The worst thing is never knowing why one person catches the illness and another is spared. In a good year a whole street can be well, and one person, perhaps in a little house in the very middle, will die. But in a bad year the whole street will go dark and only one little house, surrounded by death, will burn a candle and use whatever preventatives they can buy. As the heat of August goes on and on, it becomes clear that this is a bad year, one of the very worst. The parishes have to send out carts to fetch and bury the dead every night, and they report that perhaps as many as a thousand people are dying every week.

Every day I am more terrified for myself and for my boys, and for Ned in the Tower. “Keep away from the boys,” I say anxiously to Mrs. Rother and to Lucy, to anyone who comes into the Tower from the diseased city. “I will care for them today. And throw away all the linen that has come from the Thames washerwomen. And clean up the room, sweep the floors and make it sweet.”

Lucy looks at me with sulky resentment. Her grief for her mother has soured her. “Your son Thomas slept with his wet nurse,” she says. “The clout he has on was hemmed by my dead mother. If you think the plague comes from touch, the boys may have it already.”

I give a little moan of fear. I think that if I lose either of my sons, I will die of grief. I think: this is what Elizabeth was hoping for. She has prayed that I will die, and my sons will die, and nobody will be able to fix the blame at her door. I will be like Amy Dudley, her victim whom everyone has forgotten.

* * *

I put out a blue scarf from the window so that Ned can see that we are well, and I stand by the window till I see the answering flutter of blue on his wall. I know he will be pacing the floor in his fury, writing to all of our friends at court. A bad year for plague makes imprisonment in the Tower a death sentence. Here, in the very heart of the city, encircled by a stinking drain, every cloth that we wear and everything that we eat comes from the diseased city and is handled by half a dozen people before it gets to us.

I write to William Cecil myself and beg him to send Ned and me and our babies out of the Tower to the country. I have never, in all my life, willingly spent the summer in London. I dare swear that neither has he. Nobody with a country house or even a little cottage stays in the city during the plague months.