Marie Brennan - In Ashes Lie

“Why are you still here?” she asked Valentin, who flinched. “Find someone to carry this out—or I will send you. ”

“Yes, madam,” he murmured, and fled.

LOMBARD STREET, LONDON: September 15, 1665

Antony needed water. A raging thirst had scoured him for hours, parching his throat and mouth and gut, while sweat poured off his skin to soak the clinging bedclothes. He had fetched watered wine from the cellar…he could not remember how long ago. The jug sat empty now, knocked onto its side, though he could not recall drinking from it. Perhaps he had spilled it all.

He called weakly for Burnett, in a voice that went no farther than his bed, before remembering the servant was gone. In the pest-house. Dead, by now.

Pain stabbed upward from his groin, curling his body in protest. Medicine. Was there nothing in the house for pain? For the headache that threatened to split his skull in half? Antony knew dimly that he had a fever, and must bring it down—cool cloths, soaked in water, to lay across his forehead. Kate would do that. She had gentle hands.

No. Kate was not here either. Dead? God forbid… no, she was in Norfolk still. They exchanged letters, but only rarely, since few men were brave enough to carry the post. He prayed the plague had not come to her there. She was safe, as Jack wanted Antony to be.

The stairs creaked. Burnett at last; the servant must have heard him call. No, his voice was gone; but Burnett was a good man, and came to check on him regardless.

“God have mercy…”

Not Burnett. Antony forced his eyes open, and Jack Ellin’s face swam into focus. He croaked the name, unsure whether this was another figment of his fever.

Jack had nothing over his mouth; he should be wearing a kerchief, or one of those ridiculous beaked masks some doctors affected, stuffing the front with strong herbs to cleanse the air they breathed. The man’s hands felt like ice through Antony’s sodden linen shirt. He shivered uncontrollably and tried to push them away, but Jack evaded him with ease and yanked the laces open. Antony gasped in pain as the physician rolled his head to one side and then the other, checking his neck and under his arms; then agony lanced through him again as Jack pulled aside his drawers to examine his thighs.

The doctor growled an oath, and that forced home the truth Antony had been denying all this time. Telling himself it was just a fever. A headache. It would pass.

“I am dying,” he whispered.

The pain was unmistakable. Bad now, it would only grow worse, until he ran mad, and thought of ending his own life to end his suffering. Antony could feel the swellings in his groin, not just tokens but the very stamp of the plague.

“You will not die,” Jack said violently, and shifted his weight back, preparatory to a burst of activity that would bring all his medicinal art to bear on the task of saving Antony’s life.

Antony caught his arm before he could stand, digging his fingers in hard. “Listen. You must do something for me. You must. ”

Jack covered the hand with his own. “Tell me.”

“You must do it. Your oath on it. Swear to me, before God, that you will do exactly as I bid you. No matter—no matter how strange it seems. No matter what you see.”

The physician’s face grew hesitant. “Antony—I must fetch my medicines, lance the swellings—”

“Later,” Antony rasped. He did not know whether it was sweat or tears that ran down his cheeks. “Swear it!”

Jack swallowed, then nodded once. “As God is my witness, I will do as you bid me. If it will get you to cooperate, I’ll do anything.”

Antony sagged back against the pillow, made weak by relief. His hand trembled against Jack’s arm, its grip now slackened. “Thank you. God bless you, John Ellin. You may save my life indeed.”

THE ANGEL INN, ISLINGTON: September 15, 1665

What in the name of the Devil’s unholy arsehole am I doing here?

Fulfilling his oath to Antony. Every stride Jack’s horse took northward felt like another strip carved out of his heart; he should be back in Lombard Street, burning quicklime and spices to cleanse the room, getting opium and hopefully some food into his afflicted friend.

But Antony would not rest; he kept repeating his feverish words. And so Jack rode north into Islington, on the word of a dying—

Do not say “dying.”

On the word of a very sick man.

The faster Jack carried out his duty, the sooner he could get on with his treatment. It had saved some patients, he believed. None of them so old as Antony, true—

He snarled the thought away, and dismounted behind the Angel Inn.

Go to the rosebush, Antony had said, and tell it your name.

Jack felt like an ass, but he suspected a secret meaning in the instruction. Antony had friends, he knew, from before the King’s restoration, and subtle means of passing information; Jack had long thought some of them associated with the Angel Inn. Speaking to the rosebush was no doubt a signal. But he didn’t share Antony’s apparent conviction that someone would be watching, ready to receive his message.

Nevertheless, he had sworn it. So, taking a deep breath, Jack bent to one withered, rain-starved blossom and said, “My name is Dr. John Ellin. Sir Antony Ware has sent me to say that he has fallen ill with the plague. He is in his house in Lombard Street, and begs—”

He got no further, because the rosebush began to move. The tendrils stretched themselves upward, forming a graceful arch. Jack stumbled backward in surprise, then fell without dignity on his rump as a woman appeared in the arch. “Lord Antony? Sick? Oh, no —”

Then she stopped, because a familiar sound rang out over the grassy field: the church bell of Islington, tolling the death of a parishioner.

The woman’s eyes rolled up in her head, and she crumpled to the ground.

Jack sat in the grass, staring. Did a three-foot-tall woman just come out of a rosebush and faint at my feet?

He had his answer an instant later, when a second woman of equally small stature popped out of the arch, looking harassed and bearing a tiny cup in one hand. She made an exasperated noise when she saw the figure on the ground. “Honestly, if she had just listened—I warned her not to come out unprepared.”

Reflex took over; Jack crawled forward and supported the unconscious woman—girl? No, she was mature, though dwarfish in size—helping the other pour what looked to be a swallow of milk down her throat. “She fainted—”

“Yes, the bell. I heard it.” The woman tucked the cup into her rose-embroidered apron. “Come now, Gertrude, wake up—there’s a good girl.”

Honey-brown eyes fluttered open. She blinked twice, dazed, before seeming to realize she was lying against Jack’s knees. Then she sat bolt upright. “Antony!”

He rose, backing up a pace, and brushed the dirt and dried grass from the knees of his breeches. The two women were so much alike, they could only be sisters; were it not for their different aprons, he would have trouble distinguishing them. Antony had told him to bear this message to “the sisters,” and one thing more, to a specific name. If the woman with the daisies was called Gertrude, then the other…“Are you Lune?”

The woman with the roses blinked. “What? No, of course not. She isn’t here. Why—”

“I have a message for her as well.”

Focusing his mind on that errand helped. As long as he concentrated on his promise to Antony, he could keep the rest of that promise: to carry out his task no matter what he saw.

Both of the women were standing now. “Tell us,” Gertrude said.