William Monk 14 - The Shifting Tide

could not afford to say anything to them. She was deceiving them by silence, but she had no choice. She felt guilty, angry, and above all suffocatingly afraid.
    It seemed like hours until Sutton came back. Hester was in the front room. She had given up even pretending that she was not waiting for him. Everyone else had gone to look after the seriously ill, or in Bessie’s case, to take a few hours’ sleep before relieving Claudine in the small hours of the morning.
    “I got ’em,” Sutton said simply. “They’re outside, dogs an’ all. I got a sack o’ potatoes an’ some bones. I’ll get cabbages an’ onions an’ the like from Toddy same as usual.”
    “Thank you.” Suddenly she realized what her own imprisonment was going to mean. Perhaps she would never leave this place. Worse than anything else at all, she would never see Monk again. There would be no chance for good-byes, or to tell him how he had given passion, laughter, and joy to her life. In his companionship she had become who she was designed to be. All the best in her, the happiest was made real.
    “Can you take a letter to my husband . . . so he knows why I don’t come home? And why he can’t come here . . .”
    “I’ll tell ’im,” Sutton answered.
    “And you’d better tell Margaret, Miss Ballinger, too. She can’t come back. Anyway, we will need her help raising money even more than before. Make her see that, won’t you!”
    He nodded. His face was sad and bleak. “Yer gonna tell ’em ’ere?”
    She hesitated.
    “Yer gotta,” he said simply. “They can’t leave. If they try, they’ll set the dogs on ’em too. That in’t a death as yer’d wish on anyone.”
    “No . . . I know.”
    “No you don’t, Miss ’Ester, not unless yer seen anyone taken down by dogs.”
    “I’ll tell them!” She stood up slowly and walked over to the door as if she were pushing herself against a tide. She reached it and called out into the passage beyond. “Claudine! Mercy! Flo! Someone please waken Bessie as well, and Squeaky. I need you all in here. I’m sorry, but you have to come.”
    It was ten minutes before they were all there, Bessie still dazed with sleep. It was Mercy who first realized something terrible had happened. She sat down hard on one of the chairs, her face white. She looked as if she had not eaten or slept properly in days. “What is it?” she said quietly.
    There was no point in stretching out the fear which already sat thick and heavy in the room.
    “Ruth Clark is dead,” Hester said, looking at the incomprehension in their faces. They saw nothing beyond a small loss in the midst of others. Most of them had not liked her. Hester drew in a shivering breath. “She did not die of pneumonia. She died of plague. . . .” She watched their faces. One of them knew that was a lie. Had that person any idea at all of the deeper, infinitely more terrible truth than murder? She saw nothing except the slow struggle to understand, to grasp the enormity and the true horror of it.
    “Plague?” Claudine said in bewilderment. “What sort of plague? What do you mean?”
    “What the ’ell are you talking about?” Squeaky demanded.
    “Bubonic plague,” Hester replied. “In some cases it starts as pneumonic congestion in the chest. Some people recover, not many. Some die with it in that stage. In others it goes on to the bubonic—swellings in the armpits and the groin that go black. We call it the Black Death.”
    Flo stood motionless, her mouth open.
    Squeaky turned white as a sheet.
    Claudine fainted.
    Mercy caught her and pushed her head between her knees, holding her until she struggled back to consciousness, gasping and choking.
    Bessie sat blinking, her breath rasping in her throat.
    “No one can leave, in case we carry it out of here to the rest of London,” Hester went on. “No one at all, at any time or for any reason. Sutton has already arranged for friends of his, with pit bull terriers, to patrol outside. If anyone leaves, they will set the dogs on them. Please believe that they will really do that. Whatever happens, we cannot allow the disease to spread. In the fourteenth century it killed nearly half of Europe—man, woman, and child. It changed the world. Our few lives are nothing; we must stop that from happening again.”
    “ ’Ow are we gonna live?” Squeaky asked furiously, as if it were some kind of reason to deny it all.
    “Other people will bring us food, water, and coal,” Hester replied.