The Crippled Angel. Sara Douglass

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       II Tuesday 21st May 1381 —ii—

      Margery Harwood lived with her husband William and their three children in a comfortable house on Ironmonger Lane off Bishopsgate Street. Margery was proud of her house—she spent an inordinate amount of time polishing, sweeping, washing and straightening—but her pride in her house formed only one part of her general satisfaction with life. She and William had emigrated to London when they were just married, and Margery pregnant with her first child. They’d come from a small village just east of Gravesend, where there was little prospect for an ironworker of William’s calibre. So to London they had come, and if the first years establishing William’s business were hard, then all the effort had been worthwhile. Now Margery was in charge of a house of ten rooms, a pantry, cellar and wine store that was stocked with far more goods than those of her neighbours, and three servants and a cook. William not only had a thriving business, but he also had five apprentices, as well as two guildsmen, working under him. Margery and William’s children—three sons, praise be to God!—were healthy, and well ahead of their classmates at the guild school in learning their sums and letters. Their future was assured. Life was good.

      Margery was in the kitchen at five of the clock that afternoon when everything fell apart. She’d been busy all day, supervising her servants as they cleaned out the cellar in preparation for the crates of spring-fresh vegetables that would soon fill it, consulting with the cook about that evening’s fare, and then helping her to strip the eels and baste the vegetables for William’s favourite pie, and thus Margery had enjoyed no free time at all in which to stand in her doorway and gossip with the neighbours.

      She had no idea of what had happened at St Paul’s that day, and, by virtue of the fact that her home was tucked right at the end of Ironmonger Lane, a reasonable distance from Bishopsgate Street which was itself on the far side of London from St Paul’s, she’d heard none of the fuss that had carried up and down most of the city’s main thoroughfares. Both William and her sons had yet to come home, and in any case, Margery wasn’t expecting them for another hour or so.

      So when the scraping at the kitchen door came, Margery merely muttered her displeasure at the interruption, told the cook and the kitchen girl that she’d see what was about outside, wiped her hands on her apron, and walked to the door that opened into the kitchen courtyard.

      Ironmonger Lane was a quiet part of London, rarely visited by the beggars and criminals seen in so many other streets, and so Margery had no hesitation in throwing open the door.

      A massive black dog stood not three feet away, staring at Margery with yellow eyes, snarling so viciously that ropes of saliva spattered across Margery’s apron.

      Margery gave a small shriek, and slammed the door closed.

      “Mistress?” asked the cook, staring up from the table where she’d been rolling out pastry.

      Margery took a deep breath. “A dog. A stray,” she said. “Nothing to be concerned about.” And she walked back to the table to her duties, resolving to ask William to speak to the local alderman about the problem of stray dogs.

      At that moment she heard their front door open, then, after the shortest of intervals, slam closed. Footsteps thudded down the corridor towards the kitchen.

      William, their three sons, and two of his apprentices. William’s face was shiny with sweat, his pale blue eyes wide and panicked.

      “Lock the doors,” he said, his voice hoarse and breathless. “Shutter the windows!”

      “William—”

      He ignored her, brushing past the cook and the kitchen girl to bolt closed the shutter over the kitchen windows. “Harry!” he said, looking at his eldest son. “Upstairs—the windows!”

      Harry nodded, and darted away towards the stairs.

      “William, what is going on?”

      “Pestilence,” William said, staring about wildly as if looking for something else to shutter closed.

      Margery drew in a deep breath. “But we haven’t suffered from the pestilence in—”

      “How long it has been doesn’t matter,” William said, and directed his middle son into the front rooms of the house to shutter the windows. “What matters is that the pestilence is back now. Have you opened the door to anyone this day? Any beggars, anyone who has touched you?”

      Margery stared at him, then very slowly looked down at her apron. Wordlessly she tore it off, then bundled it into the coals in the hearth.