The Crippled Angel. Sara Douglass

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       IV Thursday 23rd May 1381

      Emma Hawkins hurried down Carter Lane by St Paul’s, then ducked into a small alley. The streets were deserted save for a few scurrying people, and those wretched souls manning the plague carts on which were piled the dead. Fires coughed and spluttered on their diet of wood, brimstone and saltpetre at intersections and in marketplaces: their noxious fumes twisted and writhed into the air, tangling about eaves and overhangs before rising into a sky made scarlet with the sunset and the smoke of the fires.

      There was the faint sound of wailing and sobbing in the air, anguish seeping out from behind closed doors and shuttered windows where men and women and children lay dying in unspeakable agony. Occasionally the muted, sombre tones of shroud-wrapped bells tolled indifferently from one of the city’s parish churches.

      Death lurked everywhere: in the stench of uncollected corpses upon the air, in the miasma of the fires, in the sewage choking the gutters, in the soft lament from tight-closed houses. Emma gathered her shawl more tightly about her face, gagging as she coughed, and regretted her decision to walk the streets in search of custom.

      But she and her daughter needed to be fed, whatever crisis gripped the city, and Emma knew she would get God-all custom huddling at home behind closed doors. She stopped briefly, leaning against a closed door, and tried to catch her breath. Well, it was time she admitted she was going to get God-all custom out here as well. No point in even hoping. She should get home. Her daughter Jocelyn would be worried about her—she’d spent an hour this morning begging her mother not to go out into the streets—and the longer Emma stayed outside the more likely the pestilence would snatch at her.

      Ah, that she could not think about! Pestilence crawled over the entire city, dealing death to scores every hour, and Emma simply refused to contemplate the idea that she—or Jocelyn—might be struck as well. Fate had already been unkind enough to her. It wouldn’t deal her this death blow… would it?

      If only Jocelyn was older. Emma couldn’t afford to die yet. Jocelyn was only eight. Too young to work, too young to marry, and too young (by a year or two) to follow her mother out into the streets. Not that Emma would wish that on Jocelyn. It was too great a burden of sin for her frail shoulders.

      “Only one of us need spend eternity in hell,” Emma whispered. “And I will not have it be my daughter.”

      She struggled a little further down the alley. The air was thick with the noxious stink of brimstone and ash—was she in hell already? Had she died without knowing?—and night was closing in about her fast. Too fast. Emma coughed again, and then almost panicked as she tasted blood in her mouth.

      No! No! She’d bitten her tongue… that’s all. Please sweet Jesu, let that be all!

      Emma groped along one wall with one hand until she found a gate. She opened it, stumbling through into a courtyard, then hurried as best she could to the small door set to one side of the yard. Here she and Jocelyn lived in their two tiny rooms. Small, dismal, cold, but home.

      She heard Jocelyn’s small voice pipe a welcome, then, horribly, the deeper voice of her landlord, Richard Harrison.

      “Come to collect the rent, my dear,” he said.

      “Now?” Emma whispered, closing the door behind her and drawing the shawl back from her head. Her face was thin, her hair more grey than fair, her eyes enormous and black.

      A faint flush glowed on her forehead and cheeks.

      “Now?” she repeated, incredulous. The city was dying, gripped in pestilence sent from hell, and Harrison had come to collect the rent?

      Then her mouth twisted bitterly. Why not? Why not, when he might be too dead to enjoy it tomorrow?

      Emma folded her shawl and nodded towards the other room. “Quickly, then. I have Jocelyn’s supper to prepare.”

      Harrison grinned. “You’re in no position to tell me quick or no,” he said. “Rent’s rent, and it must be paid as owed.”

      Emma shot him a black look, then smiled at Jocelyn. “We won’t be long,” she said, then walked into the tiny, inner room.

      All it held was a narrow bed and a stool.

      Emma looked at the bed, unbuttoning her dress, and sighed as the door closed behind her and she felt the great bulk of Harrison fill the room.