Paullina Simons - A Beggar’s Kingdom

“Yes,” Julian says. “A fire.” Slightly his limbs shake. He wishes he knew the exact date of the Great Fire. It was in 1666, right? He’s not sure of anything anymore.

“Look at the way we live,” Mallory says. “Fire, no fire. What do you think a little flame will do? Drury Lane will remain the same fetid alley, riddled with the dead. And my mother will still be gone. She’s the only one who ever loved me, the only one who tried to keep me from harm.”

Your mother is not the only one who ever loved you, Mallory.

“What does it matter to Mother what might happen in the future? She’s dead. Frankly, what you’re saying is nothing but cold comfort, sire.”

In the night, when they are warmer, Mallory divulges things about the Black Plague. They had suffered bouts of the pestilence before, and no one paid much mind to the initial stages of the plague. At the first sign that it was a real epidemic, not just a flu that was going around, Anna sent Mallory south to live with her sister Olivia. As everyone around her continued to die, the mother finally abandoned her house of bawd and traveled across the river to reunite with her daughter. She carried in her hands bouquets of wormwood, a most bitter smelling and tasting flower. “Mother had heard that it might protect me from harm. She made me drink a potion made from vinegar and wormwood. Oh, was it ever vile!”

“Did they paint your door?”

“With a bloody cross? Yes,” Mallory says. “Death is a pale horse, but it shall not come near thee, Mother prayed over me. Then her buboes burst, and she bled to death.”

Mallory shows Julian a sheet of yellowing parchment. It’s from the parish of Clerkenwell. The paper is called the Bill of Mortality. Every week, the parish publishes the causes and numbers of the local dead. Anna ripped it from the priory wall as she was fleeing.

Diseases and Casualties this Week:

Apoplexie 1

Burned in his bed by a candle 1

Canker 1

Cough 2

Fright 3

Grief 3

Killed by a fall from a Bellfry 1

Lethargy 1

Suddenly 1

Timpany 1

Plague 7165

Seven thousand people dead in one parish! Out of how many? “Eight thousand,” Mallory replies. Julian shudders. She leaves the list with him when she goes to start her day. “For safekeeping,” she says.

Does she mean the Bill of Mortality or her?

What happened to you, Mallory? Julian asks when they lie in the hot bath together.

I don’t know what you mean.

Once upon a time, you used to be in such revolt. When was this?

When I knew you last, Julian whispers.

Who has time to revolt, sire, Mallory says, her face turned away from him. I don’t have time for such frivolity.

The steam from the bath fills the room and escapes through the open window. Mallory hints she might like to escape, too. Where, he says, and she replies, what’s it to you. She is smoke herself, her skin translucent crepe paper, once real, now an ashen vapor.

Carling and Ivy, the cleaning girls Mallory shares the room with, have confronted her about her mysterious absences from their quarters behind the kitchen. They demand she pay them, or they’ll tell the Baroness she’s up to no good. Julian pays them. Blackmail doesn’t sit well with him; he knows it’s a temporary fix. Now that the urchins know he will pay, they’ll keep raising the price. But what choice does he have? The Baroness will not take kindly to his poaching the orphaned niece entrusted into her care by her two dead sisters.

But the second reason Julian pays off Carling and Ivy is Lord Fabian. Because things have changed in Room Two, and not for the better. A week earlier, as Julian was in the final pangs of his exertions, he felt a fist strike him between the shoulder blades. It was Fabian. He’d gotten out of his chair, waddled over to the bed and hit Julian. “Stop it!” Fabian hissed. “You’re hurting her. You’re tormenting her.”

“No, my lord,” Mallory said, underneath Julian, peeking her head out, controlling her panting breath. “He’s not hurting me.”

“You were crying out.”

“Not from pain, my lord.”

After that night, Fabian stopped requesting Julian’s presence in Room Two. That is why Julian pays off the hooligan maids—so Mallory can continue to share his bed.

Sometimes in the afterglow, while she lies in his arms, he tries to talk to her about a future that doesn’t involve the Silver Cross or Miss Tilly’s girls, or Lord Fabian, but Mallory always falls asleep, and the next morning is up and out before he wakes.

The bells ring, the children play, the ink dots on his arm multiply like summer bug bites.

He and Mallory walk along the Thames, through the parks, through green lanes. They stop for fireworks and carriage races. Whitehall Palace is open to the public. They stroll through the royal gardens, and when they’re not discussing unusual plants, Julian attempts a conversation about a life that might include something for just the two of them, that might include marriage and even babies. He talks about it in fantabulous terms, in the language of dreamers not realists, not as in, let’s get married, but more as in, what if we were a prince and a princess and got married and lived in a white marble palace like this one? Wouldn’t that be something? Mostly Mallory nods.

The immutable tattooing makes Julian feel ridiculous. Count the days, Devi said, but a few times Julian gets on with his day without marking the days—on purpose, not on purpose.

He and Mallory still haven’t talked about the future in the language of realists. He doesn’t want to rush things, push things, like before in L.A. when he ruined everything with his hurry, as if he had felt on some subliminal level that Josephine was running out of time. Here in post-plague London, he wants to live with her—and does live with her—the way most people live. As if they’re going to live forever.

AT THE END OF AUGUST ONE OF THE PATRONS OF THE SILVER Cross dies in the night.

A panting, irritated Baroness Tilly bangs on Julian’s door. She was woken up by the one-eyed Ilbert, who said the dead man’s blood dripped through the floorboards into his cubby below. “It’s the last thing we need,” the Baroness says to Julian. “Today is a Saturday, our busiest night of the week. Nothing could be worse for business than death. Julian, let’s hurry and take care of it before the stench takes hold.”

It’s Lord Fabian.

In his velvet robes, the man lies face down on the floor. He has collapsed, hit the iron leg of the table, and smashed his head open. He may have bled to death, but it’s hard to tell. Why would he fall in the first place? Julian and the Baroness stand in shock.

“His heart must’ve finally gave out, the poor fat bugger,” the Baroness says. She is probably right. Nothing is out of place, except the overturned table, the silver decanter on its side, the broken crystal glasses, and the enormous corpse.

“This is the kind of thing that closes down establishments!” the Baroness says. “People are so superstitious about death. And this is one of our best rooms. Bugger it. Bugger it all to hell.”

Fabian’s head is turned to the side. His eyes bulge out of their sockets, as if he had suffocated before he died, not simply lost consciousness after a fall and a blow to the head. The suffocation seems odd for a cardiac event. Blood spills out of his filled-up mouth. There’s foam around his lips—as if he’d been gasping for breath before dying. From the disturbance around the armchair and the knocked-over table, it looks to Julian that the man could’ve gone into convulsions. The foul mess under his swollen body suggests a severe gastric disturbance.