IV. The Plague Doctor
The plague doctor stood by himself at the front of the ferry, a shallow-bottomed hoy, and leaned motionlessly on a rough kebbie staff. Sheep surrounded him, bleating, nervous—due in large part to the pigs sequestered (barely) at the opposite end.
What he was thinking, no one else on the ferry could tell. The long-beaked mask he wore beneath his wide-brimmed hat disguised his features entirely and made the other passengers keep their distance from him. The blue-glass lenses hid even where his attention lay.
The sight of him, shaped by his black oiled cassock, was like a glimpse of Death out for a casual boatride up the Thames. He had not been among them on the rough channel crossing—at least, not in that grotesquely avian costume. And he had not stood among the farmers waiting to load their animals on board for the trip to the slaughter. Where had he come from? Had he been waiting for the ferry in the shadows at Gravesend? Surely he hadn’t emerged from King Henry’s device fort there . . . unless there was plague in the fort? And there could be, and who would tell them?
No one was certain as to who had gotten on and who had disembarked at Gravesend.
He shouldn’t have had such an effect. Plague in London in the summer months was as common as fleas. So-called community plague doctors abounded. Most of them had little if any medical training; a few were young physicians just starting their careers. He had observed and interacted with them for so long now, he felt he could spot the good ones even while cloaked and masked. Most were only useful at recording deaths.
One thing was certain to those looking on as he passed by: Whatever herbs and fruits and spices he was breathing, they smelled immeasurably better than the stink of the miniature stockyard the animals were making of the long ferry.
Greenwich approached on the left, with the red-and-white royal palace of Placentia perched above. A long straight stairway led from the palace down to the river, beside its immense watergate, behind which could be discerned the royal barge: The Queen herself was not on the river today.
After that came the steeple of the church at Rotherhithe, and then a scattering of small landing stages below various alehouses. The plague doctor observed the few ships anchored there, crews gone up the steps for libations while they awaited word of a berth secured farther upriver at the Custom House docks.
Almost immediately, on the starboard side of the river, the gibbets at Wapping-on-the-Woze came into view. As it was near high tide, all that could be seen of any hanged and drowned pirates there was the tops of their cages, one of which appeared to contain a pair of hands, tied at the crossed wrists and clinging to the top of the cage.
On the left-hand side, the home of the Earl of Sussex, Bermondsey House, passed by, followed by three corn-grinding windmills. The plague doctor could recall when Bermondsey had been a quiet Benedictine monastery as he could also recollect when King Henry VIII changed all that.
The breadth of the river shortly became speckled with wherries and canopied tiltboats scooting around larger ships. Most of them had gathered near Billingsgate—the legal quays and Custom House on the north side of the river—unloading or awaiting their turn to unload. The Tower, an island unto itself, slid silently past as the steersman navigated between anchored ships and headed for a space where he could put in at the quays away from the cranes at wharfside.
They tied up against one nearly empty quay and laid out a plank onto which the animals were to be herded. Most of the passengers hurried ahead of the livestock to disembark.
The plague doctor didn’t move, but stood watching as if fascinated by the cranes—a trio of little cabins on stilts that maneuvered cargo off the nearest ship and onto the Custom House quay. Inside each cabin, a man walked inside one of two side-by-side wheels either to raise or lower the rope attached to a pulley overhead. The ropes, ending in hooks, lifted tuns, crates, and other cargo from a ship and held onto it until the cabin was rotated about and the man within stepped from the raising to the lowering wheel beside it. The cabins reminded him tremendously of the treadwheel cranes he had once helped operate to lift and set blocks of stone in the construction of abbeys and cathedrals. Not much had changed in all that time save that the cranes had become a little more sophisticated. Alpin Waldroup—it had been awhile since he’d thought of that name. Far longer since he’d spoken to Waldroup’s ghost—a spirit he could no longer resurrect if he tried.
Avoiding the livestock, the plague doctor walked along the quay then around the harbor of Billingsgate and a carrack unloading there. He lingered as if to watch the activities, but really to confirm that none of the others off the ferry were watching or following him. They weren’t. He strode to the quayside and quickly hired a wherry to row him up to Fresh Wharf on the north side of the river just below London Bridge.
After paying his penny, he climbed the steps and entered the bustling bottleneck of people attempting to push their way onto the bridge. The twelve-foot-wide roadway across the middle of it generally left little room to avoid sliding through the crowd coming from the south. Pickpockets flourished here and did very well for themselves, but even they gave the disturbing plague doctor ample room.
In the middle he passed what had once been the chapel of Thomas à Becket and was now a grocer’s shop, just one of the two hundred shops and abodes edging the length of the bridge, which included the ruff shop above which the doctor lived; for now, however, he passed it by as well.
At the south end, he walked beneath the Traitor’s Gate, where impaled heads and body parts were displayed overhead. Woe betide you, should a fresh mount drip its gore upon your person. Originally, the traitors’ parts had adorned the bridge’s drawbridge, but it had been torn down some years before, and the Southwark Gate became Traitor’s Gate.
He emerged to set off down Long Southwark. A main thoroughfare, if he’d kept going the road would have taken him all the way into Kent; as with London Bridge itself, walking down Long Southwark would have had him navigating against flocks of pigs and sheep, and gaggles of geese, all being driven to market. He would also have been rubbing elbows with disguised Catholic priests and spies on their way into the City of London from the continent and making use of the teeming main road to blend in. Knowing as he did how they had infiltrated the Church over the centuries, he suspected there were Yvags among the priests who walked Long Southwark. But this afternoon he’d become The Doctor, a man concerned neither with glamoured elves nor with Catholic infiltrators, only with disease and death.
Like the travelers on the ferry and the bridge, the people walking toward the river all parted before him as he strode down Long Southwark. As with those who’d eyed him on the ferry, he represented the very embodiment of the plague in an unsettling if not monstrous form. No one knew what lurked beneath the long-beaked mask. Medicine for them was a variation of witchcraft, simply a state-sanctioned variety. He might easily have been a demon in its employ.
Finally, without St. George’s Bar, he turned left onto Kent Street and headed for the Lazarus-house where he served. The house had been here since the 1300s, originally an isolation hospital for lepers. Now it was become one of various plague hospitals, in this case associated with nearby St. Thomas Hospital. In the guise of Dr. Gerard he divided his time between the two. As had been the case with the lepers before them, there was little anyone could do for the victims of the plague except isolate them. The afflicted who showed up at St. Thomas were directed here. The assorted available “cures” were at best harmless, at worst quite capable of killing a patient who would otherwise have recovered. The only real cure the plague doctor knew of was to leave the city until the weather turned bleak and the plague died out. Those who could afford to summer in the countryside were generally still alive come the autumn.
Outside the Lazarus—or more popularly named Lazar—house, a horse-drawn cart stood. A white stick poked up beside the driver’s bench—the warning sign that the cart contained plague, but this wasn’t a dead cart for hauling corpses. This one belonged to the Viewers—two old women who went from house to house to tally the dead and record the causes for the parish clerk. He could have done without a visit from them, but he nevertheless hurried up the steps and went inside.
All the people who beheld the plague doctor might have considered him the embodiment of the plague, but in truth the two seemingly harmless Viewers were the disease personified: To record the manner of death for their parish, they set foot in every single house where someone had died and thus by direct contact marinated in every ague and fever, shrouded in every miasma filling every plague-infested room. Rarely did the women last long in the rôle of Viewer, but at tuppence for every body recorded, they made enough money to stay off parish relief in the months or weeks before they eventually succumbed. Thus, a collective of sickness hung about them wherever they went. The parish officials, aware of it, insisted they leave their reports in an isolated box to be retrieved at a later time.
These two particular women had been at the job for going on two months. What data they’d collected thus far hinted this would be a mild plague year. The worst he’d seen since moving to London was 1563, when it had consumed 20,000 hereabouts. And that hardly compared to 1348, when nearly everyone around him had died.
In that year he’d speculated at first that the plague might be a disease conjured by the Yvag to wipe out the human infestation occupying the world they wanted. Soon enough, however, he realized he was encountering one felled skinwalker after another, and came to understand that this so-called Black Death played no favorites. The Yvagvojas themselves might be immune, but their lacunal human conveyances were no less susceptible than anyone else. It was chaos for them as it was for unoccupied humans. Nevertheless, the Black Death had drawn him into the world of medicine, the study of humors and herbal remedies for a variety of afflictions—all of which had hardly changed in three centuries.
Inside the Lazar-house he removed his hat and mask, and with a handkerchief wiped the sweat from his face, pushed back his hair. The world went from smelling of cloves, lemons, and lavender to a vague sourness. Fresh rushes for the floor were needed to clear that sick smell away; he must send someone to purchase some at first opportunity.
Thomas unbuttoned and removed the oiled cassock. Beneath it he wore a long mutton-sleeved shirt, baggy breeches to his knees, and silk stockings.
As he lay the cassock down, his nurse, Mme Bennet, wearing a yellow dress and white apron, came up to him. She reached over and tied the strings on the ends of his sleeves. “The parish Viewers are here,” she told him, as though he wouldn’t have realized that already.
He thanked her, then walked around the corner into the hall, leaving Mme Bennet in the entryway. The two elderly women awaited him there.
The nearest Viewer said, “God protect ye, Warden.”
“And you. Who have you brought?”
“Family,” she said.
She made room for him to pass. He became immediately concerned with the second Viewer, who appeared to have developed a swelling on one side of her neck. She saw his stare, and touched a hand to the swollen gland as if to hide it from him. He said nothing as he passed by and entered the open chamber.
It was a small room, containing a single bed and chair. Another woman, sunken-eyed and hollow-cheeked, either starving or afflicted, lay abed. Beside her sat either her husband or son—given both their states he could not say for certain. The young man was drawn and pasty of countenance as though he might collapse beside her at any moment. Behind him, a dark-haired girl of perhaps twelve stared down at her mother, then up at Thomas. If she had plague, it was not obvious yet.
Behind him, the Viewer said, “These folk been shut up the full twenty days. Parish fed ’em. Dead cart took away the ’usband and parents of ’im and another boy. This elder boy, Mathias, ’e’s strong, outlastin’ it so far, though his mum might be gone in the night. And the girl, called Syndony, she been with the rest but ain’t showin’ no signs at all. Thought us mebbe she’s a special one.” He glanced around and she smiled in gap-toothed amusement. He knew what she meant—that the girl might be a witch. She knew better than to say so directly. “We could take her with us.”
The girl was staring at him with her large cobalt-blue eyes, her expression shocked, as if surprised to see him. They held each other’s gaze for so long that he thought perhaps she was mute. Then, too softly for him to hear, she mouthed what looked like the word “red” before turning back to her mother. He went on watching her a moment longer before turning back to the healthier Viewer.
“Thank you for your attentiveness, we’ll look after her as well.” He drew his purse from out of his loose breeches, counted out twelve pennies, and leaned forward to hand six to each of the women. The second Viewer held out her palm, which gave him a closer look at the swelling on her neck, which only reinforced his opinion.
How long did he suppose she would last? Longer than the mother lying here? She must already be experiencing symptoms. She took the money and said nothing. Her eyes dared him to suggest that she might be ill. As a Viewer, she knew what her chances were once she was walled up. The other woman would know, too.
“They are in God’s hands now as are we all,” he said, and gestured for them to go.
The Viewers took their money and left. Mme Bennet came in to stand beside him.
“We need some fresh rushes,” he told her. “Can you see to it?”
“Oui,” she said, and went back out.
Thomas walked back to the room with the family. The son looked up at him with tired eyes.
“Young man,” he said. “Young man, do you have any family in the countryside, away from the city?”
The brother nodded, finally with some effort making eye contact with him. “Horsham,” he said. “Roffey, that is. Near Horsham. Got a cousin.”
“Name?”
“Wyntour, same’s us.”
“Well and good. I want you to come lie down. I shall arrange with the hospital for a wagon that will take you to your cousin. It’s not that far, Horsham. Might e’en have you to ’em by day’s end, and the healthier for it. Come.” He reached out a hand and the brother all but fell against him. He caught the boy and walked him to the next room, placed him on the pallet there, unconscious. Then, with hands pressed to him, Thomas closed his eyes.
The first time he’d done this, forever ago with Janet, his wife, he had felt an abnormality in her and by some means he still didn’t understand had pummeled it into nothingness. Whatever had afflicted Janet, however, it hadn’t been plague. With victims of plague, there was far less that he could do. If they weren’t too weak, he could make them sleep, and sometimes that sleep proved restorative. This boy had resilience, as the Viewer had said, and seemed to be fighting against the disease.
After a while, he got up from the brother, who was sleeping peacefully now. In the doorway he found that the girl, Syndony, had followed them and stood watching. He told her, “Your brother is sleeping. I need to see to your mother. You should go sit with him.”
The girl walked boldly past him, unafraid, and stood over her brother. She lifted his hand and held it. Watching Thomas, her head tilted in curiosity, she waved her free hand about just above her brother and repeated the word “Red,” then turned her head to stare at him again.
A special one, the Viewer had said. Perhaps, thought Thomas, in this instance she was absolutely right, although he’d no idea what the girl saw.
Mme Bennet had gone to St. Thomas the Apostle Hospital and arranged for a wagon to come collect the family.
The driver, named Hughe Lothey, had provided his services on numerous occasions before this for the hospital, and as much as he could trust anyone under the circumstances, Thomas trusted that Lothey would deliver these three to the hamlet of Roffey near Horsham. Short of going there himself, it was all he could do.
Lothey told him, “We’ll make Dorking today anyways.”
Within Lothey’s hearing, Thomas told Syndony and Mathias, “When this summer is past and plague’s in retreat, I shall come look in on you and see how you’ve fared.” He clasped the boy’s hand, taking him aside, and gave him three shillings. “To help with your keep and welfare meantime,” he said. “Don’t say anything to Lothey, he’ll be paid well upon return.” Mathias seemed to understand. He tucked the coins away, then climbed up and lay back beside his mother. His sister sat cross-legged, and studied him as if trying to figure out what he was.
From the doorway, Thomas watched them roll off in Hughe Lothey’s wagon. In spite of his assurances that he would pay them a visit, it turned out that events would conspire to send him off in another direction entirely, and he would not reach Roffey at all.