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By Root 3619 0

victims should be kept apart in the city hospitals. But there were so few: there was old St Bartholomew’s, another hospital dedicated to St Thomas, in Southwark and St Mary’s up by Moorfield. They were full to bursting. The city had opened extra ones – called pest-houses – to the north and east of the city, and at Westminster. They were full too. Even more shocking, to Meredith, was the condition of the dead. The parish graveyards had not enough space. Great plague pits had been dug, mostly outside the walls, into which bodies were flung by the dozen. But still, Meredith observed, sextons were continuing to pile the bodies into the graveyards until the top ones were covered by only a few inches of earth. In one yard, he had actually seen feet and arms sticking out of the ground.

He frequently went over to the pest-houses at Westminster, and it was one day, starting back towards the city, that he was accosted by a watchman with a request that he would come to a house nearby where a patient had need of a doctor. Minutes later he found himself entering a small but pleasant house in Petty France.

Six days had passed since Jane Wheeler had begun to feel feverish. At first she had tried to ignore it. The twinges of pain in her arms and legs, similarly, she dismissed. After all, she reminded herself, I am over eighty years old. By that evening she felt weak, but could not sleep. The next day she began to feel giddy. At midday she decided to go out, but she had only gone ten yards when suddenly she began to stagger. Hardly knowing what was happening to her she had turned to go home. A neighbour came to help her. She remembered little of the next few hours. She thought her neighbour had come again in the evening, and the following morning. Then a strange woman came whom she had never seen before. A nurse of some kind. But by that time she could only think of one thing. It was in her neck, her armpits and between her legs. Great lumps: she could feel them. And the pain. The terrible pain.

Meredith sighed. If the pneumonic form of the plague killed swiftly, the other form, called the bubonic, was even more terrible to behold. The old woman before him had the bubonic plague and was suffering the final stages.

With bubonic plague, the lymphatic glands become horribly inflamed, swelling into lumps – buboes, as they called them. The body bleeds under the skin, causing dark spots and purple blotches. Patients are often delirious. At the very end – and this is what Meredith now saw – rosy-coloured spots often appear on the body. But, in this last crisis, the old woman was lucid. And it seemed she wanted something.

“Can you read and write?”

“Of course. I’m a physician.”

“I want you to write my will. I’m too weak.” She shivered. “There’s pen and ink in the corner.” He found them and, sitting down on a chair, he took off one of his gloves and prepared to write as she began: “I, Jane Wheeler, being of sound mind . . .”

So that’s who this woman was. She had no idea of his identity; but though he had not seen her since he was a boy, he remembered the scandal about her. Poor woman, he thought, what a way to depart.

The will was short and to the point. She had no children. She left her little fortune, which it seemed had been diminished by time, equally to all the surviving children of John Dogget deceased, with the exception of the child by Martha. Hardly surprising, Meredith thought privately. “Is that all?” he asked.

“Nearly,” she said. “But there’s one thing more.”

Richard Meredith was not aware, as he was writing, that under the floorboard of the room a black rat had just died. Nor could he have seen for it was very small indeed, the flea that had just come through the crack between the boards.

The flea was in poor condition. For several days it had been feeding upon the blood of the black rat, which had the plague. The bloodstream of the rat had contained hundreds of thousands of the plague bacilli, and some tens of thousands had been transferred to the flea. Inside the flea’s stomach, the plague bacilli had multiplied, blocking