Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  “Jesus, Rose,” Oliver said, and coming from him the sound seemed tinier, even, than it was. There was admiration in his voice.

  Rose crept stealthily under the bed, tugging the feather bed after her inch by inch. She could still see Oliver’s shadow projected by the candlelight upon the wall. It sat up and looked at its wound.

  “Sorry, old boy,” Oliver said drunkenly. “Had no idea she did such things. Have some brandy.”

  Oliver’s shadow poured brandy onto its wounded part.

  “Aaah!” Oliver cried. “Sorry, old boy, very sorry!” His shadow drank from the bottle and then fell back on the mattress.

  Her head filled with the raw aroma of brandy, Rose wrapped herself up in the feather bed and watched the shadow some more in case Oliver should rouse and grope under the bed for her. But he was sore and drunk, and he soon fell asleep, twitching and muttering in his dreams.

  Rose heard music. It was coming through the wall of the house, and she realized that she had been hearing it, faint and lovely, all during the time that these awful things had been happening to her. It was Fanny Harding, playing the harpsichord in her own identical house next door.

  Rose decided that she would creep away as soon as Oliver fell asleep and slip into bed with Fanny. He wouldn’t trouble her there. The brute would never do anything to frighten or injure Fanny, his Fanny-my-love, whom he loved better than anything else in the world.

  Cowering naked under the bed with Oliver moaning and drinking brandy and whispering her name just above her, Rose began to think about other things. She remembered the cat squalling down the table, knocking everything over, flying through the window like a stone.

  She was sure that the man who had stared at Fanny while she sang was the one who had thrown the cat into the room. He appeared to be rich, even a lord.

  “Who is he, Fanny?” she whispered, imagining herself warm in bed with her friend. “He said he wanted to eat you up.”

  “Rose,” Oliver bellowed, rousing up. “Rose!”

  Rose lay very still, watching his shadow. In a moment he fell back and began to snore. Rose giggled. Men really could not help themselves.

  2

  There were good reasons why Oliver loved Henry Harding’s daughter as if she were his own. The two men had been inseparable friends since childhood—so inseparable, in fact, that they had both seen Fanny at the same moment on the day of her birth. Many events in their lives had bound the two men together, but no tie was stronger than Fanny’s birth, which took place on February 6, 1685, the day Charles II died and Fanny’s mother died too.

  Because of the difference in their sizes—Henry in middle age was a small quick-moving man, hardly larger than his daughter, and as a boy he had been even littler—Oliver had believed for nearly forty years that he was protecting his friend from the dangers of the world. In fact the arrangement worked the other way around. At Saint Paul’s School, where they met, Henry had done Oliver’s Latin and mathematics for him, and by providing him with plausible explanations for his crimes, kept him safe from the masters who wanted to beat him because he was so large and so good-natured. Henry had never been in any physical danger because nobody had ever wanted to hurt him. He had the gift of enthusiasm—everything interested him, new and old, and he had never heard a life story that did not absorb him. His reddish hair grew in curls and he had thick curling eyebrows that he twisted between his thumb and forefinger. He had a wonderful smile that began deep in the dark blue eyes that he had passed on to Fanny and then lit up his whole face with an expression of innocence and eager interest.

  There were 153 boys at Saint Paul’s, the same number as the fishes brought up from the Sea of Galilee by Jesus and His companions in the miracle of the draught of fishes. At school, Henry formed the three lasting enthusiasms of his life—strangers, books, and Latin. Many of the boys were foreigners, and from them he learned to admire the exotic. He learned to love books and Latin from one of the masters, an ebullient curate named William Peleg Ethelred Graves, who taught Latin by having the boys recite Cicero, Caesar, and especially Horace while hopping on one leg and talking in the dead language as fast as they could. Graves believed that this combination of physical and mental exercise eliminated shyness and boredom, the two great enemies of learning. However, few scholars could do two things at the same time, as Graves’s method required. Henry was one of the rare boys who was both intelligent enough and athletic enough to excel at these strenuous recitations. When Graves discovered that Henry understood everything that he read in English as well as in Latin, he loaned him books. The boy and the man became friends, and every year for the rest of Graves’s life, even after the old teacher became arthritic and had to hold on to Henry for support, they would dine together on December 8, the birthday of Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 B.C.), the Roman poet known to the English as Horace, and afterward hop side by side on one leg far into the night, reciting in unison, always ending with the motto of their friendship: “Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum/Grata superveniet quae non sperabitur hora”—Believe that every day is your last; the hour you don’t anticipate will come as a happy surprise.

  Henry had been reciting Horace, a small boy hopping up and down in a dim room at Saint Paul’s, on the winter day that Oliver had seen him for the first time. He smiled at Oliver in the midst of the Latin for no reason at all. Something about Henry, Oliver never really knew what—the smile, the puppylike quickness of his movements, the ginger hair, the smallness of him—tickled Oliver; he laughed aloud and threw his arm around the other boy. Oliver was just as tickled every time he saw his friend—which was every single day—over the next forty years. Henry brought something into the room with him wherever he went—a childlike lack of fear, a slightly crazy goodness, a generous heart, again Oliver could not name it—that made the other man’s whole chest and throat fill up at the sight of him. Henry was the great love of Oliver’s life. He felt the same emotion for Fanny, who had her father’s smile as well as his eyes, and was as beautiful as Henry was plain.

  As for Henry’s memories of Oliver, they mostly involved football. Even as a boy Oliver had been the most powerful player in the City of London. He played like a demented giant, knocking grown men down like ninepins and howling at the top of his booming voice. Henry, too, loved the game and was always just behind his friend, sometimes even holding on to his shirt with one hand as he dribbled the ball downfield. Henry was strong for his size and very clever with his feet, and because he was so intelligent he saw what the other side was going to do before they did it.

  “Left, Oliver! Right, Oliver!” he would shout, guiding the juggernaut that was pulling him toward the enemy goal. At the end of a game Oliver’s face would be covered with blood from the blows he had taken, but Henry would be fresh and unmarked.

  Football, as it was played in Britain in the 1600s, was a far bloodier affair than the game the Romans had introduced into the islands in the first century of the Christian era. Usually it was played in the streets with twenty or thirty or even fifty to a side. The only rule was to move the ball across the enemy’s goal, and as it might be a mile or more between goals, a proper match commonly lasted from morning to nightfall. The ball usually was an inflated pig’s bladder that still smelled of the animal and was sometimes encased in leather. On the great English football day, Shrove Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, nearly every village and parish in the realm had one last match before Lent began. Because these contests were played by sides that had reason to hate each other—countrymen against villagers, merchants against gentlemen, carpenters’ guild against masons’ guild—they did not so much resemble a sport as a battle between human beings who were so primitive that they had not invented weapons but made war with blows and kicks and strangleholds. The holy day was always marked by cracked skulls and broken shins from one end of the realm to the other, and most English monarchs since Edward the Confessor had tried to suppress the game on grounds that it was noisy, lawless, drunken, an
d produced so many young cripples that the kingdom was in danger of not having soldiers enough to fight its enemies in real battles. None had succeeded in keeping the English from their sport. When the cry “All fellows to football!” was heard, every able-bodied lad turned out. Oliver and Henry were usually the first on the field.

  In the year 1665, when Henry and Oliver were fourteen years old, there was no Shrove Tuesday football match in London. The whole city was in the grip of the Great Plague. The first victims had been diagnosed in December 1664, and by the following summer the disease, which was carried by fleas that lived on the feet of rats, was killing thousands of Londoners every week. Children sang:

  Ring-a-ring o’ roses

  A pocket full o’ posies

  A-choo! A-choo!

  All fall down

  The rhyme was a reference to the dreaded tokens, or symptoms, of the disease: fever, rash, cough, and the dark wartlike swellings, about the size of nutmegs, that appeared on the thighs of the doomed. Bubonic plague was always present in London and other cities of the time and there had been epidemics before, but this one was quickly recognized as being exceptionally dangerous. Parliament was recessed, the king went to Hampton Court, and thousands fled to the countryside, where they were stoned and pelted with manure by country people terrified of infection.

  About ten thousand people moved to boats moored in the middle of the Thames. Oliver’s family was among the latter, and Henry rowed out nearly every day in a hired boat to talk to his friend across the brown water. Oliver’s old father would not let Henry approach nearer than fifty yards because he had come from the pestilential city, and in the event this proved to be wisdom, because of all the Londoners who tried to flee from the plague, the boat people had the highest rate of survival.

  In August, the hottest month in memory, Henry’s father decided to take his family to Norwood, in the Surrey woods, to drink a potion, concocted by the Gypsies, that ‘was supposed to protect whoever drank it against infection. Many plague remedies, often composed of such ingredients as urine and sulfur, were being sold in the city. The Gypsy brew was supposed to be particularly powerful because it was made from secret forest plants known only to the Gypsies and was accompanied by a magical incantation.

  In order to reach Norwood it was necessary to cross the Thames. Oliver arranged to slip away from his parents and meet Henry on the southern bank of the river, so that they walked along the forest trail to the Gypsy encampment together. There were hundreds of people waiting in line to drink the potion, which was dispensed from a single wooden cup that was passed from lip to lip. While the customer drank, after placing a shilling coin in the palm of the Gypsy who held out the cup, another Gypsy—a withered crone who had burning eyes but no chin at all beneath her tattooed lower lip—sang out the magical incantation in shrill Romany.

  From the woods beyond came the sound of men and boys shouting and loudly grunting as the wind was knocked out of them.

  “That sounds like football,” Oliver said. “Are you going to drink that filthy Gypsy muck?”

  The boys had not played football since winter; even the school had banned it because there was no place to play except the streets, which were strewn with rotting corpses awaiting burial, and the Anglican clergymen who were in charge at Saint Paul’s did not want their boys kicking a ball on such a playing field. “The Lord Jesus forbids it,” the masters said, invoking the Savior’s name as they always did when denying the boys a pleasure.

  “I don’t believe the Lord Jesus wants me to drink it,” Henry said.

  The boys slipped away and joined the match. Henry always remembered it more clearly than any other they had played together. The playing field was a muddy space dotted with saplings whose leaves filtered the morning sunshine into a pale green twilight; in after years Henry always recalled that particular light and the fact that the Gypsies, when they rushed at him, smelled of forest rot and woodsmoke. It was a hard match, with Gypsies on both sides playing treacherously against the English boys, but finally Henry stole the ball and dashed toward the goal. Oliver, who was already bigger and stronger than most grown men, went ahead of him, howling and cursing and knocking Gypsies over left and right. The goal was the stump of an enormous oak, and as the boys approached it, a dozen Gypsies, then twenty, joined arms to keep them out.

  “Ninepins!” Oliver shouted.

  He seized a sapling in either hand, threw himself back, and then catapulted his body at the Gypsy line. Struck by nearly two hundred pounds of bone and slabby muscle, the Gypsies fell, grunting and shrieking in pain. Henry darted across the goal. Oliver rose up, picked Henry up by the armpits and swung him over his head as if he were no heavier than a child, and shouted “Oof!.” in imitation of the swarthy fallen enemy.

  The potion was all gone by the time Henry and Oliver returned to the encampment.

  A week later, Henry’s father woke up and discovered that he had developed the tokens of plague. He showed them to Henry, the only boy among his five children.

  “This is the fever, touch my head,” he said. “This is the rash.” He dropped his breeches. “These are the tokens—you see? Dark and something like a nutmeg. Soon I will go out of my head. I’ll be unable to look at the light, I’ll beg for water. Soon after that I’ll be dead. You must know the signs because you’ll be alone with your mother and the girls.”

  He gave Henry a leather sack tied at the mouth with leather laces.

  “There’s a thousand pounds inside, saved by me in case this happened. Have me buried in the church-yard of Saint Andrew by the Wardrobe. The others, too.”

  “What others?” Henry said. He was weeping.

  “We may all die, Henry. Be a man and try to die last. Make sure they bury us by the church in consecrated ground. Otherwise they’ll take your money and dump us into a ditch in Tuttle Fields.”

  He took off his trousers, folded them carefully, and lay down in the bed.

  “Close the shutters, Henry,” he said. “The light hurts my eyes.”

  Henry did as he was asked and then sat down beside the bed.

  “If you live, and still have money, go to the Royal Exchange and see a man named Adkins, Praise God Adkins,” the old man said. “You can trust him.”

  In his final hours Henry’s father frothed at the mouth and tried to run into the street. Henry struggled with him, looking into his father’s delirious eyes as the two of them, both small and wiry, spun around the room like wrestlers. The delirium came and went.

  “Tie me to the bed,” the dying man said in one of his moments of sanity. Henry did so, and later untied the knots when the dead-cart came around for the corpse.

  After that, things happened as Henry’s father had predicted. The authorities ordered a red cross painted on the door of the Hardings’ house in Shoe Lane and posted guards armed with sharpened halberds at the threshold to keep the victims inside for forty days and nights.

  When Henry did not come out onto the river for a whole day, Oliver came ashore to find him. When he saw the red cross on the Hardings’ door and the halberdiers standing in front, he went to the nearest tavern and bought a quart of ale and a stack of toast, the Londoner’s breakfast. He tapped on the window glass until Henry came.

  “Breakfast,” he said.

  “My father’s dead in the night and my sister Henrietta has the tokens,” Henry said. “You’d best go away, Oliver.”

  “If I drink the whole quart of ale I’ll be drunk,” Oliver said. “Here, have some.”

  Henry drank, then dipped a slice of toast into the ale, soaked it, and ate it.

  “That’s better,” Oliver said when they had finished. “Where’s your dad?”

  “Still in his bed. The dead-cart hasn’t come around yet.”

  He told Oliver about his father’s wish to be buried in Saint Andrew’s churchyard.

  “But I can’t go with the bastards to make sure,” Henry said. “They won’t let me out of the house.”

  The dead-cart wa
s coming through the street, the attendants crying, “Bring out your dead, bring out your dead.” Henry watched it with glassy eyes, all traces of his old happiness gone from his face.

  “I’ll go, then,” Oliver said.

  Oliver walked behind the dead-cart all the way to the Thames. He kept his eyes on Henry’s father, who lay with his eyes open across the lap of a dead girl with a face full of freckles. It seemed strange to see a man Oliver had known so well lying dead on the heap of bodies with other bodies thrown on top of him.

  By the Temple Stairs that led down to the river, two boys in rags who were about Oliver’s age ran down a big gray tomcat, cornering it by a wall and clubbing it to death. One of them took out a knife and cut off the cat’s head.

  “Why are you doing that?” asked Oliver, who had been living on his boat for six weeks and knew little of what was new in the city.

  “The lord mayor has ordered every cat and dog killed,” said the larger boy. “They carry the plague, he says.”

  He opened a sack he had been carrying and the heads of ten or fifteen dogs and cats rolled out onto the dust, cats’ eyes staring, dogs’ tongues lolling.

  “They pay tuppence each,” the boy said.

  There were many more corpses in the street now. Mixed in with the waxen men and women and children were hundreds of dead dogs and cats, many of them decapitated. The dead were covered with rats, which had come out by the thousands to feed on the human bodies and on those of their cats and dogs, the rat’s natural enemies. The dead-cart men dumped all the corpses onto a stack, kicking rats out of the way to make room.

  “Which one was yours?” they asked.

  Oliver pointed to Henry’s father.

  “Twenty guineas.”

  Oliver showed them the money Henry had given him. “You’ll get it when the man is safely in the ground,” he said.

  They looked at the size of Oliver and did not argue. He saw Henry’s father buried in Saint Andrew’s churchyard, and then, one after the other, Henry’s mother and all four of his sisters. The last to die was Henry’s favorite, a six-year-old girl named Pamela who could not bear to look at the light. All the others had suffered when the sun came in at the window, but Pamela, who had been a jolly child, fond of games and full of saucy remarks, was in agony. Even the strip of sunlight in the crack in the shutters made her scream. Henry darkened her room by hanging bedclothes over the window, but on the last day she thrashed about in her bed so that he tied her down and held his hands over her eyes while she died, screaming.