Marie Brennan - In Ashes Lie

They had fought this point before. Jack hated that order, and championed the pest-houses. What he advised now was nothing less than the knowing subversion of law. If Antony already bore the plague, he would carry it with him into the countryside, as others had done before him: the exact situation the plague order was designed to prevent.

That argument would make not a dent in Jack’s skull. Instead Antony said, “I cannot leave. We are meeting today to arrange relief; we’ve found ways to shift collections of coin from the parishes that can spare it to those that cannot, and to delay the payment of certain debts. Half London can scarcely feed itself, Jack, and trade is at a standstill. Would you have me abandon my city to famine and collapse?”

“No.” A trace of the old, wry smile crossed Jack’s face. “I know you better than that. But you cannot do that work shut up in your house with a red cross on the door, either. You must send Burnett away.”

The very thought of it ached. Burnett was loyal, and deserved loyalty in return. Antony would gladly have kept him at home, and hired some woman to nurse him—one who had survived the infection already. Far better than sending him into that festering realm of hell in St. Giles Cripplegate, where they could almost throw a corpse out a window and have it land in a plague pit.

Where Burnett would die, alone.

But keeping him would mean the end of Antony’s own ability to help.

More footsteps outside. Sir William Turner appeared in the doorway, and someone else hovered behind him. Two aldermen, at least; with Antony, three. Perhaps they would get more. And together, they might keep London on her feet.

They would. They had to.

Antony lowered his voice, and hoped that hid the shame in it. “Very well. Do everything you can for him, Jack.”

The doctor gripped his arm, heedless of risk. “My oath to God. I will save him if I can.”

CHEAP WARD, LONDON: September 13, 1665

Despite the oppressive heat, Antony shivered as he made his way on foot down Cheapside. Charred logs still crouched at the corner with Old Change, though the sudden downpour that extinguished the bonfire last week had vanished without a trace, returning the summer’s terrible dryness in its wake.

Three days of bonfires, burning throughout the City, ordered by the King from his court at Salisbury. Three days of flame, to purify the air.

Seven thousand dead, that very same week.

He swerved left to give a wide margin to a body slumped against the wall of the Mermaid Tavern. Dead, or dying; it hardly mattered which. The reek of death was in the air, the churchyards filled to overflowing and beyond, despite the orders that insisted all corpses be buried at least six feet deep.

His change of course brought him too close to another man, who shot out bony hands and seized Antony by the front of his waistcoat, crumpling the sweaty cloth in his fingers. “They insist we purge our bodies with potions,” the man gasped, foul breath gusting into Antony’s face. “They insist we purge the air with fire. But do we purge our souls ? Do we repent our sins, which have brought this visitation upon us?”

A moment of frozen paralysis; then Antony shoved at the man, struggling to force him away. The buttons of his waistcoat gave way before the stranger did. “Get back! Do not come near me.”

The man laughed at him, exposing broken teeth, as if he had been struck in the face. “You have nothing to fear—if you are a righteous man. This is the Lord’s will, His divine punishment for a nation that has strayed from the path of holiness.”

A filthy, damnable Puritan. Rage flushed Antony to the roots of his thinning hair. “God,” he snarled in the man’s face, “has nothing to do with it. This? Is random bloody chance. It is our physical squalor, the garbage in our streets, the foul air we breathe. The pestilential suburbs we permit to crowd around our walls. God is not here. He watches from above as we scream in our agonies and die, begging His mercy or cursing His name, and He has nothing to do with any of it!”

The last shouted words echoed in his ears, reflecting off the smoke-stained walls of the shops that lined this once great street. The Puritan was running by then, staggering down Bow Lane, desperate to get away. Antony gasped for breath, his head pounding. When had he last eaten? He could not recall. With Burnett gone, vanished into the maw of the pest-house, no doubt dead by now, he made shift for himself as best he could.

There should still be a cold meat pie for him at home—if he had not eaten it already. Antony could not remember. They could feed him below, but he would not go; he could not bear the sight of the fae anymore, clean and whole and safe from the cataclysm above. If this heat did not break, if the plague did not subside, then even the living few would soon be gone, and London left to the ghosts and the faeries in the shadows.

He set off again, moving more by force of habit than anything else, down Lombard Street to the familiar door. He fumbled a cluster of rue out of his pocket and breathed deeply of its pungent scent, hoping to clear any contagion picked up from that man. Was there anything yet in his house that could take this headache from him? He could scarcely think through its clamor.

The door opened. The interior of the house was blessedly cool, no fire having been lit in the hearth for days, and Antony wrenched off his doublet and waistcoat, baring his sweat-soaked undershirt. The thought of food turned his stomach. He would eat later, after he had rested. Dropping the garments to the floor, Antony sought his bed, where he lay shivering and restless, waiting for his tremors to cease.

THE ONYX HALL, LONDON: September 14, 1665

“The problem,” Valentin Aspell said patiently, “is that it fades, your Majesty.”

Lune resisted the urge to snarl at him. Instead she forged her irritation into a sharper, cooler edge of condescension. “I am aware of the nature of faerie gold, Lord Valentin. But with judicious timing, we might yet be able to assist Lord Antony in a manner that does not expose us to the threats above. If we can do nothing for the sick, we may at least help those who are still well, by giving them the coin with which to buy food and other necessities.”

As her Lord Keeper reminded her, faerie gold would eventually turn back to leaves, and that could draw unwanted attention. But from what Antony said, the chaos above had reached such a pitch that their interference might pass unremarked. He had even named a few fellows that might be suitable targets. One boasted of increasing his personal wealth as he rushed all over London and Westminster to obtain supplies for the Navy in their wars against the Dutch, yet gave only a few pounds for the relief of the afflicted.

“Samuel Pepys,” she suggested to Valentin. “In Seething Lane. Substitute faerie gold for some of his own, and I shall give the true coin to Antony, for distribution elsewhere.”

The Lord Keeper bowed. He did not see the point of this, Lune knew. To his way of thinking, the plague was a necessary cleansing of the filthy, overcrowded streets of London and its suburbs. Humans were not meant to live like maggots, crawling over the rotting corpse of their home, polluting their houses with their own smoke and waste. He had little understanding of them as people, and no sympathy for their plight.

But Lune did. The carnage above sickened her, evoking the terrifying specter of mortality; she shuddered at the thought of going above, among the boarded-up windows and the painted crosses and the desperate prayers of the dying. Yet this little thing, she could do. She knew Antony thought her wholly occupied with faerie affairs, the breathless wait for Nicneven’s next move, but the waiting threatened to drive her mad. And it would ease his heart to know she had done something, small though it was. When he returned, she would have a surprise for him: a windfall from the men who gilded their own coffers while others starved for want of charity.