Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [371]
“See, Mason,” he shouted, so that his voice echoed round the precincts, “the world has changed today. Only you and I about and not a priest to be seen.”
It was remarkable. At a time when one in fifty of the population was in some form of holy orders, the cathedral city was teeming with priests. That morning however, it was as if they had melted into the moss on the walls of the buildings. “The silence is wonderful,” Adam called, and his raucous guffaw of laughter seemed to shake the shutters.
“Aren’t you afraid of the plague?” Nicholas asked.
“Me? No. I’ve the cure.” He pointed to two pouches that hung from his magnificent belt. “Six garlic in one. Six onion in the other. The plague won’t come near me.”
Nicholas wondered if this was a joke, though it was no stranger than the other remedies people were trying.
“It’s true,” Adam assured him, and his big, open face broke into a happy smile. “Watch me, Mason, and you’ll see.” And he strode away towards the town.
Nicholas spent the day working in the cathedral. In the evening he returned to Avonsford where he learned that the buboes had appeared on Rose de Godefroi. Two more people in the village, both women this time, had been afflicted, one with the terrible buboes, the other in the lungs.
The next morning he went up to the high ground again. This time he stopped well outside the circle of stones.
“Stay where you are. Do not come down,” he told them. “The plague is everywhere and it is spreading.”
Yet never in his worst nightmares had Nicholas imagined what, in the next ten days, was to follow. The start of the plague had given little hint of it.
At times, he wondered if everyone at Sarum would die. The contagion seemed to swirl and eddy round the city like the waters when the river flooded.
Some were consumed by the plague at once, and died within hours; in others it took the pneumonic form and its victims died coughing blood and mucus; the stronger went down more slowly with the buboes that, in their final stage, spread across the body in a terrible, pestilential swelling that left the body of the dead victim a loathsome and infectious mass of suppurating sores. Of those who caught the plague in its pneumonic form, none lived. Of those who suffered the buboes, about sixty per cent died.
Each day he watched the carts roll through the city picking up the dead. By the end of the first week they were being buried indiscriminately in trenches outside the city gates. One morning he saw the door of the Shockley house open and three pairs of arms unceremoniously drop the bulky form of William Shockley on the ground outside, before slamming the door again. He lay there for two hours before a passing cart decided to pick him up; the next day his wife followed. The day after, two of their children and a servant. But these events were hardly remarked in the general horror. Nor was the news that Rose de Godefroi had died at Avonsford.
The close fared no better than the rest of the town. For two days the gate was closed, in a useless attempt to seal its sacred precincts off from the contagion in the town, but then the porter at the gate succumbed, and it was left open.
Some of the priests emerged to do their duties in ministering to the dying. The friars never hesitated, moving quietly from door to door, apparently undisturbed in their holy work.
But over the whole city a strange fear and lethargy had fallen. The evil spirit of the plague had seeped like a noxious vapour into every nook and cranny of the city. And when the suppurating corpses of the victims were brought into the streets, there was indeed a sickly, terrible stench that turned the stomach. It seemed to Nicholas that men’s souls were filled with terror, and the sense of that, too, was almost palpable.
Only one figure seemed untouched,