Petals in the Ashes

Mary Hooper

For Brenda, Hilary,
Pat, Terry and the
class of 1990

Chapter One The Journey

Chapter Two The Pesthouse

Chapter Three Highclear House

Chapter Four Chertsey

Chapter Five London

Chapter Six Nelly Gwyn

Chapter Seven The Magician

Chapter Eight Bartholomew Fair

Chapter Nine 2nd September

Chapter Ten The Fire Takes Hold

Chapter Eleven The Raging Beast

Chapter Twelve Moore Fields

Chapter Thirteen The Devastated City

Notes on the Great Fire of London

Recipes from the Still Room

Also by Mary Hooper

‘A saddler who had buried all his children dead of the Plague, did desire only to save the life of his remaining little child, and so prevailed to have it received stark naked into the arms of a friend.'

‘Rouse yourself, Hannah,' Sarah said, shaking my shoulder a little. ‘Tie your hair back … and can you not splash your face with water from the flask? We don't want to arrive at Milady's house looking like frowsy kitchen wenches.'

With a big effort I opened my eyes and looked at my sister, who was sitting on the opposite side of the carriage from me and holding the babe, Grace, asleep in her arms. I yawned hugely.

‘And put your hand to your mouth when you yawn,' Sarah said, ‘or Lady Jane will think we've no manners at all.'

But I just yawned again and closed my eyes, for the effort of trying to keep them open was too much. After nearly three days on the road and two nights at wayside inns, with Grace hungry most of the time and
squealing like a piglet, neither the constant jolting, the clatter of hard wheels on rough road nor the continuous thud of horses' hooves could stop me from sleeping.

Dimly, as if from far off, I heard Sarah address Mr Carter, our driver. ‘Is it much further now to Dorchester?' she called, but I could not hear his reply over the drumming and the rattling and the clanging.

London seemed further away than just three days' travel. Already everything was so different. When I peered out of the curtains of our carriage there were no corpses slumped in the streets, no crosses on doors, no screams of those enclosed within foetid houses and no death carts conveying raddled bodies to the plague pits. There were just fields and farm animals and the occasional village, and the endless dusty road which threatened to jolt us to bits before we ever arrived at our destination. Our lives in London, threatened by the monstrous plague which had stalked and caused the deaths of our friends and neighbours, seemed a great way off, as if it had all happened in another existence.

My dear friend in London, Abby, had been nursemaid in one of the houses of the nobility. When this house had fallen to plague and been shut up for forty days, one by one those within had succumbed to the sickness and died. Towards the end, only Abby – and Grace, the babe in her charge – had remained alive in there. When Abby, too, had contracted plague, the babe had been entrusted to our care. My sister Sarah and I had stolen her away from the house and, using the Health Certificates meant for Abby and her mistress, Mrs Beauchurch, were taking Grace to her
aunt, her mother's sister, Lady Jane Cartmel in Dorchester.

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew Sarah was shaking my arm. ‘Were you having a bad dream?' she asked. ‘You were murmuring to yourself and twisting in your seat.'

I raised my head from where it had lolled forward and shivered. I
had
been dreaming and it had not been pleasant, for Abby had been standing before me as I'd last seen her, her body ravaged by plague sores, holding out little Grace for me to take. I had not seemed able to hold the babe, though, for as I had reached for her she had become small and slight, like a changeling child, and had slipped through my fingers and floated away on the air, and Abby and I had watched her glide past us and wept together.

‘I dreamed of Abby,' I said to Sarah, my eyes filling with tears. ‘And of Grace. I was trying to hold her, but she just floated away.'

Sarah looked at me with some pity. ‘We've got Grace safely now,' she said, and gave a wry smile. ‘No one who has heard her yells could doubt that.' She leaned across the carriage and stroked my arm. ‘And Abby is at peace, with no pain and no plague. Perhaps she's even watching over us to make sure we're taking care of Grace.'

I nodded and sniffed back my tears. ‘I'm worried that she may not be getting enough milk,' I said. Although we had obtained flasks of ass's milk, we knew, of course, that this was no substitute for a mother's milk. ‘Mayhap there'll be a wet nurse at the big house so she can feed properly.'

‘Of course there will,' Sarah said, nodding. ‘Lady
Jane will have prepared for our coming. There'll be a proper nurse and a lady's maid and a nursery, and for all we know some little cousins for Grace to play with. The poor lamb needs clothes as well – all she has is that little cloth she's wrapped in.'

When we'd had Grace lowered from the window of her plague-torn house we'd made sure she'd been naked, so she didn't take any plague germs with her. We'd wrapped her in a soft linen sheet we'd brought with us, but we'd been tearing off strips of it for her napkins all along the journey, so that now it was one quarter the size.

‘If the journey takes much longer we'll be tearing up our shifts for her,' I said.

Sarah moved on her seat towards me. ‘Will you take her for a moment, Hannah, while I adjust my dress? Mr Carter said that we're nearly there and I want to look tidy.'

‘Are we really there at last?'

Sarah looked out of the window. ‘Almost. He said we'll know we're at our destination when we turn into a park which is planted with all manner of fine and rare trees.'

‘And these must be them!' I said, for I could see that around us, on either side of the wide drive and as far as the eye could see, were many shapely and beautiful trees with leaves of gold, lime, emerald, amber and deepest plum.

I took Grace carefully, being sure that the small round head was cupped securely in my hand. She was a pretty babe, with delicate pale skin and thick dark hair, and her eyes were as blue as forget-me-nots. I'd never seen Mrs Beauchurch, her mother, but Abby had
said that the babe took after her rather than Mr Beauchurch, whom she'd once described as a red-faced booby with a nose like a tomato. But both of Grace's parents were with God now, I reminded myself, and it was not meet that I should speak ill of the dead. Indeed, if Grace, once grown, should ever ask me what her father was like, I would lie and say that he was the very model of princely good looks with all elegant attributes known to man.

Our destination being close, I began to think about how we would be greeted by Lady Jane. ‘Milady will certainly be very pleased to have her infant niece here safely,' I said to Sarah as she rose and, holding on to the carriage straps, tried to smooth the creases out of her gown. ‘Do you think she will reward us?'

‘Tush!' Sarah said reprovingly. ‘We are not doing this for gain. There's enough reward in saving Grace's life and gaining safe passage out of London for ourselves.'

‘Yes, but she may reward us as well …'

Sarah permitted herself a small smile. ‘Yes, she may.'

‘I wonder if she will keep us there as companions in the big house with her. Or do you think we will be made to live as servants?'

Sarah shrugged. ‘I cannot guess. We don't know her circumstances or whether she has a big family and children of her own – or even what age she is.'

‘But I'm sure she will be so grateful to us that she will treat us like family and give us lovely rooms with four-poster beds in her elegant house!'

‘When we get there I shall sleep for a week, whatever our rooms are like,' Sarah said, rubbing the
back of her neck. ‘I swear I am black and blue with being bounced in this box.'

‘Abby told me that the house is newly built,' I said, ‘and that it has a room just for bathing in, with cold water and hot water coming from a tap in the wall.'

Sarah's eyes grew wide. ‘Indeed! I have never heard of such a thing.'

After thinking on this wonder for a moment, my thoughts turned once more to London. And from there, of course, to Tom, my sweetheart. ‘But how long do you think we'll have to stay in Dorchester?'

Sarah shrugged. ‘Until we get word that London is free from the plague. When we hear that the king and his court have returned, then we'll know it's safe.'

‘And then perhaps Milady will give us a grand carriage to travel back in, and we can visit Chertsey on the way and see our family!' I said. But we wouldn't stop there too long, I told myself, for I would be dancing on coals by then to get back to Tom.

‘We must pray that Chertsey, and our family, remain safe from plague,' Sarah said, very serious. ‘For they do say that what is suffered in London one year spreads out from there the next.'

I fell silent at this, for I could not bear to think of the plague spreading and my family contracting it … of my mother, father, brothers or sister being visited. Surely it was enough that around us in London so many had died that their corpses rotted in the streets for want of people to bury them? Hadn't everyone suffered enough?

‘Highclear House!' Mr Carter called suddenly, and Sarah and I scrambled to the window to look out and
see our new home.

When we saw it we both gasped, for it was very large and immensely grand, with tall white marble columns to each side of the entrance, and steps going upwards to the doors. It had a great gravelled drive which swept across the front of the house with a fountain in its centre, and the water from the fountain rose into the air in a sparkling flume, catching the sunlight and making a rainbow.

I gazed at it in wonder, thinking that I had never seen a house more noble than this in my life before, nor a sight prettier than the rainbow in the fountain.

‘I did not realise it would be so grand!' Sarah said, when we had stared and marvelled and found our voices again.

‘And we have only the clothes we stand up in!' I wailed, trying to pull back my unruly hair and straighten my cap with my one free hand. ‘I didn't even wear my best gown. I should have worn my green taffeta!'

The carriage came to a standstill and, as if knowing she was at her new home, Grace awoke and immediately began struggling to sit up. Anxious to be out of the carriage, I leaned forward to open the door. Sarah, however, motioned to me to sit back.

‘Let Mr Carter do it,' she said. ‘It's what he's used to.'

And so we waited while Mr Carter climbed down from his high seat and tied up the reins of the horses, then came to open the carriage door for us and lower the steps. Sarah got out first and I handed Grace to her, then I climbed out myself and gazed about me. The house in all its beauty stood before us, backed by
more trees and a great park and, far off, what looked like a lake. Lady Jane's husband, I thought, must be monstrous rich.

‘What shall we do now?' I whispered to Sarah, taking Grace back from her. ‘Go and knock at the door?'

‘I don't know,' Sarah answered, looking troubled.

We thanked Mr Carter for his great care in bringing us here, and he bade us farewell and began to lead the horses and carriage across the drive and towards the back of the house. A moment later the great doors opened and a woman dressed in black ran down the steps of the house.

‘Mrs Beauchurch!' she called, with something like joy in her voice, and then she reached us and stopped. ‘Oh, you are not …'

‘No. No, indeed,' Sarah said, while I stood awkwardly, not knowing if I should curtsey to this woman, or indeed if she should curtsey to me. Was this a maid – or was it Lady Jane? Indeed, I thought it was not Lady Jane, for this woman was dressed quite modestly in a black moiré of half-mourning, with just one row of pearls around the high, ruffled neckline.