MORNING CAME AT last, the sun rising bright and hot in a cloudless sky. Amber, looking out, wished desperately for fog. The brilliant joyous sunlight seemed a cruel mockery of the sick and dying who lay in a thousand rooms all over the city.
Toward dawn the look of angry worry which had been on Bruce’s face, from the first morning she had seen him at the wharf, changed to one of listlessness and apathy. He seemed to have no consciousness whatever of his surroundings or of his own actions. When she put a glass of water to his mouth he swallowed involuntarily, but his eyes stared dully, seeing nothing. His quietness encouraged her and she thought that perhaps he was better.
She got into the dress she had worn yesterday and began to clean up the night’s accumulated filth. Her movements were slow, for her muscles felt heavy and aching and the rims of her eyeballs burned. She carried the slop-jars—all but that which Mrs. Spong had used—down to the courtyard privy and there she had to stand and wait, for there was a man inside and he seemed leisurely.
At six she went to wake Spong, shaking her roughly by the shoulder. The old woman smacked her lips together and looked up at Amber with one eye. “How now, mam? What happened?”
“Get up! It’s morning! Either you’ll help me or I’ll lock the food away and you can starve!”
Spong looked at her resentfully, her feelings hurt. “Lord, mam! How was I to know it’s mornin’?”
She flung back the quilt and got out of bed, fully dressed but for her shoes. She buttoned the front of her gown, pulling and twisting at the skirt, and cocked her wig back to approximately where it had been. She leaned backward, stretching and yawning noisily, massaging her fat belly, and she stuck one finger into her mouth to pick out some shreds of meat, wiping what she extracted on the soiled front of her gown.
Amber stopped her as she was going through the bedroom on her way to the kitchen. “Come here! What d’you think? He’s quieter now—does he look better?”
Spong came back to look at him, but she shook her head. “He looks bad, mam. Mighty bad. I’ve seen ’em like that not a half-hour before they’re dead.”
“Oh, damn you! You think everyone’s going to die! But
Spong went. “Lord, mam—ye but asked me and I told ye—”
An hour later, when she had finished cleaning the bedroom and had fed him the rest of the soup, Amber told Spong that she was going to a butcher-shop for a piece of beef and would be gone perhaps twenty minutes. There was one, she knew, not a quarter of a mile away near Lincoln’s Inn Fields. She fastened her gown as high as she could and filled in the neck-line with a scarf. It was too hot to wear a cloak but she took a black-silk hood out of the chest and tied it beneath her chin.
“The guard won’t allow ye to go, mam,” predicted Spong.
“I think he will. You let me alone for that. Now listen to what I say: Watch his Lordship and watch him close, because if I come back to find you’ve let him harm himself in any way or so much as throw off the blankets—believe me, I’ll slit your nose for it!” Her tawny-coloured eyes glared, the black centers swelling, and her lips drew tight against her teeth. Spong gaped, scared as a rabbit.
“Lord, mam, ye can trust me! I’ll watch ’im like a witch!”
Amber went through the kitchen, down the back staircase, and started off along the narrow little alley that ran behind the house. She had not gone twenty yards when there was a shout, and she turned to see the guard running toward her.
“Escaping, eh?” He seemed pleased. “Or maybe ye didn’t know the house is locked?”
“I know it’s locked and I’m not escaping. I’ve got to buy some food. Will a shilling let me out?”
“A shilling! D’ye think I can be bribed?” He lowered his voice. “Three shillings might do it.”
Amber took the coins from inside her muff and flipped them to him—he did not venture to step up close and he had a pipe of tobacco in his mouth, for that was thought a plague preventive. She walked swiftly down the lane and turned into a main street. There seemed to be even fewer people out today than yesterday and those who were did not loiter or stop to gossip but moved along briskly, pomanders held to their noses. A coach followed by a train of loaded wagons went by and several heads turned wistfully; it was only the prosperous ones who could afford to leave, the others must stay and take their chances, put their faith in amulets and herbs. And there were several houses shut up along the way.
At the butcher’s stall she bought a good-sized chunk of beef, taking the meat from the hooks on which he extended it to her and dropping the money into a jar of vinegar. She put the meat, wrapped in a towel, into her market-basket and on the way back she stopped to buy a couple of pounds of candles, three bottles of brandy and some coffee. Coffee was so expensive that it was not hawked on the streets and while Amber did not drink it often she hoped that it would help her get through the day.
