Kathleen Winsor - Forever Amber

It was several minutes before she could force herself to return to the bedroom. There she found that Bruce was awake. “I wondered where you were. Where’s Spong? Is she worse?”

The room had darkened and as yet she had lighted no candles, so that he could not see her face. She waited for a moment, listening, but as she heard no sound she decided that the nurse must be dead. “Spong’s gone,” she said, trying to sound unconcerned. “I sent her away—she went to a pest-house.” She picked up a candle. “I’ll light this from the kitchen-fire.”

In the semi-darkness of the parlour she could see the bulk of Spong’s body but she went by without stopping, lighted the candle, and then returned. Spong was dead.

Amber picked up her skirts with an automatic gesture of revulsion, and walked back into the bedroom to light the candles. Her face was white and she had an intense desire to vomit, but she went about her tasks, determined that Bruce should not guess. And yet she could feel him watching her and she dared not meet his eyes, for if he should speak she felt that she could not trust herself. She seemed to be hanging on the ragged edge of hysteria but knew that she must keep herself in control, for when the dead-cart came by she would have to get the woman down the stairs and outside.

A pale velvety blueness still lingered in streaks in the sky when she heard the first call, from a distance: “Bring out your dead!”

Amber stiffened, like an animal listening, and then she seized a pewter candle-holder. “I’ll get your supper ready,” she said, and before he could speak she went out of the room.

Without looking at Spong she set the candle on a table and went to open the doors leading through the anteroom. The call came again, nearer now. She paused there a moment and then with sudden violent resolution she came back, flung up her skirts, unfastened her petticoat and stepped out of it. Wrapping it about her hands she bent and took hold of Spong by her thick swollen ankles, and slowly she began to drag her toward the door. The old woman’s wig came off and her flesh slid and squeaked over the bare floor.

By the time Amber reached the head of the stairs she was sick and wet with sweat and her ears were ringing. She reached backward with one foot for the step, found it and sought the next; it was perfectly dark in the stair-well but she could hear the nurse’s skull thump on each carpeted stair. She reached the bottom at last and knocked at the door. The guard opened it.

“The nurse is dead,” she said faintly. Her face looked out at him, white as chalk in the twilight, and the linen petticoat trailed from one hand.

There was the sound of the dead-cart rattling over the cobble-stones, the clop-clop of the horses’ hoofs, and then the unexpected cry: “Faggots! Faggots for six-pence!”

It seemed strange to her that anyone should be selling faggots in this weather, and at this hour. But at that moment the dead-cart drew up before the house. A link-man came first, carrying his smoky torch, and he was followed by the dead-cart, beside which walked a man ringing a bell and chanting: “Bring out your dead!” In the driver’s seat sat another man, and now Amber saw that he was holding the naked corpse of a little boy, no more than three years old, by the legs.

It was he who shouted, “Faggots for six-pence!”

While Amber stared at him with incredulous horror he turned, flung the child back into the cart, and climbed down. He and the bell-man started forward to get Spong.

“Now,” he said, grinning at Amber, “what’ve we got here?”

Both men bent over to pick Spong up. Suddenly he seized the bodice of her gown and ripped it down the front, exposing the old woman’s gross and flabby body. From neck to thighs she was covered with small blue-circled spots—the plague tokens. He made a noise of disgust, hawked up a glob of saliva and spat it onto the corpse.

“Bah!” he muttered. “What a firkin of foul stuff she is!”

Neither of the other men seemed surprised at his behaviour; they paid him no attention at all, and obviously were accustomed to it. Now they picked Spong up, gave a heave and dumped her into the cart. The link-man started on, the bell-man took up his bell again, and the driver climbed back into his seat. From there he turned and surveyed Amber.

“Tomorrow night we’ll come back for you. And I doubt not you’ll make a finer corpse than that stinking old whore.”

Amber slammed the door shut and started slowly up the stairs, so weak and sick that she had to hold onto the railing as she went.

She entered the kitchen and began the preparation of Bruce’s supper, thinking that as soon as that was done she must take hot water and a mop and clean the parlour floor. For the first time she felt resentful that there was so much work to do, such an endless number of tasks reaching before her. She wished only that she might lie down and sleep and wake up some place far away. All at once responsibility seemed an unbearable burden.

And the driver of the dead-cart was still with her. She could not get rid of him, no matter what she tried to think of. It did not seem that she was there in the kitchen, but still downstairs, standing in the doorway watching him—but it was not Spong whose gown he tore open, and it was not Spong he thrust into the dead-cart. It was herself.

Holy Jesus! she thought wildly. I think I’m stark raving mad! Another day and I’ll be ready for Bedlam!

As she went about her work, mixing the syllabub, setting the tray, her movements were slow and clumsy and finally she dropped an egg onto the floor. She scowled wearily but took a cloth and bent to wipe it up, and as she did so there was a sudden splitting pain in her forehead and she was seized by a swirl of dizziness. She straightened again, slowly, and to her amazement she staggered and might have fallen but that she grabbed the side of a table to brace herself.

For a moment she stood and stared at the floor, and then she turned and walked into the parlour. No, she thought, shoving away the idea that had suddenly come to her. It can’t be that. Of course it can’t—

She took the candle-holder, carried it to the little writing-table and set it there. Then she placed the palms of her hands flat onto the table-top and leaned forward to look at herself in the small round gilt mirror which hung on the wall. The candle-flame cast stark shadows up onto her face. It showed the deep hollows beneath her eyes, flung pointed reflections of her lashes up onto her lids, heightened the wide staring horror of her eyes. At last she put out her tongue. It was coated with a yellowish fur but the tip and edges were clean and shiny, unnaturally pink. Her eyes closed and the room seemed to sway and rock.

Holy Mother of God! Tomorrow night it will be me!

GOD’S TERRIBLE VOICE was in the city.

But twenty miles away at Hampton Court it could scarcely be heard at all; there were too many distracting noises. The whir of shuffled cards and the clack of rolling dice. The scratching of quills writing letters of love or diplomacy or intrigue. The crashing of swords in some secret forbidden duel. Chatter and laughter and the sibilant whisper of gossip. Guitars and fiddles, clinking glasses raised in a toast, rustling taffeta petticoats, and tapping high-heeled shoes. Nothing was changed.

They did, occasionally, discuss the plague when they gathered in her Majesty’s Drawing-Room in the evenings, just as they discussed the weather, and for the same reason—it was unusual.

“Have you seen this week’s bills?” Winifred Wells would ask as she sat talking to Mrs. Stewart and Sir Charles Sedley.

“I can’t bear to look at ’em. Poor creatures. Dying like flies.”

Sedley, a dark short plump young man with snapping black eyes and a taste for handsome lace cravats, was scornful of her tender heart. “Nonsense, Frances! What does it matter if they die now or later? The town was overcrowded as it was.”

“You’d think it mattered, my Lord, if the plague got you!”

Sedley laughed. “And so it would. Sure, my dear, you’ll allow there’s some difference between a man of wit and breeding and a poor drivelling idiot of a baker or tailor?”

At that moment another gentleman approached them and Sedley got up to welcome him, throwing one arm about his shoulders. “Aha! Here’s Wilmot! We’ve been sitting here most damnably dull, with nothing to talk on but the plague. Now you’ve come we can be merry again. What’ve you got there? Another libel to spoil someone’s reputation?”

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was a tall slender young man of eighteen, light-skinned and blonde with a look of delicacy which made his handsome face almost effeminate. Only a few months before he had come to Court direct from his travels abroad, precocious and sophisticated, but still a quiet modest lad who was just a little shy. He adapted himself to Whitehall so quickly that he was but recently released from the Tower for the offense of kidnapping rich Mrs. Mallet with intent to marry her fortune.

Writing was the fashion. All the courtiers wrote something, plays, satires, lampoons on their friends and acquaintances, and the Earl had already shown that he had not only a quick talent but a flair for malice. Now he had a rolled-up sheet of paper stuck beneath his arm and the other three glanced at it expectantly.

“I protest, Sedley.” Rochester’s smile and manner were deceptively mild, and he bowed to Stewart and Wells so courteously that it was impossible to believe he had not the most charitable opinion of all women. “You’ll convince the ladies I’m an ill-natured sot. No—it’s no libel I have here. Just a silly thing I scratched out while I was waiting for my periwig to be curled.”