At the Sign of the Sugared Plum by Mary Hooper Read Free Book Online Page A

– different ones according to whether you were rich or poor – the banning of all needless gatherings of people and a ruling that beggars must not be allowed to go about from parish to parish in case this spread the disease.
    Several folk were gathered about the poster and many of them, not being readers, begged me to impart its contents. As more people arrived I was asked to do this several times over, until I almost knew the words off by heart. As I read them once again it came to me that those who surrounded me did not seem overly worried about them. They made good-humoured comments about the contents, laughing and saying itwould be more work for death-mongering coffin makers, and naming doctors and apothecaries as quacks and charlatans.
    ‘They would as soon kill you as cure you – for they get paid either way,’ one woman said to me cheerfully, and again I could not bring myself to believe that these Orders – this plague – was any great matter. The sun was shining, the day was fair and the people around me were bonny and of good heart. Perhaps the authorities had just been thrown into a panic by a few deaths.
    Returning home, however, I was given some cause to change my mind, for I blundered unawares into the very heart of the dread plague-land. Going the long way back – for I was trying to make my journey lead me past Doctor da Silva’s shop – I found myself approaching the parish of St Giles. Sarah had told me this was a disreputable area and that many derelicts and paupers had made their homes amongst its slums. It being daylight, however, and the streets being busy, I did not worry about entering. As I ventured further into the mean and shabby streets though, I began to feel considerable unease, for in some passageways shops were closed up and there were few people about, almost as if it was a holy day. I pressed on, for though I had never been this way before, being a country girl I knew by the position of the sun in the sky that I was going in the right direction.
    After a few moments I reached Cock and Ball Alley and judged I should turn left into it. But a man lounging by the first house held his hand up to bar my way. He held a sharpened halberd aloft and was adirty and ugly-looking fellow with a red, sweaty face and several teeth missing at the front.
    ‘I need to get along here,’ I said, somewhat nervously.
    ‘No, you don’t,’ he said, and he pointed to the door of the house behind him.
    This was a stout oak door, cast all about with heavy chains and locks, and as I stared at it my heart seemed to contract, for it had a great painted red cross on it and a written notice saying: LORD, HAVE MERCY ON US.
    I gasped, my stomach lurching. I knew already, of course, what these signs meant, but the ill-favoured fellow was eager to explain further. ‘Four dead of plague in there and the rest shut up for forty days!’ he said. He pointed with his halberd. ‘And further down Cock and Ball Alley two more houses are enclosed.’
    I stared up at the house before me. One small window was open on the second floor, but apart from that it was shuttered and silent.
    ‘But . . . but how do they eat? Who gets their provisions?’ I asked.
    ‘I does their errands,’ the fellow said, ‘and buys their milk and bread.’
    ‘But how do they get on, shut up all that time? How do they take the air?’
    ‘They don’t take no air,’ he said. ‘The only time that door will be opened is to bring out a body.’ He scratched his head and I saw something – some small insect – dart along his greasy scalp. ‘Four dead so far and two more expected before nightfall.’
    As I stood there, horrified, staring at the shuttered windows and trying to imagine how the people fared inside the house, there came from within a suddenwailing, turning to a high-pitched scream which went on and on without any end. There was the sound of running feet and another scream joined the first.
    I stared at the man waiting for