Petals in the Ashes (8 page)

It was taking an age to get through the crowds for, in spite of the incessant mewling of the kitten, Anne was stopping on every corner to gawp and gaze at the streets, the shops and the passers-by. I thought how different London looked from the way I'd last seen it. Looking now at the hoards of people, the crowded shops, the noisy taverns and the countless street-sellers shouting their wares, it was difficult to picture the City as it had been: bleak and silent, its streets rank with death. It felt to me now as if that other, plague-infested city had been but a dream.

‘I never thought there were so many people in the
world,' Anne said wonderingly, as we paused at Cheapside and looked down the wide cobbled street thronging with horses and carriages and people dressed in their best. ‘And such things to buy!' she added, darting to a window where all manner of luxurious silk and satin collars and scarves were displayed. ‘I swear I will not rest until I have visited every shop in London.'

‘Then I fear you will never sleep!' I retorted.

We walked deeper into the City, away from the crowds and through the lanes and alleys. Here I could see traces of the year before, for there were shops still closed and shuttered and houses – once shut-up – which still bore marks of the red cross which had been painted on them, or had their doors still barred. In some of these, whole families had died and no one had come forward to take over the accommodation.

Anne paused before one of the churchyards, looking through the railings curiously. ‘Why is the ground raised on each side of the walkway?' she asked. ‘It is fully six feet above the path.'

Something caught at my heart and I stood quietly for a moment, for it was this churchyard, St Dominic's, which early on in the plague time had taken the corpses of the four young children who had been neighbours of ours, and their mother as well. ‘Because so many died of plague they had no space to bury them all properly,' I explained to Anne. ‘They just had to pile bodies upon bodies until they could put in no more. And when the graveyards were full right up they took to throwing corpses into plague pits.'

Anne gasped. ‘Bodies upon bodies …' she breathed.

‘They say one hundred thousand died in all.'

‘One hundred thousand!' Anne said wonderingly. ‘I do not know and cannot think what that number is.'

‘And it is better that you don't,' I said.

We moved on. We were very near our shop now and I began to be nervous, for I had no idea what I'd find. Had all our neighbours perished? Had our shop been looted of what little we had left? Had some drunken hawker, seeing it was empty, set up home in it? Where would I turn for help if things were not as they should be?

‘There's our sign!' I said to Anne, pointing above the row of shops to where the metal sign swung and creaked. ‘See the sugared plum!'

We reached the shop and stood outside, staring up. The floor above had been rented by a rope-maker who had stored his twines there; but I didn't know whether he had survived the plague or not.

‘Is this it, then?' Anne asked, disappointment in her voice, and I remembered that when I'd arrived a year back, I'd been disappointed at the sight of it too. ‘It's quite small,' she said.

I nodded. ‘I know. It's not like the shops on the bridge – or in Cornhill or Cheapside. Were you expecting more?'

‘I thought it would be bigger,' she said. ‘Varnished in bright colours. With a glass window.'

‘Well, maybe if we work hard and make our fortune we'll be able to have one of those soon. A little shop in the Royal Exchange, perhaps!' I put my bundles on the ground, found the key (which Sarah had placed on a long ribbon around my neck for safekeeping) and opened the shop door. It was dank and gloomy in
there, though, and we needed the shutters opened before we could see anything. These, however, were fixed with pegs and a turning device, and a damp winter had swelled them so that they no longer turned. After a struggle I went to the shop of our neighbour, Mr Newbery, who, trading under the sign of the Paper and Quill, sold parchments and fine writing paper.

I pushed open the door of his shop somewhat nervously, for I had last seen Mr Newbery at the very height of the plague when people had been dropping like flies around us. The day Sarah and I had left London he'd informed us he was going to shut up shop and take up drinking at the Two Pigeons instead.

He was back in his shop now, however: a short stocky man bent over the counter reading
The Intelligencer
, his oversized wig pushed to the back of his head. He looked mighty surprised when he saw it was me.

‘Young Hannah!' he said. ‘How are you? Not dead of the sickness, then?'

‘No, indeed not!' I said, smiling to myself as I remembered Mr Newbery's relish for conversation of a morbid nature. ‘I am here to open up our shop.'

‘Your sister Sarah is with you?'

‘No, she—'

‘She's dead?'

I laughed. ‘No. She is well. I have my younger sister with me – Sarah is staying at home to help our mother with her lying-in.'

‘Ah, lying-in,' he said. ‘A tricky business. Midwives kill more than they save.'

‘Well, it is our mother's seventh and she will more
than likely deliver it herself,' I said. ‘But I am here to beg your help, Mr Newbery. Our shutters are jammed and we need a man's strength.'

‘You're going to start trading again?'

‘We are.'

He shook his head, sighing. ‘Your rooms are like to be in a terrible state – fair eaten away by rats, I should think. Or dripping damp from the rain we've had over the past months. And to be in London now – don't you know that there have been bad omens about this year? There is a hellfire preacher at St Paul's who says that God's dreadful punishment will be meted out to sinful London soon.'

‘But you're still trading,' I pointed out.

‘Well, that's as maybe,' he said gruffly, pulling his wig forward on his head and straightening the curls.

He took a small hammer and a stool from beneath his counter, then followed me outside. I presented my sister to him and, after scaring her by telling her about a pamphlet detailing a seer's vision of the City set all in flame from one end to the other, he got up on the stool and tapped on the turning peg with a small hammer to release the shutter. This shutter, when lowered, allowed light into the shop and also formed a counter from which to sell our sweetmeats.

‘As I thought – all of a muddle and a mess,' Mr Newbery said with satisfaction, peering into the room and shaking his head.

He went back into his own shop and Anne and I then surveyed the room before us, which was not much spoiled – although the walls were mould-ridden and would need washing, and the herbs we'd strewn on the floor were black and gave off a musty,
unpleasant smell. The fireplace was laid neat and tidy, however, with the fire irons all in place and the saucepans set above, and there was the small burner to heat the sugar water nearby. To one side of the room was the marble working surface on which stood various sizes of wooden drums. These were empty and dusty now but, after a visit to the market, would soon contain sugar, spices and the various fruits and herbs with which we worked.

‘It is a good business, and we must work hard and make a success of what we do, for Sarah's sake,' I said to Anne.

‘Of course we will!' My sister took Kitty (for thus we had named her) from her basket and began to walk around the shop with her, and then into the living quarters beyond, telling her that this would be her new home and she wasn't to stray but must stay with us and be a good, playful kitty.

‘Anne, are you listening?' I asked.

She nodded. ‘You said we must work hard.' She put Kitty down and turned to me, looking puzzled. ‘But what was that that your neighbour was saying – about the City in flame?'

‘It was nothing,' I said. ‘Mr Newbery likes to scare.'

And if God's dreadful punishment was being meted out to the City, I thought to myself, then surely it had happened last year. The plague. Nothing could be worse than that.

It is well known that a London housewife may buy everything she needs from her own doorstep, and we proved this by setting our shop to rights without needing to go abroad for any of our purchases. Within
two days the walls – both in the shop and our room beyond – were newly limewashed, the floor was scrubbed with soda and strewn with fresh herbs, and a new water carrier and some enamel jugs had been purchased. There were fresh wax candles in all the holders and two shimmering sugar loaves standing ready to be used. Thus all was prepared, and it just remained for us to go to Covent Garden market to buy the blooms and the fruits we needed to start making the sweetmeats.

Before I'd left Chertsey, Sarah and I had talked about what should be made first, and had decided upon frosted rose petals, orange and lemon suckets and herb comfits. These were simple sweetmeats which Anne could help with and which we knew sold well. Once we had a few regular sweetmeats in stock, we would then begin to make the more time-consuming things: the marchpane fruits, the crystallised violets and the sugared plums.

All was prepared, then, and I was mighty pleased with myself. There was one thing I had not done, though, and it was on my mind constantly. I had not yet been to Doctor da Silva's to speak to Tom.

We were too busy, I told myself, there was much to put to rights, and I could not leave Anne, for she needed to be instructed all along the way. These were my excuses – but what truly delayed me was the thought that Tom might have forgotten about me in the eight months that I'd been gone – for it was said that 'prentices bedded where they could, and why should he wait for a girl who might not ever return to him? Moreover, a girl he had not even kissed. All the while I did not go to see him, then, I could pretend
that all was well between us.

Late on the afternoon of our third day there, however, all being done in the shop, the part of me that wanted to see Tom won over the part that was afeared, and on an impulse I took off my work clothes and put on my best green taffeta gown, which I had worn all that time ago when Tom and I had walked to Chelsea to pick violets, and which I'd left in our back room. I caught up my hair in a top-knot, as was now the fashion in London, and put some sprigs of deep blue rosemary flowers into my curls. Rosemary for remembrance, I thought, and prayed that I had not slipped far from his mind.

Before I left I circled the shop, swirling my skirts around to show the darker green lining and ruffled underskirt. ‘Do I look very fine?' I asked Anne. ‘Do you think my Tom will be fair overcome at the sight of me?'

She laughed and nodded. ‘But you must pull your bodice down a little to show more of what a man likes to see!'

I pretended to look shocked. ‘You have been learning such things from the minxes in our village, I suppose.' Anne blushed and I added, ‘I am quite confident of Tom's good opinion without doing that, thank you kindly.' (Although truth may have it that I did go into our room and lace my bodice a little tighter, which had more or less the same effect.)

Going up the lane towards Doctor da Silva's shop I felt both excited and nervous. I would not take for granted that we were sweethearts, I decided, but would act as if I were someone recently returned from the country calling on an old friend.

As I rounded the corner I saw, glinting, the sign of the Silver Globe hanging outside the apothecary's shop, and my heart caught in my throat. How often over the past months had I dreamed of coming back here and seeing Tom, of him looking up and seeing me standing there, then coming to me and taking my hand …

But … but when I reached the shop the windows were shuttered, the door was barred with two planks of wood across it and – oh, foul thing! – a faded red cross was upon the door.

Plague!

My heart began beating loudly – so loudly that I could hear it in spite of the noise all around. I stood quite still for some moments, trying to control this, and then I began to walk around the shop examining the shuttered windows in case there was a crack I could see through. There was not, however, and I came once more to the door and stood before it, pressing my hands against the wood as if it could impart some secret to me. I closed my eyes and saw again the shop as it had been last September: windows full of plague preventatives and a trail of people outside, some with plague tokens on them, some with discharging buboes, all waiting to see Doctor da Silva and be treated, for many physicians had already left the City and the poorer folk had nowhere else to go. It should be no surprise to me that he and Tom had succumbed to the disease. Why had I thought that they had some special immunity?

Behind me I heard a street-hawker's cry of ‘Hot faggots! Five for sixpence!', but I did not turn.

‘You want an apothecary, dearie?'

I opened my eyes and an old woman was looking up at me, bent low under the burden of a tray of faggots which she carried tied around her neck.

I shook my head. ‘I don't want an apothecary – well, I do, but only this one.'

‘Doctor da Silva? He stayed to help us, didn't he? Poor man. He went the way of most of 'em that stayed. He and his lad both.'

‘They … they both contracted plague?'

‘Aye,' she nodded, swaying on the stick. ‘They was taken ill just when we was athinking it was all over. Near Christmas, it was.'

‘Do … do you remember what happened?'

She shrugged. ‘What happened? Only the usual thing: one day they was here, the next they was poorly, the next they was dead.'

‘They are … truly dead, then?' I asked.

‘Aye. Both of 'em. Dead and in the pit. I kept indoors most of that time meself. Didn't go out for three months and near starved.' She suddenly gave me a suspicious look. ‘But why do you need a 'pothecary? Do you have a fever?'