The Shifting Tide - Anne Perry [91]
Ruth Clark had died of plague. Clement Louvain had brought her to the clinic. Where from? Who was she? He had said she was the cast-off mistress of a friend. Was that true? Was she his own mistress? He knew she was ill, but had he any idea with what?
Where had she contracted a disease like that? Not in London. The Maude Idris had just come back from Africa. Had she come on it? Was that how the plague had got here? Did Louvain know that, or guess? And he had taken her to Hester!
For a moment red fury swept over Monk so it almost blinded him. His body trembled and his nails dug into the flesh of his hands till they drew blood.
He must control himself! He had no idea whether Louvain had known what was wrong with her. Why should he? The woman was sick. That was all Hester had known, and Hester was a nurse who had cared for her day and night.
He started to walk back and forth. Should he go to Louvain and tell him? Should he at least tell him that Ruth was dead? If Louvain had known she had the plague, he would be expecting it. Would he panic now? Might he cause the very terror they were afraid of? But then if he had not known, and she had been his mistress, would he be distressed? Hardly, or he would have gotten a nurse in to care for her, not sent her to a clinic for street women to be looked after by strangers. Far better to keep her death silent. Let him find out in time.
Then another thought struck him. What if Gould had been telling the exact truth, and Hodge had been dead, without a mark on him except the slight bruises of a fall, and his head had been beaten in afterwards, because he had died of plague? Was it not a murder, but the concealment of a death which could end up killing half the world?
Half the world? Wasn’t that a ridiculous exaggeration? Nightmare, hysteria rather than reality? What did the history books say?
Back in 1348 England had been a rural community, ignorant and isolated compared with today. If people traveled at all it was by foot or on horseback. Knowledge of medicine was rudimentary and filled with superstition.
He strode back and forth, trying to picture it. He could not make himself sit down or concentrate his mind in linear reasoning. It had been a barbarous time. Who had been on the throne? One of the Plantagenet kings, long before the Renaissance. It was a hundred and fifty years before they had even learned that the world was round!
There were still forests over England, with wild animals. Nobody would have conceived of such a thing as a train. They burned witches at the stake.
And yet the plague had spread like a stench on the wind! How much farther would it spread now, when a man could ride from the south coast of England all the way to Scotland in a day? London was the largest city in the world, crammed cheek by jowl with close to five million people. He had heard someone say recently that there were more Scots in London than in Edinburgh! And more Irish than in Dublin, and more Roman Catholics than in Rome!
London would become a wasteland of the dead and dying, disease spreading ever outward until it polluted the whole country. It needed only one ship leaving the shores with a sick man, and it would destroy Europe as well.
He had only one choice. He had no power to investigate Hodge’s death or to question anyone. He must find Durban and tell him the whole truth. There was time to pay the price of that afterwards. All that mattered now was to trace the disease, and anyone who might carry it.
He slept fitfully and woke confused and heavy-headed, wondering what was wrong. Then the hideousness of the memory returned, filling him like darkness till he hardly knew how to bear it. He lay frozen, as if time were suspended, until finally intelligence told him the only way to survive was to do something. Action would drive the horror back and leave free a fraction of his mind in which he could live, at least until exhaustion made him too weak to resist.
He dressed quickly with as many clothes as he could, knowing that he would almost certainly