The Wildest Rake

Mistress Brent, moaning in acute pain, had wept, ‘They will burn my new hangings. They will burn all my best furniture ... my bed curtains, my best linen. . . Alas, alas. ...’

Andrew watched her sombrely. Cornelia plucked at his black sleeve.

‘Can you do nothing? I cannot bear to hear her cry like that. She is in agony. It wrenches my heart to hear her.’

‘I can soften the carbuncles and lance them,’ he said gently. ‘I can lessen the symptoms, yet not cure her. There is no cure I know of, I am afraid.’

‘You mean she will die, she must die?’

‘No,’ he said heavily. ‘She may live. Only God knows her fate. I cannot do much. Have you got the nitre to hand?’

He had asked her to procure nitre, tar and rosin, and now he placed these on the leaping flames of the faggot fire which she had laid, at his instructions, for the sweeter odour of burning wood was better than the oily smoke of sea-coal fires for freshening plague-ridden air.

The thick odours of the burning filled the chamber. They coughed and stumbled away.

Mistress Brent was rolling her head around, torn between the pain of the plague and the pain of her hip.

Andrew gave her some physic which calmed her a little. From the smell of it, Cornelia guessed it to contain some sleeping draught.

Her mother was delirious, mumbling thickly from blackened lips.

Andrew moved to the door. She ran after him and caught at his arm. ‘You are not leaving her? You cannot go and leave her to die like this. ‘

He sighed. ‘I have other patients, my dear. Ellen is sick with the plague, too, and likely to die.’

‘Ellen?’ She shrank back, eyes widening in horror. ‘Ellen? Oh, God, no.’

He looked at her in some surprise. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She, too, sickened suddenly overnight.’

‘God, God, it is my fault,’ Cornelia moaned. ‘I asked her to visit my mother. I brought this thing into the house.’

Andrew frowned. ‘You could not know that this would happen. We cannot even be sure your mother caught it from Ellen—they may both have caught it from some other person. Nobody knows how the plague is carried. Some say it is in infected linen, others in water, others in the very air we breathe.’

‘It is my fault,’ Cornelia repeated feverishly.

He looked at her in anxious alarm. ‘You must not excite yourself. You must stay calm.’

She laughed at him, her voice high and shrill. ‘Stay calm at such a moment? Only you could say such a thing. Andrew, I am frightened. I do not want to die.’

He looked into her eyes, his own cool and compelling, and gripped her by the shoulders.

‘You are not going to die. I will not let you.’ The ice in his voice was the surface of a cold and grimly determined passion. She heard the strength beneath, and responded.

‘I am sorry.’ She stepped back, trying to smile, her lips quivering wistfully. ‘I am behaving badly. See, I am myself again, now.’

He nodded. ‘Good. Now, give your mother the medicines I have left at the intervals I commanded. Keep her as warm as you can. Keep the windows tightly shut. The fire high. Burn the nitre from time to time. And, for yourself, eat and drink sparingly, but so that you are never hungry. Be moderate.’

‘When will you come back?’ she asked.

‘When I can do so. I will not be able to visit my patients now unless they have the plague, for fear of carrying it to them. But there are plague victims enough for me, I fear. Now that it has entered the city it will spread like fire.’

She was horrified by this thought. ‘You believe so? Oh Andrew, what are we all to do?’

‘It is the judgment of God on our sins,’ he told her, his blue eyes flashing.

She did not know what to say to that, but let him go.

Mistress Brent grew steadily worse during the evening. Her body, weakened already by the pain of her broken hip, could not stand up beneath the new strain. She was beyond recollection now, wandering in her thoughts, calling in a childish voice for her mother, weeping over the death of a long-dead cat, crying in a shrill voice that she was dying, dying.