Cornelia sighed. ‘Well, she would not know him anyway. It may be best.’
Andrew nodded. ‘Yes, there is always great danger in entering a plague room.’ He looked at Cornelia with a wild, almost savage expression. ‘You know that, do you not?’
She looked back with a dull acceptance, feeling a strange pang of pity for him. ‘Yes,’ she said coolly. ‘I know that. Andrew, how brave you are—you go in and out every day, never caring how close to death you tread. I love my mother dearly, but I have been half frightened to death every minute I have spent in this chamber.’
Mistress Brent gave a thick, choking cry. They both turned towards her. Andrew moved hurriedly back to the door and called to Nan to run and ask the watch to fetch the minister from the church to give her the last comforts of the dying.
Cornelia knelt beside the bed with him, praying. She had rarely seen death, but she knew it now.
Nan came a short while later, and called through the door that the watch had said that the minister was already at such offices elsewhere, but would be told of Mistress Brent’s sickness when he returned.
Andrew, bending over the dying woman, shook his head. ‘Too late,’ he said softly.
‘Mother,’ Cornelia sobbed.
The restless, searching hands were still at last, lying flat upon the crumpled bedlinen.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The watchmen, standing beside their fires in the street, studied the cart as it drew up outside the house. Cornelia, with streaming, bloodshot eyes, peered from her window to see her mother’s body, wrapped in a shroud, being carried out and placed in the cart. None from the house could walk in procession behind. Her mother would go to her final resting-place without one member of her family to mourn her.
She was to be buried in the churchyard though, unlike those poor slum paupers who, for want of friends or money, were thrown in hurried confusion into a mass grave as though they were unwanted offal.
They stripped the great chamber where she had died. Every piece of cloth was burnt in the street: the handsome bed curtains, the good linen, the curtains from the window. All Mistress Brent’s fine clothes were thrown out of the window and pitchforked with casual indifference upon the flames by the watchmen, who were careful to keep their distance from these infected remains. Some poorer women, watching from a few houses off, wailed in regret as they saw fine silks burning merrily on the pyre.
Cornelia’s bed linen was brought into the chamber for her to use.
She had decided, against Andrew’s advice, to remain in the chamber. A fatalistic calm lay now upon her spirits.
‘If I am infected I cannot escape,’ she said, shrugging. The watchmen had refused to let her send a letter to Rendel, explaining her peril, and she feared what he would do when he discovered what had happened.
She longed to see him, yet knew she must not do so until the full month had elapsed since her mother’s death.
No member of the household could be permitted to leave for that month. No outside person could enter, either, except Andrew, or the officers of the parish.
No letters could pass out. No news came in except that which was bawled by the watchmen through the windows.
Three days after Mistress Brent’s death a loud wailing from the kitchen told the whole household that the plague had claimed another victim. The cook was infected. The servants grew hysterical with fear. Cornelia heard them screaming and weeping.
Their fear proved justified. One by one they fell sick. The cook died next day, a maid two days later. Nan, kept busy watching them all, grew ever more irritable, but herself showed no sign of infection. Cornelia offered to nurse the sick, but Andrew would not permit it.
‘There are five of them. Let them nurse each other. They have been shut up together for days.’
Thomas died suddenly, sickening so rapidly that Andrew had no time to visit him. He fell down, choking, and was dead within an hour, with no visible sign of what had killed him.
‘It must be plague,’ said Andrew, but he could not be certain, and certified death from natural causes to the parish, knowing that there was already enough panic over the numbers of deaths from plague.
The city had begun to empty rapidly. Everyone who had enough money fled by horse or in a coach, taking all their households with them if they could, or turning off servants callously to wander the plague-ridden streets and die in extreme poverty and distress.
The authorities, terrified by the mounting deaths, falsified the figures. Many plague deaths were given other names.
One superstition held that sexual licence was a preventive against the plague, and the prostitutes did a roaring trade. Men and women danced lecherously in the streets, making love openly, believing that they were saving their lives in doing so.
A pall of black smoke seemed to hang over the city. Every street burnt fires. Rings of flames see
med to dance around the houses. Many houses burnt down, their wailing inhabitants running forth in night clothes, the plague victims mingling with the healthy, spreading the contagion further.
Some people, so terrified that they lost all sense of honour, fled from plague houses, spreading the contagion throughout the countryside.