The rent was exorbitant—one hundred and twenty-five pounds a year—but Amber had the merest contempt for such small change and paid it without a word of protest, though she hoped and expected that she would not be there even half that long. For Bruce should be back soon; he had been gone now more than eight months and the Pool was crowded again with captured merchant-shipping.

She moved her belongings from Dangerfield House before she herself left, and though the process took three or four days no one came near or commented on what she was taking, not all of which strictly belonged to her. She had hired a wet-nurse and a dry-nurse for the baby, and now she hired three maids, which completed the equipage necessary to a woman of fashion living alone. The day she left, the great house was perfectly silent; she scarcely saw a servant and not even one of the children appeared in the hallways. Nothing could have told her more plainly than this silent contempt how they hated her.

But Amber did not care at all. They were nothing to her now—those stiff precise formal people who lived in a world she despised. She sank back onto the seat of her coach with a sigh of relief.

“Drive away! Well—” she turned to Nan. “That’s over-thank God.”

“Aye,” agreed Nan, softly but with real feeling. “Thank God.”

They sat quietly, looking out the windows as the coach jogged along, enjoying everything they saw. It was a dirty foggy day and the moisture in the air made stronger than ever the heterogeneous and evil smells of London. Along one side of the street swaggered a young beau with his arm in a sling from a recent duel. Across the way a couple of men, obviously French, had been caught by a group of little boys who were screaming insults at them and throwing refuse picked up out of the kennels. The English hated all foreigners, but Frenchmen most of all. A ragged one-eyed old fish-woman lurched drunkenly along, holding by its tail a mouldering mackerel and bawling out her unintelligible chant.

All at once Nan gave a little gasp, one hand pressed to her mouth and the other pointing. “Look! There’s another one!”

“Another what?”

“Another cross!”

Amber leaned forward and saw a great red cross chalked on the doorway of a house before which they were stalled. Beneath it had been printed the words, in great sprawling letters: LORD HAVE MERCY UPON us! A guard lounged against the house, his halberd planted beside him.

She leaned back again, giving a careless wave of her gloved hand. “Pish. What of it? Plague’s the poor man’s disease. Haven’t you heard that?” Barricaded behind her sixty-six thousand pounds she felt safe from anything.


For the next few weeks Amber lived quietly in her apartments at the Plume of Feathers. Her arrival in the neighbourhood, she knew, created a considerable excitement and she was aware that every time she stepped out of the house she was much stared at from behind cautiously drawn curtains. A widow as rich as she was would have aroused interest even if she were not also young and lovely. But she was not so eager to make friends now as she had been when she had first come to London, and her fortune made her suspicious of the motives of any young man who so much as stepped aside to let her pass in the street.

The courtiers were all out at sea with the fleet and—though she would have enjoyed flaunting to them her triumph over the conditions which had once put her at their mercy—she had no real interest in anyone but Bruce. She was content waiting for him to return.

Most of the time she stayed at home, absorbed in being a mother. Her son had been taken away from her so soon, and she had seen him so infrequently since, that this baby was as much a novelty to her as if it were her first. She helped the dry-nurse bathe her, watched her while she fed and slept, rocked her cradle and sang songs and was fascinated by the smallest change she could discover in her size and weight and appearance. She was glad that she had had the baby, even if it had temporarily increased her waist-line by an inch or so, for it gave her something of Bruce’s which she could never lose. This child had a name, a dowry already secure and waiting, an enviable place of her own in the world.

Nan was almost as interested as her mistress. “I vow she’s the prettiest baby in London.”

Amber was insulted. “In London! What d’you mean? She’s the prettiest baby in England!”

One day she went to the New Exchange to do some unnecessary shopping, and happened to see Barbara Palmer. She was just leaving when a great gilt coach drove up in front and Castlemaine stepped out. Barbara’s eyes went over her clothes with interest, for though Amber was still dressed in mourning her cloak was lined with leopard-skins—which Samuel had bought for her from some African slave-trader—and she carried a leopard muff. But when her eyes got as far as Amber’s face and she saw who was wearing the costume she glanced quickly and haughtily away.

Amber gave a little laugh. So she remembers me! she thought. Well, madame, I doubt not you and I may be better acquainted one day.

As the days went by red crosses were seen, more and more frequently, chalked on the doors. There was plague in London every year and when a few cases had appeared in January and February no one had been alarmed. But now, as the weather grew warmer, the plague seemed to increase and terror spread slowly through the city: it passed from neighbour to neighbour, from apprentice to customer, from vendor to housewife.

Long funeral processions wound through the streets, and already people had begun to take notice of a man or a woman in mourning. They recalled the evil portents which had been seen only a few months before. In December a comet had appeared, rising night after night, tracing a slow ominous path across the sky. Others had seen flaming-swords held over the city, hearses and coffins and heaps of dead bodies in the clouds. Crowds collected on the steps of St. Paul’s to hear the half-naked old man who held a blazing torch in his hand and called upon them to repent of their sins. The tolling of the passing-bell began to have a new significance for each of them:

Tomorrow, perhaps, it tolls for me or for someone I love.

Every day Nan came home with a new preventive. She bought pomander-balls to breathe into when out of doors, toad amulets, a unicorn’s horn, quills filled with arsenic and quicksilver, mercury in a walnut shell, gold coins minted in Queen Elizabeth’s time. Each time someone told her of a new preservative she bought it immediately, one for each member of the household, and she insisted that they be worn. She even put quicksilver-quills around the necks of their horses.

But she was not content merely with preventing the plague. For she realized sensibly, that in spite of all precautions one sometimes got it, and she began to stock the cupboards with remedies for curing the sickness. She bought James Angier’s famous fumigant of brimstone and saltpetre, as well as gunpowder, nitre, tar and resin to disinfect the air. She bought all the recommended herbs, angelica, rue, pimpernel, gentian, juniper berries, and dozens more. She had a chestful of medicines which included Venice treacle, dragon water, and a bottle of cow-dung mixed with vinegar.

Amber was inclined to be amused by all these frantic preparations. An astrologer had told her that 1665 would be a lucky year for her, and her almanac did not warn her of plague or any other disease. Anyway it was true, for the most part, that only the poor were dying in their crowded dirty slums.

“Mrs. de Lacy’s leaving town tomorrow,” said Nan one morning as she brushed Amber’s hair.

“Well, what if she is? Mrs. de Lacy’s a chicken-hearted old simpleton who’d squeak at the sight of a mouse.”

“She’s not the only one, mam, you know that. Plenty of others are leaving too.”

“The King isn’t leaving, is he?” They had had this same argument every day for the past two weeks, and Amber was growing tired of it.

“No, but he’s the King and couldn’t catch the sickness if he tried. I tell you, mam, it’s mighty dangerous to stay. Not five minutes’ walk away—just at the top of Drury Lane—there’s a house been shut up. I’m getting scared, mam! Lord, I don’t want to die—and I shouldn’t think you would either!”

Amber laughed. “Well, then, Nan—if it gets any worse we’ll leave. But there’s no use fretting your bowels to fiddle-strings.” She had no intention at all of leaving before Bruce arrived.

On the 3rd of June the English and Dutch fleets engaged just off Lowestoft, and the sound of their guns carried back to London. They could be heard, very faintly, like swallows fluttering in a chimney.

By the 8th it was known that the English had been victorious —twenty-four Dutch ships had been sunk or captured and almost 10,000 Dutchmen killed or taken prisoner, while no more than 700 English seamen had been lost. The rejoicing was hysterical. Bonfires blazed along every street and a mob of merrymakers broke the French Ambassador’s windows because there was no fire in front of his house. King Charles was the greatest king, the Duke of York the greatest admiral England had ever known—and everyone was eager to continue the fight, wipe out the Dutch and rule all the seas on earth.

The red crosses had now entered the gates of the City.

Nan came in a few days later with a bill-of-mortality in her hand. “Mam!” she cried. “Mam! There was 112 died last week of the sickness!”

Amber was entertaining Lord Buckhurst and Sir Charles Sedley who—along with the other gentlemen—had just returned from sea, all of them sunburnt heroes. Nan stopped on the threshold in surprise to find them there.