Sickness was abroad, plague ransacking the city. They had stayed in London so her father could minister to his parishioners at a time when it was difficult for them to understand God’s purpose and they cursed Him in their grief and their pain. Eleanor could have left with her uncle and aunt, who had secured permission to take their household to her aunt’s estate in Kent. But her father had insisted on staying and Eleanor had stayed with him, having refused her aunt’s entreaties to come away.
“Now see here, Nell,” her father had said three weeks ago, as her aunt packed up noisily, shouting at the servants, shouting at her father to make the girl see sense. He had called Eleanor to his room, where she had turned briefly to look at his rich tapestry of Eve offering Adam an apple. Turning back, she found her father sitting at his table in front of the big diamond-paned window that overlooked the garden. It was a good place to read, the river at the garden’s end reflecting bright watery light onto the paper. Her father was a man of light, at least these past few years; a broad substantial figure in a parson’s coat and breeches who beamed goodwill like a big soft evening cloud with the sun just behind it. That glow about the edges. The warm grace. She had no intention of leaving him.
“See here,” her father repeated. “Your aunt wants you in Kent, and you’d better go.”
“I will if you come with us.”
“Nell, listen to me.” Her father paused a moment and surprised her with a change in his manner, leaning forward and clasping his hands on his table, his expression strangely rueful. “I can’t go.”
“You mean you won’t.”
He shook his head. Another pause, then he gave a small smile. “There comes a time in a man’s life, Nell, when he is called upon to serve his penance. Or do his duty. The two are often interchangeable. When, in essence, God wants him to do what he doesn’t particularly care to do. I have prayed on this.”
He didn’t seem to be speaking to her, then checked himself and met her eye.
“Many don’t do their duty. What do we think of them?”
“That they ought?”
“That they are human and fallible, and to be pitied. I don’t particularly like to be pitied, Nell.”
She didn’t understand him when he talked like this.
“Duty, penance, and pride are a powerful combination, and when one adds love of God, one’s course is clear.”
“And love of one’s fellow man,” she felt compelled to say, to show she understood this much, at least.
“I’ve been less good about that. Amusement I can manage, God help me.” He sat back in his chair and clasped his hands on his paunch, watching her closely. “I’m speaking of finding a purpose and embracing it. I must stay here, and I wish you to understand my reasons.”
Her father had never spoken so seriously to her. He was usually attentive and fond and satirical, as if he was forever in the middle of telling a joke. It came to Eleanor that he was speaking as if it were the last time they would see each other, and that this was the message he wanted to leave her with. It only made her feel more stubborn.
“You,” her father said, “have no penance to pay, having had little opportunity to sin. Only a few small occasions of disobedience, as I recall. You haven’t had time to do worse, have you? Your aunt has brought you up well, has she not?”
“I’m very grateful to my uncle and aunt.”
“Who wish you to accompany them to Kent. As things stand, one of your sons will be your uncle’s heir. Fifteen is young to marry, but circumstances oblige you to take a husband early. Your aunt has thoughts.”
Eleanor’s cheeks blazed. She wanted to marry a man like her father and hadn’t yet met one.
Maybe not exactly like her father. She knew in her heart he would be quieter. Taller. More reliable: a thought she pushed aside.
“Here is your purpose in God’s eye,” her father said. “You’ll spend your life as a wife and a mother. A helpmeet, as the daughters of Eve are asked to be. That is your duty, and it will be your pride. I hope it isn’t your penance, although I know your aunt will choose well.”
“But I’m not yet married, is it true, Father?”
“Eh, what?” he said, recognizing the start of one of their debates, amusement igniting his eyes. He had trained her in logic, in Latin and a little Greek, and had given her a glimpse of mathematics. He liked to spar with her, saying (as she had heard him say to her uncle) that it was like being attacked by a determined little sparrow.
“I’m not yet married. Is it true?”
“I humbly agree.”
“And therefore my duty is to my father. My purpose is to serve him. My pride is in making him comfortable so that he may serve God.”
Her father chuckled, but seemed moved. She went to him, winding an arm around his neck and kissing his cheek. “If God wants me, he can take me as easily in Kent as he can here.”
Her father had no answer to this. It was what people said when they chose to stay, or if they had no prospect of leaving, as was the case among the great body of the poor. Those who had started fleeing—the king and his court to Salisbury, the peers riding off to their estates, wealthy commoners like her uncle and aunt packing up for their houses in the country—preferred to say that God helped those who helped themselves. Resignation was suspiciously close to the religion of the Pope and antithetical to the muscularity of the Protestant faith.
Eleanor had overheard her father say precisely this to her uncle: God can take me here in London or in Kent or while I’m riding a unicorn across Hy-Brasil if he prefers. I’m more concerned with whether he will like what he sees when he does.
“My poor child,” he said, kissing her hair.
When her aunt learned that Eleanor was staying, she passed her in the hall with a fierce hiss and slammed into her father’s room. Eleanor followed on soft feet, intending to listen at the door. But her aunt’s French maid loomed over her when she got close, yanking her away by one arm. They began a silent tug-of-war, the maid under orders to keep her from eavesdropping, Eleanor trying to escape, until finally she managed to break free and slap the maid’s cheek.
Really, the Frenchwoman wanted to hear as badly as she did, and having obeyed her mistress as nearly as she could, she signalled truce so they could lean their ears against the door together. Inside was an argument about God’s will: whether he was testing them with the pestilence or whether the plague was the work of the devil. Her father and her aunt couldn’t agree, although Eleanor heard her aunt say very clearly, “Whether or not he’s testing us, William, I wonder whether in staying here, and keeping her here most pridefully, you mean to test God.”
The next morning, her aunt and uncle joined a flood of refugees jostling toward the city gates, swearing when they jammed at corners, cartwheels clattering together. The great bulk of gentle London had concluded on the same day that it was time to flee in a crowd Eleanor recognized without ever having seen it before.
Her uncle planned to cross the river at London Bridge so they could turn south, and Eleanor and her father walked beside their carriage toward the bridge, Eleanor holding tight to her father’s hand. She felt sorry for the poor whipped horses, the lost urchins, and discarded servants crying piteously to be taken. Her aunt was more benign than many, taking most of the household and leaving principally those who refused to go, Cook chief among them. Cook had survived the plague before and said she intended to do so again. Among the rest were guards charged with protecting her uncle’s property, uneasy men well armed.
Eleanor was afraid her aunt and uncle would try to snatch her at the bridge, but the way was so packed that her aunt had no hope of even opening the carriage door, and her uncle sat high on the box with his coachman. As the crowd pushed them back, her aunt could only turn her face from the window while her bullish uncle called down, “William,” as if saying her father’s name would pin him to the world.
Elbowing back through the crowd, they soon reached home, where her father shooed her inside before leaving to meet his sexton. After barring the doors, Eleanor faced the desolate hall and looked terror in the eye. Her heart beat like a rabbit’s and her breath panted in and out until her chest hurt. Propelled into a run, she clattered downstairs to the kitchen, where she found their squint-eyed cook sitting by the fire.
“So yuh didn’t scarper,” Cook said. “Stubborn, you are.”
A cat sat on Cook’s lap, one of her pride of watchful beasts. They were half the reason she wouldn’t leave, rumour having it that the Lord Mayor planned to kill the city’s cats and dogs to halt the spread of plague. “And mine a healthy breed,” she’d told Eleanor’s aunt, having improved the race like a pigeon fancier, drowning runts and mating the better mousers. Her cats were now smarter than dogs, she claimed, and famous for keeping her storerooms free of vermin.
“Hullo, Pisser.” Eleanor tried to hide her panic by patting a big tom. “Want your ears scratched, do you?”
“You’re not expecting to eat?” Cook asked.
“When my father gets home.”
“Not feeling sick, are ye?”
Shaking her head, she forced herself to sound casual. “I’m going to bring my book and sewing down here, so you’d better get used to it.”
“Put you to work peeling tatties.”
“No, you shall not.”
She loved their old cook and gave her a kiss before skittering upstairs for her things and running back down, scraping a bench toward the fire.
“You won’t go out,” her father had said at the door, and there wasn’t any chance of that. Nor did Eleanor have to, the gardens yielding well in the mockingly fine weather, the chickens laying and the piggery grunting with piglets just as the household diminished. It wasn’t only loyalty to her uncle or father that made her uncle’s men protect his walls, chasing out known shifters and priggers and former soldiers limping home from the Dutch war, which continued as heedlessly as the sun kept rising.
Eleanor tried to distract herself, sewing and reading to pass her days while her father was out. With neither maids nor friends in town, she was left with few companions. But her disposition was active, and before a week had passed, Eleanor found herself walking in circles around the empty house as if it were a cathedral and she was doing stations to plead for God’s mercy.
Then came a day, after rain, when Eleanor lingered at the door as her father girded himself to go out. (“The poor souls. It’s a miserable death.”) After closing and barring the door, she leaned against it, everything as usual except that her fear had invisibly dissipated and she realized she was bored. Grabbing her cloak, Eleanor put her head outside to make sure her father had turned the corner. Then she slipped out, her pattens pattering on the cobbles, wanting to learn what was going on.
The city was empty, the few passersby as silent as shadows, hoods drawn, hands up their sleeves, so any one of them might have been Death out walking. Few carts, no sedan chairs. Eleanor found the silence stony and uncaring, and more than once had to start away from vermin swaggering out in broad daylight. A pair of rats fought over slops in the middle of Threadneedle Street, shrieking like scraped metal.
Beyond them, she saw a cobbler they often used walking toward her. She was about to greet him when she saw the ravage of his face. She realized that his walk was a shamble and told herself, He’s walking to his grave. She pictured him lurching to the churchyard and unfastening the gate and finding a vacant hole to fall into.
A tug on her arm. Startled, Eleanor found a beggar woman at her elbow.
“Please, good young lady. My children are starving. For my children, young lady.”
“Away with you,” said an old voice behind her.
A look of panic on her face, the beggarwoman scrambled off.
Eleanor turned to find the Scotswoman watching her, the Widow McBee: tiny, tattered, her hands wrapped in rags. She was far from terrifying, but Eleanor’s father had got her appointed as a searcher of the dead, one of two old women in the parish whose job it was to inspect bodies and name the cause of their dying. Not even a beggar wanted to breathe the same air as a searcher. Her father said the power of naming was too potent. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
“Sacrilege, that,” he’d said. “I’d ask you not to repeat it if there was anyone left who might understand.”
“You shouldna be out,” the widow told her.
“I wanted to see,” Eleanor said.
“Well, you’ve seen, and now you’ll be off home.”
The bundle of rags took her elbow, but Eleanor snatched it back.
“I can go on my own, widow,” she said, although she was conscious at each step that the tiny tattered Scotswoman was following her to her uncle’s house and making sure she went inside.
They were lucky: their household was healthy. Her father looked tired and pale when his cheeks had always been a bright cheerful red. But despite his exhaustion he showed no more sign of plague than the rest of them, as the city died. Bells tolled endlessly, mournfully, each set in doleful harmony with the others. When the bells of one church went silent, it meant no end to the dying but was a sign that the ringer had died, or the sexton, or the priest—maybe all of them. No one dug graves anymore. Instead, they hacked trenches outside the city walls so the plague carts could tip in their loads and go back for more.
“Nell,” her father said one afternoon. He’d called her to his room, and the river light danced across his walls. “My child, it’s time to go. Tomorrow I have a chance to speak to the Lord Mayor about getting a certificate of health. Then it’s off to Kent.”
“We’re going?” Unspeakable relief.
“You’re going,” her father said.
“No, Father!” There might not have been as much conviction in her voice as there had been the first time. “No, Father,” she repeated more firmly.
He stood, ready to order her, and staggered. Wheezing, her father put a hand on his table to brace himself. Eleanor had never heard that sound but knew it was wrong. She ran around the table and managed to get her arms around his bulk as he went down, able at least to cushion the blow. She knew she was calling for help although the world went as silent as if God had folded it within a cloth. Her father’s lips were moving but no sound came out of them. Eleanor leaned close to try to hear but heard nothing. When she leaned back to look in her father’s face, he was staring over her shoulder with an expression she couldn’t decipher. Then his pupils widened in great surprise and he sat up in her arms before collapsing dead.
Commotion as Cook rushed into her father’s room, followed by her father’s men. The men stopped fearfully but Cook ran up and yanked her father’s garments over his head to find his underarms free of buboes. The guards stood down. Not the plague. And here was her father’s chest as hairless and innocent as a boy’s.
“He worked himself to death,” Cook said. “A saint, he were. A ministering angel.”
Cook elbowed Eleanor out of the way and got the men to lift her father onto his table, papers shoved by rude elbows onto the floor. There was a great deal Eleanor didn’t grasp or later remember, although Cook permitted her to help wash her father, and that she would never forget.
The Widow McBee was there. Eleanor didn’t know when she arrived nor understand why she was arguing with Cook when they seemed to agree. Cook said it was an apoplexy and the Widow McBee said it were, and Cook said she wouldn’t get more nor her groat she was owed for telling Them it weren’t the plague. Because it weren’t, she insisted, and the Widow agreed it weren’t, and said she wouldn’t take more than she were owed, not from his reverence. Nor indeed would the puir good minister go to his own grave, she told the cook, Eleanor crying out in shock but the widow saying the sexton and the gravediggers were dead, all dead. A funny look on Cook’s face when she said that then They didn’t have to know it were Himself gone, just a man from the household. They could all stay safely here, could they not, and the widow agreed once more, turning down the extra groat Cook now offered, a refined expression on her dirty face.
Then Eleanor was standing outside her uncle’s house before dawn. Her back was tight to the damp plaster wall as a creak-crack, creak-crick slowly heaved toward her. Creak, creak, crack. She didn’t want to hear it. Didn’t want to see it. Wanted it to pass by and knew that it wouldn’t.
The door opened behind her and the men carried her father to the plague cart wrapped in his winding sheet. The Widow McBee was still there, first of all murmuring to the men on the plague cart and then saying to Eleanor, “Come now.”
“We’re to go with them?”
Cook gave her a basket and embraced her for a long time. When Eleanor was free, she found the cart creaking up the street while the Widow McBee tugged her in the opposite direction.
“Come now. We’re for the stairs.”
“Why for the stairs?”
“A Scotsman with a punt there to take us cross the river, ur-en’t there?”
Eleanor didn’t understand. The widow kept tugging at her arm.
“To get you to your uncle in Kent.”
“But I don’t know how to get there.”
“Wull who’s going to take you, isn’t she?”
“But if you know a way out of the city, why didn’t you leave before?”
“Dudn’t have where to go, dud I?” A crow of triumph from the widow: “But won’t they be glad to see me now, and what I bring!”
Eleanor’s legs were saplings with thin roots bursting through her boots. They snaked out of her, wormed out of her to insinuate themselves under the cobbles in search of good soil. They were stealing all the vigour out of her and pulling her into the ground, under the ground like her . . .
“I can’t!”
“Come, little mistress,” the tiny ragged widow said, urging her onward. “Come on now. Come, my sweet. We’ll get you safe. We’ll get you home.”