The bleak tone pierced Antony’s weariness, and he saw in the candlelight that Jack’s ironical face was pale and strained. “You—are not ill? ”
His mind leapt to that conclusion without prodding; it was the obvious one, nowadays. With Jack, more than obvious: the man, in his lunacy, was offering his services as a physician in the parish of St. Giles Cripplegate, now among the worst afflicted. Over three hundred and fifty dead there last week, and those were only the ones reported as plague; they were scarcely half the full total. Antony’s mind tallied the numbers reflexively.
The doctor shook his head. “Not I. But Burnett, yes.”
It should have upset Antony. Perhaps somewhere, far beneath his exhaustion, it did. At the moment, it was a blow to insensate flesh. Impact, without meaning. “How—”
“I called at your house this morning. He answered the door in a fever.” Jack’s jaw tensed, heralding his next words. “I examined him, and found the tokens.”
Hard red spots on the body, like fleabites. Coupled with fever, an infallible sign of the plague.
“Antony.” The name broke through his dazed blankness. Jack crossed the room with swift strides, but halted himself before he could take Antony’s arm. No doubt the doctor had worn gloves and all the rest of his usual costume when examining Burnett, but even standing this close could be dangerous, if Jack had breathed in the distempered vapors. How much longer could the man survive, going so often among the diseased?
“Antony,” Jack said, softly. “You must send him to a pest-house.”
He shook, roused himself. “Incarcerate him among the dying? I might as well shoot him myself.”
“He’ll likely die anyway,” Jack said. The topic was too familiar for tact. “The pest-house will not help his chances—but it will help yours. Antony, if you don’t send him away, they’ll shut up your house. With you in it.”
The backbone of all their attempts to stem the plague. A man could carry the distemper without knowing it; anyone who lived under the same roof as a victim must be locked in, until enough time had passed to prove they were not sick.
Or until everyone inside was dead.
Antony swallowed and turned away. “You have said yourself—the pest-houses are overwhelmed.” They had managed to build three, supplementing the two left over from the last great visitation, but they were scarce able to hold a few hundred, let alone the stricken thousands.
Jack would not let him dodge the question. “If you will not send him away, then you must leave. Remove yourself from the house, today, and go into the countryside. Join Kate. Shutting yourself in with him…you might as well put that pistol to your own head.”
They had fought this point before. Jack hated that order, and championed the pest-houses. What he advised now was nothing less than the knowing subversion of law. If Antony already bore the plague, he would carry it with him into the countryside, as others had done before him: the exact situation the plague order was designed to prevent.
That argument would make not a dent in Jack’s skull. Instead Antony said, “I cannot leave. We are meeting today to arrange relief; we’ve found ways to shift collections of coin from the parishes that can spare it to those that cannot, and to delay the payment of certain debts. Half London can scarcely feed itself, Jack, and trade is at a standstill. Would you have me abandon my city to famine and collapse?”
“No.” A trace of the old, wry smile crossed Jack’s face. “I know you better than that. But you cannot do that work shut up in your house with a red cross on the door, either. You must send Burnett away.”
The very thought of it ached. Burnett was loyal, and deserved loyalty in return. Antony would gladly have kept him at home, and hired some woman to nurse him—one who had survived the infection already. Far better than sending him into that festering realm of hell in St. Giles Cripplegate, where they could almost throw a corpse out a window and have it land in a plague pit.
Where Burnett would die, alone.
But keeping him would mean the end of Antony’s own ability to help.
More footsteps outside. Sir William Turner appeared in the doorway, and someone else hovered behind him. Two aldermen, at least; with Antony, three. Perhaps they would get more. And together, they might keep London on her feet.
They would. They had to.
Antony lowered his voice, and hoped that hid the shame in it. “Very well. Do everything you can for him, Jack.”
The doctor gripped his arm, heedless of risk. “My oath to God. I will save him if I can.”
CHEAP WARD, LONDON: September 13, 1665
Despite the oppressive heat, Antony shivered as he made his way on foot down Cheapside. Charred logs still crouched at the corner with Old Change, though the sudden downpour that extinguished the bonfire last week had vanished without a trace, returning the summer’s terrible dryness in its wake.
Three days of bonfires, burning throughout the City, ordered by the King from his court at Salisbury. Three days of flame, to purify the air.
Seven thousand dead, that very same week.
He swerved left to give a wide margin to a body slumped against the wall of the Mermaid Tavern. Dead, or dying; it hardly mattered which. The reek of death was in the air, the churchyards filled to overflowing and beyond, despite the orders that insisted all corpses be buried at least six feet deep.
His change of course brought him too close to another man, who shot out bony hands and seized Antony by the front of his waistcoat, crumpling the sweaty cloth in his fingers. “They insist we purge our bodies with potions,” the man gasped, foul breath gusting into Antony’s face. “They insist we purge the air with fire. But do we purge our souls? Do we repent our sins, which have brought this visitation upon us?”
A moment of frozen paralysis; then Antony shoved at the man, struggling to force him away. The buttons of his waistcoat gave way before the stranger did. “Get back! Do not come near me.”
The man laughed at him, exposing broken teeth, as if he had been struck in the face. “You have nothing to fear—if you are a righteous man. This is the Lord’s will, His divine punishment for a nation that has strayed from the path of holiness.”
A filthy, damnable Puritan. Rage flushed Antony to the roots of his thinning hair. “God,” he snarled in the man’s face, “has nothing to do with it. This? Is random bloody chance. It is our physical squalor, the garbage in our streets, the foul air we breathe. The pestilential suburbs we permit to crowd around our walls. God is not here. He watches from above as we scream in our agonies and die, begging His mercy or cursing His name, and He has nothing to do with any of it!”
The last shouted words echoed in his ears, reflecting off the smoke-stained walls of the shops that lined this once great street. The Puritan was running by then, staggering down Bow Lane, desperate to get away. Antony gasped for breath, his head pounding. When had he last eaten? He could not recall. With Burnett gone, vanished into the maw of the pest-house, no doubt dead by now, he made shift for himself as best he could.
There should still be a cold meat pie for him at home—if he had not eaten it already. Antony could not remember. They could feed him below, but he would not go; he could not bear the sight of the fae anymore, clean and whole and safe from the cataclysm above. If this heat did not break, if the plague did not subside, then even the living few would soon be gone, and London left to the ghosts and the faeries in the shadows.