“What precaution, sir?”
“In my church in St. James’s I have caused the banns to have their first reading.” She made her cry joyous and his voice rose above it. “That Sarah Chalker, widow, might marry Sir Roland, Lord Garnthorpe, bachelor of this parish.”
Another sob. Lucy again. Yet for once, he did not take his stare from Sarah until the bells of St. Dunstan’s briskly tolled. “Five of the clock,” he said at the final strike. “I have something I must do.” He stood. “An important personage to see.”
There was danger in it; she could tell that instantly. At the beginning of her imprisonment he had said they had one week for her “studies.” One week to the day, she had been in the house. Now her role there demanded something more. For herself. For Lucy. For John Chalker.
“Sir,” she said, rising too. “Tell me you go not into peril.”
The words were almost the same as in a play she had once performed. She could only pray Garnthorpe had not seen it.
“It is true, madam. I am about something wonderful. And yes, there is danger in it. I may not—”
“May not return?” She took his hand then, squeezed it. “Tell me it is not so.”
“It is. I—” He broke off again when she lifted his hand, kissed it. “Mrs. Chalker, you weep?”
“Call me Sarah, I beg you. And I cannot help my tears, sir.” She looked up at him, eyes welling. “I know you have doubted me. Thought me a sinful woman, ignorant of all save pleasure. But my time here has changed me. Your kindness has, in teaching me.” She gestured to the Bible under the saint’s painting. Her face, she knew, wore a look near identical to the martyr’s. “And you were right, Roland—may I call you so? You were right also in this. That first moment our eyes met I also knew, though I have tried so hard to deny it.” She wiped tears away. “Revelation speaks of the End of Days fast coming. Do not let me face it alone, I beseech you.”
The next moment he was in her arms, his mouth on hers, and she opened to him, let his tongue penetrate her. A different church’s bell sounded, these tolls slow, and for their duration he held her, kissed her, and when he pulled back, she kept his body close.
“I must go. To help a friend in a … an enterprise at the palace. Yet I have always triumphed in the cause of King Jesus.” He stared into her eyes. “If I do return, shall I cause the banns to be read the second time?”
“Do so!” she cried. “And then I shall count the hours till the third reading and we can be—Oh, Roland! That we did not have to wait!”
She saw it then, in his eyes, heard it in the husk of his voice, felt it in the heat of his body pressed against her. “Maybe we do not. For will our troth not be plighted in the eyes of God?”
“Of course it will!”
She had only one fear now: that he was so far gone in lust he would try to take her immediately. But then his eyes changed and he slipped from her grasp. “I will return … Wife,” he said. “Tonight. Be ready for me.”
“Sir,” she called as he reached the door, “can you send your man for some ass’s milk or goat’s milk? My friend weakens.”
He considered, then nodded. “Maggs must remain to watch. But I will send one of those outside.”
“Thank you, sir. Roland. Husband.”
He stared at her a moment longer, then bowed, left. She heard him issue commands, heard the front door opened and bolted behind him. Her knees gave; she sank onto the chair—until another cry had her up, out, moving down the hall.
“Open it,” she ordered before the cellar door. Maggs took his usual exaggeratedly slow time despite the moans from beyond it. When the key turned, Sarah pushed past him, ran down the stairs.
Lucy was not on the truckle bed. She was standing, leaning on a wall. “So hot!” she moaned, as Sarah rushed to her, sagging into her friend’s arms at the first touch.
“Hush, child,” Sarah said, struggling to hold the younger woman up. She was not as strong as she had been and Lucy was much heavier than ever she was. “Here.”
With an effort she half lifted, half dragged Lucy across to the bed. She fell heavily upon it. Then, when Sarah had raised the young woman’s legs up, took a step to pick up the bolster that had been thrown across the floor, Lucy gave a louder cry and fastened on her arm. “Do not leave me,” she begged, “do not. He will come when you are gone.”
“Nay, child, he has gone out. Let me fetch—”
“No!” Lucy’s voice rose to a shout, the fingers dug deeper. “The baby!”
Despite the pain in her arm, Sarah went still. “You are certain?”
“I cannot think this hammering is anything else. God help me!” she screamed. “For my head feels like it is to burn right off.”
What has birthing to do with the head? Sarah thought. Yet truly, what do I know of birthing? And even though it was useless, still she asked herself for the hundredth time, why is Lucy not in Cornwall?
She knew why: another forged letter, a false Rochester seeking forgiveness, offering a house, protection, maybe more. So a strong-willed girl had moved her seafaring family to secure her a berth in a Falmouth packet; the westerlies had blown her faster to London than feet could carry her friends through England. And why had the family not sent one of those sisters to help her? To be here now as Lucy gave another sharp cry, to know what to do as Sarah did not?
Questions were useless. She was all there was. And she had watched her own mother give birth several times on the floors of various hovels. That not a baby had lived beyond three months did not matter. God decided that—but there were things she could do to influence his choice.
She climbed the stairs and banged upon the locked door. “What?” Maggs drawled from the other side.
“It is Mrs. Absolute’s time,” she called. “Open straight.”
The key turned. Sarah flung the door wide and pushed past the man. He grabbed her. “Oy! Where are you going?”
“To fetch linens from the bedchamber.”
“You can’t go—”
“Hear me,” she said, her voice steel. “My friend is about to bring a child into the world. You will help me. Or if you prevent me, I will see to it that you are arrested for both her death and the child’s. And if you don’t swing for that—” she grasped his fingers, twisted them off her “—I promise you, cock, I’ll swing for you myself.”
For once, Maggs had no mocking response. He took back his hand. “What must I do?”
“Fetch me hot water. Lots of it.”
She moved to the stairs. Maggs looked to protest again, but at a great cry from Lucy, he turned and made for the kitchen.
Sarah climbed to the level above, where Garnthorpe had never allowed her. Two of the rooms were empty of any but the most basic furniture. The third—she halted in the doorway, stunned by its opulence, fresh colours, plush appointments. The bed itself was a vision of luxury, the bolsters plump, the sheets beyond the lace curtains of richest linen. For a moment she wondered what it could mean. When she realized, she shuddered, then ripped off the sheets.
As she went back downstairs, the cries built to a shriek. And then she heard a thump. She ran into the cellar to find Lucy off the truckle bed again, trying to rise from the floor. “Here, child,” Sarah cried, flinging the bed-stuffs down, pulling the horsehair mattress from the frame onto the floor, helping Lucy to roll atop it. The girl lay back with a long-drawn groan, legs spreading wide, her skirt billowing out. The garment seemed constricting at the waist to Sarah, so she yanked it off. Lucy had only her shift on now.
It was soaked. “He comes?” Sarah asked.
Lucy, panting now, her brow shiny with sweat, looked up. “In haste,” she replied, “in a manner most like his father, the earl. Aye me!” she yelled, bucking from the mattress.
“Water!” Sarah shouted, turning—and there was Maggs in the doorway, a small saucepan in hand.
“I had some on for my tea,” he said, setting it down on the floor.
“More!” snapped Sarah. “Much more!
Hot and cold.”
Eyes averted, the man ran out. “Breathe slower, child,” Sarah said. “Deeper.”
Sometimes, in the next minutes, Lucy heeded her; sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she flung back her head and howled; sometimes she lay still and almost calm. And it was during those increasingly brief moments that Sarah used a knife she’d fetched from the kitchen—which Maggs, humming loudly to himself and engaged in cleaning a matched pair of pistols, had wordlessly let her take—to cut up the bed linen, using some to replace that which Lucy soaked, for her whole body was venting sweat; some to steep in cold water to lay across Lucy’s boiling brow, and her breast, spotted in a red and angry rash.
And then the child came, in a rush, with Lucy risen to a squat, bearing down, her arms around Sarah’s neck. Sarah had one arm about her and the other fortunately free, to catch the slick babe as he burst forth; catch, nearly lose, then secure him, while Lucy, with a last great cry, slid down to lie entirely upon the mattress. Sarah was acting on instinct now and memories a decade old; she scooped up the glistening bundle up and placed him at Lucy’s breast, where the child, until then deafening them with roars, went to silence as he filled his mouth.
“Is it …?”
“A boy, as you always knew.”
“A boy!” Lucy sighed. “Does he resemble the earl, do you think?”
“I do not know. He has the black Celt hair of your Absolute cousins, sure,” she replied, adding, as the child removed his lips from the breast to wail again, “and the Absolute playhouse lungs.”
Then they were both laughing, and crying, and laughing more. The babe seemed to startle at their noise, pause in his, then renew louder as if seeking to outdo them. A nipple placed quieted him, and as Lucy lay back and closed her eyes, Sarah happily set about the tidying, the cutting of the cord, its tying, relieved the birth had been so easy, when most of her mother’s had not. After all was done, she cut another sheet into strips and, while mother and child slept, took the infant, washed him, then swaddled him in linen. Moving quietly so as not to wake either, she sat upon the one chair, clutching the bundle tight and shedding tears again, for another cause; her own, in thinking then of John Chalker, of the baby they’d made and lost, not six months before. Tears fell, dried; the babe did not stir but snored as gently as his mother did on the mattress. Her own eyes drooped, and she slept too.
She did not know how long. The light beyond the shutter seemed different—and then St. Dunstan’s tolled seven. She looked down—babe and mother were gone. “Lucy?” she called, rising.
“Up here.”
Lucy was in the parlour, on a chair, wrapped in a sheet. She was feeding again. “It’s nicer here than in that cellar, don’t you think?” Sarah knelt beside her and Lucy squeezed her shoulder. “All’s well,” she croaked. “Except in my head. It aches horribly still. And I feel nauseous. Is that common?”
Sarah placed a palm on Lucy’s forehead. It was feverishly hot. “I do not know. You have just given birth. I am sure there are many different ways that affects one.” She went back to the cellar, dragged the mattress up. “Do you rest again,” she said, laying it down. “I will fetch you some broth. A new mother needs feeding too.”
“I will. So tired,” said Lucy, passing the babe over, lying straight down.
She was asleep on the instant. Holding the child in one arm, Sarah bent to pull her friend’s shift over her exposed breasts. She grasped the cotton—and stopped. The fever was not only in Lucy’s head; the rash Sarah had seen earlier now ran from neck down … to where? She lifted, the cloth sucking away from the dampened skin.
Lucy’s entire torso was covered in furious red bumps. Sarah laid the baby down upon the mattress. Then she lifted the shift from its base, pulled it up. The rash went from the ankles all the way up to—No! It cannot be, she thought, moving fast away till the wall stopped her and she sank down. I have mistook. I must have.
But she knew she hadn’t.
Someone came in behind her. Saw what she had seen, the black oval mark. Named it. “Plague token!” Maggs cried. “She’s got the plague.”
“She does not!” Sarah stood. “Yet even if she did, we must—”
“No!” the man yelled, stumbling back, a hand thrust out at her. “The plague! I’m not staying. You can’t make me stay!”
He ran into the hallway, flung the front door wide. “Wait!” Sarah cried, following. “You must fetch us medicines. A doctor!”
The door slammed in her face. She reached for the knob, twisted it—just as the key turned. “Stop!” she shouted. “Come back, you dog!” She pressed her ear to wood but heard no reply, just Maggs’s voice raised and two others, the footmen Garnthorpe kept outside his house, questioning, followed by the footfalls of several pairs of boots rushing away. “Come back!” she cried again, beating upon the wood till her hands ached, words of fury lost in tears and terror. Finally, exhausted, she slumped down with her back against the door and wept.
Between her sobs and the child’s from the other room, it took her a while to hear the scratching. Then the voice that went with it. Not Maggs returned. Another’s. This voice was choppy, unrefined—and infinitely sweeter to her ear.
“Sa-Sarah,” said Dickon. “Are you there?”
He’d remained outside his lordship’s house for a week, faithful to his captain’s orders, stirring only to void, drink and buy such food as Coke’s last coins allowed him. But those had soon gone, and he’d had to be away a little longer each day, to scavenge and to check back at their lodgings. The cap’n had gone somewhere to see the giant Pit Man; that much Dickon knew. Where, he did not; nor could guess why he had not returned.
Until earlier when the cap’n had appeared at their lodgings, all in … motley! This new word Dickon had learned from Sarah’s play script, and he’d been pleased to use it so appropriately too—for the captain had been dressed most strangely, in a variety of coloured cloths and textures and what his ward was quite certain was a woman’s shirt, which looked especially odd considering the stubble on his usually shaved chin. But he’d not been allowed to laugh for long, seeing that as soon as the cap’n was changed, they’d had to go straight to the house where Sarah was.
Most of this he now managed to convey through the door—including the word “motley,” excellently pronounced, with no stutter.
“And where is the captain now?” Sarah asked.
“With the Pit Man,” he replied, “who needs help to free his fa-family. The cap’n wanted to charge the door and free you first. But he had not sword and pistols, and there were the two men outside and I told him of the two within. But I will go fetch him back now since they have all g-gone.”
“Yes!” Her second cry came as he was moving away. “No!” He only just heard it because the church bell had resumed nearby. “Dickon?” she called. “Still there?”
“S-still here.” He pressed one ear to the door jamb again, shoving a finger into the other so he could hear her against the peals. Which he did, clearly and the first time, even though she asked him to repeat what she had said. He knew her words by heart, but if it made her feel better …
He repeated her entire message faithfully: “ ‘To not come here straight. There is something more urgent. It is not Rochester but Lord Garnthorpe who has held me prisoner here. He has gone to Whitehall Palace about some b-business tonight. It is to do with some important p-personage. A friend joins him in his evil. You must stop them.’ ” Then he asked, “Is that all?”
She spoke again after a pause. “Only this. Tell him he goes with my love.”
Dickon smiled as he ran. He’d repeat everything, of course. But the cap’n would know that last anyway. Any idiot could see that they loved each other.
30
REUNIONS AND FAREWELLS
Through the slats of the boarded-up and abandoned tavern, Pitman gazed at the windows on the first floor of the house opposite. His house. The first evening candles were just being lit behind them. Perhaps Bettina was abou
t to read scripture to the children. What would the lesson be today? He hoped it was not something too strict. New Testament rather than Old, Christ’s loving words over a prophet’s ranting.
“ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,’ ” he murmured.
Once more, a vision of the room appeared and he had to look away, breathe deep, else he would have been across the street, hammering upon the door, crying out to those above. For he did not know who lived, who sat cross-legged upon the floor, who they hearkened to. Two he knew were dead. Was Josiah recovered? Anything could have happened in a week. The plague could have taken them all in one day. Or the pale horse could have departed, Death upon him, and all recovered.
None of it could he know crouching there. Yet crouch he must and wait for the captain’s return, though the agony of that was a physical pain in his guts worse than his wounded shoulder in its sling. For Coke was not known to the constables opposite, who kept the red-daubed house shut up. Pitman was, for he’d been one of their number, though he’d probably already been reported dead. He did not blame Coke for tending to his own affairs first, for rushing to Mrs. Chalker’s lodgings. They’d both assumed that the ironmonger’s shop that backed onto Pitman’s house would still be abandoned and so its attic free to call Bettina up and hear all the news. But a family had moved in, refugees from France, and they had not even opened the door to him, despite his pleas.
Would he himself have opened to a coughing, wasted, scraggly-haired giant dressed in a strange assortment of clothes? He looked like too many other lost inhabitants of the sick metropolis. No, he did not blame the family. He just did the only thing he could—found a different abandoned vantage and tried not to run mad.
Thunder rumbled—in the distance, yet closer than it had been. London felt as if a heavy, hot hand was pressing down upon it, upon him. Bring the rain, he thought, looking away from the house. Wash me clean.
Soon, voices. He peered between the slats—and saw the captain, standing before his house, in conversation with the constables. As he watched, one of the men took off his hat, scratched his head, then walked away. The other spat and then raised his hands to heaven in a gesture of prayer.