with something. Better wrap up…Three days later (four if you were unlucky) you’d be dead. But not before you’d been placed on a rack worse than anything even snow-blooded Exeter could have invented. Because, standing at the head of this particular bed of prostration, there was no rackmaster, nobody you could turn to and ask to lessen the pain, just a little, for a few minutes’ respite, please, no kindly torturer, no-one, just that awful invisible adversary. You never saw who was actually turning the screws.
After the sneeze you could go one of two ways: the way of ice or the way of fire. If you experienced a sharp and sudden drop in temperature then you knew which route you were taking. On the way your lungs would fill up with bloody fluids which would find their exits when you coughed and sneezed or even talked, bloody syllables bubbling on your lips as you lay and shivered in thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice: the road chosen for you by God. If you tried to rise and walk about to get warm, your limbs refused to obey your brain, behaving crazily, till eventually you fell into a chill stillness, out of which you never came.
‘Never?’
Never.
If on the other hand the fever took you, then you were burned alive – convulsions, dizziness, delirium, stupefaction, shivering sweats – and vomiting blood from a carcass racked with agony from the hard and suppurating buboes, swellings the size of eggs and apples that lodged anywhere in the body but especially in armpits and groin – soft cradles for such rough and biting babies. When these buboes sweated and burst, the evil pus that spouted from them smelled worse than hell.
Sometimes the routes ran parallel and if your plague symptoms combined the two then you knew that you really were one of the chosen few, twice favoured by God. Because the plague, was actually seen by some as a blessing, not a curse: an affliction that placed you, like a leper, in a special relationship to the Almighty. You’d been smitten, singled out. The divine stroke had landed on you. That was something you could at least think about as you lay and suffered your double symptoms: the seas of sweat, the seas of ice, engulfing the agonized anatomy, the throat a desert, the lungs like icebergs, melting in hot blood, all your smooth skin a vile and loathsome crust, most lazar-like, the buboes blowing up under your arms, rivalling your balls in sensitivity and size, hammers in the head, skewers in the back, dreams and delirium in the fevered brain, floundering, drowning, raving, rotting – and all ending one way, from that first innocent sneeze to the final hectic welter of blood and puke or the dark door of the coma. Of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, Francis, none was more terrible than the plague. Could anything be worse?
‘I’d have to answer no.’
You’d have to answer yes, much worse. The symptoms themselves were superficial, physical pain, nothing more – the ultimate horrors went deeper still, to the core of a humanity gone unbelievably rotten. People simply abandoned one another, terrified out of their minds by the fear of contagion.
The virulence was a fact, fabled from the fireside. The Stratford outbreak in the year I was born had revived the inherited memories of Granny Arden, who passed them on to me with grim relish, the stories of how the Black Death had first appeared.
‘It was in the October of 1347 that a convoy of twelve Genoese galleys from the Crimea came limping into the straits of Messina, steered by dying men…’
She was off. And with such particularity and precision that the thing unrolled in front of me like one of the painted cloths.
‘These sailors carried in their bones a disease so deadly that anyone who only spoke to them was seized by the terrible illness and couldn’t escape death. Even those who merely looked at them were doomed…’
So spoke the chroniclers. So quavered Granny Arden.
Oh yes, I knew the stories all right. And when the plague attacked London in ’92 I saw for myself that they were true.
Human beings were deserted by those closest to them, and the bonds of blood and the knots of the heart were snapped and unravelled. Wife left husband, brother left sister, parent left child. A mother ran from the cries of her own babies. Corpses piled up on the streets, shops were unkept, doors stood open, shutters swinging in the wind, criminals afraid to rob the dead and dying, though all they had to do was walk in and help themselves. Gravediggers grew rich quick – and sometimes died faster. Worse, priests walked out on their parishioners, overcome by mortal terror in spite of their immortal calling, refusing to attend deathbeds and administer the last rites to solace stricken souls. They went instead with the Levites. So the dying were ditched by friends and loved ones, and even by God – a terrible spectacle. And a frightening thing it was to die alone, utterly bereft of some word of comfort, some little touch of humanity in the night, a cup of water, a gentle tear, the squeeze of a hand, the last longing lingering look of farewell. There were stories of people sewing themselves up in their shrouds at the least sign of a shiver or a sneeze, accepting the inevitable. Or they rushed to the graveyards, screaming mad with pain, scooped out rough graves and, to the astonishment of the gravediggers, heaped the earth over themselves with dying hands – anything to avoid the ignominy of burial in unconsecrated ground and the fear of the eternal flame. Did such things really happen, Francis, in the last decade of the queen’s reign? You only had to hear it to believe it. You saw plenty else with your own horrified eyes.
All the other refugees on the road, for example – it wasn’t just the actors who fucked off to the provinces, to stamp around on boards and barrel-heads to the tune of an old cracked trumpet. People left London like rats from a house on fire, people shouldering sacks, struggling with chests, carrying purses
bulging with money – bribes for their lives. You could hear their saddlebags chiming as they galloped past. If there had been any monasteries left they’d have thrown the bags over the walls – and the monks would have lobbed them back again, caring neither for the lucre nor for the filthy sinners who wanted shot of its contagion. In ’92 the fear of infection was the beginning of wisdom. Radix malorum est cupiditas. And so, leaving behind Greene and a disintegrating city, the well-heeled passed us on the roads, making for the villages.
They might have saved themselves the trouble. Nobody wanted them for all their wealth, not even in their barns and hovels, for fear of the visitation. One poor rich bugger, begging for shelter, stood outside a pigsty all night, asking to be allowed at least to lie down with the occupants. He quoted scripture. ‘Even the Prodigal Son,’ he pleaded, ‘lay down with the swine and ate their leavings, and God saved him in the end.’ But the yokels kept the rich nob at pitchforks’ length and, considering the wind of him, resorted to stones. ‘The Prodigal Son wasn’t carrying the fucking plague in his bowels, friend! We don’t want our pigs infected, to pass it on to us! So you can take your prodigal arse out of here and back to fucking London!’
There are few times in the history of the world when money loses its power to persuade and to corrupt, and to blind men to the fear of death. This was one of them. So some rich buggers died on the skirts of villages where every single door stood shut and barred against them, and their corpses lay rotting in the sun, laden with maggots and silver. They might as well have been dead dogs in ditches, spurned by the very rats. Some of the bodies were wind-picked bones before anybody ventured near enough to take the trash from their pockets. But there were others who wouldn’t even pick out the gold pieces that winked and glittered among the ribs, glinting in the sun. They believed the disease to be malignant enough to remain alive even in bleached bones and barren metal. And besides, the money was blood-money of a kind, and the place where it lay a potter’s field.
Back in London, four days after Greene died, the City Council issued its first plague order for years. On account of the pestilence all performances were forbidden until further notice. Back on the road! Keep your players’ hides hidden—and at least seven miles from the city. Well, Francis, I wasn’t going to stay away and let Greenes Groatsworth ruin my reputation, plague or no plague. The time was out of joint and I made sure I would set it right. That’s when I came back to London, aiming for Chettle’s testicles, and saw the city sights for myself.
‘You went back, you asshead! I never cast you as a death-wisher.’
Apocalypse on show everywhere and admission free for anyone that had the brainlessness or the balls to attend. And so the powerful play went on, with real live actors, and plenty of dead ones too, jostling for the parts. Who needed theatres?
It was still raining when I arrived, God’s great arrows raining down hard. I’d travelled all day and it was dark by the time I came through Newgate. All the way along Cheapside and Lombard Street and up Gracious Street to Bishopsgate and Shoreditch the burial parties were out with their torches and barrows. They scarcely needed the torches. There were fires everywhere and tar barrels burning at every corner, purging the air of pestilence – so they said, though the stench was like hell on a bad day, with the bloodshot columns of smoke blotting out the stars. ‘Bring out your dead,’ they bellowed, stopping their barrows at the doors daubed with red crosses and inscribed with the desperate words slashed in scarlet, Lord have mercy upon us! The bodies were put out for collection, some naked, still barely cold, and in some cases horribly disfigured, as though the buboes had crashed on them like black bombs, spattering the flesh from crown to toe, like old Job in the ash-pit. ‘No more stews for you, friend, your days are numbered! And you in there – bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!’ Cries that were accompanied by the dreadful tolling of bells.
But there were plenty who didn’t bring out their dead, and watchers were employed to identify those suspected of infection or of harbouring an infected family. It was understandable. People didn’t want their goods destroyed, they didn’t want their houses shut up, didn’t want to be quarantined, incarcerated, to be sealed in like the living dead. They didn’t want their dearly beloved departed consigned to the ignominy of mass burial – a mother, a sister, a baby, humiliated along with hundreds of others, hurled into the pits to land horribly spread-eagled on a mountain of anonymous corpses, many of them naked and unwound. And so they tried to smuggle out the deceased by night and negligence, to bury their own dead, to corrupt the lurking watchers with huge sums to look the other way. The plague had become a kind of crime, the worst in the book. Thieves and murderers were small fry now.
Some of the sufferers, anxious to spare their families these horrors, took their own lives, ran to the river and hurled themselves cursing to their deaths. Some made little fuss over it. They walked up to the water, slipped softly in at the edge, just like Kate Hamlet, pulled the cool Thames quietly over their festering bodies, and said goodnight, quenching the fires of plague while fearing the fires of hell that now awaited them, suicides as they were. The flames of the disease raged through a man’s body for three or four days at most – nothing compared to the lake of fire that burns forever. And yet such was the unbearable torment that people put an end to it there and then, unable to exist an hour longer on the miserable island that life had become for them, this bitter little bank and shoal. The fires of damnation had suddenly become preferable to those of the plague. Would Master Ridley have agreed, I wonder, burning in his fire outside Balliol? Or what would Dives have thought, watching from hell as they tore the clothes from their pain-racked frames and rushed to the riverbanks to die by flood, allowing their howling mouths to drown in silence on the cool and comfort of the river bed, down in the beautiful darkness, away from the shrieking, festering city? What would Dives have given for one drop of that precious water? Sweet Thames run softly.
Others were far less selfless. Sickening and dying, they leaned out of their windows and breathed into the faces of innocent pedes-trians, spitting into the streets in the fury of their hearts. Or they threw their plague-plasters into the windows of healthy and wealthy homes. ‘Here you are, you fuckers! Try these on for size! Why should you be spared? Have a gobful of bloody sputum! You can come to hell with us for company!’ And the rich ran screaming from the sight of the cast linens splattered on their floors and festering in the streets, larded with suppurations and burst blood.
‘Fucking hell!’
Oh, come on Francis, you can see why some were driven to it. It’s human nature to seek out companions in misery, especially the rich and favoured ones – to want to ram the silver spoons right up their pampered arses. But there was something else too: the feeling that God had let them down, in spite of Lazarus, so-called levelling death preferring to huddle down not in princes’ palaces but in poor men’s cottages and the rat-infested slums. That’s where the buboes bred best, there and in the bear-pits and brothels of Clerkenwell and Southwark and Shoreditch, the sinfully polluted suburbs.
And in the theatres, of course, death held court and pitched his tents, taking off the poor rather than the rich, in terrifying numbers. Worst of all was the lot of the prisoners, starving in the jails. Jack Donne’s brother Henry ran into King Death in Newgate, where he was waiting to be tried on a charge of harbouring a priest. The plague took him apart, saving Tyburn the trouble. Hangmen grumbled that they were losing out on fees while the gravediggers were laughing all the way to the Rialto – those who didn’t handle one plague-batch too many, that is.
There were few perks of the plague, and they were gruesome enough wages at that. Nurses robbed the dying of their last blankets and proved to be cunning murderers if a fat-pursed patient showed any alarming signs of recovery. Masons paid nothing for hair to mix their lime, nor glovers to stuff their balls with, not a penny, for they had it for nothing, it simply dropped off men’s heads and beards faster than an army of barber-surgeons c
ould have shaved it. The ground was adrift and it lay like snow. If hair breeches had been in fashion, they said, what a world it would have been for tailors. My father would have made a fortune. But few thought along these lines. Preserving life at all costs was more precious than the usual pursuits of money and power.
Charlatans flourished. The streets were leprous with them. And their purses hung from their belts like bulls’ balls, though any of them seriously trying to combat the plague were pissing into the wind. But the drowning man will clutch at the straw, and a man drowning in his own blood in a city paralysed by fear will grab whatever comes his way even if the most clapped-out quack in Christendom slaps it down on the table as a cure for the incurable.
‘How do you cure the incurable?’
Rosemary and onions, wormwood and lemons, vinegar and cloves, arsenic and mercury, held to the buboes to draw away the poison; tobacco and dried toads, smoked together; the inevitable white wine and henshit; sherry and gunpowder and salad oil concocted; aristolochia longa and celandine boiled together and strained through a cloth with a dram of the best mithridate and the same of ivory finely powdered, together with six spoonfuls of dragon-water, to be drunk each morning; the dried root of angelica, chewed or sniffed on the dried end of a ship-rope; plasters of egg yolk, honey, and herb-of-grace chopped small; hot bricks laid to the soles of the feet; even a live pullet held squawking against the sores and swellings till the venom entered the sacrificial bird and it died. Some doctors sliced the bird in two and clapped the bleeding sections, still twitching, to the suppurations.
‘Horrible – and your son-in-law a physician too!’
And the ultimate cure, on which the swindling knaves grew fat: the horn of the unicorn grated and boiled in wine to hot-rinse the mouth. Or ground to a powder so fine it would cause a violent sweat and expel the plague poison at fever pitch. Where did the unicorns come from? The quacks were busy grating their own toenails, it was said, and passing it off as the sacred powder. All that was ever expelled by these bastards was the tortured life of the victim, poured out in a torrent of vomit and blood.
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