Margery was in the kitchen at five of the clock that afternoon when everything fell apart. She’d been busy all day, supervising her servants as they cleaned out the cellar in preparation for the crates of spring-fresh vegetables that would soon fill it, consulting with the cook about that evening’s fare, and then helping her to strip the eels and baste the vegetables for William’s favourite pie, and thus Margery had enjoyed no free time at all in which to stand in her doorway and gossip with the neighbours.
She had no idea of what had happened at St Paul’s that day, and, by virtue of the fact that her home was tucked right at the end of Ironmonger Lane, a reasonable distance from Bishopsgate Street which was itself on the far side of London from St Paul’s, she’d heard none of the fuss that had carried up and down most of the city’s main thoroughfares. Both William and her sons had yet to come home, and in any case, Margery wasn’t expecting them for another hour or so.
So when the scraping at the kitchen door came, Margery merely muttered her displeasure at the interruption, told the cook and the kitchen girl that she’d see what was about outside, wiped her hands on her apron, and walked to the door that opened into the kitchen courtyard.
Ironmonger Lane was a quiet part of London, rarely visited by the beggars and criminals seen in so many other streets, and so Margery had no hesitation in throwing open the door.
A massive black dog stood not three feet away, staring at Margery with yellow eyes, snarling so viciously that ropes of saliva spattered across Margery’s apron.
Margery gave a small shriek, and slammed the door closed.
“Mistress?” asked the cook, staring up from the table where she’d been rolling out pastry.
Margery took a deep breath. “A dog. A stray,” she said. “Nothing to be concerned about.” And she walked back to the table to her duties, resolving to ask William to speak to the local alderman about the problem of stray dogs.
At that moment she heard their front door open, then, after the shortest of intervals, slam closed. Footsteps thudded down the corridor towards the kitchen.
William, their three sons, and two of his apprentices. William’s face was shiny with sweat, his pale blue eyes wide and panicked.
“Lock the doors,” he said, his voice hoarse and breathless. “Shutter the windows!”
“William—”
He ignored her, brushing past the cook and the kitchen girl to bolt closed the shutter over the kitchen windows. “Harry!” he said, looking at his eldest son. “Upstairs—the windows!”
Harry nodded, and darted away towards the stairs.
“William, what is going on?”
“Pestilence,” William said, staring about wildly as if looking for something else to shutter closed.
Margery drew in a deep breath. “But we haven’t suffered from the pestilence in—”
“How long it has been doesn’t matter,” William said, and directed his middle son into the front rooms of the house to shutter the windows. “What matters is that the pestilence is back now. Have you opened the door to anyone this day? Any beggars, anyone who has touched you?”
Margery stared at him, then very slowly looked down at her apron. Wordlessly she tore it off, then bundled it into the coals in the hearth.
It was too late. By evening one of the apprentices, the cook, two of Margery’s sons, and William himself were fighting raging fevers. Huge swellings appeared in their armpits, at the bases of their necks, and in their groins.
They were tight and agonising, filled almost to bursting point with black blood and pus.
Margery did what she could—and she was left on her own to do it, because the two still-healthy servants had fled the house at the first signs of sickness—but that was little enough. She moved from bed to bed, wiping faces and hands with cloths wrung out in cool, herbed water. When her youngest son and one of the apprentices began to soil themselves with great clotting black messes, she changed their linens, her heart almost failing at their screams of agony as she rolled them over.
In the dark of early morning, as she was trying to change the linens under the apprentice, three of his buboes burst, and he bled to death, screaming, in under ten minutes.
And the nightmare had only just begun.
By dawn, William was dead, drowned in the mass of blood and pus that had collected in his lungs. The child and the apprentice who had so far escaped were tossing with fever, and Margery, in emptying out a bucket of blood and pus-stained rags into the courtyard refuse heap, suddenly realised that her arms were aching, and difficult to move.
There were hard lumps in both of her armpits.
Margery stood there for long minutes, the bucket at her feet, staring sightlessly at the refuse heap before her.
She moved her arms, very slightly, and again felt the painful swellings in her armpits.
Margery began to weep, great sobbing gulps, full of exhaustion and terror. She remembered how only a day ago her life had been so good, how the future shone so bright, how she and William had done so well for themselves from such humble beginnings.
Now?
Now it was all gone. Gone in less than a day.
Margery slowly sank to the cold cobbles, lay down, and waited to die, staring up at the grey sky with her weeping eyes.
Much later, dogs began to feed on her almost dead body.
III Tuesday 21st May 1381 —iii—
Bolingbroke stretched tired neck and shoulder muscles, and looked one more time at the plans and documents that Dick Whittington had spread on the table. He lifted a candle—even though dawn light now shone through the windows, it was still not strong—and peered more closely at the plan of London spread before him.
He and the Lord Mayor, as also Bolingbroke’s Chancellor, the Bishop of London, and several other clerks and secretaries, stood in one of the upper chambers of the Tower of London Keep. Most of the palace was still undergoing renovation, but at least this chamber was finished, and warmed by a fire roaring in the grate.
Someone—Bolingbroke had forgotten who—had thrown rosemary and rue on the fire, and now the sweet scent of the herbs infused the chamber.
Bolingbroke didn’t think the herbs would have much effect in keeping the pestilence at bay.
The door to the chamber opened, and a man dressed in the livery of the Grocers’ Company hurried in. He bowed perfunctorily to Bolingbroke, then whispered in Whittington’s ear before hurriedly quitting the chamber.
“Well?” Bolingbroke said.
“Over a hundred and twenty more deaths,” Whittington said, his shoulders slumping. “Sire, the pestilence has now touched most parts of London.”
Bolingbroke nodded. “That black Dog has done its work well.”
Several of the men in the room exchanged glances, their eyes filled with superstitious fear. Reports of the Dog of Pestilence had come in all night, appearing first here, then there, then somewhere else. No one could catch it, for whenever a band of men closed about it, the Dog merely seemed to vanish into the