Read Online At the Sign of the Sugared Plum by Mary Hooper - Free Book Online Page B

tell me. And then Mrs Williams ran into the street. She was tearing at her clothes and screaming, pulling her hair out like she was going mad with grief. Only then did someone tell me it was Marie who had died, and it was thought to be of the plague.’
    I went to our fireplace and put the kettle on to boil so I could make some camomile tea for us both. I felt cold and hollow, hardly believing what had happened. How could that child be among us one moment, running about happily, and dead the next?
    ‘The worst thing,’ Sarah went on, ‘is that this poor woman . . . this mother quite demented by grief...could mayhap have been comforted by someone’s voice soothing her and telling her that she must look now to her other children, but no one would go near her.’
    ‘She has no husband,’ I said, remembering what Sarah had told me about Jacob’s father being a sailor, and dying at sea earlier in the year.
    Sarah shook her head. ‘No husband, no comforter at all. I felt I wanted to do something for her, put my arms around her and console her, but I could not bring myself. The fear of the plague was too great. And so she suffers in her grief alone.’ Sarah began crying. ‘But you have not heard the worst,’ she added – and I knew it was selfish of me but I immediately looked round to see where Mew was.
    ‘It’s not Mew,’ she said, shaking her head through her tears. ‘He’s in a box under our bed and hasn’t been out.’
    ‘What, then? Tell me quickly,’ I begged her.
    ‘The eldest child has it. Kate – she has the same symptoms. And their house is being shut up.’
    ‘Oh,’ I breathed.
    We were both silent as we waited for the water to boil. I tried to imagine how it would be in that house, with Mrs Williams just sitting and waiting for the signs of plague to appear, waiting to see if Death would visit any other of her children.
    ‘What if she dies?’ I asked suddenly. ‘What if Mrs Williams dies next and the children have to fend for themselves alone, shut up in the house?’
    Sarah shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe they will all be taken to the pesthouse – although there are not many of those and I hear they are already full.’
    ‘Is their house already closed?’
    ‘I fear so,’ Sarah said. ‘And now they must stay inside for forty days.’
    ‘The boys will hate that.’
    Sarah glanced up at me and I knew what she was thinking: they would probably be visited with plague and die before then.
    ‘Maybe we could give them something,’ I said suddenly.
    She nodded. ‘I was thinking that. Something to cheer the children, perhaps. Some comfits.’
    The kettle was rattling on the fire, so I poured boiling water on the camomile flowers and let it steep for a few moments. ‘Even if the house is already locked and barred, we could ask their guard to give them the sweetmeats.’
    Sarah dabbed at her eyes with her apron and stood up. ‘It will make us feel better if we do something – even just some little thing – for the family,’ she said. ‘What flowers did you harvest today?’
    I showed her the trug and its contents, and while we drank our tea I told her something of my hours with Tom, and how thoughtful and pleasant a companion he was. I did not tell her of the times when we’d been rapt in each other’s glances, however, for they were private moments, for me to think on later.
    I changed into my working dress and Sarah busied herself putting more water on to boil in a pan, then she chipped a goodly piece of sugar from a new loaf and put that in as well. ‘Tomorrow we will begin to candy some borage flowers,’ she said, ‘for they are said to have virtues which may help lighten their hearts. Tonight, though, we’ll make some little violet cakes. And we will take them to the house together and try not to be alarmed at anything we might see.’ She shook the pan to help dissolve the sugar. ‘Whatever fright we take will be nothing compared to what they are going