London - Edward Rutherfurd [411]
“Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.”
Some parishes, almost a quarter in total, were free of the plague. On the last day of August, walking by St Paul’s, he encountered a man named Pepys whom he had met several times at gatherings of the Royal Society. Pepys was an official at the Navy Board and, Meredith knew, had access to information of all kinds. “The real number of deaths is higher than the Mortality Bills show,” Pepys told him. “The clerks are falsifying the accounts and some of the poor aren’t being counted. The bills show seven and a half thousand last week.”
“And the real figure?”
“Nearer ten,” Pepys replied grimly. “But perhaps, Doctor Meredith,” he added more cheerfully, “if God spares us both, I shall have the pleasure of hearing a lecture from you one day at the Royal Society, upon what is the true cause of the plague.”
No subject, indeed, could have been nearer to Meredith’s heart. As he had gone from house to house, seen people – whole families – feverish, delirious, screaming in the agony of death, he had felt a terrible sense of helplessness. He was a physician; yet the truth was he could do nothing about plague and he knew it. And why, he considered? Because of his, and everyone else’s complete ignorance. How could he suggest a remedy, or even alleviate the condition when he had no idea what caused it; how to protect his patients when he did not even know how it was transmitted?
He had formed certain suspicions. It was assumed that people gave the plague to each other: hence the attempts at quarantine. Certainly, as he went into some of the worst areas – Southwark, the parish of Whitechapel outside Aldgate, the road up to Shoreditch, Holborn – and saw whole streets where nearly every door bore the dreaded cross, this seemed a fair assumption. But why was the plague so concentrated in these places? Many people were smoking pipes because the smoke was supposed to cleanse the air. It was said that not a single tobacconist had caught the plague yet. But if it was carried in the air, then why did he find plague in one city parish, yet not in the parish a street away? Nor could he discover anything in common between the worst affected areas – one marshy, another dry and airy. It can’t just be the air, he decided. Some other agent carries the plague. But what? Dogs and cats? He had heard from a neighbour that it was Sir Julius who had shot Ned and removed him. For a week he had been furious, but now he was no longer. God knows how many cats and dogs had been destroyed by now on the mayor’s orders. Twenty or thirty thousand, he guessed. But even if it were dogs or cats, how did they pass it on?
A possible solution to the question of transmission came to him early in September, when he was attending a dying man down in the Vintry.
The plague came chiefly in two forms: in one, the bubonic, about one in three who caught it lived; in the other, pneumonic form, hardly any survived. The patient’s lungs filled; he sneezed a lot, coughed up blood, had sudden, terrible fits of fever and chill, and then fell into a deep sleep, that grew deeper and deeper, until he was still. The poor fellow before Meredith had been a humble water carrier, with a bent back and six children. Shivering with the chills, he looked hopelessly at Meredith. “I’m going,” he said simply. Meredith did not deny it. One of his little children came over to comfort him. And then the fellow sneezed. He could not help it. He sneezed into the child’s face. The child winced. And Meredith, with a terrible instinct, rushed to the child, seized a rag, and wiped off its face. “Keep them away from him,” he cried to the mother. “Burn this cloth.” For it must be so, he thought. The phlegm and spittle of an infected person must carry contagion, since they derive from the most affected part. A week later, the child died.
Martha still hesitated, though