The Apothecary's Daughter (44 page)

‘As you see.’

‘I have used the best linen I could find to make a winding cloth for your father and Jennet and I have carried him down and
rested him on the counter in the shop.’

‘He would have liked that,’ said Susannah, a quiver in her voice.

In the distance she heard a bell ringing. Her insides lurched and she began to tremble.

‘The cart is coming,’ said William.

The bell rang again and now she could hear the mournful cry of the bellman.

‘Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!’

The bell became louder and the people hurrying along Fleet Street flattened themselves against the walls to give the bellman
a wide berth. The horse-drawn cart, lit by lamps, lurched out of the darkness, trundling over the cobbles with its sorry load.
Two buriers, dressed in high boots and shrouded in long capes, followed with lamps swaying in their hands. A number of weeping
men and women walked behind.

The watchman held his lamp high and stepped into the dead-cart’s path. Then he motioned Susannah and Phoebe to stand well
back and took the door key from his pocket.

William waited inside with Jennet behind him.

Her heart thumping against her ribcage, Susannah watched William speak a few words to one of the buriers as he came forward.
She heard the chink of coins changing hands. Then the buriers went inside the shop and she waited, her eyes fixed on the open
door, while she clenched her fists so hard that her nails drew blood on her palms.

The men reappeared a few moments later, carrying Cornelius’s linen-wrapped body between them. A corner of his winding sheet
had come loose and trailed in the dust. They carried him with as much ceremony as if he were a rolled-up carpet, no longer
wanted and about to be put into storage.

Susannah pressed her hands to her mouth, suppressing an involuntary cry. Was this cumbersome parcel all that remained of her
beloved father? She tilted forward, in a despairing need to throw herself upon his body and pull away the winding sheet to
see his face one last time.

The watchman grasped her tightly by the arm and dragged her back. ‘No you don’t, missus!’

One burier held up a lantern and threw aside the sacking on top of the cart.

Susannah gasped and reeled back. Corpses, some wrapped in rags, some naked, were stacked in an untidy heap. A young woman
dressed only in her night shift lay spread-eagled on her back, her golden hair falling in a waterfall over the edge of the
cart and her swollen neck black and suppurating.

In the doorway, Jennet let out a screech and covered her face with her apron.

Susannah stared at the cart in horror, revulsion making her stomach churn. ‘You can’t put my father in there!’ She fumbled
for the vinegar-soaked handkerchief in her pocket and clasped it over her nose, retching at the stench of the dead. Even by
the wavering light of the lantern she could see, and smell, the terrible pestilential tokens on the corpses.

‘Death is the great leveller,’ said the burier who held Cornelius’s legs. He nodded at the other, carrying the shoulders.
‘On three,’ he said. ‘One, two, three!’

They swung the body up between them and dumped it upon the
cart. It landed with a thud on top of the young woman with the blond hair.

One of the buriers cackled and nudged his assistant. ‘That’s one old man gone happy to the grave!’

‘Tuck ’em up nice and warm together for all eternity, shall we?’ Still chuckling, they threw the sacking back over the top,
took hold of the horse’s head again and the cart rolled on its way.

Susannah, frozen with horror, stared at William, framed in the doorway.

‘I wish you hadn’t come here tonight,’ he said. ‘No daughter should have to see such a sight.’

The watchman came forward. ‘Inside with you, sir. Now!’

‘May I not offer this lady a few words of comfort?’

‘Not if you don’t want to pass on the contagion. Go on, inside with you!’

‘Susannah …’ The door slammed in William’s face.

Susannah watched the tail end of the dead-cart disappearing down Fleet Street, the lantern bobbing up and down. She heaved
a great sigh. She knew what she had to do now. She
must
see where they were taking her father.

‘Missus!’ Phoebe hastened behind her.

Susannah waited impatiently for her to catch up before following the cart.

Presently the cart stopped outside a milliner’s shop. A knot of people waited outside, talking in hushed tones. Screaming
and crying came from an upstairs window as the buriers brought out the tiny corpses of three children. Their father stood
nearby in shocked silence as they were thrown onto the cart.

An old woman fainted and her husband began to shout, tearing at his hair and railing at God for forsaking his grandchildren.

Susannah looked away, unable to bear the weight of their grief added to her own.

The cart moved on again, the horse’s hooves clip-clopping over the cobbles. The children’s father followed and then the other
grieving relatives in a ragged procession.

At last they reached the high fence which surrounded the plague pit. Susannah gagged into her handkerchief at the sickly stench
of corruption which filled the air, saturating it in despair.

Phoebe turned aside with a groan and vomited onto the ground.

The bellman rang his bell vigorously and called out, ‘Open the gate!’

After a moment the palisade quivered and then a section opened inwards and admitted the cart.

The procession attempted to follow but the watchmen barred the way. The father of the dead children, overcome by grief, began
roaring and shouting and in only a few moments a fist fight had broken out between the relatives and the watchmen as the mourners
were denied access.

Susannah took her chance. ‘Stay here!’ she hissed to Phoebe. She slipped through the gate while the watchmen were occupied
and hovered in the shadows while she took in the scene before her. Numb with horror, she gazed at the burial trench. No preacher
could have described a vision of hell as terrible as this.

Lanterns hung on poles, casting flickering light into the pit, some forty feet by twelve. The bottom was only eight feet or
so below the surface now and she caught glimpses of half-buried bodies, a grinning skull, an out-thrust hand. The sweet reek
of rotting flesh was overpowering, a hundred times worse than the overflowing sewers in August or the stench of simmering
fish bones from the glue-maker’s vat.

Susannah started as the gate slammed shut behind her. The screaming and wailing continued outside the palisade.

The horse and cart were backed up to the pit with a great deal of shouting and the buriers, like some hellish demons, began
to drag the corpses off the cart and hurl them into the hole.

The children went first, spinning towards the centre of the pit with their arms and legs flying out like little rag dolls.
Susannah’s father was next to be dragged off the cart. She suppressed a moan as the loose end of the winding sheet unravelled
and she caught a glimpse of his bare foot swinging free. The sight of his naked toes
was almost her undoing. She lurched forward, desperate to snatch up his foot and press it to her cheek, to touch her father’s
skin for one last time, but she stumbled and fell to her knees. By this time the buriers had heaved his body into the pit.
The other corpses followed, tumbled on top of each other with no thought given to any respect for the dead.

Shaking with distress, Susannah watched the buriers sprinkle quicklime over the bodies and then set to with their shovels,
spreading a thin layer of earth over the lot. She kept her eyes fixed upon her father’s last resting place until the men had
finished. Once they were leaning on their shovels, slaking their thirst with a jar of beer, she gathered up a handful of earth
and crept towards the edge of the trench. She scattered the earth onto the spot where she had last seen her father’s body.
‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ she murmured.

She stared into the pit, remembering her last sight of her father at the window. Now she would never know what his final words
to her were. She wept then, hot tears coursing down her cheeks until, at last, all her emotions were deadened.

The bell rang again and the gates opened to admit another cart. Keeping to the shadows, Susannah stole through the gate and
out into the street again.

The following week passed in a haze for Susannah. She slept a little but only to be haunted by terrifying dreams of her father’s
corpse rising from the plague pit, trailing earth and putrefying skin behind him as he wandered the streets searching for
Arabella and the children.

She wrote a letter to her brother, Tom, the ink blotched and tear-stained, to tell him of their father’s terrible death. He
was all the family she had left now and she wished with all her heart that she could be with him so that they might mourn
together.

She took the letter to the docks to find a sailor to carry it to Virginia. He snatched her money and then stuffed the letter
carelessly into his jacket and she turned away in despair with no idea if it would ever reach her brother’s hands.

Each day she dragged herself to the apothecary shop with leaden feet, terrified as to what she might find. Each day her grief
was renewed as she stood outside the window to be reminded of the last time she had seen her father. Sorrow made her so weary
that she longed to be able to go inside and climb the stairs to her old bed-chamber, where she could curl up and fall asleep,
never to wake again.

But William and Jennet showed no signs of sickness so far.

Jennet made it her business to scrub the house from top to
bottom; William fumigated each room in turn while they hung out of the windows coughing until the smoke had dissipated.

‘I am passing the time in discovering your father’s library,’ said William, wiping the smoke-induced tears from his eyes,
‘and have been reading his treatises on the merits of Galen versus Hippocrates. Your father was a learned man as well as one
of the best apothecaries I knew.’

‘He would have been so pleased you thought that.’ Susannah found it helped her to talk of her father, to remember the good
things rather than the sad times that followed.

‘If you had been his son, you would have been an excellent apothecary, too.’ William drummed his fingers on the windowsill.
‘It’s making me fretful to be so confined and I’ve had a great deal of time to ponder on certain matters.’

‘Now you know as well as I how arduous it is to be in enforced idleness when you are used to being industrious,’ said Susannah.

A small frown appeared on William’s forehead. ‘I was thinking that, perhaps when I am released from here …’

‘Perhaps what?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ve been making plans but if I’m spared, there will be enough time for that later. You are grieving for
your father and should not be troubled by fanciful ideas and I have kept you talking too long.’

‘I’ll bring you more provisions tomorrow.’ But she made no move to go, reluctant to leave him in case he sickened and died
while she was away. Even though he had betrayed her so cruelly, the very thought of him dying made her feel as if there was
a tight band crushing her chest.

‘Send Aunt Agnes my love, won’t you?’

She hesitated but the Devil made her say it. ‘And shall I send your special love to Phoebe and Joseph?’

‘Phoebe and Joseph?’ His brow wrinkled.

She waited, trying to find the right words to tell him that she knew about his treachery, but failed.

‘Susannah?’ William’s expression was concerned. ‘You look exhausted. Go home and rest.’

If she hadn’t seen him with her own eyes leaving Phoebe’s room that night, she would never have guessed that he could be so
duplicitous. ‘I’ll come tomorrow with more provisions,’ she said.

On the walk home Susannah admitted to herself that she still loved William, in spite of the shameful way he had behaved. Nevertheless,
he had been extraordinarily brave and selfless in nursing her father and Ned and he had shown every concern for her well-being
since Father had died. Part of her wished that she had never gone up to the attics that night and then she might never have
known about his betrayal.

Turning into Whyteladies Lane, she wondered again where her stepmother could be. A note had come back from Arabella’s brother
to say that she and the children were not with him and he had no idea of her present whereabouts. Susannah was anxious about
the twins and sad at losing touch with her baby brothers. They were her only remaining family in the country and it was of
great importance to her that they knew what sort of a man their father had been. She knew she couldn’t rely upon Arabella
to keep his memory alive for them and was still pondering on how to find them as she neared the Captain’s House.

Three small boys ran out of the butcher’s shop, shrieking as they chased each other down the lane. They darted from side to
side, dashing in front of Susannah and nearly sending her flying. One of the boys was Joseph.