Prue Phillipson - Hordens of Horden Hall (21 page)

“I was
told
to give it you,” she yelled at him. “You don’t have to die if you will do what is wise. Drink what I give you and keep under the covers. You have to sweat it out. I have heard that from the few who recover.”

“Ay, few indeed. Bring me my Bible but don’t come near. You can reach from the doorway to set it on the table and I can pull it towards me. I must make my peace with God. He is calling me home.”

The speaking exhausted him and he slipped back onto the pillows. She took a step towards him to pull the covers up but he croaked out, “Keep your distance.” A skeletal hand appeared and drew the blankets up to his chin.

“I will set a mug of vinegar there too with the Bible. Sip it when you can.”

She ran down again. It was unnatural to be giving him orders but it was beginning to come more easily since his outburst. Could it be that the return of consciousness meant that he would recover?

She brought the Bible and the vinegar and set them down. His eyes were closed but he muttered, “They gave me gall and vinegar to drink. Ah my Lord, your sufferings were worse than this.”

She slipped into her own room. A horrifying feeling came over her that she didn’t want him to recover. He had oppressed her life so long. She would be free at last. At once she fell to her knees by her bed and gabbled prayers that he would live.

That night she didn’t go to bed. She had no blankets but the warmth of the day had seeped into these small upper rooms with their ceilings so low that even she could put up a hand and touch them. Her father had to stoop when he came up here. Would he ever stoop again?

For hours he lay groaning and restless. She didn’t think he had touched the vinegar so she moistened a cloth in it and touched his lips and tried to squeeze some into his mouth but he rolled his head aside and she backed away and wiped her own hands with it and went back to her room. She sat on the stool by her bed and tried to pray.

The day was bright when she woke to find herself curled on the floor. She started up wondering what hour it was. The sun was high in the sky. She peeped into her father’s room. His eyes were wide open and fastened on her. Was he dead? She had seen the dead look like this.

But then he spoke. “The spot is hardened. That is a bad sign. I may not have long. You must pack up and leave this house. It is not safe for you to stay in it. Go to your grandmother’s.”

“They have fled and I may not leave here for a month.”

He had forgotten what she had told him yesterday, a man who remembered every detail of a conversation for months, even years afterwards.

“God is telling you to go. He speaks through me, your father. You do not have to pay heed to any other man’s word. You are still healthy. You have a life to live.”

His speech was coming in painful jerks but his manner was of great urgency. He does care for me, she thought. He has always loved me in his own way.

“Swear to me that you will leave this house,” he gasped out. “Do not touch the Bible but from where you are standing hold your hand towards it. Swear that you will go.”

She did as he told her. “I swear that I will go.”

I have not said when, she thought. And she noticed he hadn’t moved the Bible all night – or the drink. His lips looked dry and cracked.

“Drink the vinegar,” she ordered him. He reached it but his hand was unsteady and he spilled some. When she leapt forward to grab it his eyes were so piercing that she shrank back.

“Keep away. You have sworn to go, now go.”

She saw him raise his head and drink some, his face distorting at the bitterness of it, but his eyes never left hers. “Go,” he said again, setting the mug down and dropping back but still directing all the old fierceness of his authority at her. “Go.”

She scurried back into her own room and shut the door. Of course she couldn’t leave him
now
but she had sworn. That was a real oath, she reminded herself, though I didn’t mean it when I said the words. But it was done before God on the Bible and I will be cursed if I fail to keep it.

She pulled from under her bed the worn leather bag that was all she had brought from the old home after her mother’s death. Into it she piled her few clothes and her one pair of shoes she seldom wore as she was always in clogs on the filthy streets round about. The cloth slippers she was wearing in the house she would put in last although they were almost worn through. She had one coarse woollen winter cloak which she must take though the weather was so warm at present. She took from her small drawer her mother’s miniature and her purse with a few pence in it. Her father might have money in the pocket of his black coat but she would not touch that.

Going downstairs to look about for provisions she saw there was a jug outside on the window ledge. It was set to the side so she could open one casement and reach it. It contained milk so Tom must have been to the dairy that morning to fetch it with their own supply.

She emptied the bucket of kindling into the grate and made a fire. She would cook some porridge and try to make her father eat. When it was ready she carried it up but found him delirious. She could not force food into him in that state and if she tried she risked the return of his fury. He thought she had gone.

She ate the porridge herself and drank some milk and felt invigorated. She was alive and wanted to go on living. As the afternoon wore on she began to hear unusual noises from the leather-worker’s shop. Presently there was the sound of wheels and peeping from the window she saw a cart outside and Mistress Fletcher and Tom carrying out boxes from the shop door. Bundles of clothes and bedding followed and then baskets of provisions. They were leaving. Was it because of her father’s sickness?

Most of the wealthy had long since escaped into the country and many shops had shut. She remembered Mistress Fletcher saying she had a sister whose husband ran a small-holding south of the river. Was she going there and would Tom stay to help his father in the shop? She wished Tom would come to her window and tell her what was happening.

Every half hour she ran up to look at her father. His face looked more sunken and ashen as the day drew towards evening. In her heart she was railing against God for everything – his sickness, her helplessness as a nurse, her lifelong fear of his anger and his persistence in living. Some people she had witnessed with her own eyes fell down dead while they were walking in the street.

These thoughts filled her with sickening guilt and she could only creep back to the window and, shaded by the sacking, keep one eye on what was happening next door. What she saw – and heard – this time was Giles Fletcher himself nailing up the window shutters and boarding up his shop. They were all going then and she would be even more bereft.

As she looked she heard a ghastly rattling cry from upstairs. Stumbling in her haste she clattered up and stared into the room. Her father had arched his back and was struggling to breathe. Even while she looked his face contorted and he fell back with a small grunt and she knew life had gone.

“Oh God,” she sobbed, “I did nothing to help him.” She ought to hold him in her arms now and pray his soul to heaven but she couldn’t do it. His “Go, go” was still in her ears. The fear of the plague that had gripped all London had taken hold of her. She seized the bundle she had prepared. She dare not touch anything from his room if she was to have a hope of escaping the infection from which so far miraculously she felt free.

Downstairs she put on her clogs, drank the rest of the milk and gathered into a basket the few remaining provisions from the shelf. At least he had touched nothing there since he had come in sick two days ago.

Setting down her burdens at the door she lifted the latch and pushed hard. It did not yield. She seized the poker and hammered at it.

Giles Fletcher’s voice sounded outside. “You cannot come out, the door is sealed up.”

“My father is dead.”

“We’ll tell the coffin-maker. Stay where you are.”

She heard his footsteps going away. She heard Tom’s voice protesting something. He sounded high up. He must be already on the cart. Then his father’s voice geed-up the horse and she heard the clip-clop of his hooves.

They were going, the only friends she had.

She pushed one of the benches against the window, shouting, “Tom, don’t leave me here.”

She was small enough to get through. She leant out first and lowered the basket as far as she could before letting go. Then she realised there were other noises in the street – a party of revellers rolling by singing a bawdy song. One of them snatched up the basket. “Thank you for our supper, m’lady,” he shouted.

One of the others yelled, “It’s a plague house. Are you mad?” and dashed it from his hand. The contents rolled in the dirt.

Eunice, sitting on the sill, was squeezing feet first through the aperture so she could drag her bundle through after her. “How dare you?” she screamed.

One of the drunks turned round and pulled on her legs so that her skirt rode up round her hips. “Oh ho, my pretty, what have you there” and he put up his hand to touch her. A friend yanked him away yelling, “She has the plague, you fool. Run.”

Eunice, horribly scraped, landed on her feet and the bundle she was clutching followed in a rush hitting her on the shoulder. She was ashamed and sobbing. Father was right about men. They all wanted their wicked way with women. She pulled down her skirt and looked to see if the drunks had reached the corner of the lane. They had met the dead-cart there with its doleful bell and swaying lantern. She heard them shout, “There’s a plague house breaking out,” and the officers came on at a run.

“You, girl, plague girl, stop in the King’s name.”

Eunice shouted, “I am well. There is a body inside,” and she fled the other way, up to the top of their lane which looked like a dead end but gave onto a narrow alley between two houses. She would double back on her pursuers.

Though it was still only dusk it was utterly dark in the alley and she tripped and fell over a corpse. There was another and another. She sprang onto them and over them. The stench was unbelievable. This was what London had come to, unburied bodies shoved up alleyways and back lanes. At the end of the alley she turned right onto a street of little shops all shut up. Running down it she came out onto Cheapside and saw progressing slowly in the distance the Fletchers’ piled up cart. Tom and his mother were sitting among the baggage with the father driving.

“Tom!” she shrieked, realising it was the noise of the drunks that had prevented him from hearing her at the house. “Don’t leave me behind.”

The boy looked round. She was catching them up.

“It’s Eunice,” he called to his father. “Won’t you stop?”

His mother looked round. “Do you want to give us all the plague? Why do you think we are getting out of London? If you are a Christian keep away.”

His father was trying to whip up the poor horse but he could go no faster.

But Eunice had stopped. Her father had urged her to go because he was selfless and should she endanger others’ lives?

“Go home,” Mistress Fletcher said again. “Stay there and if you are clear they will let you out. That’s what the laws are for, child, to stop it spreading.”

Tom’s face shone with tears in the light of the lantern he was holding. Eunice bowed her head and turned back.

She began to walk towards the foot of their lane when she heard the dead cart again. “Bring out your dead!” She slipped behind a projecting doorway and saw the cart emerge and turn the other way. There was another body on it wrapped in a coarse shroud. Her father? The two officers who had begun to chase her had evidently decided it was a waste of time. She could go back now unseen.

When she reached her house door she saw the plank had been removed and very roughly knocked back. The red cross was still on the door and the dreaded writing, ‘Lord have mercy’ scrawled above it. I could probably rip the plank off with my bare hands, she thought.

She couldn’t do it. The notion of going inside where the plague was lurking and the officers would come again and seal the door for four more weeks appalled her. I am free, she told herself. God’s heaven is above me. I am alive. I can walk where I will in the world. I made an oath that I would go and go I will.

She saw her scattered food on the stinking road, the loaf, the cheese, the bag of oatmeal. God had fed Elijah in the desert. She kicked the basket aside, slung her bundle over her shoulder and began walking.

CHAPTER 16

Bel took her letter from Dan when she went to visit her mother-in-law, Anne Wilson, on a balmy evening in late September. She never went by the shortcut she took to the village as a child, following the marks she had cut on the trees in the wood behind Horden Hall. Since its association with the night of the rick-burning she had kept clear of that way and the ensuing years had made the undergrowth so dense that it would be impossible to get through. As she followed the longer, open route she was telling herself that when Dan began to do his duty by his estates one of the tasks he must tackle would be the care of his neglected woods.

She strode freely down the track already leaf strewn from the first autumn gale and reached the plank bridge over the Horden Burn. Beyond it lay the Turner’s farm on the left and the haystack, plentifully crammed with hay, on the right. “Pray God it may never again be fired by such carelessness as mine that night,” she said half-aloud.