“No, you’re tired. I’ll bring hot sack and a cover.”
Pigeons swooped low, then rose: were they afraid?
Six people had died that day.
During the week twenty-six died, men, women, and children. Our town heard the bell toll morning and afternoon and evening. At times the tolling seemed to be right in my ears; at times I forgot it, bringing water or food, medicine or cover, anything to help. Father and I worked together as much as possible...his word or nod kept me going.
The Avon seemed blotched and diseased for there, there was the plague’s mucous caulking the water and the water was grey and beaten and unmoving, locked in its own foetidness, dead by the weir, dead by the church and underneath the bridge.
Stratford
February 14, 1615
I remember the plague, how, with our theatre closed, I worked to aid the sick and cart away the London dead. Appleton...I remember his red beard, his cough, his scared grin. Meerie, talking Irish, blamed us, saying “there’s narra a plague in Ireland—it’s your filthy London—you damn filthy foreigners!” Miller cursed the altar and the saints behind his head, as he struggled to breathe. And that gargoyle-like fellow, Fackler, crawled off to die or recover, we never learned: he said the open field was the proper place to get well, or die.
The Cheney twins died right outside the Globe: they had been working as stage hands: clever lads from Sussex, faithful, hard-working: they got sick on Tuesday; as the bells tolled on Thursday evening they were dead, dying a few minutes apart, their hands clasped, eighteen years old, flax-headed, tall.