Taking Wing

City of Ghosts

The ride back into London unsettles Isabel before she even reaches her own street. The first thing she notices is the sound of running water, brooks and streams she never used to hear over the city’s usual roar, now trickling clearly past Saint John’s Priory, down Ely Place, and on through Saint Bartholomew and Smithfield.

The bells that once competed all day with hawkers’ cries and rumbling cart wheels now fall silent until nightfall. Their horse senses something is wrong and has to be driven forward with sharp words and kicks. The manservant riding beside Isabel tries to look unconcerned, though she can tell he is frightened, too.

Everything reeks of smoke. A gray haze hangs over the city like fog. No color survives beneath it, only shuttered doors closed tight against the sickness, giving London the look of something gone blind. There is no laundry strung across the alleyways to dry, no pots of geraniums on the windowsills, just muted tones of smoke and ash.

Then a shock of red leaps out from a doorway, a crude cross painted there to announce that plague has visited inside. The manservant gasps at the sight of it. Other red flickers mark the street corners, where watchmen keep fires burning day and night to destroy the clothing and belongings of the dead.

In the eerie hush, a handbell jangles and cart wheels trundle closer. A weary voice calls for people to bring out their dead. Isabel feels the cart pass by like a breath of death itself. She thinks of the regions of hell her tutor, Master Hart, once described to her. She decides that the shadowy Londoners she sees slipping into doorways and alleys must be its unhappy spirits.

Riding on through Cheapside, Isabel counts so many livid red crosses that she marvels anyone is left alive. In some streets, grass has already begun creeping up between the cobblestones. A helpless dread builds in her that her own family’s door will bear the same mark. She wonders how a nervous gentlewoman, an elderly nurse, and a sickly little girl could possibly hold out if the plague has turned all of London into this world of shadows.

When they finally reach her own street and urge the exhausted horses toward the house, Isabel can hardly believe her eyes. There is no cross on the door. She half-expects to hear the deathcart’s bell any moment, certain some mistake has been made. But the door creaks open cautiously. She hears Alice calling back into the house that the mistress’s niece has returned, praise be. Isabel thinks, flooding with relief, that they are still alive.

Alice comes hobbling out to meet her. Isabel, terrified, asks at once whether her sister still lives, whether it’s true she has the plague. Alice presses her hands to her mouth and says the contagion passed Hope by. But the child is now very near death and no longer knows anyone around her. Isabel begs to be taken to her.

Isabel follows her old nurse into the back parlor, where a little bed has been made up by the fire. Aunt Elinor sits at Hope’s bedside, looking older than Isabel remembers. Isabel sees at once that her baby sister’s life hangs by the slenderest thread. Hope plucks feebly at the sheet in her delirium. Aunt Elinor whispers that she fears the little thing won’t live through the night. No matter what anyone says, she knows it is plague, and soon they shall all be dead. Then, to Isabel’s dismay, her aunt begins to cry, racked by dry sobs.

Isabel has never once seen Aunt Elinor weep. She has always borne life’s disappointments without complaint and expected everyone else to do the same. But the terror of the plague on top of Hope’s illness has finally broken her.

Isabel is exhausted herself, longing for nothing more than a hot bath and a long sleep after the sights and smells of the ravaged city. But she understands that she alone is left to bring order and health back into this house. She speaks to her aunt more sharply than she ever has before, insisting that Hope does not have the plague at all. Then she pulls back the covers to show her Hope’s flushed but otherwise flawless skin: no boils, no blisters, no discoloring, only a raging fever.

Aunt Elinor, past reasoning, only repeats that it makes no difference, that she has sponged the child morning and night to no avail. Isabel gently sends her aunt off to rest, telling her it is her turn to sit with Hope now. Then she asks Alice for warm water so she can wash the grime of the road from her hands before touching her sister.

A fearful, despairing sickroom can poison a delirious child’s spirits as surely as any infection. Determined to seem calm rather than afraid, Isabel settles in for what becomes the longest night of her life. Again and again she sponges Hope’s face and body with Aunt de Vere’s cooling flower water. She burns scented herbs to clear the sickroom air the way her aunt in the country once taught her. And she takes Hope onto her lap to spoon in tiny amounts of thin porridge, the same patient way Alice fed her as a newborn.

Almost none of it stays down. But Isabel praises her anyway, coaxing her along with promises. Alice predicts Hope will live to 104 and raise ten strapping sons. Once she is well, they will ride together in a fine coach to see Aunt de Vere and the woolly lambs just like the one in her hornbook. Their aunt’s cook will let her press raisins into gingerbread men for buttons, five of them, all by herself, since that cook is far kinder than sour old Joan.

Past midnight, Isabel lights a watch candle at the hearth and keeps vigil. Alice, worn thin from days of worry, dozes off despite herself. But Isabel refuses to let her own eyes close, singing lullabies and murmuring stories, willing the small spark of life she senses in her sister to hold on. Only near dawn does birdsong finally reach her, one startled note and then a full chorus. Looking down, she finds Hope resting quietly in the pale early light, her small hand cool and still in Isabel’s own but her breathing steady. Somehow, her sister has lived through the night.

A few days later, with Hope safely left in Alice’s care, Isabel hurries out into Cheapside to run errands. She wants silk thread so Aunt Elinor can sew Hope a new gown from a leftover length of rose-colored silk, hoping the task will give her aunt’s frayed nerves something useful to occupy them. After buying the thread from the mercer, she stops at the apothecary for frankincense and myrrh, remedies Aunt de Vere taught her to burn against infection.

The market Isabel remembers is gone. No fire-eater performing for a Christmas crowd, no street musicians, stilt walkers, or men hawking sugar pigs, only a handful of stalls selling dried beans, salted fish, and bundles of kindling. The few people out keep carefully to the middle of the street, away from walls that might carry the sickness.

An old scholar has even set up a bookstall on the pavement. Isabel spots a battered copy of the same book of travelers’ tales her brother used to frighten her with as a child. She would love to flip through it to find the old picture of men with heads beneath their arms. But she resists, afraid the pages themselves might carry contagion.

A familiar voice behind Isabel calls out the old name she went by while traveling in disguise with the players. She spins around to find Kit. For a moment they only clasp hands like frightened children, until she catches the look in his eyes and grows afraid to ask what’s wrong. Meg has died, he tells her bluntly.

A neighbor woman fell ill with plague sores. When the woman’s husband saw them, he abandoned her and their children rather than risk staying. Meg said she would not leave even a litter of puppies to die that way. So she went next door to nurse them herself. After the woman died, the law required the house to be sealed shut for six weeks. The watchmen nailed the shutters closed with Meg and the children still inside, bringing food to the door each day even as, one by one, everyone within caught the disease, too, and died.

Isabel is too stunned to speak. Kit says gently that he is sorry to shock her, that it happened only the week before, and that he could only manage to say it bluntly or not say it at all. Isabel tries to make herself believe Meg is truly gone, but the thought will not settle. Instead her mind leaps to Hope, left alone almost an hour now. She worries she has stayed away too long already. She tells Kit she must hurry home to her sister. Seeing the alarm on his face, she quickly assures him it isn’t plague, only that Hope came close to death and is still too weak to speak. She asks if she might find him again once things are better. Kit answers softly that if they are both spared, he will come find her himself.

Isabel runs the rest of the way home and finds Hope lying so still and pale she looks carved from marble, like some baby angel. Her hand, when Isabel touches it in fear, is warm. The relief of it, coming right on top of Kit’s news, breaks over her all at once. She bursts into tears. Alice, alarmed, asks what is wrong, and Isabel can only sob out that Meg is dead. Alice is stricken, too, grieving for the sweet girl she remembers.

In the days that follow, Isabel cannot make sense of how someone as full of life as Meg could be gone while her own frail little sister survives. It is a mystery too large to hold in her mind. So instead she keeps her hands busy and gives herself no time to think. With Aunt Elinor still too nervous and Alice too weak to help much, Isabel takes on cleaning the neglected house entirely herself.

Isabel sweeps and scrubs the flagstones, polishes the furniture and oak paneling with beeswax, and strews the floors with fresh rushes mixed with rosemary and rue. She strips the sheets from every bed, boils them in a cauldron, and hangs them out to dry. She walks to the market for marrowbones, dried beans, and whatever vegetables can be found. Then she comes home to simmer simple soups and pottages meant to build everyone’s strength back up.

Aunt Elinor, still shaken, begs Isabel to be careful, asking what they would do if she fell ill next. Isabel has already noticed that trying to soothe her aunt only feeds the panic further. So she answers plainly instead.

Isabel may be wild and stubborn, exactly as her aunt has always said. But she is as strong as an ox, and she means to see that all of them come through this alive. Something shifts in her aunt’s face at that. Aunt Elinor’s mouth tightens, but she quietly agrees to help keep up their strength rather than argue further.

That evening, Father comes home. After a quick, relieved reunion, he asks Isabel to play her lute. She sits with Alice that night, singing “Lullay My Liking” to Hope. Hope is now well enough to sit up in her nightcap and shift, singing along as merrily as a blackbird. She demands, with great importance, that she be allowed five buttons to fasten all by herself.

Near the end of the song, a footstep sounds in the hall, and the parlor door opens behind them. Isabel falters, but Father’s voice asks her not to stop, and his hand settles on her shoulder. She tries to keep singing through a throat suddenly tight with tears. Then Hope’s sheet rustles as an unsteady little voice joins hers on the final lines.

Father murmurs that their angel has come back to them, his arm coming around Isabel, and Alice echoes him in wonder. Isabel and Alice trade a look of pure astonishment, hardly able to believe that after everything, Hope is truly going to live.