Among such surroundings we picture Cherry doing her simple duties, tending her mother, thinking somewhat primly of her vivacious neighbour Violet, fancying she has lost her heart for ever to poor Mark, and then waking to a heroine’s work in the horrors of the Plague, and finding through that her own bright reward.
“The Plague growing on us,” says Pepys, and of remedies “some saying one thing, and some another.” So it begins in May, and by the first week of June, “much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there; which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the kind that to my remembrance I ever saw.” Ten days later, and as he goes in a hackney coach from the Lord Treasurer’s, his coachman is struck of a sudden “very sick and almost blind”—and journey by coach becomes “a very dangerous passage nowadays.” So it comes till there are seven hundred dying in a week, and “it was a sad noise to hear our bell to toll and ring so often either for death or burials.”
And soon, “But, Lord! how sad a sight it is to see the streets empty of people and very few upon the ’Change. Jealous of every door that one sees shut up, lest it should be the Plague; and about us two shops in three, if not more, generally shut up.”
Reports are terrible of the thousands who every week are carried to their graves in the long pits; and with an even closer terror speaks the record of the veracious diarist. “I went forth and walked towards Moorfields (August 30th) to see (God forgive me my presumption!) whether I could see any dead corpse going to the grave; but, as God would have it, did not. But, Lord! how everybody looks, and discourse on the streets is of death, and nothing else, and few people going up and down, that the town is like a place distressed and forsaken.” “What a sad time it is,” he writes on 20th September, “to see no boats upon the river; and grass grows up and down White Hall Court, and nobody but poor wretches in the streets.”
To these records the genius of Defoe adds an immortal picture. “As this puts me upon mentioning my walking the Streets and Fields”—he has been speaking of the numbers that fled to the outskirts of the town, “into the Fields and Woods, and into secret uncouth Places, almost anywhere to creep into a Bush, or Hedge, and die,” and how it “was a general Method to walk away” if any one was seen coming—“I cannot omit taking notice what a desolate place the City was at that time. The great street I lived in, which is known to be one of the broadest of all the streets of London, I mean of the Suburbs as well as the Liberties; all the side where the Butchers lived, especially without the Bars, was more like a green Field than a paved Street, and the People generally went in the middle with the Horses and Carts. It is true that the farthest End, towards White-Chappel Church, was not all pav’d, but even the part that was pav’d was full of Grass also; but this need not seem strange, since the great Streets within the City, such as Leaden-Hall Street, Bishopgate-Street, Cornhill, and even the Exchange itself, had Grass growing in them, in several Places; neither Cart nor Coach were seen in the Streets from Morning to Evening, except some Country Carts to bring Roots and Beans, or Pease, Hay and Straw, to the Market, and those but very few, compared to what was usual: as for Coaches, they were scarce used, but to carry sick People to the Pest-House, and to other Hospitals; and some few to carry Physicians to such Places as they thought fit to venture to visit; for really coaches were dangerous things, and People did not Care to venture into them because they did not know who might have been carried in them last; and sick infected People were, as I have said, ordinarily carried in them to the Pest-Houses, and some times People expired in them as they went along.
“It is true, when the Infection came to such a Height as I have now mentioned, there were very few Physicians which car’d to stir abroad to sick Houses, and very many of the most eminent of the Faculty were dead as well as the Surgeons also; for now it was indeed a dismal time, and for about a month together, not taking any Notice of the Bills of Mortality, I believe there did not die less than 1500 or 1700 a-Day, one Day with another.
“One of the worst Days we had in the whole Time, as I thought, was in the Beginning of September, when indeed good People began to think that God was resolved to make a full End of the People in this miserable City. This was at that Time when the Plague was fully come into the Eastern Parishes: the Parish of Algate, if I may give my Opinion, buried above a thousand a Week for two Weeks, though the Bills did not say so many; but it surrounded me at so dismal a rate, that there was not a House in twenty uninfected; in the Minories, in Houndsditch, and in those Parts of Algate about the Butcher-Row, and the Alleys over against me, I say in those places Death reigned in every Corner. White-Chappel Parish was in the same Condition, and tho’ much less than the Parish I liv’d in; yet buried near 600 a Week by the Bills; and in my Opinion near twice as many; whole Families, and indeed whole Streets of Families were swept away together; insomuch that it was frequent for Neighbours to call to the Bellman, to go to such and such Houses, and fetch out the People, for that they were all dead.”
There is little, if anything, in the description which is exaggerated. How much in tone as well as detail Miss Manning learnt from this great master of fiction is clear. But it was altogether foreign to her nature to paint long in such gloomy colours, and she turned, with a true art, from the horrors of the Plague to the peace of country life “in good King Charles’s golden days.”
So she brings her heroine down into Berkshire. A very short journey we take it to have been, or the old horse must have been more swift of foot than we should gather from Mistress Cherry’s description, for Buckland in Berks lies not far from Faringdon, and over seventy miles from London town. One of those quiet little villages it is that nestle among the low hills that overlook the peaceful valley of the upper Thames. A fine old church may have had Master Blower for its vicar. It has four bells and a register that date from his day. There are memorials of two families, the Yates and the Southbys, who have passed away with the good old times. The house is not such as Mistress Cherry stayed in, but speaks all of the eighteenth century, of George the Second and Mr. Wood of Bath.
It is tempting to wonder whether this part of the country was one Miss Manning ever saw—whether she watched the deer speeding by her—whether she felt the fascination of