Plague Child
Authors: Peter Ransley
PETER RANSLEY
PLAGUE CHILD
For Cynthia, Nicholas, Imogen, Rebecca and Lochlinn
Contents
One cloudy September evening in 1625 Matthew Neave drove the cart, loaded with the bodies he had collected, to the edge of the River Cherwell. Seven bodies: they would not pay him much for that.
While the horses drank he finished off the last of his bread and cheese. The bread was hard and dry and he softened it from his flask of beer as he waited for the light to go. He never went near the plague pit before dark.
In early summer, at the start of the plague in Oxford, relatives would lie in wait for the cart. Fear of the disease was overcome by the fear of hell that their loved ones (and they later) would suffer if they did not get a Christian burial in sanctified ground. Matthew was stabbed and nearly thrown into the pit in one fight before the watch was called.
But as people died or fled, and that remorseless hot summer reduced the remainder to a numb apathy, the disturbances petered out. Nevertheless, when he heard the sound of a galloping horse, Matthew put down his flask. Beer dribbled unnoticed down his stained fustian jacket as he stared over Christchurch Meadow.
He couldn’t make out the rider at first for the trees, but the horse was a black gelding, a gentleman’s horse. The horse cleared the trees. The rider was dressed in black. He was masked, although the day had not been hot. The mask might hold a nosegay of herbs to protect against the plague, but Matthew was taking no chances.
He picked up the knife with which he had cut the cheese and retreated to the cart – the stench of its rotting bodies better protection than any weapon.
The man reined in the horse well short of him.
‘Matthew Neave?’
‘Who wants him?’
The man took off his mask, but kept the herbs it contained to his face. Matthew dropped his knife and pulled off his hat, words drying in his throat. This was no gentleman. The horse was better bred than the man riding it, but for Matthew Mr Ralph was of much more immediate concern than any gentleman.
Mr Ralph was Lord Stonehouse’s steward. A yeoman’s son, he had acquired a small estate in his own right, field by field, the painful struggle to build it showing in the deep seams of his face. The deepest seam was a jagged scar running from his right cheek to his neck.
‘There’s a dead child at Horseborne. Bennet’s farm.’
Several miles away, over Shotover Hill, on the edge of Lord Stonehouse’s estate.
‘A plague child, sir?’
‘Yes.’
Matthew knew this was wrong, knew this was trouble. He had caught the disease when he was six. The agonising black boils under his arms burst and he had survived. They threw the rest of his family in the cart and left him locked in the house alone.
The Plague Orders, no doubt reflecting most people’s conviction that the disease was God’s punishment, specified that victims should be quarantined for forty days and forty nights. For over a month Matthew had been locked in alone, kept alive by the pottage and weak beer passed to him through a window by the only neighbour who would go near him.
Since the few who survived did not catch the plague again, what had nearly killed Matthew now provided him with his bread and, in a plague year like this, meat. Some people thought Matthew a cunning man because it was said he could predict who was going to die of the disease and who was going to live. Perhaps the steward kept his distance now not just because of the bodies, but because he had heard these stories.
Matthew scratched his head. He knew every case for twenty miles around. Someone might have escaped from quarantine, but that was unlikely. It was even less likely that the disease was still spreading. The cold sharpness in the air, the dwindling number of bodies, told him the outbreak was practically over.
Matthew shook his head slowly. ‘Horseborne, sir? Can’t be.’
As painstakingly as he had built his small estate, Mr Ralph had built his voice, away from Matthew’s slow burr, mimicking the cool mockery of his betters.
‘I’m afraid it can. It’s still spreading.’
The clouds were now edged with black and the wind freshening. As if aware that the evening would be a short one, swifts were diving, skimming above the water catching flies. Soon they would go, swarms of them, vanishing into the sky. Just as the swifts knew when there would be no more flies, so Matthew knew there was no plague at Horseborne.
‘I’ll collect he tomorrow.’
In spite of the steward’s fear, both of the bodies in the cart and the curse Matthew might put on him, Mr Ralph pulled his horse closer. His voice reverted to a country, flint-edged burr.
‘You’ll collect he tonight.’
‘There’s no papers,’ Matthew answered stubbornly.
Not all the people ending up in the pit had been plague victims. Nobody worried overmuch about the poor, but when a farmer was murdered and dumped in the pit, the watch had dinned into Matthew the importance of papers which they flourished in front of him before unsealing a plague house. And Susannah, who lived with him, had dinned into Matthew the evil of denying anyone a Christian burial whom God had not touched with the plague.
From a pouch on his saddle Mr Ralph produced an order. He did not bother to move any closer, for he did not expect Matthew to be able to read it. The paper was enough. Afterwards, Matthew could not remember whether there was a signature, but burned in his mind was the falcon’s talons clutching a shield, the seal of Lord Stonehouse, whose word was law.
The wind was bending the trees above Matthew and what was left of the sun was buried in dark clouds. It would take him an hour to get over Shotover Hill. He would set off in that direction and then turn back to Oxford, pleading the next day a broken wheel, or a lame horse. He went to his horses.
‘I’d best go now,’ he said.
‘You’ll do it – no excuses!’
Matthew stared at him. The steward had a reputation of being afraid of nothing, but something had frightened him. His words came out so violently the nosegay he was holding over his mouth dropped from his hand but still he pulled his horse closer.
‘Here –’
There was a glint of silver in the air. Matthew caught the coin as deftly as the swifts catching the flies. His manner changed.
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘I will give you another at the pit. Say nothing – do you understand?’
Matthew understood that two half crowns were a crown. And that Mr Ralph would be waiting for him at the pit to make sure he finished the job.
The rain began shortly after Matthew left the meadow. It swept at him in great gusts as he swore and cut at the horses, struggling and sliding to climb up Shotover. At the top of the hill, to lift his spirits he took out the silver coin. A half crown. Newly minted that year for the coronation of Charles I.
It helped Matthew forget he was soaked to the skin. A half crown! More than a labourer’s wages for a month. And another at the pit!
He was so intent on the coin that he was only dimly aware of the approaching coach, the driver lashing the horses to pick up speed at the start of the hill. The cart, rattling and bumping down the incline, had drifted into the centre of the road. He yanked at the reins and sparks flew as he pulled ineffectively at the brake.
The horses of the approaching coach reared. Matthew glimpsed the driver’s angry face and felt the sting of a whip across his cheek. He lost the reins and the cart lurched, with a grinding of wood against stone, into the ditch.
He shouted and cursed after it, then searched for the coin, which had jumped from his hand. He shoved aside one of the bodies which had been thrown from the cart, before giving up, dropping his head in despair. Then he thought of the other silver coin, waiting for him at the pit. He flung the body back in the cart with the others and covered them with the thick bundles of hay with which he disguised his cargo.
The near-side wheel was buckled and grating against the side as, just before Horseborne, he found the track to Bennet’s farm. The name meant something to him, but he couldn’t remember what.
The track was a thick, gluey pottage of mud, leaves and dung, pockmarked by cattle and horses. Overlaying them were the recent, deep ruts of a coach.
It was now almost dark and the rain, which had slackened, dripped steadily through the trees. The cart rattled and jerked through a small copse, a branch wrenching at Matthew’s hat before the open gate of the farmyard.
He stopped at the door of a prosperous-looking wattle-and-daub farmhouse. There was no red cross on the door. And something else was wrong.
There was no dog. Who had ever heard of a farm without dogs? Then he remembered. Bennet was a farmer who, returning from market drunk, had been murdered. The farm had been bought by Mr Ralph to add to his nearby lands, and was not yet tenanted.
Feeling increasingly uneasy, he approached the door, stopping abruptly. A pair of eyes glittered at him from the bushes. He was about to run when he realised the gaze was unblinking. They were jewelled eyes, set in the head of a falcon, the centrepiece of a magnificent pendant whose gold chain was entangled in the bushes. He knew where it came from. There would be a reward for it – a substantial one. He had lost silver, but found gold. He stuffed it inside his jacket and knocked at the door.
He expected Widow Martin, or some other fuddled midwife, but the woman who answered the door was another shock. Like Mr Ralph, she was not quite gentry. Kate Beaumann was a gentlewoman’s lady, as God-fearing as her sober black indicated, and she was plainly as shocked to see him as he was to see her. They knew each other, for it is surprising how many people, from all walks of life, will seek out the services of a cunning man. She had a warm, kindly face, which reminded Matthew of the good neighbour who had kept him alive during the plague. She was in her mid-twenties, but there were already streaks of grey in her hair, and her eyes were red with weeping. Her dress, like her pattens, was splashed with mud.
He touched his dripping hat. ‘Evening, Miss Beaumann.’
Without a word she beckoned him to follow her, shutting an inside door quickly, but not before he glimpsed a weakly guttering fire, a birthing stool, and a spattering of blood on the rush-covered floor. She led him into a stall where the farmer would have kept a sick animal. On the straw was a small shape wrapped in a linen apron.
‘Take him.’
When he didn’t move she picked up the object and thrust it into his arms. The little bundle was cold and wet. Part of the covering fell away from the baby’s face, which carried none of the telltale plague spots or scars. The child looked to Matthew to be stillborn, or to have died shortly after birth.
‘He don’t look no plague child,’ he said.
The harshness in Kate Beaumann’s voice was as unexpected as her kindly face. ‘He was a plague to us,’ she said.
Without another word Matthew left, half-running to the cart. He took off the apron before dropping the baby on the cart and covering it with the bundles of straw. The apron was fine linen, Flemish possibly. Kate Beaumann’s muddy skirt suggested she had dumped the child in the fields to die. That was as common as death itself.
The mystery was why Kate did not leave the child there. Or bury it. Or throw it in the river. One baby was much like another. But bodies could be found.
Mr Ralph’s urgency and fear all but spoke out loud there must be no risk of that. Perhaps the child had some special feature, or birthmark. If that was the case, the pit was the ideal solution to the problem.
Put there to destroy the plague, lime ate quickly into bodies and faces, dissolving them in a few days into an unrecognisable slime. No one would go near the pit, let alone lift a body from it. Someone wanted to prevent anyone from recognising, or claiming he recognised, the features of the child at the bottom of his cart.
Matthew shrugged. His hand closed round the pendant, feeling the outline of the jewelled bird and the links of the chain, one by one. Then his hand stopped stroking it. Suppose he was accused of stealing it? It was risky, far too risky to return it. The horses, which were dragging the cart more and more slowly, needed shoeing and the blacksmith would melt the gold down. Broken up, the stones he could sell one by one at Witney Fair, or Oxford, with the linen apron, which Susannah would wash and press.
He was musing like this, the rocking of the cart sending him into a half-sleep, the reins slipping gradually from his fingers, when he first heard the stuttering cry.
He had been asleep. Dreaming. There was nothing but the wind, the weary stumble of the hooves and the creak of the cart. But there it was again. Unmistakable. A baby’s cry.
Hadn’t he feared, from the very beginning, that this was wrong? Hadn’t Susannah warned him, time and again, of the evil of throwing someone who had not died of plague into the pit? The baby had been clap-cold dead – now it had come back to haunt him.
As the cry increased into a pitiful wail, he crossed himself in terror, lashing the horses in an attempt to escape from the spirit that he believed was pursuing him, he was now convinced, into hell. It was the hell he had somehow escaped as a child, but knew he had always been destined for; a pit, not of fire, but of bodies slowly eaten, burned, then re-formed, only to be eaten and burned again, forever being consumed, writhing in lime.