Page 89 of The Shifting Tide (William Monk 14)

uld was guilty of theft, as he had pleaded, but there was more than reasonable doubt that any murder had been committed at all. Of that charge he was not guilty.

Rathbone walked out into the mid-morning rain with a sense of one very small victory, one man’s life saved, at least for the time being.

THIRTEEN

In Portpool Lane time was measured not in nights and days but in loads of laundry, whether it was light enough to blow out the candles, or dark enough to ask the men in the yard to fetch water from the well at the end of the street. Everything still had to be done by signs from the back door. No one must come close enough to risk catching the contagion.

Four women had died now, including Ruth Clark and Martha. Hester went to each of the survivors as often as she could. For those with pneumonia or bronchitis it was a matter of keeping the fever down and making sure they drank as much as possible: water, tea, soup-anything to make up for the fluid loss.

For the three whose illness was recognizably plague there was less to be done, and a more desperate desire to try anything at all to lessen the pain, which was acute. It was not only the knowledge of almost certain death, but the poison that raged through their bodies before it erupted in the blackened, putrefying flesh of the buboes, that made a person so ill that he or she longed for oblivion. The moments of awareness between one delirium and another were so agonizing that they cried out, and there was nothing Hester or any of the others could do but administer cool cloths, a sip of water, and not leave them alone.

“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Flo said softly, pulling uncomfortably on the sleeve of her blouse-like all of them, conscious every moment of her arms and groin. She set down another bowl of water on the table outside one of the rooms so Hester could wring out cloths for the woman inside. “Not even that Ruth Clark, the lyin’ bampot.” Her face was pale with tiredness, the freckles on it standing out like dirty marks, her eyes dark ringed. “I may be a tart, Miss ’Ester, an’ a few other things, I daresay, but I in’t never bin a thief. I got a name like anybody else, an’ she got no right to take it from me by tellin’ lies. Why’d she do that? I in’t never done nothin’ to ’er?”

“She was an angry woman,” Hester replied, putting the cloths over her arm, then picking up the bowl. “A man she trusted, maybe even loved, threw her aside like so much rubbish when she most needed him. She just lashed out at everyone.”

Flo shrugged. “If she trusted a man wot paid for ’er, the more fool ’er!” She looked at Hester defiantly, and Hester stared straight back at her. Flo sighed and lowered her gaze. “Well. . I s’pose we’re all stupid sometimes, poor cow,” she said reluctantly. Then she smiled. “I’m alive, an’ she ain’t, so I reckon I don’t ’old no grudges. I won, eh?”

Hester felt the cold grasp her as if the outside door had been opened onto the night. “Is that what you call winning, Flo?”

“Well. .” Flo started, then she froze. “Geez! I din’t do nothin’ to ’er, Miss ’Ester!”

The cold deepened inside Hester, gripping like ice. “Why would I think you did, Flo?” she asked very quietly.

“ ’Cos she called me a thief, an’ I i’nt!” Flo said indignantly. “That’s a nice thing ter say! If yer’d believed ’er yer could a put me out on the street, fer Gawd’s sake! I could die out there!” A wry, miserable smile flickered across her face. “Come ter think on it, I could die in ’ere too. But in ’ere I’m wi’ friends, an’ that counts.”

“I never thought you were a thief, Flo,” Hester said, surprised how completely she meant it.

Flo’s face lit with amazement and joy. “Din’t yer? Really?”

Hester felt tears prickle in her eyes. It must be tiredness. She could not remember when she had last slept more than an hour at a time. “No, I didn’t.”

Flo shook her head, still smiling. “Then I’m glad I never fetched the poor sod in the chops, an’ b’lieve me, I thought of it! D’yer want some more towels, then?”

“Yes, yes please,” Hester accepted. “Bring them next time you come.”

Another woman died, and Hester and Mercy tied her in one of the dark blankets as a winding sheet. When they were finished Hester looked across and saw how white-faced Mercy was, and when Mercy turned her head, hearing footsteps on the stairs, the candlelight accentuated the hollowness around her eyes.

“We’ll get Squeaky to help us carry her down,” Hester said. “Don’t you do it.”

Mercy started to argue, then gave up. “Perhaps you’re right,” she conceded. “It would be terrible to drop her-poor soul.” Her face was filled with pity and there was also a note of anger. Hester wondered why, but she was too tired to pursue it.

Claudine stood in the doorway. She looked at Hester for a moment, then at the bundle on the bed. It was a woman she had despised, but even a glance at her face showed that death had cleansed judgment from her and left only a common humanity.

“I’ll tell the men,” she said. She turned from Hester to Mercy. “You don’t look as if you could lift your own feet, let alone anyone else’s. I’d better fetch that useless man away from his books!” And without asking Hester’s agreement she withdrew. They heard her feet going down the passageway, still sharp-heeled on the wood, but slower than before. She too was on the edge of exhaustion. It would soon be time for Bessie and Flo to take over for the rest of the night.

“We can manage,” Hester said to Mercy. “Go to bed now. I’ll wake you when it’s time.”

For once Mercy didn’t demur.

Claudine returned with Squeaky a step behind her, grizzling all the way.

“In’t my job ter be a bleedin’ undertaker!” he complained. “Wot if I get the plague, eh? Wot then? Carryin’ bodies! Mr. Bleedin’ Rathbone din’t say as I ’ad ter be carryin’ bodies-that weren’t part o’ the agreement. Wot if I get it, eh? Yer don’t answer me that, did yer?”

“You didn’t hold your tongue long enough to give me the chance,” Claudine responded tartly. “But if you can’t work out the answer for yourself, then I’ll tell you. You’ll die of it, that’s what. Exactly the same as the rest of us.”

“Yer’d like that, wouldn’t yer!” he accused her, glaring at her where she stood just inside the door, her head high, hair untidy, hands on her wide hips.

“Of course I wouldn’t like that!” she snapped. “If you were dead I would have to carry all the water myself, instead of just most of it, as I do now. Apart from that, who’d carry you out?”

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