P. Chisholm - A Plague of Angels

She rubbed her arms anxiously up and down her apron. ‘Oh no, no. Nothing like that. Some kind of flux, I think. Or even poison. I don’t know, sir. He says he’s dying and he keeps calling for paper, says he’s got to finish his swansong.’

Carey frowned with suspicion and disbelief. ‘What? Let me see him, I’m his patron, damn it.’

‘I’ll ask,’ whispered the woman and scurried upstairs.

‘Ye never are,’ said Dodd, staggered at this further evidence of financial insanity.

‘Yes, I am. Or I was. I paid five pounds for a thing he wrote last year and dedicated to me.’

‘What was it?’

‘Er…can’t remember, I only read the dedication.’

The woman came downstairs again, her face drawn and miserable. ‘He’s not making any sense, sir, and he particularly said he wasn’t to be disturbed…’ Carey slipped a sixpence into her hand and she shrugged. ‘…but you can go up if you want.’

They went up the narrow winding stairs at the back of the shop and into the room under the roof. It was almost filled by a small bed and a little carved and battered table next to it. Papers covered the elderly rushes on the floor, piled up in drifts and held down with leather bottles, plates, rock-hard lumps of bread and, in one instance, a withered half of a meatpie; there were books on the windowsill and books on the floor under the bed. In a nest of unspeakable blankets sat the barrel-like Robert Greene, wearing a shirt and nightcap he might have wiped his arse with, they were so revolting.

His skin was greyish pale under the purple network of burst veins, his face worked in pain. A full jordan teetered on a pile of books. Next to him on the table were a pile of papers covered in a truly villainous scrawl. With a book on his knees and a piece of paper resting on it, an inkpot teetering by his feet and a pen in his fist, Robert Greene was scribbling with the fixity of a madman.

‘Mr Greene,’ said Carey, marching in and bending over the man on the bed. ‘I want to talk to you about my brother.’

Greene ignored him, breathing hoarsely through his mouth and sweat beading his face, the pen whispering across the page at an astonishing rate.

‘Mr Greene!’ bellowed Carey in his ear. ‘My brother, Edmund. What have you found out?’

‘I’m busy,’ gasped Greene. ‘Piss off.’

Carey sat on the bed and removed the ink bottle. The next time Greene tried to dip his pen, he discovered it gone, looked up and finally focused on Carey.

‘Give it back,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Damn you, I’m dying, I must write my swansong…Oh, Christ.’

Seeing the man retch, Carey got up hastily and backed away. It was the one of the ugliest sights Dodd had ever seen in his life, to watch anyone vomit blood. There were meaty bits in it. When the paroxysms finished Greene was sweating and shaking.

‘Joan,’ he roared. ‘Get these idiots out of my chamber and bring me another pot of ink.’

He doubled up again and grunted at whatever was going on inside him, a high whining noise through his nose with each return of breath.

‘Edmund Carey,’ shouted the Courtier mercilessly. ‘Tell me what you found out about him?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ gasped Greene. ‘Who cares? I’m dying, I know I am, I’m facing Judgement and what have I done, I’ve wasted my life, I’ve drunk away my gift, what have I ever done but write worthless plays, books full of obscenity, garbage the lot of it, I must write something good before I die, can’t you see that, can’t you understand?’

There were tears in the wretched man’s eyes. On impulse Dodd took the ink bottle out of Carey’s hand and put it back on the bed. With only a grunt of acknowledgement, Greene dipped his pen and started scribbling again. Carey didn’t protest.

‘Dear, oh dear,’ said Barnabus from the stairs as Joan Ball pushed past him. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Why hasn’t he seen a doctor?’ Carey asked the woman.

‘They’ve all run on account of the plague.’ She was wiping sweat off Greene’s face as he panted over his page.

‘Plague? That’s not plague.’

Not as far as you could tell, although Dodd felt it paid to be suspicious. But there was no sign of lumps disfiguring Greene’s neck, no black spots. The smell in the room was unspeakably foul but more a muddle of unwashed clothes, old food, drink and an unemptied jordan plus the sour-sweet metallic smell of the splatter in the rushes by the bed. Plague had its own unmistakeable reek.

‘No, sir, but there’s plague hereabouts, and the doctors are always the first to know and the first to run for the country.’

Carey’s eyes were narrowed.

‘Have you heard about this, Barnabus?’ he asked.

Barnabus coughed. ‘There’s always plague in London,’ he said. ‘It’s like gaol-fever, comes and goes with the time of year.’

Greene had started whooping and bending over his belly, his face screwed up with pain.

Joan Ball scurried to the window with the disgusting pot, opened it wide, shrieked ‘Gardyloo!’ and emptied, before running to the bed. ‘Get the apothecary.’ She hissed, ‘Get Mr Cheke.’

‘The quality of the angels-there you see the cunning of the plot,’ gasped the man in the bed. ‘They’re all in it, by God, who could doubt angels,…urrr…And where’s Jenkins, eh? Answer me that?’ His face contorted.

They tactfully left the room and Carey turned to Dodd. ‘Go with Barnabus and see if you can find or kidnap a doctor or the apothecary,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get some sense out of him or I’ve nowhere to start looking for my brother.’

Dodd was quite glad to get away from the place. As they went down again into the street he tapped Barnabus on the shoulder. ‘Where’s Simon?’

‘Oh, he’s back in Whitefriars, looking after Tamburlain the Great.’

‘How is he?’

Barnabus didn’t look up. ‘He’s fine. Let’s try here.’

It was a barber’s shop with its red and white pole outside. There was only one customer and he and the barber glared suspiciously at the two of them.

‘What do you want?’ demanded the barber.

‘We’re looking for a doctor.’

‘Stay there. Don’t come any closer. Why?’

‘It’s not for plague,’ said Barnabus stoutly.

‘So you say, mate, so you say.’

‘I ain’t lying. Will you come?’

‘No.’

‘Well, is there anyone who will?’

‘Certainly not a doctor,’ said the barber and sneered.

‘What about Mr Cheke?’ Dodd asked.

‘The apothecary’s round the corner. He’s mad enough to try it.’ The barber was snipping busily again. As he left the shop, Dodd heard one of them sneeze.

They went round the corner and found the right place with its rows of flasks in the windows and a pungent heady smell inside, and a counter with thousands of little drawers all labelled in a foreign language Dodd assumed was Latin. A boy peered over the top of the counter.

‘Yes, sirs?’

‘Where’s the apothecary?’

‘Out, in Pudding Lane.’

Philosophically they went back into the street, turned left and then right, and found themselves in a street where every door seemed to be marked with a red cross and a piece of paper, where there were already weeds growing in the silted up drain down the centre of the alley and what looked suspiciously like dead bodies lying in a row down one end.

Both Dodd and Barnabus stopped in their tracks and froze. Down the centre of the street a monster was pacing towards them. It was entirely covered in a thick cape of black canvas and where its face should be was an enormous three foot long beak of brass, perforated with holes. Above were two round eyes that flashed in the sun and from the holes in the beak came plumes of white smoke.