Brief Gaudy Hour by Margaret Campbell Barnes

Author:Margaret Campbell Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Four

In spite of all their herb pomanders and careful precautions, plague closed the Court. All through the hot summer it raged and ravaged through narrow, gable-hung London streets, festering in prurient privies and dried-up, garbage-rotten gutters. The dreadful sweating sickness.

A sharp pain in the head and heart, a profuse sweating, and, in three or four hours, Death—with scarce time for prayer or languishing.

All men feared it, and few were ashamed to show their fear. The poor, perforce, stayed in their stagnant streets; and the rich moved away. The King to his daughter’s sequestered home at Hunsdon. Wolsey, with overworked constitution and weak stomach, to Hampton, where all messages from the outside world were blared through a trumpet from the far side of the moat. Katherine, not much caring except for her child, to Greenwich. And the Boleyns, who really caught the dread disease, to Hever.

George, who caught it first, went there because his wife had no mind to risk her skin nursing him; and Anne, who had been sent there by the King in order to escape it, had had it only mildly. They were two of the lucky ones who had lived. Or so they believed then. It was pleasant, having George home again, convalescing in the September sunshine. Sitting with him on the terrace, Anne lifted a mirror for the third time to scrutinize her transparent skin. “Not a blemish,” she murmured. It mattered so supremely. “You see, my face is my fortune,” she laughed apologetically.

“Say rather, all our fortunes, sweet,” he corrected her. For had not their father been created Earl of Wiltshire?

They were not yet quite strong and their escape had sobered them. It was the first time the dark wings of Death had brushed near enough to make them aware of its irrevocable reality and of their own passionate attachment to life. Each of them felt older for the experience.

“It took poor Will Carey and scores of our friends and yet we have both been spared, thanks be to God,” reiterated George. “And to Jocunda.”

“And Dr. Butts.” In sheer relief, because they were still here with the sun warm on their faces and not newly laid with their ancestors in the gloomy vault, they began to laugh, remembering the dignified physician and the pills and all the instructions Henry had sent to save them.

“The King has been very kind. You know, George, he really does care. Several times he has made real sacrifices for me.”

“You may be sure that he has not left himself without other competent physicians. And, lest you should grow puffed up, my sweet, Jane tells me with gleeful spite that he sent the same pills and affectionate letters to Thomas Wolsey. And screeds of advice. ‘Have only a small and clean company about you. Do not eat and drink too much at supper. Put apart fears and fantasies, and make as merry as you can at such a contagious season!’”

“And of course that fat spider Wolsey won’t catch it at all.

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