Winsor, Kathleen (89 page)

But
as the days went by he grew gradually stronger and though at first he had to
rest after each small task he finally got all the rooms cleaned again. And one
day while Amber was sleeping he moved her into the freshly-made bed and from
then on occupied the trundle himself. Both of them joked about his housekeeping
and cooking—which he did as soon as he was well enough—and the first time she
laughed was when she woke up one morning to see him, naked but for a towel tied
about his waist, sweeping the floor. She told him that she must have his
recipes to give her next cook and asked him what method he used to get the
sheets so white, saying that her laundress sometimes brought them back in worse
condition than they were sent.

Soon
he began going out to buy the food himself—for the guards had been withdrawn as
useless—and found the streets almost empty.

The
people were dying at the rate of 10,000 a week or more —it was a frightening
insidious fact that of those who died a great percentage were never reported or
even counted. Dead-carts came by at all hours, but in spite of that hundreds of
bodies lay in the streets or were piled in the public squares, sometimes for
days, while the rats swarmed over them. Many were half-gnawed away before they
were taken up for burial. The red cross was no longer chalked on the doors, but
large printed posters were nailed up instead. Grass grew between the
cobble-stones; thousands of houses were deserted and whole streets were
barricaded and closed off, all their inhabitants having died or fled. Even the
bells ceased tolling. The city lay perfectly still, hot and stinking.

Bruce
talked to the shop-keepers, many of whom, like others who had remained behind,
had shrugged off their earlier terrors. Death had become so common that a kind
of scorn had replaced fear. The timid ones were shut tight in their houses and
never ventured abroad. Others who went on with daily work and habits acquired a
fatalism which sometimes was tempered by caution, but which more often was
deliberately reckless. Mourning was now almost never seen, though at the end of
the first week in September 2,000 were dying each day and almost every family
had lost someone.

There
were innumerable grotesque and terrible stories, heard on every hand, but none
more terrible than what was actually happening. Instances of premature burial
were widely known— partly because of the death-like coma which made the mistake
natural, partly because nurses often took advantage of it to get the patient
out of the way and plunder the house. There was the story of the butcher who
was laid outside in his shroud for the dead-cart, which neglected to carry him
off, and who regained consciousness the following morning. He was said to be
alive and almost well again. One man escaped from his house, raving mad, and
jumped into the Thames, swam across it, and recovered. Another man, left alone,
knocked over a candle and burned himself to death in his bed. A young woman
discovered a plague-spot on her baby, dashed out its brains against the wall of
a house and ran along the street, shrieking.

The
first day that Bruce was able to go out he walked the half-mile or so to
Almsbury House, let himself in with his key, and went up to the apartments he
had always occupied to get some fresh clothing. What he had on he took off and
burned. There were a couple of servants who had been left as caretakers—for
many of the great empty houses were now being entered and robbed by thieves and
beggars—and they had been shut in there for more than two months. They refused
to come near him but shouted out questions, and were much relieved when he
left.

By
the end of the second week in September Amber was able to dress and sit in the
courtyard for a few minutes every day. Bruce carried her down and back again
the first few times but she begged him to let her walk for she wanted to grow
strong enough so that they could leave the city. She believed now that London
was doomed, cursed by God, and that unless they got out they would die with
everyone else. For though she was much better she was still gloomy and
pessimistic; her usual attitude was completely reversed. Bruce was so well now
that his own confidence and optimism had returned and he tried to amuse her—but
it was not easy to do.

"I
heard an interesting story today," he said one morning as they sat in the
courtyard.

He
had brought down a chair for her and she drooped in it pathetically. The
clothes she had worn while taking care of him he had burned, and the one gown
which was left was a high-necked one of plain black silk that made her skin
look sallow and drained. There were dark pits beneath her eyes and her hair
hung in drab oily coils about her shoulders, but there was a red rose pinned at
one temple which he had found that morning while shopping. Flowers had almost
vanished from the town.

"What?"
she asked him listlessly.

"Well,
it sounds preposterous but they swear it's true. It seems there was a drunken
piper who left a tavern the other night and lay down in a doorway somewhere to
sleep. The dead-cart came along, tossed him on top of the heap, and went off.
But halfway to the graveyard the piper woke up and nothing daunted by the
company took out his pipe and began to play. The driver and link-man ran off
bellowing that the cart was haunted—"

Amber
did not laugh or even smile; she looked at him with a kind of incredulous
horrified disgust. "Oh— Oh, how terrible! A live man in that cart— Oh, it
can't
be true—"

"I'm
sorry, darling." He was instantly contrite and changed the subject
immediately. "You know, I think I've found the means to get us out of the
city." He was sitting on the flagstone before her in his breeches and
shirt-sleeves, a lock of his own coarse dark hair falling over his forehead,
and he looked up at her now with a smile, squinting his eyes against the sun.

"How?"

"Almsbury's
yacht's still here, moored at the water-stairs, and it's big enough so that we
could take along provisions to last us for several weeks."

"But
where could we go? You can't go out to sea in a yacht, can you?"

"We
won't try. We'll sail up the Thames toward Hampton Court and go past Windsor
and Maidenhead and on up that way. Once we're sufficiently recovered not to
spread the disease we can go to Almsbury's country seat in Herefordshire."

"But
you said they wouldn't let ships leave port at all." Even
simple plans
sounded more difficult to her now than preposterous ones would have when she
was in good health.

"They
won't. We'll have to be careful. We'll go at night— but don't you worry about
it. I'll make the plans. I've already begun to—"

He
paused, for Amber was staring at him, her face almost green, all her body
stiffened in an attitude of listening. Then he heard it too—the rumbling sound
of wheels turning over the cobble-stones, and a man's distant voice.

"Bring
out your dead!"

Amber
began to sway forward but swiftly he was on his feet and had her in his arms.
He carried her back up the stairs to the balcony and through the parlour into
the bedroom and there he laid her down, very gently. She had lost consciousness
for only a moment and now she looked up at him again. The sickness had left her
wholly dependent upon him; she looked to him for all strength and confidence,
she expected him to supply the answer and solution for every fear or worry. He
was lover, God and parent.

"I'll
never forget that sound," she whispered now. "I'll hear it every
night of my life. I'll see those carts every time I shut my eyes." Her
eyes were beginning to glitter, her breath came faster with hysterical
excitement. "I'll never be able to think about anything else—"

Bruce
bent close and put his mouth against her cheek. "Amber, don't! Don't think
about it. Don't
let
yourself think about it. You can forget it. You can,
and you've got to—"

A
few days later Amber and Bruce left London in Almsbury's yacht. The country was
beautiful. The low riverside meadows were thick with marigolds and along the
banks grew lilies and green rushes. Tangled masses of water-grass, like green
hair, floated on the swift current, and in the late afternoons there were
always cattle standing at the edge of the water, quiet and reflective.

They
passed a great many other boats, most of them small scows or barges on which
were crowded whole families who had no country homes and had taken that means
of escaping the plague. But though they exchanged mutual greetings and news,
people were still distrustful of one another. Those who had avoided the
sickness this long had no wish to risk it now.

They
progressed slowly, past Hampton and Staines and Windsor and Maidenhead, stopping
whenever they found a spot they liked and staying there for as long as they
liked and then going on again. By the time they had been gone a night and a day
London and its dying thousands seemed to be in another world, almost another
age. Amber began to improve more rapidly, and she was as determined as Bruce to
shut those memories from her mind. When they tried to creep in she pushed them
aside, refusing to meet them face to face.

I'll
forget there ever was a plague, she insisted.

And
gradually it began to seem that Bruce's sickness and her own, all the events of
the past three months had not happened recently but many years ago, in another
life. It even seemed they must have happened to other people, not to them. She
wondered if he felt the same way, but she never asked, for it was a subject
they refused to discuss.

For
a while Amber was desolate over her appearance. She was afraid that her beauty
was gone forever and that she would be ugly the rest of her life. In spite of
everything Bruce could say to try to reassure her she cried with rage and
despair every time she saw a mirror.

"Oh,
my God!" she would wail dismally. "I'd rather be dead than look like
this! Oh, Bruce—I'm never going to look like I did before, I know I'm not! Oh,
I hate myself!"

He
would put his arms about her, smiling as though she were a naughty child,
coaxing away her fear and anguish. "Of course you're going to look the
same, darling. But good Lord, you were mighty sick you know—you can't expect to
be well again in only a few days." They had not been long on the yacht
when her health improved so much that she did begin to look something like her
old self.

Both
of them realized, as perhaps they never had before, how pleasant it was merely
to be alive. They spent hours lying stretched out on cushions on the deck,
soaking in hot sunlight, that seemed to penetrate to the very bone—and though
Bruce lay naked, his body turning a deep rich brown again, Amber kept herself
carefully covered for fear of tanning her own cream-coloured skin. They shared
everything, so as to enjoy it more intensely: the late summer sky, clear and
blue, painted only here and there with a thin spray of cloud. The sound of a
corncrake on a dewy morning. The good smell of earth and warm summer rain. The
silver-green leaves of a poplar growing just beside a shallow stream. A little
girl, standing amid white daisies, surrounded by her flock of geese.

Later
on they began to go into the villages to buy provisions or sometimes to eat a
ready-cooked meal, which now seemed a rare luxury and almost an adventure.
Amber worried a great deal about Nan and little Susanna, particularly after she
found that there was plague in the country, too, but Bruce insisted that she
must make herself believe that they were well and safe.

"Nan's
a woman of good sense, and there's no one more loyal. If it became dangerous
where they were she'd go somewhere else. Trust her, Amber, and don't make
yourself miserable worrying."

"Oh,
I do trust her!" she would say. "But I can't
help
worrying!
Oh, I'll be so glad when I know they're well and safe!"

Everything
that Amber saw now reminded her of Marygreen and her life there with Aunt Sarah
and Uncle Matt. It was rich agricultural country, as was Essex, with prosperous
enclosed farms, many orchards, quiet pretty little villages usually no more
than two or three miles apart—though often as she
knew, so far as those who lived
there were concerned it might as well have been two or three hundred miles.
There were cottages of cherry brick with oak frames and thatched roofs that lay
like thick blankets over them. Morning-glories and roses climbed the walls and
clustered about the dormer windows. Pearl-grey doves perched softly cooing on
the steep-slanted roof-tops, and sparrows ruffled themselves in the dusty roadway.
It seemed to her now to mean peace and quiet and a kind of contentment which
must exist nowhere else on earth.