P. Chisholm - A Plague of Angels

On the last flight of stairs Dodd saw a sight that froze him in his tracks. It was a dead rat, black as sin, and swollen, lying out there in the open. Nameless dread filled Dodd and if Carey hadn’t been ahead of him, he would have turned tail and run. But he wasn’t a wean or a woman to be afeared of rats, though he was afraid of them, and he forced himself to go past, only to bump into Carey, standing stock still on the tiny landing.

Carey was staring, lips slightly parted, face ashen, at the door of their lodgings. There was a red cross branded there, the paint still wet, the latch sealed and a piece of paper nailed beside it. The plague-finders could only have left a few minutes before.

Dodd’s legs felt weak and shaky. Simon Barnet and Barnabus Cooke were on the other side of that door, along with Tamburlain the Great, Barnabus’s fighting cock. And Simon Barnet’s family had been visited by God’s wrath, and he must have gone in to say goodbye to his mam, must have done. You couldn’t blame the lad, but that’s how he had taken it and Barnabus must have taken it from him. Plague wasn’t like a knife that you could see, it was mysterious, it struck where it wanted to.

As if there were no danger there, Carey went and hammered on the door. ‘Barnabus! Simon!’ he roared. For answer the cock crowed, and they could hear it flapping heavily about beyond the door. Nothing else. No sound of humanity at all.

Carey lifted his hand to break the seal on the latch, and that galvanised Dodd into action. He grabbed the Courtier’s arm and pulled him back.

‘Nay, sir. Ye willnae go in,’ he growled.

‘But…’ There were tears standing in Carey’s eyes. ‘I can’t leave them there.’

‘Ye must. There’s naething ye can do, save take the plague yersen.’

For a moment Carey resisted and something cold and calm inside Dodd got ready to hit him. ‘I’ve seen plague, sir, back when I were a wean, when it hit us in Upper Tynedale. There’s nothing ye can do, nothing. It gets in the air and if ye breathe near a man with the plague, ye get it yerself. Ye cannae go in.’

For a moment Carey stayed rigid by the door, Dodd still holding his arm, and then he relaxed, turned away and headed blindly down the stairs again.

We might have it already, Dodd thought as he followed, both of us might be just a day away from horrible pain and fever and death, you can never tell and Barnabus was with us yesterday when it might have been on him already, you can’t tell with plague, there’s no way of knowing until you get a headache or start sneezing and the black marks start rising on your neck and armpits and groin…

Carey was walking out of the cloister, across a little walled lane, to an elaborate gate. He tested it and found it opened, went through into a large walled garden full of big trees, so it was almost like a forest. Dodd could not get used to the way London ambushed you: five steps away from closepacked tumbled houses squatting in the ruins of a monastery and you came out in a cool green place, with grass and flowers as if you had escaped into the countryside by magic.

Carey didn’t sit down under a tree, but leaned against the smooth trunk of an elm and blinked up at the blue sky between the leaves. Dodd hitched up the back of his hose and sat down on one of the roots. Neither of them said anything for a while, but they listened to the birds singing in the trees for all the world as if there were no such things as sickness and death.

‘I didn’t realise the plague was so bad in London,’ Carey said, voice remote. ‘Was that Barnabus’s little secret?’

Dodd sighed, loath to explain what he knew. Best get on with it, he thought, and weather the storm.

He told Carey what had happened to Simon Barnet’s family and Carey simply took in the information.

‘Why didn’t you tell me, Henry?’

Dodd felt guilty. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I should have. But Barnabus begged me and so I didnae.’

‘I see now why you’re so anxious to leave London.’

‘Ay, sir. Will we go and find your brother now?’

‘It has got a bit more urgent, hasn’t it?’ drawled Carey. ‘I mean, either one of us or both of us could be dead of plague tomorrow, couldn’t we?’

‘Ay, sir.’

‘I wish you’d told me earlier.’

‘Ay, sir. So do I.’

Carey shrugged. ‘We’ll try Peter Cheke again,’ he said, and strode between trees to a small passageway running round the back of a magnificent hall facing a courtyard with a handsome round church in it. He went up the side of the church, past the railings, past some chickens and a small midden heap and came to another gate that gave onto Fleet Street. There he waited for Dodd to catch up, peered out onto Fleet Street and Dodd scouted ahead. The street was filling with people, handcarts, beggars, pigs going to market driven by children, and the shops opening up on either side. As far as you could tell with so many strangers, it seemed safe enough.

They had passed the conduit at the end of Shoe Lane, heading for Fleet Bridge, when it happened. Dodd was a little ahead of Carey, keeping his eyes peeled for men in buff coats, but unable to stop his mind wandering back to speculating on what was happening in their lodgings.

A man in a wool suit tapped his shoulder. ‘Sir Robert Carey?’

‘Nay,’ said Dodd as loudly as he could. ‘I’m not him.’

The man smiled cynically, and held Dodd’s left arm above the elbow in a very painful grip. ‘No, sir, of course you’re not.’

‘Will ye let me go?’ Dodd demanded belligerently. Two other men smartly dressed in grey wool and lace trimmed falling-bands were suddenly on the other side of him. One of them had a cosh in his hand, the other had his sword drawn.

‘Please sir, let’s not make a scene,’ said the man who had hold of Dodd’s arm. ‘Sir Robert Carey, I must hereby serve you with a warrant for a debt of four hundred and twenty pounds, five shillings.’

‘Ye’ve made a mistake. Ah’m no’ Sir Robert.’

The bailiff smiled kindly. ‘Nice try, sir. We was warned you’d let on you was someone else.’

Dodd’s hand was on his swordhilt, but a fourth heavyset man had joined the party surrounding him. This one briskly caught his right arm and twisted it up behind his back while the one who had first spoken to him held a knife under Dodd’s chin and tucked the piece of paper he had read from into Dodd’s doublet.

‘I’m not Sir Robert Carey,’ shouted Dodd, furiously. ‘If ye want him he’s over there.’

The bailiff looked casually over his shoulder in the direction Dodd was pointing and smiled again. ‘Yes, sir. An old one but a good one. Please come along now. We don’t want to ’ave to ’urt you.’

Admittedly there was absolutely no trace of Carey anywhere on the crowded street. The slimy toad must have run for it as soon as Dodd was surrounded, God damn him for a lily-livered sodomite…

Boiling with rage at such betrayal, Dodd let himself be hustled along in the direction he and Carey had been travelling, over Fleet Bridge, under the overgrown houses that made a vault above the alley, and up the lane beside the little stinking river to a large double gatehouse. The postern gate opened at once to the bailiff’s knock and Dodd was hustled inside, blinking at the sudden darkness.

‘Sir Robert Carey,’ announced one of the bailiffs. ‘On a warrant for debt, Mr Newton.’

A wide beetle-browed man with a heavily pock-marked face came hurrying out of the gatehouse lodgings, rubbing his hands and bowing lavishly.

‘Sir Robert Carey, eh?’ he said delightedly. ‘Pleased to meet you at last, sir.’

‘I tell ye,’ growled Dodd, ‘I am not Sir Robert Carey. I’m Henry Dodd, Land Sergeant of Gilsland, and I dinna owe onybody a penny.’