Читать книгу The Crippled Angel - Sara Douglass - Страница 17

Margery Harwood lived with her husband William and their three children in a comfortable house on Ironmonger Lane off Bishopsgate Street. Margery was proud of her house—she spent an inordinate amount of time polishing, sweeping, washing and straightening—but her pride in her house formed only one part of her general satisfaction with life. She and William had emigrated to London when they were just married, and Margery pregnant with her first child. They’d come from a small village just east of Gravesend, where there was little prospect for an ironworker of William’s calibre. So to London they had come, and if the first years establishing William’s business were hard, then all the effort had been worthwhile. Now Margery was in charge of a house of ten rooms, a pantry, cellar and wine store that was stocked with far more goods than those of her neighbours, and three servants and a cook. William not only had a thriving business, but he also had five apprentices, as well as two guildsmen, working under him. Margery and William’s children—three sons, praise be to God!—were healthy, and well ahead of their classmates at the guild school in learning their sums and letters. Their future was assured. Life was good.

Margery was in the kitchen at five of the clock that afternoon when everything fell apart. She’d been busy all day, supervising her servants as they cleaned out the cellar in preparation for the crates of spring-fresh vegetables that would soon fill it, consulting with the cook about that evening’s fare, and then helping her to strip the eels and baste the vegetables for William’s favourite pie, and thus Margery had enjoyed no free time at all in which to stand in her doorway and gossip with the neighbours.

She had no idea of what had happened at St Paul’s that day, and, by virtue of the fact that her home was tucked right at the end of Ironmonger Lane, a reasonable distance from Bishopsgate Street which was itself on the far side of London from St Paul’s, she’d heard none of the fuss that had carried up and down most of the city’s main thoroughfares. Both William and her sons had yet to come home, and in any case, Margery wasn’t expecting them for another hour or so.

So when the scraping at the kitchen door came, Margery merely muttered her displeasure at the interruption, told the cook and the kitchen girl that she’d see what was about outside, wiped her hands on her apron, and walked to the door that opened into the kitchen courtyard.

Ironmonger Lane was a quiet part of London, rarely visited by the beggars and criminals seen in so many other streets, and so Margery had no hesitation in throwing open the door.

A massive black dog stood not three feet away, staring at Margery with yellow eyes, snarling so viciously that ropes of saliva spattered across Margery’s apron.

Margery gave a small shriek, and slammed the door closed.

“Mistress?” asked the cook, staring up from the table where she’d been rolling out pastry.

Margery took a deep breath. “A dog. A stray,” she said. “Nothing to be concerned about.” And she walked back to the table to her duties, resolving to ask William to speak to the local alderman about the problem of stray dogs.

At that moment she heard their front door open, then, after the shortest of intervals, slam closed. Footsteps thudded down the corridor towards the kitchen.

William, their three sons, and two of his apprentices. William’s face was shiny with sweat, his pale blue eyes wide and panicked.

“Lock the doors,” he said, his voice hoarse and breathless. “Shutter the windows!”

“William—”

He ignored her, brushing past the cook and the kitchen girl to bolt closed the shutter over the kitchen windows. “Harry!” he said, looking at his eldest son. “Upstairs—the windows!”

Harry nodded, and darted away towards the stairs.

“William, what is going on?”

“Pestilence,” William said, staring about wildly as if looking for something else to shutter closed.

Margery drew in a deep breath. “But we haven’t suffered from the pestilence in—”

“How long it has been doesn’t matter,” William said, and directed his middle son into the front rooms of the house to shutter the windows. “What matters is that the pestilence is back now. Have you opened the door to anyone this day? Any beggars, anyone who has touched you?”

Margery stared at him, then very slowly looked down at her apron. Wordlessly she tore it off, then bundled it into the coals in the hearth.

It was too late. By evening one of the apprentices, the cook, two of Margery’s sons, and William himself were fighting raging fevers. Huge swellings appeared in their armpits, at the bases of their necks, and in their groins.

They were tight and agonising, filled almost to bursting point with black blood and pus.

Margery did what she could—and she was left on her own to do it, because the two still-healthy servants had fled the house at the first signs of sickness—but that was little enough. She moved from bed to bed, wiping faces and hands with cloths wrung out in cool, herbed water. When her youngest son and one of the apprentices began to soil themselves with great clotting black messes, she changed their linens, her heart almost failing at their screams of agony as she rolled them over.

In the dark of early morning, as she was trying to change the linens under the apprentice, three of his buboes burst, and he bled to death, screaming, in under ten minutes.

And the nightmare had only just begun.

By dawn, William was dead, drowned in the mass of blood and pus that had collected in his lungs. The child and the apprentice who had so far escaped were tossing with fever, and Margery, in emptying out a bucket of blood and pus-stained rags into the courtyard refuse heap, suddenly realised that her arms were aching, and difficult to move.

There were hard lumps in both of her armpits.

Margery stood there for long minutes, the bucket at her feet, staring sightlessly at the refuse heap before her.

She moved her arms, very slightly, and again felt the painful swellings in her armpits.

Margery began to weep, great sobbing gulps, full of exhaustion and terror. She remembered how only a day ago her life had been so good, how the future shone so bright, how she and William had done so well for themselves from such humble beginnings.

Now?

Now it was all gone. Gone in less than a day.

Margery slowly sank to the cold cobbles, lay down, and waited to die, staring up at the grey sky with her weeping eyes.

Much later, dogs began to feed on her almost dead body.