The Lord Mayor’s Palace

My friend Molly got a new job looking after the Lord Mayor’s Palace while he’s away. His usual woman died of the plague.

It meant I got to sleep in a house, in a palace no less. Molly opened a window in the East Wing at the appointed time, enabling me to slip in.

It’s right luxurious. There were a few of us staying, Legs Anderson and Tony Marchant. That first night Tony found a way to pick the lock of the cellar and came back with two bottles of wine, one red, one white.

We drank out of glasses, that Molly had borrowed from the kitchen.

“We’re living like kings,” I said, as I danced around the luxurious drawing room, glass of red and white wine in my hand, my ‘pink drink’ as I’d christen it. “The house is ours all the time the Mayor’s away. London’s ours to do what we want with. The world’s ours. ”

“To the new Lord Mayor of London,” Legs said, raising his glass as a toast.”

“YeahyousthekingofLondonnowallthenobsisaway,” Tony said, spitting out his words in a stream of vowels and cuntentants. Myself, Molly and Legs are the only ones alive who can understand him, it’s like having our own secret language.

That night we went upstairs to sleep, each with our own room, each with our own soft, plush, velvety bed, the size of a six man cell, each with a million pillows stuffed with the feathers of half the geese in the kingdom. The only thing missing is my own personal mayoress, I thought to myself, until Molly arrived, seeking solace from nightmares. I managed to distract her from bad dreams in my own sweet way. We solaced all night in fact.

Of course, this idyll was not so idyllic as it seemed. True we had wine, we had a palace to ourselves, we had every luxury known to man, but we had no food. We had no money with which to buy food. We could pawn some of the Mayor’s finery, but this would attract ‘attention’ from the authorities, and we had long learned to avoid ‘attention’.

In plain truth times were hard. Nobody had the time of day for people such as me.

They say London’s empty, ‘cause of the plague, but that ain’t true. There’s still plenty of people, traders still trade, people still need to buys food and drinks, they still needs to work, but people rush by, never stopping to talk, now wanting to change breath with anyone lest they catch that which it’s bad luck to name.

What all this means to your average Joe sitting in the gutter is that you can’s sit there all day and not have so much as a word spoken at you, let alone a penny coin tossed your way. People, such people as are about, are rushing, not talking, and most are short of spare coin, with little or no work. I see new faces begging, faces I once saw rushing by on the way to work, porters, coal heavers, a thousand and one trades all hit by the fall in ships coming to London, affeared away by the plague.

Which means, living like a lord though I might be, my belly’s living the life of the poorest man in the kingdom. None of us had eaten more than a crust of bread in three days, Molly’s meagre wages barely making for any food at all.

Which is why I was delighted when Legs announced that they were jobs on the carts.

“It’s a tough job though, all day lugging corpses, then taking them a mile to the pits at the edge of town.”

“It’s good pay though,” I said. These jobs were much coveted in normal times, I’ve heard of waiting lists of over a year, bribes of twenty or thirty pounds changing hands from those desperate for the coveted position of cartman.

“Very good. And then there’s the tips.”

“andthedips,” Tony added. Most corpses are stripped of all valuables, by relatives and friends before they’re placed on the carts, but in a time of plague people can be rary, and fail to check every pocket and secret stich-ins where serious riches could remain hidden.

“So how come’s there’s vacancies?”

“The cartmen keep dying.”

“Bloody fools,” I said, “why die when there’s so much money in death just now.”

“It’s the plague see, the cartmen catches it off the dead ‘uns.”

“I thought you caught plague from the breath,” I said. “So how’s all the carters catching the plague from dead men? Have dead men started breathing all of a sudden.”

Tony looked thoughtful for a while. I had, single-handedly, out-thought the finest medical minds of the day. “Must be something else then,” he said, “maybe it’s clothes, or flesh. We’d better wear gloves.”

“Do you owns gloves?”

“No, but we’ll take some of the first corpse we see wearing ‘em.”

It was, I had to admit, a fine plan, besides which it was the only way we had of making money.

Working on the carts is a fine job, once you get used to the smell of the dead. Most of the relatives were desperate to get rid of the dead ‘uns, some slipping us up to a pound for the privilege of getting shot of ‘em.

By the end of the first week we’d made over thirty pounds between us. Tony kept hold of the monies, being the only one of us that can do counting and division. We trusted him to count it up equally between.

That Saturday night we dragged the cart of bodies up the hill to the body-tip for the last time. This was the third of the mass graves they’d dug since the plague began and it was already stinking with the corpses of over a thousand men, women and children when we emptied our cart into to it, another twenty-three, most of them victims of the plague, a couple that claimed to be oldage, only because we couldn’t demand as big a tip for oldage.

Suddenly Tony spurted water out of his mouth, like you might do if you were mucking about in the river.

“Where d’yer get water from Tony?” I asked. I had a thirst on me after a hard day’s lifting and shoving the dead.

“Itsnotwateryerfoolitsblood.”

He spurted again and this time I could smell the rank richness of blood as it gushed from his mouth.

“Don’t die on us Tony, you’ve still got our money.”

But Tony ignored me and before Legs or I could stop him he stumbled towards the death pit, spewing out the bloody remnants of h is life as he did so. With a last great cry he clutched his heart and died, falling into the pit and taking with him over thirty pound in ready money.

“Fuck.”

“Don’t die Tony.”

We ran over to the pit, but Tony had fallen all the way in and was, already, just another corpse among a thousand.

“We can’t leave him there,” Legs said.

“It’s a grave,” I said, “doesn’t matter whether he died of plague or not, I’m not lifting him out just to bury him elsewhere.”

“I mean we can’t leave the money there.”

This was true.

It was dark already and hard to make out how deep the pit was, but we knew from previous visits that it was over fifty feet to the highest-reaching corpse.

“Do you have any rope?” I asked, “one of us could lower the other down.”

“Why the fuck would I be carrying rope?”

“So what’s the plan?”

“This.” Legs leapt in the pit.

Fuck it. I jumped in after him.

There was just about enough moonlight for us to find Tony’s corpse, and we managed to retrieve our money.

“How do we get out?” I asked Legs. The sides of the pit were steep, there was nowhere to grip on the mud. The pit had simply not been designed with a mind for the inhabitants to be able to get out.

“Pile the bodies up,” Legs said. “We can use them as a ladder.”

It was easy words for Legs to say, the reality proved somewhat harder. The corpses had settled into their natural final positions and resisted strongly being pulled and pushed into a makeshift ladder of the dead. Some of them had decomposed already and squelched apart when we tried to lift them.

It took all night. The sun had already peeped its head out to look at us as we dragged the last of the corpses into place and started to climb. But it worked. We climbed out of the pit rich men, with over fifteen pounds apiece.

With Tony Dead Rat Man moved in to the palace in his place.

Rat Man is so named as he keeps rats as pets. He has rats in every pocket, and rats running around at his feet. He’s so many rats he loses count of ‘em.

“The reason I keep rats,” he always says, “is that they keeps disease away.” It’s true that Rat Man is the fittest man I know, he’s never had a day’s illness in his life.

“Stands to reason,” he says. “Rats is healthy, look how fat and fit they are. Stands to reason they’ll keep disease away.”

Rat Man also took over Tony’s place in the carts. “Things is looking up,” he said, “steady work, place to live and I’ve got more rats than ever.”

That first day on the carts Rat Man took his rats to work with him.

“You’ll lose ‘em” I warned him, “there’s a thousand rats in the plague pits, they’ll go and join there friends. “

“Na, they’re my pets, they might sneak off to the pits for a snack, but they’ll come back. They’re homely creatures is rats.”

Rat Man was right, he never lost a rat in all his day on the cart, in fact he always came back with more rats than he left with.

Back at the palace, though, things weren’t so good. Molly was waiting for us with the news when we crawled through the window that night.

“There’s plague in the house,” she said, “someone in the East Wing. The central section has sealed itself off from the rest of the house, we can’t get to the kitchens.”

We could still get to the wine cellar though and with the money we had made from our first week on the carts we really did live like lords.

Over the coming days and weeks we heard less and less activity in the rest of the house. Someone painted a red cross on the palace door, though tradesmen had long since ceased calling and we never had no visitors ourselves.

The carts remained full, as did our pockets. It was the best of times. We had never had it so good. Even the rats thrived, soon Rat Man’s entourage took up several rooms in the west wing. We took it as a good omen, the abundance of fat, healthy life that Rat Man carried with him was testament that the plague had its limits.

Then tragedy struck. Legs woke up one morning with a giant, black bubo on his arm. Within a few hours lumps had broken out all over his body and he lay in a pool of his own sweat screaming out profanities and calling for the devil to come and take him.

The devil obliged. Legs lasted no longer than the next morning.

Then, a few days later, lying abed with Molly, I noticed that she too had grown a black sore. She lasted longer, two weeks of sweating, cursing, screaming agony, before the plague finally claimed her. We took her to the pits and dumped her in with the rest of the corpses. It was undignified, but then there’s no dignity in death.

There’s just me and Rat Man left now. If there was anyone else left alive we’d be thrown out the house, but the whole palace is empty of life. We emptied the corpses from the east wing and the central section, helping ourselves to a few stray coin in recompense.

The pits have grown full, the town empty. I remain the Lord Mayor in Residence, there is no hint that the original mayor will ever return, but I take no pleasure in my title, it is as if I am Lord Mayor of Hell, the Lord May of the End of the World.

The rats, however, continue to thrive, and I take solace in their company, for as long as they are healthy all bodes well for myself and Rat Man.