As she went about her work, mixing the syllabub, setting the tray, her movements were slow and clumsy and finally she dropped an egg onto the floor. She scowled wearily but took a cloth and bent to wipe it up, and as she did so there was a sudden splitting pain in her forehead and she was seized by a swirl of dizziness. She straightened again, slowly, and to her amazement she staggered and might have fallen but that she grabbed the side of a table to brace herself.

For a moment she stood and stared at the floor, and then she turned and walked into the parlour. No, she thought, shoving away the idea that had suddenly come to her. It can’t be that. Of course it can’t—

She took the candle-holder, carried it to the little writing-table and set it there. Then she placed the palms of her hands flat onto the table-top and leaned forward to look at herself in the small round gilt mirror which hung on the wall. The candle-flame cast stark shadows up onto her face. It showed the deep hollows beneath her eyes, flung pointed reflections of her lashes up onto her lids, heightened the wide staring horror of her eyes. At last she put out her tongue. It was coated with a yellowish fur but the tip and edges were clean and shiny, unnaturally pink. Her eyes closed and the room seemed to sway and rock.

Holy Mother of God! Tomorrow night it will be me!

CHAPTER THIRTY–SIX

GOD’S TERRIBLE VOICE was in the city.

But twenty miles away at Hampton Court it could scarcely be heard at all; there were too many distracting noises. The whir of shuffled cards and the clack of rolling dice. The scratching of quills writing letters of love or diplomacy or intrigue. The crashing of swords in some secret forbidden duel. Chatter and laughter and the sibilant whisper of gossip. Guitars and fiddles, clinking glasses raised in a toast, rustling taffeta petticoats, and tapping high-heeled shoes. Nothing was changed.

They did, occasionally, discuss the plague when they gathered in her Majesty’s Drawing-Room in the evenings, just as they discussed the weather, and for the same reason—it was unusual.

“Have you seen this week’s bills?” Winifred Wells would ask as she sat talking to Mrs. Stewart and Sir Charles Sedley.

“I can’t bear to look at ’em. Poor creatures. Dying like flies.”

Sedley, a dark short plump young man with snapping black eyes and a taste for handsome lace cravats, was scornful of her tender heart. “Nonsense, Frances! What does it matter if they die now or later? The town was overcrowded as it was.”

“You’d think it mattered, my Lord, if the plague got you!”

Sedley laughed. “And so it would. Sure, my dear, you’ll allow there’s some difference between a man of wit and breeding and a poor drivelling idiot of a baker or tailor?”

At that moment another gentleman approached them and Sedley got up to welcome him, throwing one arm about his shoulders. “Aha! Here’s Wilmot! We’ve been sitting here most damnably dull, with nothing to talk on but the plague. Now you’ve come we can be merry again. What’ve you got there? Another libel to spoil someone’s reputation?”

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was a tall slender young man of eighteen, light-skinned and blonde with a look of delicacy which made his handsome face almost effeminate. Only a few months before he had come to Court direct from his travels abroad, precocious and sophisticated, but still a quiet modest lad who was just a little shy. He adapted himself to Whitehall so quickly that he was but recently released from the Tower for the offense of kidnapping rich Mrs. Mallet with intent to marry her fortune.

Writing was the fashion. All the courtiers wrote something, plays, satires, lampoons on their friends and acquaintances, and the Earl had already shown that he had not only a quick talent but a flair for malice. Now he had a rolled-up sheet of paper stuck beneath his arm and the other three glanced at it expectantly.

“I protest, Sedley.” Rochester’s smile and manner were deceptively mild, and he bowed to Stewart and Wells so courteously that it was impossible to believe he had not the most charitable opinion of all women. “You’ll convince the ladies I’m an ill-natured sot. No—it’s no libel I have here. Just a silly thing I scratched out while I was waiting for my periwig to be curled.”

“Read it to us!” cried both women at once.

“Yes, for God’s sake, Wilmot. Let’s hear it. The silly things you scratch out while you sit at stool are better than anything Dryden can do though he eat a peck of prunes and put himself into a course of physic.”

“Thanks, Sedley. I’ll be in the front row to cry up your play if you ever bring yourself to finish it. Well, here’s what I’ve writ—”