Death in the Peerless Pool by Deryn Lake Read Free Book Online Page B

gone?’
    â€˜Her. The wicked one.’
    â€˜Tell me which she is.’
    â€˜The one who came for me. Oh, Sir, the one who came for me.’ Petronelle’s beautiful lips quivered and tears glistened in her eyes. ‘Oh, Mama, Mama,’ she sobbed.
    John slipped an arm round the girl’s heaving shoulders and was rewarded with a frantic clawing of his coat. ‘You won’t let her take me, will you?’ Petronelle implored.
    â€˜Nobody’s going to harm you. You’re safe here,’ the Apothecary answered, wishing he believed it to be true.
    â€˜She thinks I don’t remember,’ the girl continued in a whisper, close to his ear. ‘She thinks that because I’m grown I’ve forgotten all about it. But I haven’t. I’ll always remember her and the way she came for me.’
    So saying, Petronelle’s mood seemed to swing and she wandered off again, her eyes vacant, her beautiful face as devoid of expression as a mask.
    â€˜I wonder what she meant by all that,’ said Samuel, staring after her.
    â€˜I don’t know,’ John replied thoughtfully. ‘But I have every intention of finding out.

Chapter Five
    Pest House Row, as John and Samuel saw when they turned into the lane that ran between Old Street and Islington, stood, an untidy jumble of straggling houses, the sole reminder of the place in which the City Pest House had once been situated. Built in the last few years of the sixteenth century by money raised from companies interested in Sir Walter Raleigh’s adventure at sea, namely his piratical exploits plundering Spanish galleons, the House had been erected ‘as a lazaretto for the reception of distressed and miserable objects infected by the dreadful plague’. Having taken in many patients at the time of epidemic, principally those poor wretches who were homeless, moneyless and friendless and who regarded the Pest House with hatred and horror, the building had finally fallen into disrepair in the early part of the eighteenth century and, in 1736, had been sold to the French Hospital, the governing body of which knocked down what was left and erected new buildings on the site.
    â€˜Do you reckon there’s a burial pit anywhere round here?’ said Samuel, staring at the rise and fall of the land behind the cottages.
    John shook his head. ‘No, the poor bastards were all thrown in at Mount Mill, weren’t they?’
    Samuel looked vague. ‘I’m not certain. Where is Mount Mill?’
    â€˜Just off Goswell Street, near Peartree Street. Supposedly there are hundreds of plague victims buried there.’
    â€˜Hurled into the ground with scant ceremony, just a few hastily mumbled prayers. Frightening thought.’
    The Apothecary gave a cynical smile. ‘One could say the same for Hannah Rankin.’
    Samuel shivered. ‘Don’t! A goose walked over my grave when you spoke those words. Are you going to knock on doors in Ratcliff Row to find where she lived?’
    â€˜In a moment or two. First of all I want to get the lie of the land.’
    They had been walking as they talked and now found themselves standing outside the French Hospital, a gracious and beautiful building erected round three sides of a quadrangle. Funds for the project had been provided by a French Huguenot, James de Gastigny, Master of the Buckhounds to King William III. Though it had originally been intended that the Hospital should be a place of refuge for ‘Poor French Protestants and Their Descendants Residing in Great Britain’, the asylum also had its share of aged and infirm people, providing them with a permanent home. But for the rest of the Huguenots it was a place of sanctuary, a shelter where they could find friendly advice in determining their future plans. The Hospital also acted as an agency for locating other French immigrants who had already settled elsewhere in London. As he walked past the entrance,